Violence has surged over recent weeks in the Bolivian departments bordering Brazil, in a pattern ACLED’s South America research manager Julia Franciotti attributes to competition between Brazilian criminal groups spilling across the frontier — with direct attacks and retaliation taking place on Bolivian territory.

The incidents cluster along trafficking corridors, particularly around San Matías and San Ignacio de Velasco: targeted killings, clashes between suspected members of the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho, attacks on police, and the killing of farm workers.

The two groups involved

The PCC was founded in a São Paulo prison in 1993 and is the more hierarchical of the two. The Comando Vermelho emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s and operates in a more decentralised way. Both have extended well beyond Brazil, into Bolivia and Paraguay, principally around cocaine trafficking.

Bolivian officials say the groups have found a haven in border towns where they can operate and take refuge with relative ease. Guayaramerín, in Bolivia’s north-east on the Mamoré river opposite the Brazilian town of Guajará-Mirim, has become one focal point; residents there report rising homicides and assaults.

The displacement argument

Franciotti offers one explanation worth taking seriously: growing pressure on criminal groups inside Brazil. ACLED records more than 170 clashes between security forces and gangs in Brazil’s bordering states in 2026.

If that reading is right, this is the same dynamic visible in Michoacán, where Mexican deployments protecting the avocado trade are expected to push extortion into neighbouring municipalities and other commodities. Enforcement concentrated in one jurisdiction moves the activity rather than ending it, and the direction it moves is toward wherever controls are weakest. Porous crossings and limited border policing make Bolivia’s eastern departments that place.

The alternative reading, which Franciotti is careful not to foreclose, is that this is a short flare-up between rivals rather than the start of a durable pattern. She notes explicitly that it remains to be seen which. A few weeks of concentrated incidents is a real escalation and not yet a trend, and the honest position at this stage is that both remain open.

The country this is landing on

Bolivia is not in a position to absorb a new security problem comfortably. The country has spent much of this year in economic crisis — fuel shortages, roadblocks, and fifty days of cross-sectoral demonstrations over land reform and economic policy. President Rodrigo Paz declared a state of emergency on 20 June to lift the remaining blockades, after negotiating an agreement with the Bolivian Workers’ Center.

That truce is fragile, with fuel shortages unresolved. A government managing an economic emergency in the west now faces armed competition between foreign criminal organisations in the east.

Who is actually being killed

One detail in the ACLED description deserves emphasis, because it will not survive into most summaries: among the recorded incidents is the killing of farm workers.

Coverage of trafficking violence tends to count killings of rival members and of police. Rural workers in border departments are neither, and they are the population with the least capacity to move away from a corridor that has become contested. The same held in Honduras in May, when gunmen killed twenty farmers on a palm plantation in Colón — the department’s deadliest month since 2018, attributed by the security minister to a dispute between criminal groups.

What to watch over the next two months is whether incidents continue at the current rate once the immediate confrontation resolves, and whether Bolivian and Brazilian authorities revive the joint border arrangements they have set up before. The answer determines which of Franciotti’s two readings was right.

Related: Guard the Avocados and the Extortion Moves Next Door.

Sources

Analyst comment and incident data from ACLED; background on the PCC and CV in Bolivian border towns via France 24 as reported by Wire and World; Bolivia’s state of emergency and the Honduras plantation killings from ACLED’s regional overviews.