U.S.’s moves to label Brazilian crime syndicates as “terrorist organizations”: a prelude to the use of force?

On March 6th, 2026, the United States re-ignited their pressure on Brazil to designate two major Brazilian crime syndicates, PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) and Comando Vermelho, as “terrorist organizations”. In this post, I will introduce the U.S. practice to label Latin American drug syndicates “terrorist organizations”, and outline how this raises issues in relation to how international law regulates the use of force and non-intervention. I will then briefly discuss the problems that arise from classifying drug cartels as “terrorists” more broadly,  and the particularities of the Brazilian context. I will conclude that it does not appear that the U.S. will make immediate use of the “terrorism” label to employ illegal armed force against Brazil, as it has in other places in Latin America. However, it is clear that the Trump administration is trying to use the potential of a threat of armed force that comes from such classification to interfere in the upcoming Brazilian presidential elections. This is itself a violation of the rule of non-intervention, and of Brazilian sovereignty.

The U.S. practice of labelling drug syndicates “terrorist organizations”: a prelude to the use of force?

Classifying Latin American drug syndicates as “terrorist organizations” has become ubiquitous under the Trump government. Since February 2025, the U.S. has been using domestic antiterror laws originated in the 2001 Bush Administration to do this. Twelve drug cartels have been listed between February and December 2025 in the roll of “Individuals and Entities Designated by the State Department Under E.O. 13224”, all in Latin America. Labelling drug cartels as “terrorists” has many implications, that include the imposition of financial sanctions onto individual members, restriction on travel, domestic U.S. criminal indictments, and deportations of alleged members.

Egregiously, this classification has also been used to support claims to using military force abroad. Since September 2025, under the label “Operation Southern Spear”, the U.S. government has been attacking boats in the Caribbean that they allege are carrying drugs into the United States. There have been at least 44 attacks to boats since then, with 48 boats destroyed, and casualties that have crossed the 150 mark, as of 14 of March 2026. In this blog, Mary Ellen O’Connell has rightly characterised these operations as summary executions under the guise of a “phony war at sea”.

Aside from these uses of force at sea, on the 3^rd of January 2026 the U.S. engaged in a military attack on Venezuela, that included air strikes and a “boots on the ground” excursion, accompanied by the kidnapping of sitting president Nicolás Maduro, now awaiting trial in New York under “narcoterrorism” charges. The attack on Venezuela is reported to have killed between 75 and 80 people. The killings that resulted from these uses of force constitute violations of human rights law, namely unlawful deprivations of the right to life, according to United Nations experts and academics. But they also constitute breaches of the prohibitions of the use of force. They have followed the U.S. classifying the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization.

The exact legal basis the U.S. has crafted to undertake these operations has been hard to discern – as Marko Milanovic points out, U.S. Ambassador Mark Waltz did not mention “self defence” as a justification for the actions in Venezuela before the United Nations Security Council, restricting himself to alleging Maduro’s kidnapping was a “law enforcement operation”. But he did use the term “narcoterrorist” to refer to Maduro before the Council, and featured the “self-defense” justification prominently in an interview with Fox News the day before appearing at the UN.

The United Nations Charter, under Article 2(4)’s general rule, prohibits that states solve disputes by using force. There are two express exceptions to this prohibition in the Charter: the authorization of force by the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII, and self-defence under Article 51. Self-defence requires the existence of an armed attack that a state is defending itself from – as the International Court of Justice says in Nicaragua, para. 195, “[i]n the case of individual self-defence, the exercise of this right is subject to the State concerned having been the victim of an armed attack.” There are many controversies surrounding the armed attack requirement, but the most relevant ones for the present purposes are (1) whether terrorists, in the absence of state involvement, can commit an armed attack that allows for the lawful use of force in self-defence, (2) whether “unwillingness or inability” to tackle threats triggers a right to respond in self-defence by using force in the territory of innocent third states. But even more importantly, in this case, it is to question (3) whether drug syndicates, from Brazil and elsewhere, can be considered “terrorists”, and whether what they are doing amounts to “armed attacks” against the U.S., warranting such a response.

Some consider the question about whether terrorist groups in the absence of state involvement can commit an armed attack a difficult one to answer. The International Court of Justice’s view in Nicaragua (para. 195) was that a degree of state involvement was a constitutive requirement of an “armed attack”, in order to justify self-defence. Especially since 9/11, the United States has forcefully espoused a reading of self-defence that understands terrorist groups, in the absence of state involvement, as capable of committing “armed attacks” that can trigger the right to respond lawfully in self-defence. There has been some state practice to, more or less directly, support this: the offensive against Da’esh in Syria was a particularly “hard case”, in which a coalition of states did use force in the absence of Syrian consent within Syrian territory against the terrorist organization.

A pressing concern in this scenario is, however, about the destiny of the “innocent territorial State”, in whose territory the purported self-defense response is being undertaken. The United States has defended that if a state is “unwilling or unable” to prevent terrorist attacks, it opens itself up to lawful uses of force in self-defence against terrorist groups it is harbouring; some have questioned the possibility of “innocence” of third states in this scenario. Closer analysis of the practice of states demonstrates, however, that the “unwilling or unable” doctrine has not been used widely, even to support the actions against Da’esh. Additionally, the doctrine has been the target of extensive condemnation by states in international fora. Brazil, for instance, before the Sixth Committee in 2017, voiced concerns:

“32. In addition to those issues, there were also concerns stemming from attempts to reinterpret the law regarding the content and scope of self-defence, especially its applicability in relation to non-State actors. Critical legal issues involving the use of force must be discussed. Some interpretations regarding the scope and content of self-defence arising in counter-terrorism scenarios might not be adequate or advisable, as they might set dangerous precedents. Silence regarding such interpretations, such as the so-called “unwilling and unable” doctrine, should not be understood as acquiescence or as proof of opinio juris” (emphasis added).

States in the Third World have been especially critical of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine. The recent U.S. trend, to unilaterally label criminal syndicates as “terrorists” to justify using force, is proof that they were right to oppose it.

PCC and Comando Vermelho and the issue of labelling criminal syndicates as “terrorist organizations”

Organized crime is a problem in Brazil. Recent police operations have revealed these particular syndicates have impressive, cartel-like degree of organization, with clear command structures, articulation between federal state cells, and even cooperation between the two rival organizations themselves. PCC in particular has been effectively expanding internationally. They are known for their use of prisons as a hub to organize crime. Although most international members of PCC have spread to other Latin American states, especially Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Uruguay, recent reports have shown they are present in 28 foreign states, to varying degrees, focused on trafficking weapons and drugs, mostly cocaine.

Despite its rise in sophistication, organized crime in Brazil is not a new phenomenon. Its roots are multifactorial, but partly attributable to Brazil’s flawed prison system, which stimulates prisoners to seek protection from criminal syndicates to ensure shielding from police brutality. PCC and Comando Vermelho are responsible for staggering numbers of violent deaths within the country.

Public safety is a point of inflection in Brazilian politics. The far-right’s discourse is that the state must solve the dire situation by being tough on crime. In October 2025 Rio de Janeiro right-wing Governor Cláudio Castro ordered an operation against Comando Vermelho that was the most lethal of its kind, which was lauded by some but also (rightly) heavily criticized by others as a gross human rights violation. The left, including members of the Lula government, defends that combatting crime requires much more complex solutions, that involve policing, but also require lifting people out of poverty through social programmes, aimed especially at vulnerable youth.

All that said, despite involvement between Brazilian criminal syndicates and politicians, it appears that these organizations are not engaged in crime for the sake of ideology. They instead use politicians to achieve their primary purpose: to gain profit, distancing them from other groups labelled as “terrorists”. Although there are links between traditional terrorist organizations and drug and weapons trafficking,  the distinction remains crucial, as affirmed in a recent reaction by twelve UN Special Rapporteurs to the U.S. terror designations in a joint communication that, “the designation conflates terrorism and organized crime, when the two phenomena are distinct and should be subject to separate legal regimes”.

Some may argue that the lack of a general customary definition of “terrorism” under international law makes it ripe for abuse, such as what we are witnessing here. Even in the absence of a general definition, experts such as Ben Saul defend that drug and weapons trafficking on one hand, and terrorism on the other, are better addressed through criminal prosecution and transnational criminal cooperation, rather than relativizing the prohibition on the use of force at an inter-state level.  According to a recent EJIL the Podcast! Episode, there is no previous state practice defending transnational drug trafficking can constitute an “armed attack”.

Whereas the issue of the right to use force against terrorism might be a delicate one, it is undeniable that the critiques waged by the doctrine and state practice about its dangers are perfectly encapsulated in the current situation.

But let us bypass this, and say that, in theory, drug cartels could be classified as terrorist organizations capable of committing “armed attacks”, to which the U.S. could respond to with force in self-defence. Justina Uriburu and Julian Arato’s analysis in relation to Venezuela is also applicable here:

“[t]he causal chain required to characterise such activity as an armed attack against the United States would have to be stretched beyond recognition, resting on multiple factual assumptions that remain unproven”.

The Brazilian response to U.S. pressure

Brazil has been responding to U.S. pressure to label PCC and Comando Vermelho as terrorist organizations in several fronts. Brazil’s National Secretary of Public Security, Mário Sarrubo, rebutted the request, stating that, according to Brazilian national law, the criminal factions do not meet the national crime of terrorism definition of “[acting] in defence of a cause or ideology”, probably referring to the provision that requires the actus reus of terrorism under Brazilian law needs to be accompanied by “reasons of xenophobia, discrimination, or prejudice on the basis of race, colour, ethnicity, and religion, with the goal of provoking social or general terror” (Article 2, my translation).

Brazilian Prosecutor Lincoln Gakiya, from the Special Action Group on the Combat of Organized Crime, who has been liaising with U.S. officials on the issue, has alerted that Brazil will not comply with the United States request, in a recent interview. He defends that, instead of helping combat these groups, the “terrorist” label will create bureaucratic barriers to effective cooperation. Whereas now the Brazilian Prosecutor’s Office, the FBI and the DEA can communicate more or less freely to tackle the problem, if the groups are labelled as “terrorist organizations”, clearance levels are raised and information becomes “confidential”, under the purview of the CIA. This would make data less available to Brazilian investigators, and jeopardize the purported goal of controlling criminality in the region.

Brazilian president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, defends that discussions should continue taking place through diplomatic channels. Brazilian diplomats have been working hard behind the scenes, in advance of a much-anticipated Trump-Lula meeting that is supposed to happen in March 2026, to defuse the situation. So far, they are succeeding: the U.S. has pressured Brazil to reclassify the organizations, but has not unilaterally listed PCC and Comando Vermelho as “Individuals and Entities Designated by the State Department Under E.O. 13224”. U.S. officials have stated the documents required to undertake the listing are ready, however, to be submitted to Congress if needed.

Experts’ reactions in Brazilian media have varied – whereas some seem more convinced that U.S. pressure to label PCC and Comando Vermelho as “terrorist organizations” opens Brazil up for armed intervention, others link it to a violation of sovereignty in order to influence the upcoming Brazilian presidential election. Both Eduardo Bolsonaro, self-exiled in the U.S. since the attempted coup orchestrated by his father in 2023, and Flavio Bolsonaro, who is running for President in 2026 in lieu of his now arrested father, have reportedly been the ones lobbying in favour of classifying the crime syndicates as terrorists. This strategy, to use the U.S. to intervene in Brazil in favour of far-right interests, is in line with last years’ lobby of the Bolsonaro clan in favour of U.S. tariffs against Brazil, in order to pressure Brazilian authorities to acquit Bolsonaro senior during his criminal prosecution for the aforementioned coup.

In the present case, even if there is no use of force against Brazil, the U.S.’s actions still violate international law. There is a breach of the rule of non-intervention, insofar as we have (1) an attempt to interfere in Brazil’s reserved domain, namely its ability to hold elections free from intervention, and (2) a series of coercive measures, in the form of (a) pressure for Brazil to classify the organizations as “terrorists”, and (b) threats from the U.S. to unilaterally declare PCC and Comando Vermelho as “terrorists” under U.S. law, which has resulted in armed intervention in other places in the region. If the U.S. decides to go ahead and unilaterally undertake such classification, this could lead to further non-forcible but coercive measures such as financial sanctions and issuing arrest warrants against Brazilian officials.

Conclusions

There is mounting fear that the U.S.’s pressure on Brazil to classify two drug syndicates, PCC and Comando Vermelho, as “terrorist organizations”, is the prelude to an armed intervention against Brazil. This fear is not unfounded, as U.S. practice against boats in the Caribbean and in the invasion of Venezuela has used this artifice, in clear violation of international law. In the case of Brazil, however, the motivation seems further from a justification for armed intervention, and closer to an attempt to interfere in the upcoming presidential elections, in breach of the rule of non-intervention. In any event, the pressure exerted by the United States in this instance is another example of “Trump’s Corollary”, that treats the Americas as his personal “backyard”, violating Brazilian sovereignty.