MIAMI — The weapons enter Brazil through São Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport, through the Port of Santos, and through postal services whose packages are labeled as pet food. They arrive as rifle components hidden inside airsoft equipment coming from South Florida — the state with the largest Brazilian community in the United States, where gun shops, straw purchasers, and freight forwarders form the supply chain that feeds the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the Comando Vermelho (CV), and the criminal networks that have made Brazil one of the most violent countries in the world.
In the last twelve months alone, Brazilian authorities have seized 1,168 illegally imported firearms and weapons parts — the overwhelming majority shipped from the U.S. state of Florida using fraudulent declarations and concealment methods. Drug seizures at Guarulhos Airport jumped from 89 kilograms in all of 2024 to 1,562 kilograms in just the first three months of 2026 — a 1,600% increase in a single quarter.
Now, on April 10, Brazil and the United States announced they were going to do something about it.
“Brazil and the United States today established unprecedented cooperation between the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service and US Customs,” President Lula wrote on social media. “We will intensify the fight against international arms and drug trafficking through concrete actions.”
The announcement introduced two interlocking programs — DESARMA and Project MIT — that represent the most substantive U.S.-Brazil security cooperation in years. They also represent the most visible expression of a bilateral relationship that is simultaneously more cooperative and more strained than at any point since Trump returned to the White House.
DESARMA & Project MIT
The operational architecture of the new partnership is specific enough to evaluate on its merits.
Project MIT — the Mutual Interdiction Team — is a partnership between Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. DESARMA is the information system underpinning it: a real-time intelligence sharing program that activates whenever either country’s customs authorities identify shipments linked to firearms, ammunition, explosives, and other sensitive materials. The initiative enables real-time data sharing, rigorous cargo tracking, and joint operations to intercept illicit shipments before they reach their destination.
Early results are already documented. U.S.-provided intelligence has helped Brazilian authorities uncover sophisticated smuggling methods — rifle components hidden inside airsoft equipment, drugs concealed in packages labeled as common goods, including pet food shipped through postal services.
Brazil’s finance ministry said consolidating trafficking data into a structured database has improved the identification of patterns, links between senders and recipients, and recurring trafficking routes.
The mechanism is straightforward and genuinely useful: when a suspicious shipment leaves the United States destined for Brazil, U.S. Customs flags it in real time to Brazilian authorities, who can act before it clears customs. When Brazilian authorities identify a Brazilian-origin narcotics shipment heading toward the United States, they share that intelligence with Washington. The flow of information goes both ways — addressing a problem that has been structurally asymmetric for years. Brazil was absorbing U.S.-origin weapons without any advance intelligence from Washington. Now it has it.
The system expands Brazil’s ability to detect, connect, and track illicit weapons flows — moving the country’s security posture from reactive to preventive, monitoring the evolution of criminal networks before their shipments arrive rather than after they clear customs.
The Florida Problem
Sociedad Media has reported on Brazil’s Florida gun pipeline connection in April — read more here. The specific geography of the weapons flow is as politically sensitive as it is operationally significant.
Florida is home to the largest Brazilian diaspora community in the United States — concentrated in Orlando, Boca Raton, Broward County and Miami, with a significant community in Tampa. It is also home to some of the most permissive gun purchasing laws in the country. The combination — a large Brazilian-born population, easy access to firearms, and sophisticated criminal networks with transnational reach — has made Florida the primary source of the illegal weapons that are killing people in São Paulo favelas and Rio de Janeiro communities.
The Trump administration’s Shield of the Americas — the hemispheric security coalition announced at a March summit in Florida — was built explicitly around the premise that criminal networks operating across the Western Hemisphere represent a security threat that requires a multilateral response. Brazil’s left-wing government under Lula was conspicuously absent from that summit. And yet the DESARMA program announced in April — a direct operational expression of the same counter-criminal-network logic — was developed precisely through the bilateral U.S.-Brazil dialogue that the Trump administration had been pressing for.
The irony is specific and documented: Lula declined the Shield of the Americas summit on political grounds — unwilling to align publicly with a Trump security architecture that includes designating Brazilian gangs as terrorist organizations and that he regards as an infringement of Brazilian sovereignty. Then his government announced a security cooperation program with Washington that operationally achieves many of the same counter-trafficking objectives.
The bilateral relationship is doing what the multilateral posturing cannot.
47 Strikes
The DESARMA program operates alongside a U.S. security posture in the hemisphere that Brazil regards with significantly more ambivalence than the weapon-tracking initiative.
Since September 2, the United States has conducted at least 47 lethal strikes on maritime vessels traveling in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean — in what legal critics have condemned as extrajudicial killings. At least 147 people have died in those strikes. Their identities have never been publicly confirmed by the Trump administration, which has argued it is in “armed conflict” with Latin American criminal networks and considers them “unlawful combatants,” engaged as “legitimate targets” in armed conflict.
Democrat lawmakers on Capitol Hill recently addressed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in a congressional hearing last week, referring to these targets as “innocent fishermen.”
The legal framework that Washington is asserting — that criminal networks can be targeted with lethal military force in the same way as designated terrorist organizations — is one that Brazil has explicitly rejected. Lula’s government has called on the Trump administration not to use the foreign terrorist label for entities within Brazilian borders. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira told Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly by phone: “The Brazilian government is against this classification.”
The tension is palpable between the two governments. Washington wants to designate the PCC and Comando Vermelho as Foreign Terrorist Organizations — a designation that would allow U.S. military strikes against them using the same legal authority that has produced 47 strikes in the Caribbean. The designation would also allow U.S. authorities to use other powers, like the freezing of assets of those suspected of being connected to the organizations, or the expansion of targeted investigations.
Brazil, on the other hand, wants the weapons-tracking cooperation but not the terrorist designation. The DESARMA program is Lula’s attempt to satisfy Washington’s demand for action without accepting the legal framework that the FTO designation would enable.
Whether that bargain holds — whether a real-time intelligence sharing program on weapons shipments is sufficient to delay or prevent the FTO designation that Rubio is pushing — is the question that will determine how the bilateral relationship develops. It is also the question that Lula is flying to Washington to answer in person on Thursday.
The Shield of the Americas — and Who Is Not Under It
The Shield of the Americas is the Trump administration’s attempt to institutionalize the security architecture the Donroe Doctrine has been building since January.
Trump convened twelve Caribbean and Latin American leaders at the March summit and declared U.S. opposition to hostile foreign influence in the Western Hemisphere. Right-wing governments — Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Honduras, El Salvador — sent their leaders. Left-wing governments — Brazil, Colombia, Mexico — did not.
The absence of Latin America’s three largest economies from the Shield of the Americas summit is the single most significant structural weakness in the coalition’s architecture. A hemispheric security framework that does not include Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico is not a hemispheric security framework. It is a right-wing coalition with a security brand.
Washington knows this. The DESARMA program is, in part, an attempt to bring Brazil into a functional bilateral security relationship without requiring Lula to appear at a Trump-organized summit alongside leaders he regards as political adversaries. It is security cooperation through the back channel rather than the front door — which is, in the specific context of the Lula-Trump relationship, the only door that is currently open.
The Bolsonaro family has been lobbying Washington directly to accelerate the FTO designation — with Eduardo Bolsonaro and Flávio Bolsonaro both urging Trump administration officials to take action against the PCC and Comando Vermelho.
The designation would hand the Brazilian right a potent weapon ahead of the October 2026 election — painting Lula as the president who allowed Brazil’s most powerful criminal organizations to escape U.S. terrorist designation while flying to Washington for a photo opportunity.
That is the political landscape Lula is navigating. The DESARMA program is Lula’s evidence that cooperation is happening. The White House visit is his attempt to keep the FTO designation off the table. And the October election is the clock that everything is running against.
What Thursday’s Summit Needs to Produce
Lula confirmed on Monday that he will fly to Washington on Wednesday and meet Trump at the White House on Thursday morning — the first in-person bilateral encounter on American soil since Trump returned to office.
The agenda combines tariff disputes, cooperation on rare earths and critical minerals, the PCC and Comando Vermelho FTO designation question, and the diplomatic fallout from the detention of former Brazilian spy chief Alexandre Ramagem by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April. Both governments retaliated by pulling credentials from each other’s officials before agreeing to dialogue.
The DESARMA program gives Lula something to point to on Thursday — a concrete, operational security cooperation initiative that demonstrates Brazil is taking the weapons and drug trafficking problem seriously without accepting the FTO designation framework. Whether that is sufficient to satisfy Trump, Rubio, and the Bolsonaro family’s lobbying pressure is the question that Thursday’s meeting will begin — but almost certainly not finish — answering.
Sociedad Media will be monitoring Thursday’s summit and publishing a full update as outcomes emerge.
Sociedad Media is monitoring the U.S.-Brazil bilateral relationship, the Shield of the Americas, and the Lula-Trump White House summit. For tips and reporting, contact info@sociedadmedia.com
