Clandestine rifle factory and the political economy of "organized crime"

From importation to the clandestine industry: the mutation of the rifle market.

On August 20, 2025, the Federal Police raided a weapons workshop in Rio das Pedras, in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, where rifles were being assembled from parts imported from Miami. At the site, police agents found machinery, weapons in the assembly phase, and 3D printers used to manufacture components. There was evidence of the involvement of militiamen who possess a distinct expertise in the grammar of weaponry and its (il)legal and (il)legitimate uses.

A police operation that also began on August 20 and extended to August 21, 2025, exposed the scale of this practice: in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste and Americana, in the interior of São Paulo, federal and military police located, respectively: 1) a clandestine rifle workshop disguised as an aeronautical machining company, equipped with molds and precision machinery; and 2) a warehouse with parts and about 40 rifles in the finishing stage.

A few weeks later, on September 19, 2025, Bahia registered a record seizure: in less than 24 hours, 28 rifles were confiscated in operations carried out in Camaçari, Porto Seguro, and Salvador — and in Abrantes (Camaçari) alone, the police located 22 ready-to-use rifles, ammunition, and drugs. From January to September, the state had already seized almost 100 rifles, revealing the spread of this market and the expansion of the production and circulation of heavy weaponry into the interior of the state.

These recent episodes from 2025 exemplify a broader and more dynamic movement, underway for years, which tends to deepen with technological diffusion and the reconfiguration of illicit arms supply chains. More than isolated cases, they are indications of an ongoing transformation. So-called "organized crime" no longer depends on international arms smuggling: the domestic manufacture of rifles facilitates criminal activity and hinders the work of security forces. This significant shift in the (il)legal arms market, amalgamated by (il)licit and (in)formal businesses, marks the transition from a monopolistic import/export model to a hybrid production regime.

This new method combines the acquisition of external and internal components with local and modular assembly, bringing together heterogeneous pieces of distinct origin and diverse flows. It is a kind of illicit assembly. The process reduces logistical and operational costs, one of the major bottlenecks in crime and one of the main challenges for police and public security. It guarantees a regular supply and diversifies supply sources. It also increases the cost and complexity of police work—from parts tracking to ballistic analysis—bringing higher levels of demand to the different modalities of public and state policing.

By manufacturing rifles domestically and in a decentralized manner, the itinerant and networked criminal economy transforms a previously relatively scarce and expensive weapon into a mass-produced good, advantageously cannibalized and unregistered. Its performative presence in urban space exceeds its tactical-operational functionality. Although not very efficient in close-quarters confrontations, typical of urban events—from the favela to the asphalt—the rifle fulfills a symbolic, moral, and political role: an instrument of identity construction, a device of prestige and power, a means of intimidation and negotiated territorial dominance.

What is consolidated is a discursive practice in which the weapon is not merely a war resource with an extended range and high lethal impact. It is also symbolic capital and a strategic commodity, with high ostentatious visibility and performative yield for regimes of fear and their exceptional practices. It sustains the strength of criminal governance and, at the same time, exposes the vulnerability of the police response, marked by the difficulty of prompt reaction and the insufficiency of qualified repression in the face of the oversaturation of rifles among groups and within the police forces.

Each clandestine weapon introduces a new layer of calculation into the political-economic chain of crime, enabling a logic of protection based on the dissemination of diffuse threats and violence as a means of exchange. The proliferation of rifles yields a return that serves as a signaling icon of the capacity to employ potential and concrete coercion, distributing (il)legal and (il)legitimate coercion, bending wills, dissuading through violence, and imposing subjugation.

Why the rifle? Economics, prestige, and power.

Local production alters the conditions of control, monitoring, and accountability, multiplying points of vulnerability in investigations, patrolling, emergencies, special operations, and, not least, in forensic and intelligence activities.

Among the strategic options of the illicit market, there is a deliberate choice for the clandestine assembly of rifles—rather than pistols or handguns. There are good economic, logistical, and symbolic reasons for this.

Economically, the scale of production and the reuse of components make the rifle more profitable in markets that demand firepower as a regular political-economic resource. Logistically, the flow of modular parts compensates for the initial investment in machinery. Symbolically, the rifle offers prestige and intimidation, becoming a commodity with high social and political exchange value in territorial disputes.

Choosing a rifle requires specialization: gunsmiths, precision machining, finishing lines. This technical capital generates externalities favorable to crime—higher resale margins, customer loyalty, and the ability to maintain stockpiles. Thus, even with urban disadvantages (volume, weight, expensive ammunition), the economic and symbolic return compensates. The rifle functions as a totem of power and terror, whose public visibility surpasses its immediate military utility.

It is important to highlight the reconfiguration of bribery networks and police collusion revealed by the rifle economy: the presence of factories and assembly lines alters the incentives and payment circuits related to the seizure (or non-seizure) of rifles and, no less importantly, to the negotiated return to the illegal owner of the seized rifle, known in Rio de Janeiro as the "success kit".

There is a rearrangement that redefines who pays, how much is paid, and for which weapons they are paid, shifting bribery schemes from simple one-off agreements to continuous mechanisms of clandestine financing and regulation.

This reconfiguration is linked to the specialized knowledge required for the acquisition, assembly, maintenance, and distribution of weapons—knowledge that, to a large extent, comes from actors within the State itself (police officers, regular military personnel) and from actors with technical access and authorizations, such as collectors and hunters (CACs).

This creates a hybrid production chain, where the technical-political capital of the State guides, subsidizes, and regulates illegal and clandestine practices. Here, the bribery "scheme" involving public agents blends formal controls, becoming part of the policing apparatus that is integral to the protection business and its arms and drug trafficking network.

In this case, we have the advancement of policing of property, with its arrangements between criminal groups and state agents in the governance of territories, and the containment efforts through policing of property, composed of segments of the public forces that have not become bosses, partners, or employees of organized crime.

It is evident that the relevant actor, whether for or against the criminal organization (ORCRIM), is the State in its political abstraction and the state bureaucracy in the concretization of its practices, entangled and dispersed in the institutional labyrinths.

From the market to the political artifact: condensed effects of the rifle.

It can be observed how the clandestine rifle factory acts not only as a market cog, but also as a political operator that redistributes costs, risks, and gains.

To make this connection between material and symbolic dimensions visible, the following table summarizes the most significant effects of this arrangement.

Table 1: Summary of significant effects

The combined effects suggest that the clandestine rifle factory is not simply a market arrangement, but rather a political artifact that strains and reshapes the relationship between crime and the state.

These effects do not operate in a linear-causal way, but as a material and symbolic grammar that traverses distinct domains: the logistics of supply, the economics of price, the specialization of labor, police traceability, and social symbolism. It is in this context that industrial clandestinity reveals itself as a practice embedded in criminal modes of governance and the technologies of subjugation adopted.

One can observe how each effect combines and reinforces itself along the different axes that give some centrality to the rifle in the political economy of crime.

A) Logistics and supply: from scarcity to predictability

The emergence of assembly plants and small factories shifts the availability of weapons from the sporadic regime of smuggling to a more predictable supply pattern.

Where previously the supply of weaponry depended on long and risky routes, a system of stockpiles and replacements is now being implemented: parts arrive through various channels, are accumulated, and assembled according to demand.

This alters the planning repertoire of armed forces—operations, blockades, and occupations now take into account the existence of internal arms reserves, reducing dependence on external “opportunities” and making tactical and political decisions less subject to supply disruptions.

B) Economics and price: leases and turnover of firepower

Local production and temporary forms of appropriation (loans, consignments, leases) reshape the cost-benefit relationship of weaponry.

You don't need to buy to have firepower: leasing and loan formulas allow a robbery, a high-profile public action — such as the assassination of a PCC informant at Guarulhos airport, or even a lethal "contract killing," such as the assassination of the former head of the São Paulo Civil Police — to be carried out with high-caliber weaponry without the initial outlay.

This makes the rifle accessible to occasional operators and facilitates the rotation of firepower among groups. In practice, the reduction in unit price and temporary circulation dilute the cost and transfer risks to the provider, while creating bonds of dependency: local agreements and informal obligations between supplier and user consolidate as governance mechanisms.

The political effect is twofold: it expands operational capacity without requiring high capital and, simultaneously, hinders individual and institutional accountability, because weaponry ceases to be a stable, owned asset and becomes the product of a bricolage that shoots, wounds, and kills.

This scenario intensifies when considering the easing of gun ownership and access laws promoted by the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022). Pistols, carbines, and rifles began to circulate more freely in everyday life, allowing crime to "kill with a receipt."

The cost of weapons was reduced, and the already limited state capacity for oversight was exhausted—a policy that, in the logic of "anything goes," had no interest in improving itself.

This has stimulated a legal market that is unsatisfactorily regulated, with stocks overflowing into the illegal market and producing a hybrid circulation of both small and large scale.

This policy was anchored in the pseudo-liberal illusion that an armed individual could self-regulate and self-monitor, especially in an unequal and hierarchical Brazilian society that uses its reasons of race, class, gender, etc. to impose solutions.

Control has shifted to the isolated figure of the buyer — in the logic of selfish individualism disconnected from political-normative pacts, where "if you did wrong, you have to pay for it."

The counterpart continued to be the creation of harsh laws, designed to be impractical, which reinforce the dismantling and decharacterization of weapons.

The immediate effect was the creation—and reinforcement—of a potentially coercive capacity dissolved into the everyday life of ordinary people. Its existence and the display of its availability for use create an imposing and deterrent effect.

This effect creates an unequal playing field in any and all negotiations, given the constant possibility of the latent and diffuse threat of a weapon acting as an escort in conflictive interactions.

Private arsenals have become a resource for imposing violent and authoritarian solutions to conflicts in shared spaces, whether public or private, criminal or not.

This is a legacy that persists in the current Lula administration. Despite efforts to reinstate some rigor in legislation and enforcement, the effects of the previous deregulation remain, leaving marks that continue to shape the arms market and circulation.

C) Specialized work: gunsmiths, technicians and intermediaries

Large-scale assembly demands technical skills and organizational arrangements: machining, finishing, maintenance, and logistics are no longer improvised tasks, but specialized functions.

Centers of practical knowledge emerge—gunsmiths, technicians, and intermediaries—and supply chains that connect legal and illegal suppliers.

This professionalization produces more reliable and standardized goods, builds customer loyalty, and expands the capacity to offer products and services.

The problem of confrontation is shifting beyond the police sphere, because it also affects labor, economic, and market regulation dimensions.

D) Traceability and expertise: the labyrinth of state control

The fragmentation of routes and the modularity of parts complicate traceability. Unnumbered components, reassembled bodies, and the sporadic use of manufacturing technologies make identifying the origin difficult and require multidisciplinary expertise—metallurgical, digital, ballistic.

This increases investigation costs and times, and imposes a greater need for cooperation (administrative and technical) on the police, as well as customs control and financial intelligence.

The consequence is an asymmetry: while the criminal network becomes more flexible with the State's contribution, the State's response demands long and costly investments that depend on the government's political priorities. These priorities may not materialize due to the absence or presence of a personalistic, unstable "political will" susceptible to the pursuit of electoral results.

E) Symbolism and fetishism: the rifle as a relational asset

The rifle operates simultaneously as an instrument and as a symbol: even in urban settings and rugged terrain — settlements with irregular layouts, alleys, and slopes that reduce maneuverability and field of vision — its presence transcends tactical-operational rationality.

The weight, size, and ammunition logistics make the rifle unsuitable for many everyday environments. However, the public visibility of the weapon lends authority to criminal authorities.

Furthermore, circulation through leases and loans transforms the rifle into a relational asset: it is both a tool of coercion and a means of forging local loyalties and obligations.

Goals, bribes, and the political-criminal machinery.

Another perverse effect is the isolated targets for seizing rifles, which transform what should be a means to reduce the circulation of weapons into an end in itself.

This simplistic approach reinforces the logic of bribes and schemes necessary to sustain police productivity.

Since it's not possible to maintain a linear and increasing curve of seizures—especially of the most expensive weapons—such targets end up requiring direct negotiation with organized crime to guarantee impressive numbers.

The impactful statistic, converted into immediate propaganda, functions as electoral capital, while, behind the scenes, bribes are rearranged regarding what will or will not be seized.

This process is anchored in specialized technical knowledge about the acquisition, assembly, overhaul, and circulation of weapons—much of it originating from state agents themselves (police officers, regular military personnel)—and shapes a production chain that combines crime and state apparatus, transforming the management of rifles into a political and publicity tool.

Table 2 – Political mechanism of the goals

Given this mechanism — self-reinforcing goals, statistics converted into electoral capital, and a hybrid production chain — immediate practical implications follow for arms control policies, internal oversight, and operational transparency.

Reading the analytical framework allows us to understand that the effects of clandestine factories produce concrete impacts on the daily functioning of crime and on the State's capacity to respond.

It is at this point that one can systematize the practical implications of the local assembly of rifles, organized as a technical catalog that translates the industrial machinery into direct operational consequences for the illicit market and for police action.

Table 3 – Specific operational implications

The convergence of these factors generates a self-perpetuating cycle: regular supply and lower prices expand the market; specialization ensures quality and customer loyalty; loss of traceability increases impunity; and the symbolic value of the rifle feeds back into its demand.

The result is an armed political economy in which the rifle operates simultaneously as a commodity, a symbol of power, and an instrument of territorial governance.

The challenge of "criminal industrialization"

The clandestine rifle factories exemplify the industrialization of organized crime as a constitutive part of the networked political economy that involves (il)legal businesses and criminal governance under state regulation.

This is not a deviation or an exception, but an ordinary practice that reorganizes flows, regulates prices, redistributes risks, and reconfigures power relations.

This article sought to highlight five key points:

1. Logistics that shifts from a politics of scarcity to a politics of predictability;
2. an economy that dilutes costs through leases and rotation of the coercive means;
3. The specialization of labor that creates hybrid chains of gunsmiths, technicians, and intermediaries;
4. Traceability is compromised by modularity and fragmentation;
5. The symbolism of the rifle transformed into political capital, a strategic commodity, and a relational asset.

The machinery of seizure targets, publicity statistics, and bribery schemes shows how the policing of assets is intertwined with criminal management, while the policing of good is strained by institutional labyrinths.

Addressing this phenomenon requires understanding that the industrialization of the rifle is also a technology of government.

From a regulatory standpoint, this implies control over parts, kits, and online marketplaces.

From a technical standpoint, this involves expanding forensic expertise and traceability.

On the political front, it demands international cooperation, federal arrangements, and financial monitoring.

But the crucial point is symbolic: challenging the fetish of the rifle as a symbol of prestige and power, which has been constructed as a pedagogy of police and military governments within the structure of the State.

Without this internal political struggle over meaning, the political-criminal machine will continue to operate the rifle as the central artifact of the political economy of crime — even in the face of its lower logistical and tactical-operational profitability in armed territorial domains.