Words That Travel Armed

A field guide to the security vocabulary of Brazil's 2026 election — an annotated glossary

By Fernando Brancoli

About the author: Fernando Brancoli is Associate Professor of International Security and Strategic Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2025–2026). He is a Senior Researcher with the Security in Context Project. His most recent books are Bolsonarismo: The Global Origins and Future of Brazil's Far Right (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and the co-authored The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Abstract: This glossary examines the security vocabulary that the United States has projected into Brazil's 2026 presidential election — narcoterrorism, Foreign Terrorist Organization, cartel, hemispheric threat — and tests, term by term, whether each one actually travelled from Washington or arrived by some other route. Against the common claim that the United States simply exported its security lexicon to Latin America, the findings are mixed and specific: of seven terms examined, only two are US inventions, two were coined elsewhere in the Americas and acquired their present force through US law, one is multilateral in origin and unequal in application, and one is Brazilian outright. The essay proposes four modes of conceptual travel — documented legal transfer, US institutionalization of a transnational concept, multilateral circulation under unequal power, and strategic appropriation — and argues that what the terms share is not a common origin but a common function: each shifts a question from one institutional venue to another, and every such shift changes who is authorized to act, against whom, and under what oversight. Read alongside the May 2026 designation of the PCC and the CV as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the vocabulary emerges as a field of political struggle rather than neutral description. The strongest counter-evidence to any thesis of capture is Brazilian and recent: in March 2026 Brazil legislated its own severe answer to the same conduct, without the terrorism label.

An interactive version of this glossary is available at [URL do site interativo].

The web version carries the same material in a form built for use rather than for reading straight through: the seven entries are searchable and individually citable, the genealogy spectrum and the comparative table can be sorted and filtered, the timeline can be filtered by legal origin, and a short teaching exercise is included for seminar use. Readers who want the argument should read on here; readers who want to look something up, teach from it, or cite a single entry will find the web version faster.

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What this is, and why it matters

This glossary follows the security vocabulary that the United States has projected into Brazil's 2026 presidential election — narcoterrorism, Foreign Terrorist Organization, cartel, hemispheric threat — and tests, term by term, whether each one actually travelled from Washington or arrived by some other route entirely.

The objective. To replace a slogan with a method. The claim that the United States exported its security vocabulary to Latin America is repeated constantly and examined rarely; what follows is an attempt to examine it, taking seven terms and tracing each one to its origin, its institutionalization, its point of entry into Brazilian debate, and its use in the current campaign. The findings are mixed, and deliberately so. Only two of the seven are US inventions. Two were coined elsewhere in the Americas. One is Brazilian from beginning to end.

What the SiC reader should keep in view. Classification is jurisdiction. To call a Brazilian faction a terrorist organization is to move the problem out of policing and into national security, out of Brazilian courts and onto US sanctions lists, and out of the category of a neighbourhood owed public services and into the category of ground to be retaken. This is securitization observable in real time, on a calendar, with a vote at the end of it: the case study rather than the theory.

What this is not. It is not a judgement on whether the PCC and the CV ought to have been designated, and it is not the argument that Brazil is a passive recipient of policy made elsewhere. Where the evidence supports only convergence or emulation, the entries say so; where a causal claim cannot be sustained, it is marked as unsustained. One safeguard runs throughout: the circulation of language is not proof of control.

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Why this glossary, and why now

On 4 August 2026, the US State Department revoked the visa of Brazil's ambassador in Washington, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, in retaliation for Brasília's delay in granting agrément to the incoming US ambassador. The Department was careful to specify that this was not an expulsion: she may remain in the country without a valid visa, and the visa can be restored once Brazil approves the nominee. Two months earlier, the same Department had designated the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with Foreign Terrorist Organization status taking effect on 5 June — the first Brazilian organizations ever placed on that list. A year before that came a fifty percent tariff on Brazilian goods, tied by the US president to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, and Global Magnitsky sanctions on the Supreme Court justice presiding over the case.

These are not four unrelated incidents; they are a repertoire — trade, sanctions, designations, visas — and its most durable instrument is also its least visible. Tariffs get rolled back, and the Magnitsky listing on Justice Moraes was lifted in December 2025. Words are not rolled back. A vocabulary, once installed in a country's political language, goes on working long after the diplomatic quarrel that delivered it has been settled, and it shapes what a future government of any political colour can plausibly propose.

To readers familiar with debates in critical security studies, a glossary may sound like a modest contribution alongside the questions of force and sovereignty raised by the designation itself; it is not. Brazil in 2026 offers an unusually clean case of a process that is normally reconstructed only in retrospect. A legal category built in the United States in 1996 for ideologically motivated groups is applied, thirty years later, to two profit-driven Brazilian criminal organizations, four months before a presidential election, at the documented request of one of the candidates. There is no need to speculate about how security concepts travel between the hemisphere's north and south. The travel is happening in public, on a calendar, with a deadline of 4 October.

Those who have argued that the circulation of security models is never merely technical will recognise the pattern. What gets exported, as Manuela Trindade Viana's work on the transnational movement of security models insists, is rarely public safety in the abstract; it is a particular grammar — pacification units, exceptional courts, militarized intelligence, anti-mafia statutes — that arrives carrying its own assumptions about who counts as a citizen and what counts as a threat. The FTO designation belongs in that lineage. It is not just a list; it is a grammar of governance.

But the obvious reading of that lineage is also the wrong one, and this glossary is built to resist it. "The United States exported its vocabulary to Brazil" is too simple in both directions. Two of the central terms were not invented in the United States at all, one is entirely Brazilian, and in March 2026, while the designation fight was still running, the Brazilian Congress wrote its own severe answer into law and twice refused to equate faction violence with terrorism. The interesting question is therefore not whether the words moved, but how each one moved — and what each mode of movement licenses.

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The election, in brief

Brazilians vote on 4 October, with a runoff on 25 October if no candidate clears fifty percent. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, eligible for a fourth term, was confirmed at the Workers' Party convention on 2 August with Geraldo Alckmin again as running mate. He faces Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who received his imprisoned father's endorsement on 6 December 2025 and was confirmed as the Liberal Party's candidate. Registration closed on 15 August.

The race is close and closing. A Reuters poll in late July put Lula ahead of Flávio Bolsonaro 48.8 to 42.3 percent in a simulated second round; a Nexus/BTG Pactual survey in early August showed them within the margin of error. Public security is both the terrain on which the challenger is strongest and the issue on which the incumbent is most exposed — and it is the only major question in the campaign on which a foreign government has intervened by way of a formal legal act.

That combination is what makes the vocabulary consequential rather than merely interesting. Words that decide which institution owns a problem also decide which candidate owns it.

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Who is who — the actors behind the words

Two organizations sit at the centre of this vocabulary, and neither resembles the Mexican or Colombian groups around which the US framework was built. That difference is the whole argument. Both were born in prison rather than in the countryside or along trafficking routes, a genealogy with no equivalent elsewhere in the hemisphere, and one that any imported category will necessarily flatten.

PCC — Primeiro Comando da Capital, "First Command of the Capital." Founded on 31 August 1993 in the Taubaté prison, in the state of São Paulo, by eight inmates, in the aftermath of the Carandiru massacre of October 1992, in which military police killed 111 prisoners during a riot. It began as a prisoners' mutual-protection brotherhood demanding accountability for those killings. It is now the largest criminal organization in the country: governed by a written statute, funded by membership dues, disciplined through internal tribunals, and organized as a decentralized franchise rather than a chain of command. It is the more commercial of the two — authorities link it to an estimated R$52 billion in assets across fuel distribution, logistics, agribusiness and real estate — and it has expanded along cocaine routes through Paraguay and Bolivia. It was already sanctioned by the US Treasury in December 2021, under the illicit-drug authority.

CV — Comando Vermelho, "Red Command." Founded in 1979 at the Cândido Mendes penal institute on Ilha Grande, in Rio de Janeiro, out of the forced cohabitation of ordinary convicts with left-wing guerrillas imprisoned together under the 1964–85 military dictatorship — an arrangement produced by a decree of 1969. It was originally the Falange Vermelha. When the political prisoners left, the common criminals kept the organizational discipline and turned it to their own ends. It is a group of territory rather than of business: it controls favela neighbourhoods, arbitrates local disputes, taxes services, and defends ground against rivals and against the police. More violent than the PCC, less corporate, and considerably less transnational.

The milícias — the third armed actor, and the one nobody designated. Paramilitary groups composed largely of serving and former police officers, firefighters and prison guards. They seize neighbourhoods, expel or coexist with the drug factions, and monopolize local services — cooking gas, internet, transport, informal property markets — extracting payment from residents as protection. They control more of Rio's territory than the drug factions do. They appear on no terrorist list, in part because they are made of the state. Any account of "armed groups controlling Brazilian territory" that leaves them out is describing a smaller problem than the real one, and any imported framework that cannot see them will misidentify its own target.

The candidates. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — president from 2003 to 2010 and again since 2023, of the Workers' Party, seeking a fourth term at 80. His government holds that the PCC and CV are profit-driven criminal enterprises rather than political-ideological actors, and that the classification is Brazil's to make. Flávio Bolsonaro — senator, and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted in September 2025 of plotting a coup. He runs on a hard-line public-security platform and asked Washington directly for the designation. His brother Eduardo Bolsonaro relocated to the United States in February 2025 to press for sanctions, tariffs and the FTO listing, and was stripped of his congressional mandate in December 2025.

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Terms you will meet below

• facção — "faction," the standard Brazilian word for these organizations. Not "cartel."
• comando — "command," used interchangeably with facção; it appears in both groups' names.
• favela — a dense, largely self-built urban neighbourhood, historically underserved by the state. Not a synonym for criminality: most residents are workers, and roughly one in five cariocas lives in one.
• Itamaraty — Brazil's foreign ministry, named after its palace, and institutionally attached to non-intervention and sovereignty.
• STF — the Supreme Federal Court. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who presides over the Bolsonaro case, was sanctioned by the United States in 2025.
• Câmara / Senado — Chamber of Deputies and Senate, the two houses of Congress, both of which rejected terrorism-equivalence amendments.
• GLO — the constitutional mechanism for deploying the armed forces domestically. Entry 7 below.
• UPP — "Pacifying Police Units," Rio's programme of permanent police posts in favelas from 2008, now widely judged to have failed.
• DESARMA — the April 2026 partnership between Brazil's Federal Revenue Service and US Customs and Border Protection, targeting weapons and drug flows without the terrorism framework.
• PL Antifacção — the 2025–26 anti-faction bill, enacted as Lei 15.358: Brazil's own severe answer, without the terrorism label.

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Four ways a concept travels

Most commentary treats conceptual transfer as one thing. It is at least four, and the distinction matters because each mode carries a different evidentiary burden and licenses a different political conclusion. Reading the seven entries together, four patterns stand out.

1. Documented legal transfer. A clearly identifiable US legal category is imported, invoked, or formally applied to Brazil. Evidence required: the statute, the designation, the request. The strongest claim available, and the rarest.

2. US institutionalization of a transnational concept. The term did not originate in the United States, but acquired decisive legal, bureaucratic or military force there, and travels onward carrying that force. The origin defeats the imposition narrative; the institutionalization is what gives the word teeth.

3. Multilateral circulation under unequal power. Collectively negotiated, often with explicit sovereignty safeguards, but the capacity to act on it is radically asymmetric. Formally shared, practically unilateral — the hardest of the four to argue about honestly.

4. Strategic appropriation and convergence. Local actors adopt internationally circulating language to advance domestic projects, with no evidence of direct institutional transfer. The vocabulary is available; the motive is homegrown. Emulation rather than command.

A fifth possibility has to stay on the table throughout: no transfer at all. The glossary includes one such term deliberately, as a control.

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The glossary

1. Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO)

Mode of travel: documented legal transfer.

An FTO is not a generic label for a dangerous foreign group. It is a status conferred by the US Secretary of State under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, created by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 24 April 1996, and it requires that the organization be foreign, that it engage in terrorist activity, and that it threaten US nationals or the national security of the United States — where national security expressly includes foreign relations and economic interests. Its application to profit-motivated criminal organizations was not automatic; it required the executive order of 20 January 2025, which described cartels as possessing characteristics of "insurgency and asymmetric warfare," and the designations that followed, twelve Latin American groups in all between February and December 2025.

Brazil arrived at the designation along two tracks. Domestically, a Chamber committee approved a proposal on 10 April 2026 grouping the PCC and CV with eleven Latin American cartels. Externally, Flávio Bolsonaro travelled to Washington and asked for the listing — after Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira had told Secretary Rubio in March that "the Brazilian government is against this classification," and after Brazil's national public-security secretary had confirmed that Brasília refused an earlier State Department request. The announcement came on 28 May regardless, hours after Flávio Bolsonaro was received at the White House. The Brazilian government was informed but not consulted.

What actually changes. Material support under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B reaches extraterritorially, and entities fifty percent owned by blocked persons are themselves blocked. A bus operator or a retailer paying extortion in a controlled neighbourhood becomes, on paper, a compliance problem — which is why the fastest response in Brazil came from law firms rather than from the security ministries. Indirect risk is not automatic liability; knowledge, jurisdiction and ownership continue to govern. But overcompliance does not wait for legal certainty, and that is the mechanism that bites.

What does not change. The designation does not amend Brazilian law. Lei 13.810/2019 builds Brazilian asset-freezing around UN Security Council designations and Brazilian judicial process, not around OFAC. The pressure travels through the dollar and the correspondent banking system, not through the Brazilian penal code.

The dispute. Those who support the listing argue that the PCC and CV operate internationally, attack public authorities, control territory and move revenue through sophisticated corporate structures, and that ordinary organized-crime law underestimates all four. Those arguments deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. The objection is not that the organizations are harmless; it is that the category confuses terrorism with commerce, strengthens foreign coercive power over Brazilian jurisdiction, and creates rhetorical space for intervention. Senator Jorge Kajuru put the sovereignty point precisely on 17 March 2026: Brazil must not "open breaches that could justify any kind of foreign interventionism" — while continuing to support police cooperation. Three weeks before the designation, on 6 May, US Representative Jim McGovern wrote to Secretary Rubio warning that designation "would be used to inappropriately influence elections toward an outcome."

Assessment. This is the clearest transfer in the glossary. The legal category is American, the designation was issued by American authorities, and a Brazilian presidential campaign explicitly requested and absorbed it. The evidence supports documented influence and strategic appropriation; it does not support the claim that Washington controls the Brazilian security debate as a whole.

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2. Narcoterrorism / narcoterrorismo

Mode of travel: US institutionalization of a transnational concept.

The word is Latin American in origin, not North American. It is generally traced to Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde Terry in the early 1980s — the sources divide between 1982 and 1983 — describing attacks on drug-enforcement authorities in a setting where coca production and the Sendero Luminoso insurgency overlapped; the Medellín violence of the following decade, including the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice, then fixed the association.

What the United States supplied was force. The DEA came to treat narcoterrorism as "a subset of terrorism"; after 2001 the concept welded the war on drugs to the war on terror; and on 9 March 2006 the PATRIOT reauthorization created 21 U.S.C. § 960a, with broad extraterritorial jurisdiction and sentences reaching life imprisonment. It is worth noting what the statute actually requires — a legally defined connection between drug conduct and terrorist actors. It does not make every violent trafficker a narcoterrorist.

Campaign usage in Brazil is far broader than the statute. It bundles trafficking, territorial control, parallel government and the loss of sovereignty inside the home into a single accusation, one that functions simultaneously as a crime category and as the charge that the incumbent cannot govern the national territory. The legislative vehicle is PL 724/2025, introduced on 27 February 2025, which would add narcoterrorism to Lei 13.260/2016, with PL 196/2026 attached in March; neither has been enacted, and the principal bill was still awaiting a rapporteur in the Chamber's Constitution and Justice Committee.

The dispute. Lei 13.260/2016 requires specified acts, discriminatory motivation, and the intention of producing generalized terror. The objection from Brazilian criminology is narrow and hard to answer: the PCC and CV are not trying to overthrow the state; they are trying to be left alone by it. Ricardo Cavalcante, writing in Estudos Avançados in 2026, concludes that the term "functions mainly as a rhetorical and geopolitical device with limited analytical consistency." The Senate's own anti-faction debate rejected the equation, on the ground that terror may be an effect of organized crime without making the organization terrorist. And in November 2025 the Brazilian Army warned, through Folha, that the equivalence could be used by foreign powers, "especially the United States," to justify military action on Brazilian soil — a warning from an institution not usually accused of anti-Americanism, and one that deserves more weight in this debate than it has received.

What actually changes. The label moves suspects out of criminal justice and toward a state of exception. As Gilberto Maringoni has put it, terrorist is the classification you give to an enemy who does not negotiate — an enemy who, if he is not stopped, must be killed. State governors have already invoked the term to justify lethal police operations, which is the point at which the vocabulary stops being rhetorical. In a dense favela that distinction is not abstract; it is the difference between an arrest and a body.

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3. Cartel

Mode of travel: US institutionalization of a transnational concept.

The word has European economic and diplomatic roots and cannot be treated as a US invention. It was applied to Colombian trafficking by journalists and enforcement agencies in the 1980s, although the Medellín and Cali "cartels" were closer to networks of semi-autonomous traffickers than to price-fixing agreements. US agencies made it an operational category; the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act of 1999 made it a sanctions trigger; the order of January 2025 made it a route to FTO status. The National Drug Control Strategy of May 2026 completed the militarization of the register by describing itself as an "order of battle to hunt the cartels in their safe havens."

Brazilian institutions say facção, comando, or organização criminosa; the prison-intelligence map maintained by SENAPPEN identifies at least eighty-eight such groups. The CV was founded in the 1970s inside Rio's Cândido Mendes prison, under the dictatorship, a genealogy with no Mexican or Colombian parallel. Brazilian competition law, meanwhile, continues to use cartel in its original antitrust sense.

The datable moment of transfer is 10 April 2026, when a Chamber committee grouped the PCC and CV with eleven Latin American cartels. That decision does more than describe trafficking; it enrols Brazilian factions in a continental enemy category already wired to US terrorism policy.

What actually changes. "Cartel" implies commodity monopoly, centralized command, vertical integration and sovereignty over routes, and with the image comes a toolkit designed for a different animal: decapitation of leadership, interdiction, military assistance. The PCC governs through prisons, codes of conduct and decentralized commercial partnerships; the CV is more territorially violent and less commercially integrated. Neither corresponds to the Sinaloa template. The defensible method is to ask which cartel characteristics are documented in each case, rather than treating the label as proof of them — and it is a method that cuts both ways, since it also requires taking seriously the international reach the label is trying to name.

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4. Hemispheric security threat / ameaça hemisférica

Mode of travel: multilateral circulation under unequal power.

The concept descends from Pan-Americanism, from the Rio Treaty of 2 September 1947, and from Cold War collective defence. Its modern form was negotiated collectively: the Declaration of Bridgetown of 2002 and the Declaration on Security in the Americas, adopted in Mexico City on 28 October 2003, which defined security as "multidimensional" — terrorism and organized crime alongside poverty, health and environmental threats — and conditioned cooperation on international law, democracy, human rights and national sovereignty.

Brazil has participated in hemispheric institutions while resisting arrangements that subordinate national priorities to a single external agenda. It has supported police cooperation, intelligence sharing, border control and financial investigation, and has treated the deployment of force and the domestic classification of crime as sovereign decisions. The DESARMA partnership of April 2026 is the current expression of that position: cooperation is possible and welcome; subsumption under US counterterrorism law is not.

What actually changes. SOUTHCOM operationalizes the frame, and Operation Southern Spear is its sharpest expression: at least fifty-six strikes and 188 confirmed deaths by early May 2026, with the identities of those killed almost never disclosed, and with Operation Absolute Resolve in January underwritten by the same legal architecture. The order of January 2025 narrowed the concept further, from the OAS's multidimensional version to one explicitly centred on US national security.

The dispute. Nobody disputes that organized crime crosses borders. It plainly does. The dispute concerns authority, means and scope — and it is worth quoting the doctrine against its current use, since the same 2003 declaration insists that "each state has the sovereign right to identify its own national security priorities." Scholars in critical security studies often handle sovereignty claims with scepticism, and for good reason: sovereignty has been a smokescreen for state violence and a shield against transnational accountability. Those critiques are valid and necessary. But the Brazilian case poses a different question — what does it mean for a democracy to lose control over the designations of its own internal violence? The Inter-American Commission's 2026 resolution on organized crime offers the alternative regional model, treating the problem as severe, structurally caused, and answerable within a rights framework.

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5. Transnational criminal organization (TCO)

Mode of travel: convergence.

The framing consolidated through the UN Naples conference of 1994 and the Palermo Convention of 2000. The US sanctions version arrived with Executive Order 13581 of 24 July 2011, codified at 31 C.F.R. Part 590 and expanded by EO 13863 in 2019; EO 14059 of December 2021 modernized the illicit-drug regime, and the Treasury designated the PCC under it that same day, four and a half years before any terrorism label was attached. Brazil's Lei 12.850/2013 arrived on a parallel track shaped by the same convention. There was no sovereignty controversy and no objection from Itamaraty, which is the clearest indication that what operated here was convergence rather than coercion.

That is precisely why the term matters. TCO is the register in which Brasília and Washington can still cooperate on weapons trafficking and illicit finance without either side conceding anything about terrorism; the DESARMA agreement of April 2026 is what that looks like in practice. It is more precise for profit-motivated networks and less likely to imply military targeting, while still carrying real coercive power when attached to Treasury sanctions. The category may be broad enough to group very different structures together, and that objection is fair. Even so it remains the strongest existing alternative to the language of terrorism, because it recognises international capacity without presuming ideology. The distinction between TCO and FTO was the actual crux of the 2026 dispute, and it is the distinction on which any negotiated outcome will rest.

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6. Criminal insurgency / insurgência criminal

Mode of travel: US doctrinal export meeting Brazilian convergence.

John Sullivan coined "third-generation gangs" in 1997 and, with Robert Bunker, published "State of Siege: Mexico's Criminal Insurgency" in August 2008, building on RAND's netwar framework. The Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College had published Max Manwaring's Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency in March 2005, arguing that gangs constitute "a mutated form of urban insurgency… these nonstate actors must eventually seize political power."

The framework reached Brazil through military and academic channels rather than diplomatic ones. Claudio Ramos da Cruz, a Brazilian officer, and David Ucko of the US National Defense University published an article in Small Wars & Insurgencies in 2018 that explicitly reconceptualized the CV as a criminal insurgency and prescribed a counterinsurgency approach; a Brazilian Army general applied Manwaring to the Maré operations; a Naval War College monograph applied Galula to the PCC. Rio's UPP programme is widely read through the same lens.

What actually changes. Insurgencies are not arrested and tried; they are defeated. The frame makes territory militarily imaginable and residents administratively suspect, and it carries counterinsurgency assumptions about population control that, in a dense favela, are documented in casualty figures rather than in doctrine.

Counter-evidence worth foregrounding. The frame also misdescribes the terrain. The Mapa dos Grupos Armados do Rio finds that paramilitary milícias — composed in large part of serving and former state agents, and designated by nobody — control more of Rio's territory than the drug factions do. The largest territorial armed power in Rio appears on no terrorist list, because it is made in part of the state itself. Mainstream Brazilian sociology, in the tradition associated with Gabriel Feltran, resists the insurgency reading altogether: factions seek profit and coexistence with the state rather than its overthrow. The counter-argument, that territorial governance and armed confrontation are insurgent in substance whatever the motive, is not frivolous — but it is precisely the argument Brazilian law has now answered on its own terms.

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7. Garantia da Lei e da Ordem (GLO)

Mode of travel: none. Domestic.

Article 142 of the 1988 Constitution, regulated by Complementary Law 97/1999, authorizes the president to deploy the armed forces for domestic policing when civilian forces are deemed insufficient. It has been used by administrations of every political orientation, including by Lula, who signed Decree 11.765 on 1 November 2023 sending troops to the ports and airports of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo — a calculated move that demonstrated resolve and pre-empted law-and-order criticism while avoiding a militarized intervention in the favelas.

Its inclusion here is the argument. Any reading of the other six entries that casts Brazil as a mere recipient runs aground on this one: the ground was prepared locally, over decades, by Brazilian constitutional law and by Brazilian politicians of every party. The country has spent forty years rebuilding civilian constitutional rule after a dictatorship that itself drew on hemispheric security doctrines exported from Washington, and it built this instrument in the course of doing so. The objection from civil-rights advocates is separate, and it is also domestic: repeated GLOs normalize a permanent military role in civilian policing and blur the constitutional line between national defence and public security, with soldiers performing police work without police training or police accountability.

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What the vocabulary does

Read together, the seven entries do not support a single narrative of importation. The FTO designation and the sanctions machinery attached to it are identifiable US instruments with direct effects; narcoterrorism and cartel have origins outside the United States but acquired exceptional force through US law; hemispheric security is multilateral in form and unequal in institutional practice; criminal insurgency is a doctrinal export that met a Brazilian language of parallel power already in place; and the GLO is Brazilian outright.

What the terms share is a function. Each shifts a question from one institutional venue to another — from policing to national security, from courts to sanctions lists, from municipal governance to foreign policy, from Brasília to Washington — and every such shift changes who is authorized to act, against whom, under what oversight, and to what standard of proof. Classification determines which agencies take charge, which investigative powers become normal, which financial relationships become risky, and whether a territory is imagined as a community owed public services or as enemy ground requiring reconquest. This is what it means to say that a designation is not just a list.

The strongest counter-evidence to the capture thesis is Brazilian, and it is recent. On 24 March 2026 Brazil enacted Lei 15.358, creating the offence of domínio social estruturado — structured social domination — which criminalizes ultraviolent organizations, militias and paramilitary groups that impose control over territories, populations, public agents, economic activity and infrastructure, explicitly regardless of the organization's motivation. It is a severe domestic answer to precisely the conduct the terrorism debate is about, built without the terrorism label, and arrived at only after Congress twice rejected terrorism-equivalence amendments. The same logic governs the DESARMA partnership signed in April 2026 between Brazil's Federal Revenue Service and US Customs and Border Protection, which targets the same flows of weapons and drugs without invoking counterterrorism law. Brazil did not reproduce the FTO model; it built an alternative, and then offered Washington a way to use it.

So whoever wins in October inherits two instruments rather than one: an imported category that carries US financial and diplomatic power but no Brazilian legal effect, and a domestic category with real Brazilian legal effect and no foreign leverage. Choosing between them is the actual policy question, and it is the question the fight over vocabulary is currently obscuring. The vocabulary we accept now will determine the policies that are thinkable later. That is why the words matter, that is why the election matters, and that is why they cannot be analyzed separately.

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What this glossary cannot claim

On causation. Flávio Bolsonaro travelled to Washington and has said publicly that he asked for the classification, and the lobbying by his brother Eduardo over the preceding year is a matter of record. But the designation policy had been running since January 2025, twelve Latin American groups were added to the list between February and December of that year, and Brazil had already refused a State Department request. The timing and the advocacy are documented; the causal weight is not, and it should not be asserted as though it were.

On intervention. That FTO status opens Brazil to the extraterritorial use of US force is an inference. It is a well-grounded one — it follows from SOUTHCOM doctrine, from Operation Southern Spear, and from explicit warnings by the Brazilian Army and the foreign ministry — but it is not stated in the designation, and under US law a designation is not itself an authorization for military action. What it is, in practice, is a permission slip.

On economic fallout. Whether Brazilian banks and firms have actually de-risked since June has not been reported out. Compliance alerts from law firms are not evidence of compliance behaviour by banks, and the Ministry of Finance's impact assessment, which reportedly warns of billion-dollar exposure, is not public.

On what happens next. The visa revocation of 4 August is the newest data point and the least legible. It concerns an agrément dispute rather than security policy. Whether it marks an escalation of the coercion repertoire into the final two months of the campaign, or a bureaucratic quarrel that resolves quietly, will only be clear in retrospect — which is, in the end, the condition under which most of this vocabulary arrived.

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Continue reading:
‍Designating the Election: How a US Terror Label Entered Brazil's October Race — the companion essay, and the argument this glossary rests on.

Fernando Brancoli is Associate Professor of International Security and Strategic Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2025–2026). He is a Senior Researcher with the Security in Context Project. The statements made and opinions expressed here are solely the responsibility of the author.

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