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Stolen Cars


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and small, local caudillos and national legislators, from small dealers and small-time crooks to big-time illegal markets. In each chapter, we describe the empirical scale in question, although frames of analytical abstraction are present in each ethnographic moment. If, at the end of the book, the reader is convinced that urban illegalities are not part of an underworld separate from our cities but are rather inherent to their construction, we will be satisfied. We would be even more satisfied if urban theory started to consider that part of the practical production of “the illegal” is done by “us” and is not just the work of “them.”

      In Chapter 2 we are taken to the state response to the public problem of armed robbery and theft of vehicles in São Paulo. In recent years, the São Paulo police have killed two people per day. In more than 60 percent of these occurrences there is a stolen vehicle at the murder scene. The police response to robberies is focused on punishing thieves, usually young favela dwellers. The lowest operators in the illegal markets are violently repressed and immediately replaced. By hybridizing ethnography and quantitative data analysis, we find that if thefts and deaths are concentrated in the poor peripheries, it is relatively much more likely that, in São Paulo, a thief will die while stealing a car in an elite neighborhood. The debate about normative regimes gains empirical expression when one of our characters turns to the PCC to try to recover his vehicle. The geography, dynamics, and prices of this repression are discussed in the chapter – while only two of our five stolen cars are recovered by the police, both having been completely picked clean.

      Chapter 3 introduces us to market responses, from the world of business to the world of stealing cars; our focus is on insurance companies. For them, it is not important to punish those guilty of crimes; what matters is to recover the stolen cars and earn more money from them. Neither does it matter to the insurance companies if armed robberies and thefts decrease significantly – what they sell is coverage of a risk, which must be regulated. We see how the marginal circuits of the vehicle economy meet the central circuits of financial capital. Concrete characters make this connection, from informal “hunters” who retrieve vehicles with their own motorcycles in their own neighborhoods by calling on networks of community relations, to one of the biggest entrepreneurs in the Brazilian automobile industry. As the values ​​circulating in these markets begin to be understood, the sheer volumes passing along their supply and distribution chains cannot fail to impress.

      Chapter 5 is an ethnographic study of the internal inequalities within the São Paulo vehicle dismantling market. It strengthens the empirical foundation of our theoretical framework, which is centered on the notion of normative regimes, in greater detail. The rules internal to the world of crime, as codified by the PCC, coexist with formal state regulations (especially the “Dismantling Law”) in the daily life of the industry. The two sets of rules operate situationally in the daily life of dismantling establishments and tend to favor the police’s monetary extraction racket thanks to loopholes in both systems. Acting illegally, police officers demand bribes to turn a blind eye, thus reifying the cleavage between regulatory regimes.

      Chapter 6 follows on from the same argument, which now expands its scope. Our object becomes the dispute over state models for regulating the illegal vehicle market, a dispute that lasted for more than a decade and involved politicians from across the spectrum, insurance companies, auctioneers, dealers, dismantlers, as well as criminal groups and police groups. Hardening discourse around the police and the militarization of them was noted by some observers within these institutions. In extorted illegal markets, evangelical megachurches, and among elites, such discourse has found a receptive audience, as reflected in 2018 state elections.

      In Chapter 7, we examine power disputes at the national level, but now seen from the perspective of vehicle market operators. Our ethnographic research describes and analyzes the dispute as an expansion and regulation of popular economies. Empirically, we analyzed two recent, and competing, products from the insurance industry: “affordable auto insurance” offered by large financial companies and “vehicle protection” offered by popular vehicle market associations. We see how in the competitive relationship between them, the world of crime and police militias act in silence to preserve their illegal businesses. Criminalization is mobilized and unequivocal meanings of reproducing urban inequalities are reinforced by it. The criminalization mechanism in turn reproduces the self-perpetuating crime–security machine.

      In the conclusion we return to the analytical and theoretical proposal of the book, beginning with the empirical manifestations of our arguments, which offer future prospects for fruitful ethnographic investigation, but also our multiple methods, which focus less on systematic comparisons and more on those between relationships with empirical objects that demonstrate the “continuous and painful” coproduction of inequalities and violence on a worldwide scale.

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