Imperial Brazil (Vol. 2)

The history of drug trafficking in Brazil's main drug corridor

As luck would have it, the interior of São Paulo and the Triângulo Mineiro region are on the international drug trafficking route. The region is a strategic point, a route between the drug-producing countries—Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru—on one side, and the major consumption centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on the other. It is along the "rota caipira" (country route), as it was nicknamed, that the pulse of cocaine buying and selling in Brazil is measured.

For four years, journalist Allan de Abreu interviewed police officers, judges, prosecutors, drug traffickers, and coca growers in Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. He gathered thousands of documents, most of them previously unpublished. The result is this masterpiece of reporting, a courageous x-ray of the country's drug market. With a thrilling narrative, Abreu delves into the rise and fall of the major cocaine barons; their ingenuity in eluding the police—cocaine is transformed into fabric and even plastic—; the plight of drug mules; the business organization of major criminal groups like the PCC; the mechanisms for laundering millions of dollars saturated with cocaine profits; and the corruption of the repressive apparatus, from the police to the judiciary. Multiple stories, often tragic, come together in the rural landscape.