The Brazilian-Paraguayan Jarvis Chimenes Pavão rose to become one of South America’s most prominent drug traffickers and the successor of a line of local crime bosses along the border between Paraguay and Brazil. His rise and fall mirror major shifts in the border’s underworld, which has witnessed the growth of the feared Brazilian criminal organization known as the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), and the fading away of old-school traffickers like Pavão.
History
Born in Brazil’s Ponta Porã border town across from Paraguay’s infamous Pedro Juan Caballero trafficking hotspot, Pavão began his criminal career in the 1990s. In 1994, the soon-to-become drug lord was arrested with 25 kilos of cocaine in a coastal city of Brazil’s Santa Catarina state, but he succeeded in avoiding conviction. As Brazil’s federal agents continued to build trafficking and money laundering evidence against Pavão, the suspect fled to Paraguay to continue his ascension within the drug underworld.
Paraguayan authorities would finally catch up with Pavão in the Concepción border department in 2009. The Brazilian national was charged and condemned to eight years in prison for criminal association and money laundering.
His capture did little to hamper his drug activities. For years, Pavão operated his drug empire from behind bars due to a lack of control within Paraguay’s severely overcrowded prisons and deep penitentiary corruption.
After initial press reports in 2014, details of Pavão’s luxurious life in Paraguay’s Tacumbú prison hit the headlines again in 2016 and scandal ensued. The incarcerated drug trafficker would later claim he funded for more than two billion guaraníes (roughly $450,000 at the time) worth of repairs for the prison and even bought food for inmates, in exchange for VIP treatment from the prison administration.
Corruption was such that Pavão allegedly held drug business meetings with collaborators within Tacumbú. The two Brazilian convictions which Pavão would eventually be handed — one in absentia — both concern trafficking schemes run from inside Paraguayan jails and the distribution of narcotics across several Brazilian states.
The scandal of Pavão’s VIP treatment and the discovery of explosives in the walls of Tacumbú generated pressure on Paraguayan authorities, who eventually transferred the drug trafficker to a penitentiary center under police control in July 2016. Images of the heavily militarized transfer detail extracting the drug lord out of Tacumbú demonstrated the authorities’ concern over Pavao’s ability to mobilize men from behind bars.
Yet once again, his incarceration did little to hamper the drug lord’s operations, and it was from inside this facility in Asunción that Pavão is rumored to have made his most infamous move in the underworld: the spectacular hit on his competitor Jorge Rafaat Toumani, alias “Sadam.”
Early one evening, in June 2016, an SUV with a 50-millimeter anti-aerial gun mounted in the back, drove up in front of Rafaat’s bulletproof car and two-vehicle escort, and blasted all three. Pavão’s competitor was riddled with 16 bullets, while the ensuing turf war shook Pedro Juan Caballero — the crown jewel for the region’s drug lords — for hours.
The killing, carried out with men from Pavão’s then-ally, the PCC, completely reshuffled the deck within the border underworld and signalled the advent of the PCC’s rule over the key trafficking corridor.
The drug lord was finally extradited in December 2017 under impressive security measures to Brazil. Upon his extradition, a Paraguayan prison intelligence officer told El País: “The border used to be dominated by old-school bosses who worked as small companies. I see Pavão as an intermediary. He’s neither in nor out. He’s in the middle. He’s of the old-school type of drug traffickers who don’t want trouble. They don’t want blood, they want tranquility, nothing more. So he’s good with the state and he’s good with the criminals.”
In addition to a 2014 conviction in absentia, a Brazilian court sentenced the drug lord to more than 13 years in prison in 2018 for a second drug trafficking scheme run during his incarceration in Paraguay. He is currently imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Porto Velho, located in the Brazilian state of Rondônia in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest. He is scheduled to be released in 2035.
Several of Pavão’s businesses, properties, and associates are implicated in ongoing trials in Paraguay for involvement in money laundering and drug trafficking. Some of Pavão’s alleged-criminal partners and family members have been assassinated since his extradition.
Criminal Activities
Early in the 1990s, while he was still operating from Brazil, Pavão was allegedly a “large-scale distributor” for certain cities in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina.
After fleeing to Paraguay, Pavão gradually extended his control of trafficking routes to smuggle Paraguayan marijuana, as well as Colombian and Bolivian cocaine to his home country, with the support of Fahd Jamil Georges, the so-called “King of the Border” who for years called the shots along the Paraguay-Brazil border.
Authorities claim that Pavão’s providers included the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), with whom he allegedly exchanged weapons for cocaine. The kingpin always denied the claim.
As his organization grew, Pavão acquired small airplanes to run his drug flights across Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and began moving drugs as far into Brazil as the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo.
Geography
Although he was arrested in Paraguay’s Concepción department, Pavão is thought to have used Pedro Juan Caballero, Amambay, as the center of operations for his trafficking organization. In addition to Paraguay, his contacts extended to Bolivia and Colombia, from where he acquired cocaine, and his organization moved the drugs to several Brazilian states, including Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais and São Paulo.
Allies and Enemies
Though Pavão claims the two drug businessmen enjoyed amicable relations, authorities suspected Pavão of ordering the spectacular hit on Rafaat, carried out with the PCC and the Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV) in Pedro Juan Caballero.
The alliance between the incarcerated drug trafficker and the PCC lasted for some time. In October 2017, Brazil even warned Paraguay that intercepted communications suggested the PCC was planning on busting Pavão free. This alliance appears to have broken down since Pavão’s transfer to an isolated federal penitentiary in Brazil, where he is likely no longer useful to the PCC.
Prospects
Pavão is now held in a maximum security prison in northeast Brazil, which appears to have significantly damaged his ability to manage his drug operations. His criminal career appears heavily jeopardized.
Cut off from the outside world, Pavão suffered a second blow to his business with the apparent rupture of his alliance with the PCC. The Brazilian gang is reportedly picking off Pavão’s remaining men in the border one by one. Between November 2018 and January 2019, the group was blamed for attacks on two of Pavão’s nephews, his uncle, his lawyer and asset manager, as well as the individual suspected of coordinating Pavão’s drug flights. These attacks ratify the fall of the old-school trafficker that many have come to describe as the “last border kingpin.”