Under Project MIT, short for Mutual Interdiction Team, Brazil’s Receita Federal and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will share intelligence and coordinate interceptions of suspect shipments moving through ports, airports and international mail. In its announcement, Brazil’s Finance Ministry said the system will organize seizure data such as declared origin, logistics details, exporters, senders and serial identifiers, while also allowing alerts to be sent back to authorities in the country of origin.
The legal backbone is also clearer. Portaria RFB No. 663/26 formally created a pilot information-exchange project for cargo risk management under customs cooperation between Brazil and CBP, initially using encrypted electronic messages and leaving room for more specialized technology later. That gives both sides a defined channel for turning fragmentary cargo data into interdictions before suspect shipments disappear into the domestic market.
Why the Brazil-US anti-trafficking pact matters now
The DESARMA component is the pact’s main operational tool. Brazilian officials say the platform is designed to track weapons, ammunition, parts, components, explosives and other sensitive goods in real time whenever either side identifies cargo tied to the other country. Officials also say the same model can support drug cases when traffickers rely on the same logistics channels, concealment methods and freight operators.
Brazil says the system is already producing leads. The Finance Ministry said DESARMA records from the last 12 months captured 35 incidents involving 1,168 weapons parts and components, roughly 550 kilograms, shipped mainly from Florida through false declarations and concealment tactics. Reuters reported Friday that the broader bilateral initiative was presented as a concrete response to transnational organized crime, while Reuters separately reported that Brazilian officials cited more than 1,100 weapons seized over the past 12 months from the United States and more than 1.5 tons of drugs seized in the first quarter alone.
For Brazil, the pact is also a test of whether customs intelligence can become more than a back-office tool. If the data reaches police and prosecutors quickly enough, authorities could move beyond seizing parcels and start identifying repeat senders, intermediary routes, front companies and freight patterns. That would move the pact from tactical seizures toward longer-running cases against the networks behind them.
Long-running routes, new pressure
The problem the agreement is trying to solve is not new. In a 2018 Reuters report, a Brazilian Federal Police study found the United States was the largest foreign source of guns that ended up with bandits and drug traffickers in Brazil, often after moving through third countries such as Paraguay. The current pact, then, is less a sudden breakthrough than a more structured attempt to answer a flow authorities have documented for years.
The agreement also fits a more recent chain of events. In a November 2025 Reuters report, Brazil’s Finance Ministry said U.S. cooperation was essential in a money-laundering investigation that also touched illegal weapons shipments. That signaled that Brasília wanted Washington’s help not only at the border, but deeper into financial and logistics networks tied to organized crime.
At the same time, Brazil has resisted turning the issue into a terrorism debate. In a May 2025 Reuters report, Brazilian officials rejected a U.S. request to classify major local gangs as terrorist organizations, arguing Brazilian law treats them as criminal groups rather than terrorists. Friday’s pact underscores Brazil’s preference for intelligence sharing, customs targeting and financial disruption instead of a fight over labels.
Whether the initiative delivers will depend on follow-through. Real-time alerts, better cargo screening and serial-number tracing can tighten the net, but only if both sides keep feeding the system, act on the information and push cases back up the chain to exporters, brokers and facilitators. If that happens, the Brazil-U.S. effort could become more than another bilateral security announcement; it could become one of the rare efforts that starts closing the route from shipment to street.
