STOLEN CARS

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 STOLEN CARS
A Journey Through São Paulo’s
Urban Conflict

Edited by
GABRIEL FELTRAN
This edition first published 2022
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Feltran, Gabriel de Santis, editor.
Title: Stolen cars : a journey through São Paulo’s urban conflict / edited
by Gabriel Feltran.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, [2021] | Series: IJURR
studies in urban and social change book series | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033082 (print) | LCCN 2021033083 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119686118 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119686125 (paperback) | ISBN
9781119686156 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781119686163 (epub) | ISBN 9781119686149
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Crime--Brazil--São Paulo. | Automobile theft--Brazil--São
Paulo. | Social conflict--Brazil--São Paulo. | Urban
violence--Brazil--São Paulo. | Sociology, Urban--Brazil--São Paulo.
Classification: LCC HV6895.S3 S76 2021 (print) | LCC HV6895.S3 (ebook) |
DDC 364.981/61--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033082
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033083

Cover image: © Photographs by Gabriel Feltran, Lucas Alves Fernandes

Cover design by Wiley

Set in 11/13pt Adobe GaramondPro by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Contents

Notes on Contributors viii

Series Editors’ Preface x

Introduction1
Gabriel Feltran
A Phone Call 7
A Global Market 9
Theoretical Framework: Normative Regimes 11
Inequalities18
Methods: About Journeys, Tacking, and Our Collaborative
Research Team 21
A Collective Research Team 27
Ethical Issues, Diversity, and Typical Days 29
Chapter Structure 31
1 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo 37
Gregorio Zambon and Gabriel Feltran
7 a.m. (Fiat Strada) 39
10:00 a.m. (Hyundai HB20) 43
5:15 p.m. (Fiat Palio) 47
8:40 p.m. (Ford Ka) 53
Urban Violence and Market Regulation 56
2 State Reaction 63
Gabriel Feltran
Police Use of Lethal Force 66
Imprisonment74
The “Clearing of Public Roads” 78
Political Legitimation 80
3 Designing the Market 87
Deborah Fromm
Insurance as a Mediator 94
The Automobile Business: From the Streets of São Paulo
to the Panama Papers 99
vi Contents

4 Auctions and Mechanisms 104

André de Pieri Pimentel and Luiz Gustavo Simão Pereira
Central Circuits: Insurance Companies that Sell at Auctions 109
Some Numbers 111
Marginal Circuits: Car Dealerships and Chop-shops that
Buy at Auctions 115
Auctioneers: Economics and Politics 121
5 Dismantling a Stolen Car 127
Isabela Vianna Pinho, Gregório Zambon, and
Lucas Alves Fernandes Silva
Family, Market, Politics 130
Between Extremes: From “Recicla” to “Sheds” 135
Prices and Stratification 143
6 Regulating an Illegal Market 147
Luana Motta, Janaina Maldonado, and Juliana Alcântara
A Brief Chronology of the Dismantling Law 149
Old Practices, New “Political Merchandise”: The Everyday
Experience of the Dismantling Law 152
The Political Centrality of Police Officers 158
Police Regulation and Violence 161
7 Not Criminals, Legislators 165
Deborah Fromm and Luana Motta
New Laws, New Markets 169
Illegal Markets, Microfinance, Corporate Philanthropy 171
Action and Reaction 174
Parallel Insurance and the Protection Market 175
The Law that Governs the Market, the Market that Governs the Law 181
8 Globalization and Its Backroads 187
André de Pieri Pimentel, Gabriel Feltran, and Lucas Alves Fernandes Silva
A Global Market and Its Margins 190
Connecting Markets 194
Urban Reconfigurations 198
North–South Urban Inequalities 202
 Contents  vii

Conclusions 208
Gabriel Feltran
Afterword: Following Cars in a Latin American Metropolis:
Inequality, Illegalisms, and Formalization 220
Daniel Veloso Hirata
References 228
Index 245
Notes on Contributors

Gabriel Feltran (ed.)

Professor at the Department of Sociology at Federal University of São Carlos.
Senior Researcher at the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap).
Author of The Entangled City: Crime as Urban Fabric in São Paulo, Manchester
University Press 2020.
gabrielfeltran@gmail.com

Luana Motta
Professor at the Department of Sociology at Federal University of São Carlos.
Coordinator of Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
luanadiasmotta@gmail.com

Deborah Fromm
PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at University of Campinas and
researcher at the Centre for Urban Ethnographies (Neu/Cebrap).
deborahrfromm@gmail.com

Janaina Maldonado
PhD Candidate at Hamburg University in the LFF Graduate Programme
“Democratising security in turbulent times” and Doctoral researcher at
German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
janamaldonado40@gmail.com

André de Pieri Pimentel

PhD Candidate in Social Sciences at University of Campinas and researcher
at Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
andre.pierip@gmail.com

Isabela Vianna Pinho

PhD Candidate in Sociology at Federal University of Sao Carlos and researcher
at Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
isaviannapinho@hotmail.com

Gregório Zambon
PhD Candidate in Social Sciences at University of Campinas and researcher
at Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
greg.zdiniz@gmail.com
 Notes on Contributors  ix

Luiz Gustavo Simão Pereira

Undergraduate student of Social Sciences at Federal University of São Carlos
and researcher at Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
luizgustavo15pereira@gmail.com

Juliana Alcântara
Undergraduate student of Social Sciences at Federal University of São Carlos
and researcher at Namargem – Centre for Urban Research.
julianaalcantara11@gmail.com

Lucas Alves Fernandes Silva

Bachelor in Social Sciences from the Federal University of São Carlos.
lu.afs96@gmail.com

Daniel Veloso Hirata

Professor at the Department of Sociology and Methodology in Social Sciences
at Fluminense Federal University. Coordinator of the Centre for the Study of
New Illegalisms (Geni).
velosohirata@gmail.com
Series Editors’ Preface

IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change

Book Series

The IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series shares IJURR’s
commitments to critical, global, and politically relevant analyses of our urban
worlds. Books in this series bring forward innovative theoretical approaches
and present rigorous empirical work, deepening understandings of urbaniza-
tion processes, but also advancing critical insights in support of political
action and change. The Book Series Editors appreciate the theoretically eclec-
tic nature of the field of urban studies. It is a strength that we embrace and
encourage. The Editors are particularly interested in the following issues:
• Comparative urbanism
• Diversity, difference and neighborhood change
• Environmental sustainability
• Financialization and gentrification
• Governance and politics
• International migration
• Inequalities
• Urban and environmental movements
The series is explicitly interdisciplinary; the Editors judge books by their con-
tribution to the field of critical urban studies rather than according to disci-
plinary origin. We are committed to publishing studies with themes and
formats that reflect the many different voices and practices in the field of
urban studies. Proposals may be submitted to Editor in Chief, Walter Nicholls
(wnicholl@uci.edu), and further information about the series can be found at
www.ijurr.org.
Walter Nicholls
Manuel Aalbers
Talja Blokland
Dorothee Brantz
Patrick Le Galès
Jenny Robinson
Introduction
Gabriel Feltran

It’s November 2015. A white Suzuki Jimny moves slowly through the streets
of Vila Mariana, a middle-class neighborhood in southwestern São Paulo.
Inside, three researchers talk about the best way to get to Vila Cisper, an old
working-class neighborhood in the East Zone. Vila Cisper was settled in the
1950s after a glass bottle factory was set up there. The factory belonged to
Olavo Egydio de Souza Aranha Jr., scion of a family from the Portuguese
nobility, who studied engineering and architecture in Europe. His employees
were migrants from the Brazilian countryside, descendants of Christianized
Indians or blacks freed from slavery, or even poor whites, especially Italians,
who had come to São Paulo as beneficiaries of Government population-whit-
ening policies. They were taken on by the factory as they came: mostly illiter-
ate, no surname, no papers.
We don’t know the way for sure, so we decided to follow Google Maps
directions. A cell phone fixed to the vehicle’s dashboard with the help of a
plastic holder begins telling us the way to go. We continue on our way, talk-
ing about the fact that we are in a Japanese car, made in Brazil, with a cell
phone from an American multinational company, powered by Google, one of
the largest companies on the planet. Our conversation comes to rest on the
subject of the plastic holder that allows us to attach the cell phone to the
dashboard; it was made in China and bought at a São Paulo traffic light.
Informal workers born in the favelas of São Paulo sell plastic supports, but so
too do immigrants from the slums of Lagos and La Paz – they all sell them
throughout downtown São Paulo.
As a collective of researchers, we have transformed everyday scenes in the
Brazilian megalopolis into building blocks for ethnographic study, the results of
which this book presents. Transnational industries, from the biggest names –
Google, Motorola, the manufacturers of the satellites that let them work their
magic – to the humblest – Chinese plastic products sold on the informal mar-
ket – have long been mainstays of everyday life in the big cities in the Global
South (Inverses Collectif 2016; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Robinson 2002;

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
2  Stolen Cars

Simone 2013). From the high-flying world of transnational capitalism to the

dusty backroads of globalization (Knowles 2011, 2014; Mathews, Ribeiro, and
Vega 2012; Ribeiro 2009; 2010; Tsing 2005, 2015), urban conflict remains a
hardy perennial, one of those grim certainties immune to the changes in the
wider world. Urban conflict is fueled by inequalities and violence, and these are
fundamental themes underlying this book (Feltran 2020a; Machado da Silva
1967; Peralva and Telles 2015; Telles 2013; Telles and Hirata 2010).
It was early Sunday afternoon, the sun was shining and traffic was light,
and because of this we saw that we could get to Vila Cisper in 45 minutes.
The place we were aiming for lies some 30 kilometers from downtown São
Paulo. Since the middle of last century, São Paulo has grown into a sprawl.
The periphery is where poor workers live, mostly third-generation internal
migrants, and also unemployed and informal entrepreneurs who have occu-
pied land without any proper urban infrastructure since the 1940s. By build-
ing their own houses there, decade after decade, the city grew with them
(Cavalcanti 2008, 2009).
São Paulo’s demographic explosion of the 1950s to the 1980s resulted in
rapid concentric urban growth across the “Paulista” plateau, and was in no way
“disorderly.” The logic of this apparently disordered and brutal growth has
recurred in practically all Brazilian cities, as indeed it has in most Latin American
industrial cities (Fischer, McCann, and Auyero 2014; Fischer 2019), reflecting
an uneven model of industrialization. In the 1970s, this “logic of disorder” was
given the name “urban plunder” by São Paulo’s urban sociologists (Kowarick
1979). In short, it was argued that migrant workers themselves built the city in
which they would live, on rural land; for this reason, with their labor, they
simultaneously produced the industrial wealth that would drive the “country of
the future” (Brazil has become the ninth largest economy in the world by the
twenty-first century) and thus the cities that would symbolize its progress. São
Paulo was the center of this economic growth, and for that reason the driver of
the despoliation that produced such abysmal inequalities.
Fifty years later, the metropolis has 21 million people (see Table I.1) and
its poorest districts have a life expectancy of 57 years while the richest people
live, on average, to age 80 (Rede Nossa São Paulo 2019). Yes, the rich live, on
average, 23 years longer than the poor in the city that produces one-third of
Brazil’s GDP (see Figure I.1). If urban plunder is a fundamental starting
point for us, the mechanisms of reproduction of these inequalities, which
today see São Paulo simultaneously occupy the most disparate rankings of
global poverty and wealth, need to be much better understood.
In São Paulo, as in many other Latin American cities, inequalities manifest
themselves in the form of violent crime. Crime, in turn, feeds the representa-
tion, shared between elites and workers, of “urban violence” (Kessler 2011;
TABLE I.1  Population growth in the municipality and metropolitan region of São Paulo (absolute numbers)

1950 1960 1970 1980 1991 2000 2010 2018

São Paulo 2,151,313 3,667,899 5,924,615 8,493,226 9,646,185 10,434,252 11,253,503 12,176,866
Metropolitan 2,653,860 4,739,406 8,139,730 12,588,725 15,444,941 17,878,703 19,683,975 21,571,281
Region

Source: IBGE census and bulletins – compiled by the São Paulo City Government 1950–2010, first published in Feltran, 2020a.
Introduction  3
4  Stolen Cars

FIGURE I.1  Map of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, by income.

Source: The authors, with technical support form Bruna Pizzol, based on
data from the 2010 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE)
Census.

Machado da Silva 2010). The world of crime thrives in São Paulo, and as we
will see, the networks of its main criminal organization, the PCC (Primeiro
Comando da Capital, First Capital Command), are global (Feltran 2020a,
2016b; Willis 2015). Mapping (il)legal automobile markets through stolen
cars’ journeys will be our empirical instrument for understanding the repro-
duction of inequalities and urban violence in São Paulo (Feltran 2019). Our
city is not only these journeys’ scenario, nor our analytical subject, but our
theoretical and analytical perspective through which we address transnational
inequalities and global urban violences.
We continued east and no longer saw luxury malls or tall skyscrapers
through the window. Instead, we passed through huge avenues surrounded by
auto-parts stores, evangelical churches, hypermarkets, car dealerships, and
housing developments. We also saw overpasses with crack users camped under-
neath. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, someone approached the cars to
ask for change. Drivers responded with indifference, sympathy, compassion, or
irritation. The fear of being mugged is almost always present in this range of
reactions. Not many drivers opened their windows; not many of them ever
 Introduction  5

would. We did open ours and apologized for having no change; the old man
begging replied that his daughter lived in the town of São Carlos. Our Suzuki
had São Carlos license plates.
We had considered going on public transportation. It would provide a dif-
ferent experience of the city. Exposure to the potential for violence is different
when you’re not driving in São Paulo; contact with people is more direct.
There is less risk of armed robbery, often aimed at the vehicles or the objects
of those who are considered to be wealthy; on the other hand, on foot there
is more exposure to the multiple forms of potential street violence. Above all,
women are more exposed to sexual violence, from harassment to rape, when
they walk the streets of São Paulo. At night, few of them walk alone. Still, the
city in 2020 is much safer than it used to be.
The 1990s saw an explosion of violent crime in the city (Caldeira 2000;
Feltran 2011; Hirata 2018), while the 2000s saw the consolidation of the
PCC’s hegemony in the peripheries, which established order in the local
criminal universe (Biondi 2018; Feltran 2018, 2020b; Manso and Dias
2018). In central regions of the city, private security has become de rigueur
and the military police are better armed (Caldeira 2000; Feltran 2011; Hirata
2018; Telles 2010a). The city’s subway and metropolitan train networks have
been modernized, expanded significantly and have become much safer since
the 2000s (Requena 2019, Santos Silva 2017). Despite this, Paulistanos view
buses, trains, and subways as much less efficient than their private cars. Using
public transport, it would have taken 1 hour and 18 minutes to cover the
same route we had just covered in 40 minutes; nor does the price of public
transport make using it worthwhile. To give you an idea, a worker who makes
only two trips a day in São Paulo, by bus or subway, will have spent 0.24 MW1
by the end of the month. For many people, this represents a quarter of their
monthly income.2
Therefore, the majority of Paulistanos live with very little mobility. In
greater São Paulo not everyone moves around (Dennis and Urry 2009; Freire-
Medeiros 2009; Urry 2004). It is still common, in field research, to encounter
residents of the peripheries who have never, or only very rarely, left their
neighborhoods. In any event, for those who don’t live in the city center and
need to get around, the private car and more recently Uber and analogous
applications are almost always the fastest, most practical, and safest alterna-
tives. For this reason, the traffic in São Paulo is hellish: a 100-kilometer-long
traffic jam on a weekday is nothing out of the ordinary.
In addition to practicality, there are other conditions that give the car
immense symbolic power. Unlike other countries in North and South America,
cars are extremely expensive in Brazil. A 2018 Toyota Corolla costs an average
of USD 18,000 in the United States, or 13.8 US MW. In Brazil, the same car
6  Stolen Cars

costs an average of USD 23,000 or 92.5 Brazilian MW. In relative terms, the
Brazilian car is almost seven times more expensive. The middle classes and elites
were, until the 2000s, the only ones capable of moving around the city by car.3
Therefore, cars have become potent signs of social differentiation and auton-
omy in Brazil, as in other North and South American contexts (Miller 2001).
To this day, São Paulo elites get around almost exclusively by car and
almost never go to the peripheries – except when they live in gated communi-
ties, some of which lie some distance from the city center. The southwestern
quadrant of the city of São Paulo, where these elites live, is the most affluent
in the country, and it is there that the “official city” moves around, for the
most part, by car. In Brazil, the richest 1 percent holds nearly 30 percent of
the national wealth.4 There are two million super-rich Brazilians, many of
them living in São Paulo. The city, therefore, has entire neighborhoods in
which high-end markets (cars, boats, aircraft, jewelry, restaurants, etc.) are
involved in active trade. The scale of these neighborhoods in São Paulo is
unique in Brazil and, to a large extent, in Latin America. Much of our research
was carried out from trips made in our own or rented cars, but we also trav-
eled by bus, subway, and train. These trips almost always crossed extremely
unequal locations.

***

In 2015, the 3G signal was never the best in the peripheries, but we could see
from the map that we were approaching Vila Cisper and that we should soon
turn right, leaving the main avenue. There were many narrow streets in that
direction, and down each one we could see a favela. Yes, we were close. We
turned. We went up a narrow, asphalted street, which became increasingly
potholed, and could see ever more precarious houses through the windscreen.
The entire Vila Cisper region is self-built, with the exception of the
huge glass factory of the same name and the social-housing buildings built
in the 1990s (Bonduki 1994, 2009; Rolnik 2001). Many of the residents
of the periphery, in spite of having lived in neighborhoods for more than
40 years, still do not have deeds to the houses in which they live. Favelas
are almost always built on illegally occupied land. We should arrive at our
destination in three minutes.
Wilson, a contact of many years’ acquaintance and the son of one of the
thousands of migrants from the northeast who moved into the neighborhood,
was waiting for us at the headquarters of one of the capital’s amateur football
clubs.5 As we parked the car we could already hear the sound of samba music
and found ourselves smiling involuntarily. We were in a good mood. Wilson
also greeted us with a smile; we shook hands and hugged. He told us that the
 Introduction  7

group gathered at the samba party was celebrating a victory on the part of the
neighborhood team in one of the amateur championship games that year.
A moment of joy.
During the samba, while the musicians took turns playing and many peo-
ple talked, flirted, danced and drank beer, we were introduced to Aron, who
went on to become a valuable contact for years to come.

A Phone Call

Two years later, we met with Aron at the same bar, but at night this time,
while a meeting of the residents’ association was going on next door. Aron is
white with black eyes and light, short hair, shaved at the sides. He’s short and
athletic with a shy smile. He greeted us with his right hand outstretched,
while his left held the key of his new Ford Focus, which he had parked sec-
onds ago. After a few minutes of conversation, he told us that he had actually
wanted to be a football player. He said that in 2004, while still very young, he
had held high hopes for his career and nearly went to live and play in
Switzerland. Even though he was a top scorer in several youth amateur cham-
pionships, it didn’t work out in the end. Without the support he needed, his
career hadn’t taken off.
In 2017, at the age of 34, with his playing days behind him, Aron dedi-
cated himself to “entrepreneurship.” A career, he claims, that led him out of
the favela where he was born, also in the East Zone of São Paulo. His entre-
preneurship had two distinct branches. On the one hand, sports, but now as
an agent for promising young talent from small soccer teams; on the other,
drug trafficking, which, thus far, has met all of his material needs.
Wearing a blue t-shirt and a green cap, jeans and sports shoes, Aron
proudly showed us pictures on the phone of some of his soccer players, boys
of 14 or 15 years old. One of them in particular was worth keeping an eye on;
he felt sure that the boy would have a promising sports career. He never once
made reference to the other boys of the same age, with the same skin color
and the same social background as his soccer pupils, who worked in the drug
dens that he runs in the East Zone. Individuals stand out in some trades more
than others – and not all trades are best talked about in public.
In a reflective moment during the conversation, Aron asked us if it would
be possible to get him a job at the university because he wanted to turn his
life around. We told him a little about how the career of an academic works,
the study it demands, and the average salary. Aron changed the subject imme-
diately. He then told us that he runs 16 marijuana, cocaine, and crack outlets
in the East Zone; he has been involved in drug trafficking since the age of 17,
8  Stolen Cars

and nowadays a turnover equivalent to some 1,500 MW passes through his

bank account on a monthly basis. The monthly salary of a Brazilian univer-
sity professor at the peak of his career is 15 MW per month. A master’s schol-
arship is worth 1.5 MW. Aron, born in a favela and involved in the life of the
community, earned an income worth no less than 1000 times more than a
master’s student, and 100 times more than a university professor.
It’s a lot of money, we say. It’s not an easy job, he says. Trafficking sent him
to prison a few years ago, but he escaped, handcuffed, through the front door
of the police station. The policeman with him had let his guard down for a
moment and Aron ran off as fast as his legs would carry him, ignoring the
sound of gunshots behind him. He threw himself down a bank and hid in a
swamp. Two years after our conversation, in 2019, Aron was arrested again,
now as part of a Civil Police investigation. Thanks to the good lawyers he
hired, he got out in two weeks. In 2020, Aron was still up to his neck in crime
and was still trying to get out of it.
One event in Aron’s rich life story is of special interest to us: a phone call
he made on October 1, 2016. It was to a certain Rosildo, an old partner from
the same São Paulo favela, now based in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso
state. Rosildo answered after the first ring. The conversation was friendly, but
not free of tension thanks to their shared fears of something not being left
clear or coming out on the wrong side of the deal – or being tapped by the
police. Experienced thieves and dealers change cell phones practically every
week in Brazil. With few words – but trying to make sure of all the details of
the arrangement – Aron told Rosildo that “everything was alright” and that
he could now ask his boys to “take the pickup” to whoever was supposed to
receive it in San Estéban, Bolivia. Rosildo thanked him and hung up.
The following day, the main newspaper in Campos Verdes, Mato Grosso
state, reported as follows:

Early Tuesday morning, October 2nd, a family from the city of Campos
Verdes was taken hostage and their vehicle, a white 2016 Toyota Hilux
pickup, was stolen. Four armed men in a Fiat Siena, also white, held up
the Silva-Costa family. The crime, according to the victims, took place
around 7am, in the Parque dos Príncipes neighborhood of Campos
Verdes. The victims say they were approached by four men. The police-
men of the Specialized Border Group (GEFROM) were called in and
reported that the Hilux pickup had been stolen and that it was being
escorted by the criminals in the Fiat Siena. In addition to the pickup, a
motorcycle was also stolen from the victims. […] The suspects are B.J.O
(age 20), F.R.G (24), D.D.O (21) and E.C.D (20) the last carrying a
765 handgun [Local Newspaper, October 1, 2016].
 Introduction  9

Campos Verdes is 1,700 km from São Paulo, close to the border with Bolivia.
But the urban world of Campos Verdes and that of Vila Cisper, a neighbor-
hood in São Paulo, share a common genesis. Aron has never been to Campos
Verdes, to Mato Grosso, or to the Bolivian city of San Estéban. But he knows
the going rates for cars, drugs, and weapons in Campos Verdes like the back
of his hand. Ten MW/kg worth of base paste bought in Campos Verdes sells
for 50 MW/kg in São Paulo. Revenue was split between him (the owner) and
his direct employees: managers, lookouts, and scouts, in addition to the guys
who transport the drugs from the border to São Paulo (Feltran and Horta
2018; Hirata and Grillo 2017). Selling at a five times markup is good busi-
ness by any measure.
In recent years, however, Aron has realized that he could do even better. Aron
has learned from PCC contacts about swapping stolen cars for drugs, a popular
practice at certain locations along the Brazilian border. Profits are much higher,
and the math is simple: a stolen car, exchanged for drugs, greatly reduces the
investment needed to sell your cocaine on the retail market in São Paulo. Instead
of paying 10 MW for 1 kg of base paste, Aron could pay a few boys 9 MW to
steal a Hilux for him – he’d pay even less in Mato Grosso (4 MW) – and then
they’d deliver the pickup to a drug trafficker on the Bolivian side of the border
(usually for an additional 5 MW). Thus, Aron would obtain 5–7 kg of base paste
in exchange for the vehicle.
That’s five to seven times more cocaine than he’d get for paying cash, for
an even smaller investment than before.
Swapping cars for drugs is big business. It was clear to Aron that was the
way to go, and that’s why the Silva-Costa family was taken hostage in Campos
Verdes – 1,700 km away, don’t forget. His cocaine came to São Paulo in a
truck that transported soy, one of the main export commodities, hidden in a
sealed box at the bottom of the load. The truck driver was an impeccable
individual with no criminal record.

A Global Market

In this book, we will analytically reconstruct the journey of this Toyota Hilux
exchanged by 5 kilos of cocaine that goes to Aron in São Paulo and then carries
on to Berlin. We will also look at the journeys of four other cars stolen in São
Paulo – a Ford Ka 2018, a Fiat Strada 2014, a Fiat Palio 2011, and a Hyundai
HB20 2016. We chose these cars (and their journeys) because of their different
consumption profiles and consumers, and because they move within different
niches of the same (il)legal economy. The owners of the stolen vehicles and the
people who steal them are just a few of the actors inscribed in their journeys,
10  Stolen Cars

as a long list of men and women, rich and poor, black and white, derive some
economic gain from their circulation.
In recent decades, money from illegal markets has structured urban rou-
tines (Feltran 2011, 2018), produced urban territories (Batista 2015) and
modified the landscapes of cities in the Global South. It has also produced
images of global violence (Cohen 2017). The highly unequal transnational,
urban economy is produced by everyday life routines touched by various
forms of control and regulation (Knowles 2015; Simone 2004; Tsing 2005).
Armed violence is one of them and arises only in some specific contexts
related to illegal economies. Robberies are much more common in Rio de
Janeiro and Johannesburg than in Copenhagen or Montreal, which also have
drug dealers and smugglers. Marginality makes money circulate around the
world, but the forms it takes vary from place to place.
It took us a while to understand that car theft in São Paulo was feeding
global markets. We knew that Brazil’s vibrant legal trade with Mexico hints at
the equally vibrant black-market trade between the two countries (Sandoval
2005, 2012a, 2012b). But we had no idea of the magnitude of the illegal car
market (see Figure I.2), nor the scale of the auto parts and accessories markets
until our research in Europe, perhaps the continent least enamored with car
culture (Miller 2001). We conducted research in Europe over the course of

600

500

400

300

200

100

0
2013 2014 2015 2016
Mexico United States of America Germany
France United Kingdom Brazil
São Paulo

FIGURE I.2  Graph of theft and armed robbery of vehicles. Rate per hun-
dred thousand inhabitants (2013–2016).
Source: The authors, based on data from Data Unodc, InegiMX and the
Brazilian Public Security. Forum. The number of Brazilian records
corresponds to the sum of thefts and armed robberies.
 Introduction  11

several months between 2017 and 2019, specifically in Berlin, London, and
Paris. From the moment a car is stolen, as we will see, many people start to
make money, in unequal proportions. A lot of vehicles “disappear” every year
all over the world. By following five stolen cars, we will learn how this money
circulates but also how it impacts the broader social and political dynamics of
inequalities and violence reproduction.
On the move with the stolen cars we quickly exit the favelas and travel
many divergent roads within Brazil – from modest backroads to the largest
ports in Latin America where illegal markets link to many places in the so-
called Global North. Even to its richest cities. Our primary purposes in
analytically reconstructing these journeys are theoretical and methodologi-
cal. Not least because our research has taught us that, notwithstanding the
existence of classic itineraries followed by stolen vehicles, the distinguish-
ing characteristic of (il)legal markets is their perennially improvised and
circumstantial nature. Such being the case, method is called for, without
caricaturing these markets or treating their operating mechanisms in the
abstract; we decided on a multisituated ethnographic investigation, of the
type that follows objects and reconstructs typical journeys.
Furthermore, it is necessary to rethink theory in order to comprehend the
operations of these mechanisms and their contemporaneous effects according
to appropriate scales. We decided to revisit the theoretical point of view in
traditional Latin American urban and political thought that recognizes a plu-
rality of orders, in addition to that of the State, governing urban life from the
margins. Here, we emphasize the centrality of urban conflict, in São Paulo
and in several other metropolises, so as to contemplate inequalities and vio-
lence from a relational and transnational perspective.

Theoretical Framework: Normative Regimes

In Latin American cities as in São Paulo, it is not only State agencies that gov-
ern ordinary urban life (Machado da Silva 1993). During our years of ethnog-
raphy, many criminal groups and several paramilitary organizations often
informally linked to the police or churches (the so-called militias, more
recently common in Rio de Janeiro), have claimed that their uses of violence
are locally legitimate. Instead of assuming a universal state that was never
hegemonic in the margins, this book assumes the idea of a coexistence of plu-
ral orders, or normative regimes (Feltran 2020a), as an analytical framework.
The notion of “normative regimes” (Beraldo 2020; Feltran 2010, 2011, 2012,
2020a; Maldonado 2020) was developed to understand daily life in Brazilian
favelas. These regimes inform the operations of power in two ­fundamental
12  Stolen Cars

dimensions: (i) they inform how a social order should be from a local perspective
(shared codes and values on which stand justifications and senses of justice) and
(ii) they produce means for the material governance of social order, made through
concrete instruments and resources, including money and the use of armed
violence.
We argue that a normative set of plural and coexisting regimes of action,
structured by coexisting normative regimes, maintain urban order in São
Paulo. Our approach is inspired by the idea of “coexistence of social orders”
discussed in a long tradition of Brazilian and Brazilianist authors working on
urban conflict and violence (Arias and Barnes 2017; Feltran 2010, 2012;
Grillo 2013; Cabanes 2014; Machado da Silva 1967, 1993, 1999, 2004,
2016; Misse 2006, 2018; Stepputat 2013). For these authors, the hypothesis
that urban conflict occurs between subjects who do not share the same plau-
sible parameters of action is crucial. By extension, such subjects do not occupy
merely different positions in a common urban order – they are distributed
throughout different and coexistent urban orders.
Different analytical traditions discuss the same issue in political terms.
Concepts such as hybrid sovereignty, hybrid orders or “governscapes” are
called on to explain empirical challenges to modern states and to interpret
fierce violent contexts (Arias and Barnes 2017; Das 2007a; Lessing 2017;
Mbembe 2003; Stepputat 2013, 2015, 2018; Willis 2015). Alternative con-
cepts such as “regimes d’engagement” (Thevenot 2006), “forms of life” (Das
2006), and “modes d’existence” (Latour 2005) gave us relevant insights, but
they failed to inform the normative and relational dimensions we face within
São Paulo’s urban conflict.
Urban theory has also been insightful (Inverses Collectif 2016; Parnel and
Robinson, 2012; Simone 2013), although it does not address how violence
theoretically relates to urban order and urban inequality. As in many other
regions of the so-called Global South, large Brazilian cities are witnessing
rapid transformations. They represent an extremely potent analytical object
in the field of urban studies and also a theoretical challenge. Cities like São
Paulo allow us to think about the new transnational geographies of urban
informality as an ordering logic (Roy and AlSayyad 2004) that mobilizes
interpersonal engagements that act as infrastructures (Simone 2004) as well
as forms of popular politics (Chatterjee 2004). These forms can unveil con-
flicting rationalities vis-à-vis a planning and managerial rationality (Watson
2003). At the same time, they allow a problematization of certain central
concepts in contemporary urban theory, such as modernity, development
(Robinson 2006), subalternity (Roy 2011), and neoliberalism (Parnell and
Robinson 2012). Such big concepts are usually associated with normative
readings about cities, often shaped from large “global cities” of developed
 Introduction  13

countries (Sassen 2007). According to this reading, the “megacities of the

global South” would represent an “other” with respect to what cities should
be (Roy, 2011). Literature requests us to study these marginal cities taking
them as a locus of original production of urban theory (Parnell and Robinson
2012). Our contribution empirically demonstrates how stolen cars connect
otherness, manifesting violent conflicts and forms of unequal regulation
between normative regimes. The mechanisms through which this happens
challenge normative definitions about the city and urban management.
“Making the City” means producing local order and its ordinary contours.
When fierce conflictive situations last for decades without any political syn-
thesis, local sources of authority can reproduce relatively autonomous social
orders, structured not by official institutions but by ordinary infrastructures.
Jacques Rancière, in his classic work La Mésentente (1995), pursues a
related conceptual argument. For Rancière, the key conflict that helps us to
understand contemporary power struggles does not occur when one says
“white” and another says “black.” Black vs. white dispute would be only a
secondary, sequential, and managerial dimension – what Rancière calls the
“police” – of the original, essential, and political conflict that occurs when
one says “white” and another also says “white” but they do not understand
each other. Because between these subjects there is a radical and paradoxically
“mutual” incomprehension about the criteria (Rancière 1995), the many
plausible meanings (Wittgenstein 2009; Cavell 2006), and the pragmatic
effects of whiteness, as they are understood by each ‘actant’ (Boltanski and
Thevenot 1991; Thevenot 2006; Werneck 2012).
Let’s take an example. Three subjects – which we will call here Norris,
Alvin, and Cumulus – born in the same city, a contemporary European capi-
tal, which we will call Saint George. All three don’t feel safe in Saint George,
so they want more security in their daily lives. The first two, Norris and Alvin,
present their arguments about what security means to them: they want to feel
protected from ordinary urban violence, but especially from terrorism. Both
agree that, although it is on the rise, ordinary crime is rare and generally with-
out serious consequences in Saint George. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a
real and potentially lethal threat.
For Norris, achieving security means more democracy and social justice.
Norris believes in democracy, and insecurity is a structural problem for him,
linked to the inequalities and social exclusions that have persisted since colo-
nialism. If all interest groups, all ethnic, religious, generational or class groups
really shared the same world, we would achieve something much greater,
where everyone would have their place in security. Whether in the multicul-
tural equation, in the republican or federalist equation, it doesn’t matter, sub-
jects and communities can share the same public space. Norris sees many
14  Stolen Cars

successful examples of this coexistence. The equation of differences takes

place under conditions of political equality (the premise of citizenship, to be
granted to all) and the quest for social equality (to be achieved through Saint
George’s redistribution policies).
Yet, for Alvin, this same security can only be achieved by rehabilitating
values that are now lost. It is the State that must guarantee security, and the
active repression of the state against crime, through preventive actions towards
the youngest, is necessary. Above all, the State must act against terrorist orga-
nizations. Alvin wants more cameras, more surveillance, and more State con-
trol. He wants more police and military intelligence, tougher laws against
common crimes but especially against terrorist attacks. Alvin believes that
defending his values has nothing to do with reducing social diversity or disre-
specting cultural, ethnic, and national differences. He simply does not accept
that the fundamental rules of civilized coexistence, which include respect for
the law and other citizens, should be violated. The law applies to everyone.
Since it has been repeatedly flouted, greater control over all people is needed.
And this control must come from the State.
Until now, the conflict between the positions of Norris and Alvin has
opened the way for sequential debates, which focus on shared diagnoses and
divergent solutions. They defend quite different concrete policies or even
global political projects of being in the world. They have divergent views on
how to address the problem of growing insecurity. The difference between the
positions of Norris and Alvin separates right and left, but both have a com-
mon understanding of security: they do not accept ordinary crime or terror-
ism. One says white and the other says black, one may dislike the other, but
pragmatically both recognize each other as interlocutors. One says white and
the other black, but both admit that white and black are categories of the
same order, the palette of colors. Although they express different political
projects, their positions are part of the same palette, the same political spec-
trum, the same normative regime. They are part of the structure of material
regulations of the contemporary state, with its instruments, its techniques,
and its bureaucracy. Elections will show which position will take precedence
in the republic, in multiculturalism, or in any other universalist premise
equation. The public debate between their positions aims at finding possible
syntheses, plausible practices for both sides in a common world.
However, when Cumulus enters the scene, these syntheses are no longer pos-
sible without destroying the framework in which the previous debate was elabo-
rated. Our third subject does not share with Alvin nor Norris a common base of
ideas about the world; he does not consider security in the same way at all. He
believes that there is no possibility of security for all, and that there never was.
Cumulus says that Alvin and Norris think this way because they have always
 Introduction  15

had everything, including security, while he, and especially his forefathers, have
never had anything. Precisely because Norris and Alvin stole everything from
them, from him, from his ancestors, from his community, in wars and barbaric
invasions. Cumulus goes further and even says that Alvin and Norris continue
to steal his land and kill his relatives, even without knowing it. Cumulus consid-
ers Norris’ concerns futile and Alvin’s inhuman. He only believes in self-protec-
tion against people like Alvin and Norris and the police that protect them.
Cumulus expresses neither Norris’ white nor Alvin’s black, but he says another,
radically different “white” (in this case, “security”).
Cumulus thinks that blowing up a restaurant where Norris or Alvin might
be is a concrete step in the fight for the liberty and safety of his people.
Security for his people will only be achieved through a struggle for justice and
liberation, historical reparation, and a commitment to the present. From his
perspective, Cumulus is on the side of his people. His people are not a collec-
tion of citizens but a community, bonded by a blood, and a nature, and an
identity. Cumulus sees that those who look like him are excluded, while those
who look like Alvin or Norris are much better placed. Those who look like
Cumulus are caretakers or street sweepers and those who look like Norris are
doctors, financial market agents. Exceptions are really rare and Cumulus has
no more patience.
When he appears and says everything he thinks, the foundations of the
conflict between Norris and Alvin dissolve and a much stronger conflict
emerges on the previous “political” arena. But it is when Cumulus appears
armed that the scene really changes: he propels Norris and Alvin to the same
side of a new political conflict, in which the old differences between them are
hardly relevant. This new political conflict is much more radical and can, in
a short period of time, lead to violent outcomes. Cumulus, far more than the
bearer of the contents of a divergent, and even radical, political position, is in
itself, as a subject, a violent threat to social order and the state.
Cumulus arrived in São Paulo at least three decades ago disguised as the
PCC. In such a divided governmental landscape, the act of describing (how
the city is) begins to require different categorical grids depending on the per-
spective through which one sees the city (Feltran 2017). But to think about the
normative problem (how the city should be) is to face immense disagreement
and sometimes even violence. In São Paulo, for journalists, lawyers, doctors,
the middle classes, and even for many workers in the outskirts, security means
living far from thieves, bandits, and the PCC in vertical and horizontal gated
communities. But for some groups in the favelas, it is precisely the thieves and
bandits who bring them security and other resources such as income, justice,
and a sense of belonging.
16  Stolen Cars

This is why the word “thief ” is an offense in the middle classes but an
exaltation of intelligence and insight in the world of crime. The divide mani-
fests itself in many ways – including material ones, money, and violence – but
also in the common language. The word “thief ” and many others have an
essential, well-defined content in each of these places, but this understanding
is very different in each context. Both say “thief,” both say “white,” but they
do not agree on what it means. It is a polysemous word, susceptible to various
meanings, because it can be filled with different contents. Its use requires
content and context. Meaning occurs with usage, as Wittgenstein (2009)
already warned us in his Philosophical Investigations.
We dare to say this conflict is not unique to São Paulo. For decades, the
world saw republics and multiculturalism as promising or successful alterna-
tives to equalize differences, but today these are clearly insufficient. The prob-
lem is that we do not seem to have better ones. The countries of the Global
South to which the modern world order has been promised (Ferguson 1999),
such as Brazil, have huge masses that never even belonged to their own nation:
indigenous Brazilians, blacks, and the favelados of São Paulo are just three
examples. It so happens that these groups, without the mediation of national
politics, and therefore of the political communities that protect them, are
projected into national politics and globalization through other doors, those
of informal and illegal transnational markets. They are confronted daily with
the problem of understanding the order that allows them to exist, in a chang-
ing scenario and in deep disagreement about who they are, thieves or entre-
preneurs, outlaws or legislators.
The PCC represents “crime,” the government represents the state. The
PCC is not a “counter-public” (Fraser 1992; Habermas 1992) or an alterna-
tive “public arena” that would tend to a synthesis of future assumptions. The
world of crime in São Paulo represents an alternative power regime, incapable
of synthesis because of the impossibility of plausible communication with the
State order (Feltran 2020a). When the impossibility of any rational, argu-
mentative or modern communication marks the very relation between these
regimes, what remains is violence. Negotiated solutions to urban conflict, in
theory achievable by administrative means, are unlikely. Since the 1980s, São
Paulo, like other Brazilian and Latin American cities, has descended into
snowballing urban conflict manifested as violence, understood as manageable
only by the use of force or the threat of it (Caldeira 2000; Misse 2006). Thus
began, on what was a newborn, formally democratic territory, a discussion
about what we should do about them, or rather, against them.
Don’t think they didn’t do it too. “We” cannot, of course, accept Cumulus’
contention that theft is a form of justice. Theft is a crime and crime must be
punished, period. It was precisely at this limit of the admissible, the plausible,
that terror, raw violence, became the fundamental relationship between the
 Introduction  17

parties. Brazilian police have killed 10,000 to 15,000 people every year for
four decades and incarcerate millions (in 2020 there are 750,000 prisoners
and 6 million former prisoners out of a population of 220 million people).
Criminal groups are responsible for at least 50,000 deaths a year in the coun-
try, mostly shot dead in internal wars.
Brazil has the largest number of armored cars in the world and they are a
common sight in São Paulo. Armed robberies continue to happen, regardless.
Assumptions are not negotiated and, in the fracture between sets of irreconcil-
able assumptions, self-contained territories of perception of what the world
should be can be understood as formal structures of thought and action
(Simmel 2010). This is what we have conceptually called a normative regime
(Feltran 2020a). Empirical action is something else, much more varied and
variable. Normative regimes serve as a plausible guideline for suitable empirical
action, in other words, for the guideline sought for by one’s peers (Boltanski
and Thevenot 1991) guaranteed by material and objective means of gover-
nance. These safe actions internally, while accepted by one’s peers and having
resources to spread, are incomprehensible outside due to their implausibility to
those who oppose their existence (Cavell 2006). This essential political fracture
has been in place in São Paulo ever since the promise of integration of migrants
into the modern city was, with rare exceptions, frustrated. It laid down roots
once there was no social counterpart to urban wage earning, and especially for
those excluded from urban wage earning. Time did its work and the limits of
the plausible on either side of the divide settled into place.
In the following chapters, we will see that (il)legal markets are regulated
both by the laws of governments and guidelines for conduct laid down by
organized criminal groups, militias and market collectives willing to circum-
vent laws. Our approach assumes that ordinary life structures urban life and
its social forms, as per Agier (2001), Amit and Knowles (2017), Blokland
(2017), Das (2007b), Certeau (2012), Duneier and Carter (1999), and
Feltran (2016a), Simone (2004), but ordinary life is plural, conceived through
an original political fracture.
This explicitly inductive approach of social order informs how we construct
our own spheres of meaning. Our theoretical framework is based on research-
ing everyday routines and the meanings that actors give to their social interac-
tions, giving inferential consequences to them. Without accounting for these
plural urban orders, authors tend to read the social circuits around illegal mar-
kets in a deductive fashion and see them as resulting from delinquency, misbe-
havior, neoliberalism, or incomplete development.6 Such approaches often fail
to understand inequalities within large cities, as aggregated data tend to conceal
the fact of the radical difference within the city or the neighborhood. Important
ethnographic studies on informal markets in Africa, from Keith Hart (1973) to
Jane Guyer (1995, 2004), have helped to counter such narratives, in spite of
18  Stolen Cars

having barely touched on the world of crime as a power regime. Nonetheless,

the literature still lacks inductive empirical work that could enhance our under-
standing of this contemporary phenomenon, which is present in every major
city and surely most visible in the Global South.
Contrary to normative theories, recent empirical works have highlighted the
fact that it is perfectly possible to have economic development and wealthy
gated communities coexisting with various forms of urban informality, illegality,
and violent crime (Hirata 2018; Jenssen 2008; Rabossi 2008). When a national
formal economy grows, informality could surely grow with it. The literature has
already stated that there is no clear border between the “legal” and the “illegal”
city (Telles 2013), but a lack of sharpness is not the same as indeterminacy
(Simmel 2004]). In practical terms there is a relevant empirical distinction
between people, territories, and goods considered to be legal or illegal (Misse
2005). This distinction is often a division between life and death: police lethal-
ity targeting “thieves” represented as much as 25 percent of the homicide rate in
São Paulo state, and as much as 40 percent in Rio de Janeiro state in 2019.7
The way in which stolen cars’ journeys are governed by public/private/
criminal regimes of action,8 always at the boundary between legality and ille-
gality,9 is functional for urban durable inequalities (Tilly 1998). We will
empirically describe scenes of violent robbery, nonviolent theft, and the des-
tinations of stolen cars up to the point that they are turned into scrap metal.
We will see how much money circulates during each of these stages, and the
ways in which this money, as well as other relational resources, are distributed
far beyond the criminal universe.10 We will notice how entangled allegedly
“criminal” urban territories are with the “official” ones, with their various
features and stereotypes. We will observe how stolen cars – as well as trucks
and motorcycles – are exchanged for drugs and weapons, cigarettes, and con-
traband along Brazil’s borders with Bolivia and Paraguay. From there, we will
sketch the ways in which these drugs and other goods are distributed for sale
in Brazil or shipped to the transnational market. In both cases, money from
illegal economies fuels money laundering and financial flows. Furthermore,
because, unlike drugs or weapons, a stolen car is a very quantifiable illegal
good, analysis allows us to address the significance of the illegal economy to
the “economic development” of the cities of the Global South and beyond.

Inequalities
Our main reference when it comes to thinking about inequalities is Charles
Tilly (1998). He clearly addresses the question of durable inequalities in terms
of hoarding resources and opportunities, within long-lasting social processes
that produce pairs of categorical boundaries informing ordinary action:
 Introduction  19

How, why and with what consequences do long-lasting, systematic

inequalities in life chances distinguish members of different socially
defined categories of persons? How do categorical inequalities form,
change, and disappear? Since all social relations involve fleeting, fluctu-
ating inequalities, let us concentrate on durable inequalities, those that
last from one social interaction to the next, with special attention to
those that persist over whole careers, lifetimes and organizational histo-
ries. […] Let us concentrate, furthermore, on distinctly bounded pairs
such as female/male, aristocrat/plebeian, citizen/foreigner, and more
complex classifications based on religious affiliation, ethnic origin or
race. We focus on categories rather than on continua such as [rich …
poor], [tall … short], [ugly … beautiful], and so on. Bounded categories
deserve special attention because they provide clearer evidence for the
operation of durable inequality, because their boundaries do crucial
organizational work and because categorical differences actually account
for much of what ordinary observers take to be results of variation in
individual talent or effort. (Tilly 1998: 4)

Charles Tilly’s socio-historical studies suggest an analytical connection

between illegal accumulation (looting, piracy, etc.), the use of violence (rather
warlike), and the construction of plural political orders (the different types of
state). Attempts by organized actors to monopolize violence are understood
as a condition of possibility for the routinization of political and administra-
tive activities, as well as for the normalization of the monetary economy and
its form of life par excellence, urban life (Simmel 2004). More than that,
Charles Tilly’s approach also allows us to move towards explanations, linked
to historical processes and causal mechanisms. The sometimes excessive mod-
eling that marks some of the author’s works does not prevent us from verify-
ing the analytical potential that can result from his reflections on what we call
here normative regimes, with a particular emphasis on the forms of gover-
nance of daily life.
The normative regimes’ approach tries to go a bit further, analyzing not
only the actual existing categorical distinctions between bandits/workers, or
thieves/good citizens in São Paulo, but simultaneously framing its dual terms
in the experienced flow or urban life, in the “cityness” (Blokland 2017) in
which the continua bandit…worker or thieves…good citizens are also recog-
nizable (Feltran 2017). Nothing is better suited to this attempt than studying
an (il)legal market in such a durably unequal city as São Paulo. On the one
hand, such a market involves small and large entrepreneurs, bandits, and
wealthy citizens in a single empirical puzzle. On the other hand, it categorizes
market operators as legal and illegal.
20  Stolen Cars

We were able to approach ethnographically the ordinary continuum of

legal…illegal scrapyards through which pass the untracked parts of legal and
stolen cars; but at the same time, we could talk to a lawyer who sees clearly
the categorical distinction between legal and illegal auto-parts shops and can
tell us how a police officer should differentiate between them. The same theo-
retical approach allows us to understand why São Paulo can pragmatically be
both the city of walls (Caldeira 2000) and the city of flows (Rui 2014; Telles
2010a). Its internal frontiers allow both an ordinary continuum and categori-
cal bipolar inequality, resulting in structural tension that affects every-day
“cityness” (Feltran 2011) and the “accumulation of violence” (Misse 2018).
Tilly’s influence on addressing long-lasting inequalities draws our attention
to causal mechanisms: “durable inequality among categories arises because
people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organi-
zational problems by means of categorical distinctions” (Tilly 1998). In Stolen
Cars, we consider criminalization as one of the main official mechanisms for
producing a categorical difference or the aforementioned fracture within
urban communities. Meanwhile, the world of crime and the PCC violently
confront “the system” through robbery, plunder, and looting with divine and/
or pragmatic internal justifications. The conflict between these internally
coherent regimes of norms and practices, these different sets of assumed nor-
mativities, is the main source of urban violence in São Paulo. Its outcome is
the categorical and tense internal boundaries of the city (Feltran 2011).
Epistemic violent confrontations between State and criminal regimes, as
well as multidimensional inequalities, can be understood by reference to this
fracture. Following in Tilly’s footsteps, Arretche (2015) argues that economic
standards are only one dimension for approaching inequalities and unequal
reproduction. Unequal access to education, health services, social security, and
urban infrastructure contributes to the shaping of unequal urban regimes and
landscapes. Our team of ethnographers searched for instances of the reproduc-
tion of cross-generational urban inequalities and stressed the role of violent
urban conflict in its reproduction. We decided to follow the journeys of stolen
cars, and they have shown us that the young black person who steals a Toyota
Hilux earns eight times less than the auctioneer who sells the same stolen car
the following week. This young black person steals two or three cars a week,
whereas the auctioneer sells up to 400 in the same period. The former has the
standard profile of the São Paulo demographic most likely to be incarcerated
or murdered; the latter has the standard profile of the successful businessman
who decides to become a Senator and could pay for this. We will get in touch
with them all in flesh and blood in this book.
We will also notice that street scammers who cheat tourists in central Berlin
and young people who tag the walls of São Paulo, for example, are very d ­ ifferent
 Introduction  21

from the youths who sell cocaine on the corners of Bogotá. Street scammers and
taggers pride themselves on their audacity while handling very little money and
tending to circulate on foot. Cocaine traffickers, on the other hand, operate in
powerful transnational economies, and even if they occupy the lowest positions
in these markets, they aspire to drive around the city in a brand-new expensive
car. They boast about their cars and how much they cost. Faced with (il)legal
markets, a young hustler occupies a marginal position. But an international
smuggler or cocaine trafficker does not; he is central to these markets, even if he
lives in a favela in São Paulo, Fortaleza, or Bogotá. Machado da Silva has argued
since the 1960s that urban violence is a public representation that, in the public
Brazilian debate, involves very different empirical processes: drug trafficking,
domestic violence, the implementation of security policies, guns, poverty, black-
ness, masculinity, etc. He has stated that despite its intuitive familiarity, we
should avoid taking the “urban violence” concept for granted. On the contrary,
we should empirically disentangle the black box of the concrete routines of
urban life to unmask urban violence, or contemporary capitalism, not as a con-
cept but as an object to be understood (Machado Da Silva 2008, 2016). In this
book, we develop his clues.

Methods: About Journeys, Tacking, and Our

Collaborative Research Team

Studying the social life of objects is a methodological tradition well estab-

lished in the Social Sciences (Appadurai 1986; Freire-Medeiros and Menezes
2016; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Knowles 2014; Kopytoff 2014;
Latour 2005; Miller 2001; Mintz 2003). But these methods are used outside
academia as well: “follow the money,” for example, is one of the most well-
established methods in police investigations studying the operation of com-
plex “organized crime” networks.11 Recently, seminal works such as those by
Knowles (2014) and Tsing (2015) have taken this tradition to a transnational
scale and have innovated theoretically by focusing not only on trajectories or
journeys as fundamental connectors for the understanding of a globalized
social world but also on the theoretical effects of such a methodological oper-
ation. Beyond the idea of flows, assemblages, and revealed lines of force, these
authors propose a theory embedded in concrete empirical situations. Such a
theory would perforce be very plural.
In the debate on mobility (Freire-Medeiros, Telles, and Allis 2018; Martins
Jr. 2015; Urry 2002, 2004, 2010), the contribution of Amit and Knowles
(2017) proposes the notion of “tacking” as a framework to understand the
importance of the daily improvisation of actors, be they dominant or
22  Stolen Cars

subordinate, in the construction of their own possibilities for acting in society.

This improvisation includes inventiveness, timing, and the unexpected, and
describes the recurrent, though little discussed, way in which contemporary
subjects navigate their daily lives.12 Opportunities for survival and business,
income generation, mobility, and production of life forms would, to a large
extent, also result from situational improvisation in the face of very different
barriers and everyday problems, because the world has been changing rapidly.
The notion of tacking is even more useful when it comes to studying crime
rings, as we do in this book. Unlike other markets, in which advertising and
marketing are essential, in the illegal world, to keep operating in secrecy is “the
soul of the business.” As repression is always possible, it is also necessary to diver-
sify routes, hide warehouses, modify paths, and change passwords (but also cell
phone chips and devices, addresses and clothes, hair and looks, and sometimes
one’s very physiognomy). Circumstances change even faster in illegal markets
and any action may be under surveillance by the police, rivals, or enemies.
In the criminal sphere, there is no stability guaranteed by bureaucracy or
reliable information available to operators. For this reason, horizontal organi-
zation is encouraged. Criminal factions, mafias, cartels, and gangs are a way
to produce trustworthy and essential internal environments, functioning as
institutions under the logic of honor. As Amit and Knowles (2017) propose,
the skills of inventiveness, timing, and dealing with the unexpected are at the
base of the operations of stimuli and obstacles to the contemporary global
circulation of goods, services, and people.
As instability expands in the contemporary world – viz. the effects of the
coronavirus outbreak in 2020 – the circumstances and the definitions of situ-
ations are, almost always, contingent. The ability to improvise and adapt is
one of the virtues most cherished by contemporary institutions and labor
markets; it is no different in (il)legal markets. Methodologically, considering
daily tacking as a means of structuring the actions of operators is more realis-
tic than starting from any rationalist or structuralist theories. At the same
time, the effects of these improvisations produce very rigid structures of
inequality and a lot of specificity in the disposition of violence (Feltran 2012).
The actors improvise, but always very awkwardly; by improvising, they
create solutions and innovations, breaking patterns but not freely. A long-
term examination sees the reproduction of the same capitalist urban conflict
that is well known from classical theories but being reproduced among an
enormous plurality of ways of living and contemporary urban government
orders. Actors move around and produce their unequal stories but within
plausible, possible goals offered by each historical moment, each space, each
situation, understood as a situated parameter of social structuring. Without a
doubt, the trend of this construction points to an increasingly unequal and
increasingly violent social world.
 Introduction  23

Likewise, there is a long tradition of sociological studies based on life s­ tories

(Arendt 1994; Bertaux 1981; Foucault and Barbin 1980; Lewis 1961) and
trajectories (Bourdieu 1986; 2004; Cabanes 2004; Telles 2010). The situa-
tional encounter in ethnographic research has also yielded fruitful narratives
in anthropology, especially those that relate the life stories of researchers and
their interlocutors (Das 2007a; Feltran 2017). In this sense, autobiographies
and biographies become generators of the analytical unit to be worked on in
this book – the journeys of stolen cars and those of their owners and their
thieves (Bourdieu 1986, 2004, 2011).
The methodological construction of our typical journeys follows the tradi-
tion of contemporary ethnographies of objects (Knowles 2014; Tsing 2015) but
also that of narrative analysis (Alleyne 2014). In this method, the formal con-
struction of the narratives is part of the methodological-analytical work. In this
book, the journey of our five stolen cars is a composition, by aggregation, of situ-
ations and characters that we got to know in the field. The journeys must be
typical, that is, we must reconstruct the chain of profile events of subject who
were usually, frequently, found in the field. We did not, therefore, opt for excep-
tional scenes or liminal situations, even when we observed these in the field, but
for repeated scenes and situations.
Analytically, we started out with the scene of the crime of the theft of a
vehicle, we then looked at typical immediate destinations, then typical forms
of attempted recovery in São Paulo (insurance, police, or actors from the
criminal world), the standard forms of repression, the appearance of the sto-
len cars on the markets, and so on. Table I.2 summarizes the five car’s jour-
neys we follow through the chapters.
We talked at length, as a team and with our research subjects about what
would be the most typical journey and therefore the most plausible for us to
follow. When reliable quantitative data were available, they provided the fun-
damental criteria for the construction of our journeys. If insurance companies
recover many more cars in São Paulo than the police do, if car thieves are
young people in general from the favelas, or if the dismantlers have very het-
erogeneous profiles, then these were characteristics to be reconstructed during
our journeys. If the police kill many car thieves in São Paulo, but if one thief
is killed for every several hundred thefts or robberies, we decided that none of
our five cases would end with a dead criminal – although from what we’ve
seen empirically, the phenomenon should be discussed in the book. And so it
was with each decision regarding the journeys presented, in an extensive ana-
lytical work over the course of more than a year. Many tests, with different
versions of the journeys, led us to the structure that we present here, guided
by the criteria of plausibility and representativeness.
The sheer vastness of the universe that we researched means that typical
journeys do not mean major routes. There are many other plausible, possible,
TABLE I.2  The cars’ journeys

Vehicle, owner, Time and loca- Where does it What is it used Where do the Markets, pur- Other develop-
situation tion of theft or go immediately for car or its parts chases and sales ments
armed robbery go
24  Stolen Cars

Toyota Hilux 7 a.m. – Rob- Vehicle crosses Exchanged Truck driver Part of base Hilux legalized in
2016 bery with the border with for 6 kg of brings cocaine paste resold La Paz, Boliv-
kidnapping of Bolivia, 80 km cocaine (base to Ermelino in the SP East ian government
Family from
family; ordered away, by back paste + hydro- Matarazzo (bor- Zone; hydro- recognizes own-
Campos Verdes
in São Paulo, roads. Spends chloride). der with Guarul- chloride export- ership without
Insured stolen in Cam- months in San hos, where the ed through the papers, vehicle
pos Verdes (MT, Matias, Bolivia, mules are). Port of Santos becomes the car
Tracker 1,700 km) circulating with- of an elite family;
out plates. cocaine arrives at
periphery parties
in SP and clubs
in Europe
Fiat Strada 2014 7 a.m. - Theft Vehicle “cools Thieves pick up Vehicle is Parts loaded Invoice from
down” on street car and take it “chopped up” onto truck in similar Strada
Seo Claudio Aricanduva
in Sapopemba to clandestine in warehouse warehouse, sent “warms up”
No insurance warehouse and parts of to Belém, Pará other stolen
next to large
commercial state; 3,500 km parts on avenue
No tracker avenue
interest repack- away known for illegal
for three days aged for sale dismantling in
– common prac- São Paulo
tice to avoid
arrest.
Hyundai HB20 11 a.m. – Theft Vehicle “cools “Hunters” from Vehicle goes to Purchased by Parts extracted
2014 in Osasco, down” for two insurer Alvorada a small busi- from the car in
Car Auction
days in same Seguros retrieve nessman from the auction yard
João West Zone of Corp auctioneer
neighborhood vehicle by mak- the interior of circulate in the
São Paulo on Tuesday.
Insured ing rounds in Rio de Janeiro informal market;
neighborhood, and resold as a resale of beaten-
No tracker second-hand car up cars takes
airbag popped
place online;
to justify not re-
urban areas be-
turning vehicle
come specialized

Fiat Palio 2011 5 p.m. – Armed Taken to a Dismantled More than Shell stays at Owner attempts
robbery in housing project haphazardly in a week later Sergio’s house, to find parts
Sérgio, No
in Cidade Tira- front of housing police officer he thinks of pos- in the illegal
insurance Ferraz de
dentes, project, finds car picked sible destina- chop-shops so
Vasconcelos,
clean in Cidade tions; as to reassemble
municipal- owner appeals some parts stay
Tiradentes vehicle but gives
ity in São Paulo to PCC but is in the vehicle, stolen parts sold
public housing up due to cost,
Metropolitan turned down as others taken on
project, student buys
Region he cannot cite away
Mercado Livre one of the doors
any violation calls owner and
after a car crash.
of the unwrit- asks him to (online sales Shell appears on
ten code of the remove it from platform) Tietê river in dry
criminal world, the street as
season.
later files report required by law
with police
(Continued)
Introduction  25
 26  Stolen Cars

TABLE I.2  (Continued)

Vehicle, owner, Time and loca- Where does it What is it used Where do the Markets, pur- Other develop-
situation tion of theft or go immediately for car or its parts chases and sales ments
armed robbery go
Ford Ka 8:40 p.m. – Researchers Circulates Boys joy-riding Maurício wins Maurício relabels
Armed robbery follow vehicle’s unregistered in outside the and sells pieces
2018 Ford Ka
arrival in favela Sapopemba for favela are seen as Stratus part,
Av. Sapopemba,
Diego to sound of three months by police, flee, at auction
East Zone of one of the
funk music amid thanks to ab- crash vehicle,
Insured, rented São Paulo through thieves is killed
clouds of mari- sence of any po- abandon scene,
by Uber driver by police a few
juana smoke lice inspection professional
police contact months later
and tolerance buyer
insurance com-
on the part of
pany Horizonte
the community
Seguros, which
sends vehicle to
Rodrigues Paiva
auctioneer
 Introduction  27

and empirically verified journeys for stolen cars and for supply chains in these
markets that we have not reconstructed here. Our set of five cars affords us an
overview of the enormous diversity of illegal markets and their connections
with their legal equivalents. What’s more, the reconstruction of these jour-
neys, based on the principles of narrative analysis, introduces readers to the
same sociological knowledge that we researchers have access to. Empirical
fragments and analytical debates lead us to broader theoretical questions
underpinned by solid foundations.

A Collective Research Team

A team of 11 ethnographers contributed to the mixed-method research of this
book, conducted between 2015 and 2019. During our fieldwork we visited
places from favela bars to the financial offices of large automotive companies;
we conducted research in small cities, border regions, consulates, small roads
where vehicles, drugs, and weapons are transported, police intelligence cen-
ters, and large insurance companies. We conducted interviews in public agen-
cies of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, as well
as religious institutions and criminal groups. We heard the testimony of
thieves, Federal Police, Border Patrol Officers, CEOs, and Congressmen. We
complemented our ethnographic research and journeys with analysis of sec-
ondary quantitative data produced by governments and insurers, as well as
official documents, debates around changes in legislation, and so on.
We also produced primary quantitative data, especially used in Chapters 2
and 4. Young and experienced researchers worked as a team, in groups, in
pairs, or individually during fieldwork, and collectively during data analysis,
reviewing literature and writing chapter plans and summaries. Each one read
and discussed every chapter during our workshops and the entire draft during
its final stages, always sharing their critical viewpoints. We learned from one
another, we laughed, fought, worked hard, and were at times frustrated with
the limits imposed on parts of our research, but in the end we became much
closer to one another.
With the institutional support of UFSCar and the Center for Metropolitan
Studies, the daily activities of field research were complemented by weekly
reading meetings, exchanges of empirical material and literature, monthly
internal workshop,s and periodical workshops with external guests, focused
on readings of chapter drafts. At the end of the empirical work, the material
collected by our team was immense. Hundreds of field diaries, dozens of tran-
scribed interviews, dictated field reports and WhatsApp audios with research
information, as well as hundreds of documents, extracts from legislation,
prints of virtual conversations, photographs, and a great deal of secondary
quantitative data produced by governments and the insurance market.
28  Stolen Cars

The list of bibliographical references was also compiled collectively, ­organized

by theme using organizational software. We also obtained many tables of pri-
mary quantitative data – especially regarding police auctions and homicides
linked to vehicle theft – and many, many written and video press reports col-
lected systematically throughout the research process. This material makes up
thousands of pages. The densest descriptions of places, situations, people,
objects and, especially, prices make up this material. The general guidelines set
down for the field ethnographers in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Cuiabá, Campos
Verdes, Foz do Iguaçu, San Estéban, Santos, São Carlos, Berlin, London, Paris,
and elsewhere was always to focus on the two questions that guided our investi-
gation: “how does it work?” and “how much does it cost?” How can a stolen car
be sold on the legal market? How is it made legal again? What does this informal
legalization cost? How much will it be resold for? And so on, in all the circuits
we studied.
This material was all organized in shared online folders and stored in the
Cloud with password restricted access. Various checks were carried out to
verify whether names, places, and dates had been changed, including in the
virtual material, pursuant to the ethical standards of international scientific
research. A fundamental step for all of us was group analysis, in order to
reconstruct five empirical and analytical stolen car journeys: a Toyota Hilux,
a Hyundai HB20, a Fiat Palio, a Ford Ka Sedan, and a Fiat Strada.
We chose these five journeys because they enable us to demonstrate the
vastness of the stolen car market in Brazil. With these five journeys, we were
able to cover luxury and popular vehicles, new cars and old ones, as well as
dismantling, resale, and transport to the border. By analyzing the profiles of
the owners and thieves of these cars, we were also able to map the distinctions
between the universe of violent robbery, with its actors and typical modes of
operation, and the universe of (nonviolent) theft, which is much more tech-
nical and commercial. It was possible to see how, in this enormous diversity,
patterns and mechanisms of reproduction of inequalities and urban violence
are repeated.
How does the journey happen and how does it distribute money? We also
tried to learn how much the stolen car or its parts cost in each tranche of the
journey. Who loses money with these cars? How do the actors make these
journeys occur? What they teach us about urban conflict, urban inequalities,
and urban violence? After this analytical exercise, urban inequalities and
urban violence emerged as two central analytical categories to the concept of
normative regimes and to the book’s theoretical framework more broadly.
Following stolen cars around Brazilian cities and border areas, we were
confronted with various situations of strictly managed armed violence in both
legal and illegal circuits, which inspired us to think about the role of violence
 Introduction  29

in the unequal governance practices of São Paulo’s public, private, and ­criminal
actors. From our perspective, control of the means of production of violence
is one of the most important mechanisms for hoarding opportunities and
resources and reproducing inequalities. That is why violence is not equally
widespread through the social fabric but rather situated, focused, and targeted
at the most vulnerable groups.

Ethical Issues, Diversity, and Typical Days

None of the researchers in our team got into a stolen car to do fieldwork; no-
one carried hidden cameras or recorders or sought any information without
the research subject having been clearly informed about our role in the field.
None of the researchers negotiated interviews or testimonies in exchange for
money or any other consideration other than respect, transparency, listening,
and guaranteed anonymity. Our field relations have always been based on the
longest possible stay as a way of building mutual trust.
“Academic researchers, at different levels of education, participating in
a project on the stolen vehicle market in São Paulo” is how we all intro-
duced ourselves to all our research subjects: from insurance company
directors or police chiefs (through formal e-mails), to teenage car thieves,
after preliminary conversations with the relatives, educators, colleagues,
and neighborhood acquaintances who introduced us to them. Pursuant to
Brazilian legislation on Ethics in Research in Human Sciences13 (for which
we had fought), we worked with substantive consents, obtained verbally,
thus avoiding any written consent that would invariably lead us to unethi-
cal situations vis-à-vis our interlocutors.
When, for whatever reason, there was any sign that we were not welcome
in any space – as happened in notoriously corrupt Police Stations and in situ-
ations where cars were being dismantled during our initial approach – we
simply discontinued our visit and disregarded the relevant data. In the vast
majority of cases, however, our ethnography work unfolded very calmly in
conversations marked by mutual trust, built over time by repeated visits to
each space.
The only adventure we faced in the research project for this book was an
intellectual one. We avoided exposing researchers to potentially violent situa-
tions as much as possible: the scenes of violence described in the book are
based on reports from robbers and victims obtained in interviews and detailed
ethnographic conversations in addition to systematic observation of videos
from security cameras, available on the internet and transcribed by the team.
The team’s safety was also assured by constantly monitoring the quality of
relations with our subjects in the field.
30  Stolen Cars

All of our interlocutors knew that they would not be identified in our
book and consented to the information they shared with us being used in our
research. This way of working is not new for our team, having been tested in
previous projects that also dealt with the line between legal and illegal (Bertelli
and Feltran 2017). Three particularities of the (il)legal vehicle market deserve
to be highlighted as they relate to relevant methodological issues. The first is
the enormous diversity – and capillarity – of this market. This diversity can
be seen in prices. We found the same car part sold for BRL 15.00 (0.015 MW)
or BRL 450.00 (0.45 MW), depending on its origin and the consumer’s pro-
file. Identical parts can be sold at very different prices depending on the pro-
file of the consumer who enters the store. Illegal car parts are bought by both
auto-parts resale stores in favelas and luxury car dealerships in exclusive
neighborhoods. The car market is virtual as well as physical, poor as well as
rich, and “tacking” strategies are used across the board. There is no stable
“price list,” “average price,” or “typical route” in illegal markets. Negotiations
are frequent, the prices situational and the regulations subject to change. The
prices that we present in the book, therefore, are those empirically observed
during our research.
The second central feature of the (il)legal vehicle market is the way in
which it is integrated. Illegality makes prices more competitive. Legality lends
legitimacy and trust. The strategies for “heating up” all kinds of illegality are
varied but everything is done “as if ” it were legal. Official stores can sell stolen
parts and clandestine stores can sell legally purchased ones. No car or auto
part circulates without a corresponding invoice, but many invoices are false,
or contain false information. Chinese parts are known to be cheap and of
poor quality and therefore compete with the prices of stolen parts (which may
be high quality and original). A new-car dealership might own a used-car
dealership in which it sells illegal cars so that it can sell new ones cheaper by
pooling the take of the two outlets. Buying a beaten-up car at an auction is a
great way to obtain documentation so that a similar, stolen car can be resold
as if it were legal. These are just a few examples, among thousands of others,
that showed how official circuits of cars and auto parts invariably mix on the
legal–illegal frontier. Today that integration is transnational in scope.
A third fundamental feature of the vehicle market is the role of gender. Car
markets in Brazil and Latin America are largely male, sexist, and hetero-­
normative. Several times we noticed the astonishment of a subject when a
female researcher demonstrated knowledge of the vehicles and their forms of
illegal circulation. This was a point of debate and joint training amongst the
team during the entire research process, as it implies relevant methodological
issues. We often opted for mixed gendered research teams to ensure safety and
the reliability of the data obtained.
 Introduction  31

Chapter Structure

Stolen Cars is organized around the journeys of five stolen vehicles. When a car
comes to a stop in a favela or at a police station or the syzygy between one
mercantile circuit and another or when it stops on a border, or at those
moments when it oscillates between legal and illegal economic spheres –
between, say, the car lot of an auctioneer and the car lot of an insurance com-
pany – we stop too, so we can study the pertinent urban conflict reproduction
mechanisms in situ. Our analytical narrative starts out small, at the scale of
face-to-face meetings in the city, and seeks to “ethnograph” the chain of signifi-
cant events along the way. Ordinary interactions in São Paulo are our starting
point; but our journeys take us far afield – to the streets of San Estéban, Bolivia;
to the clubs of Berlin and the roads around Beirut – because in the small print
of these humble itineraries, concrete global processes are writ large.
The journeys of these five stolen cars crisscross these chapters and their
territories, connecting the specific themes of each one – thefts and armed
robberies, police response, market response, insurer and auctioneer connec-
tions, businessmen large 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 ana-
lytical 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 construc-
tion, 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.”
After the journey of the Hilux that began in this introduction, Chapter 1
presents two other scenes of theft (the Fiat Strada and the Hyundai HB20), and
two scenes of armed robbery (the Ford Ka and the Fiat Palio), all on the same day
of October 2, 2018. The ethnographic scenes of armed robbery and theft are
treated analytically as urban encounters in which we know where and how the car
owners and thieves live. Two of these encounters are violent – and we also know
how much violence is paid for in illegal Brazilian vehicle markets. We argue that
armed robbery and petty theft represent the dividing line between the poor and
the rich, as they say in São Paulo. In the vast majority of cases, stolen cars are
affordable vehicles of the types that circulate most widely in the market. The
people who steal them are almost always very poor, favela dwellers, who mostly
steal from poor and/or lower middle-class people. Middle-class people are also
frequently victims – but enormous private security protects the wealthiest.
Therefore, “urban violence” is concentrated in the peripheries of the city and
feeds the representation of the periphery as a source of such violence.
32  Stolen Cars

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 imme-
diately 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 entre-
preneurs 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.
In Chapter 4, the universe of auctions is unveiled and treated as a lens
through which we empirically identify the mechanisms of reproduction of
São Paulo’s multidimensional urban inequalities (income, race, gender, terri-
tory, access to services, and distribution across the territories of the city).
Numbers and modes of operation described in detail show us how money
from illegal markets is diluted into the strongly regulated official markets
appropriated by urban, white, and global elites. Two insurance groups and
two auction organizations alone are responsible for the immense turnover of
these markets, while at the other extremity, millions of small resale and dis-
mantling operators squabble over tiny profits. Everyone feels separated from
the black favela thieves who make this machine run while dealing on a daily
basis with the increasing probability of imprisonment and violent death, the
chances of which are inflated to meet the needs of penal populism.
 Introduction  33

Chapter 5 is an ethnographic study of the internal inequalities within the

São Paulo vehicle dismantling market. It strengthens the empirical founda-
tion of our theoretical framework, which is centered on the notion of norma-
tive 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, auction-
eers, 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.
Finally, in Chapter 8, we empirically examine the mechanisms of global
coproduction of unequal urban territories. Studying the exchange of stolen
vehicles for cocaine base paste on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, we
argue that small border cities, such as Campos Verdes and San Estéban, are in
empirical connection with São Paulo and Berlin through transnational illegal
car and drugs markets. Following a Hilux that crosses the Brazil–Bolivia bor-
der, we follow the cocaine that the Hilux bequeaths to Brazil to the retail
market in São Paulo’s East Zone and then on to Berlin’s parks and nightclubs
and the streets of north London. The chain of empirical valuation of these
products – from USD 1.00 to USD 100.00 per gram of cocaine, or from
USD 1,000.00 to USD 600,000.00 for the same car, depending on where we
34  Stolen Cars

are in the chain – measures material and symbolic inequalities that are copro-
duced between these places, in the relationship between these cities and in the
construction of their respective natives and migrants, rich and poor, and
established and outsider residents.
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.

***

In the six years of this research, we have never walked alone. We anonymously
thank all of our interlocutors in the field, who cannot be identified. We are also
grateful to colleagues who read and commented on previous versions of chap-
ters and the draft and/or preliminary presentations of the research work, in
particular Daniel Hirata, Felipe Rangel, Eugenia Cozzi, Corentin Cohen, John
Collins, Ernesto Isunza, Salvador Maldonado, Jenny Pearce, Patrick Le Galès,
Daniel Cefaï, Gabriel Kessler, Willian Alves, Talja Blokland, Jerôme Tadié,
Marie Morelle, Sébastien Jacquot, Sérgio Costa, Angelo Martins, Caroline
Knowles, Bill Schwarz, Jorge Ordonez, Efrén Sandoval, Vera Telles, Bianca
Freire-Medeiros, Andreza Santos, Carlos Perez Ricart, Erik Bahre, Martijn
Oosterbaan, Finn Steputtat, Frida Gregersen, Derek Pardue, Mitch Duneier,
Vagner Marques, Brodwyn Fischer, Mariana Cavalcanti, Federico Neiburg,
José Ricardo Ramalho, Natália Corazza, Eugênia Motta, Gustavo Onto, Luiz
Guilherme Paiva, Juliana Carlos, Fernando Rabossi, Marcella Araújo, Carlos
Flores, Hannah Schilling, Nina Margies, Daniela Krueger, Kaspar Metzkow,
Henrik Lehbun, Valdênia Paulino, Renato Lanfranchi, and our colleagues
from the CEDECA Sapopemba and CDHS. We are grateful, as a team, to all
our colleagues at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, FAPESP process
2013/07616-7, which sponsored this research throughout its development,
mixing passionate debates and material support, represented by its director
Eduardo Marques; to colleagues in the Department of Sociology at UFSCar,
represented by our coordinator, Fabiana Luci de Oliveira; to the Brazilian
Center for Analysis and Planning, represented by its President Marcos Nobre.
Each person knows how much we have learned from our scientific, profes-
sional, and personal interaction with them.
 Introduction  35

Notes

  1. Throughout the book we will use MW to represent Monthly Minimum Wage. All
prices were adjusted to the minimum wage considering USD 1.00 = BRL 4.00
(2010 average) and the national monthly minimum wage of BRL 1,000.00 (or
USD 250.00) in 2020 values. It is important to remember that the real value of
the Brazilian minimum wage increased by 75 percent between 2004 and 2019 (G1
2019 [https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2019/04/15/veja-historico-dos-
ultimos-reajustes-do-salario-minimo.ghtml]).
  2. An individual subway or bus ticket costs 0.004 MW. There are no weekly or
monthly plans that might reduce the cost, although Bilhete Único tickets, which
allow free train-subway-bus transfers within a single journey, are available. In
2018, 6 out of 10 Brazilian workers earned the minimum monthly wage (Agência
O Globo 2019).
  3. The democratization of automobiles in the city during the past 20 years has
occurred thanks to the dynamism of the informal used cars and auto-parts market
and, more importantly, the expansion of credit to lower-income earners during the
Lula governments (2002–2010). This phenomenon has, as a direct side effect, or
even as a foundational element, led to a related increase in vehicle thefts and
vehicle theft rings.
  4. O Globo 2017. https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/no-mundo-1-mais-rico-detem-
20-da-renda-brasil-ainda-mais-desigual-22190904.
  5. All narrated scenes, character profiles, and transcribed documents are faithful to
data obtained during our field research. All the characters have been given
fictitious names; all newspaper reports have been slightly modified and parts of the
dates and names of territories and cities have been changed to protect interlocutors
in the field, be they thieves, police officers, civil servants, businessmen, or their
families. The methodology section details the ways in which the writing of an
ethnography based on five cars’ journeys was constructed.
  6. Loïc Wacquant’s (Wacquant 1996, 2009; Wacquant and Howe 2008) highly
relevant studies on advanced marginality and the penal state are examples of this
normative approach and very influential within this literature.
  7. Police Ombudsman of the State of São Paulo (2018), available at http://ftp.sp.gov.
br/ftpouvidoria-policia/Anual2018.pdf.
  8. The sociology of public action and the idea of governance as stated by Lascoumes
and Le Galès (2012) helps us to think about how these markets are regulated in
everyday situations.
  9. Beckert and Dewey (2017), Dewey (2015, 2016), Feltran (2014), Guyer (2004),
Hirata (2018), Rabossi (2011, 2015), Telles (2010).
10. Everyday life, the dispositions of actors, and resources constructing the “unequal
city” are the core conceptual framework used by Blokland (Blokland et al. 2016;
36  Stolen Cars

Blokland 2017), with whom I have worked and from whom I learned a great deal
in the past few years. Misse (Misse 2010) and Machado da Silva (Machado da Silva
2016) follow an identical path. A deeply controversial “sociology of money” also
exists, dating back to Simmel (2004) and including authors such as Hart (1973),
Neiburg (2007), Wilkis (2017), and Zelizer (1978, 1988, 1994, 2011).
11. One line of ethnographic studies on the world of crime in Brazil has been built in
opposition to the normative and legal notion of organized crime (Biondi 2018;
Feltran 2016; Hirata 2018; Telles 2010b). To emphasize this as a controversial
expression, we have chosen to use quotation marks.
12. Although Georg Simmel does not appear among the fundamental references of the
authors, the approach proposed by them can be directly related to Simmel’s
theories (Simmel 2010) as well as to the results of this production both in the
classic by Goffman (2016) and later in Cefaï and Gardella (2011).
13. Resolution 510 of the National Health Council on Research Ethics in Human
Sciences, of April 7, 2016. http://conselho.saude.gov.br/resolucoes/2016/Reso510.pdf.
CHAPTER 1

Crime, Violence, and Inequality in

São Paulo
Gregorio Zambon and Gabriel Feltran

Contrary to popular belief, violence in São Paulo sets the rich against the poor
only indirectly and in a mediated fashion. As we will see throughout this book,
the rich live in safe areas. Violent crime is concentrated in the peripheries, espe-
cially along the boundaries between lower-middle-class neighborhoods and the
slums known in Brazil as “favelas.” In the vast majority of cases (and also con-
trary to popular belief ), armed robbery involves perpetrators and victims who
come from quite close social strata. Face-to-face interactions between the city’s
rich and its poor are rare; violent interactions are even rarer. This chapter sets
out to demonstrate how vehicle-related crime is an integral component of vio-
lence in São Paulo – one that underpins its perennial inequalities.
In this chapter we describe – we don’t theorize. This is just the first stop on
a guided tour. We will get to the big concepts later and these won’t be what
you’ll find in the deductive literature. The Toyota Hilux stolen in Campos
Verdes was ordered in São Paulo; our other four stolen car journeys begin
with everyday scenes of violence in the city. We have undertaken an ethno-
graphic reconstruction of two typical armed robberies and two typical vehicle
thefts. These are presented in the form of an analytical narrative through
which we identify coexisting normative regimes engaged in power struggles
that give rise to a specific urban order. We are not going to start our story with
deductive hypotheses that attribute the causes of violence in São Paulo to the
absence of the State, the law, civility, rationality, public spaces, morality, or
capital (Cunha and Feltran 2013). The same goes with analytical concepts
like capitalism, globalization, or neoliberalism, although some of these are
discussed at the end of the book.

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
38  Stolen Cars

In short, we will not treat interactions normatively, i.e., “as they should
be.” We will describe situations and individuals as they appeared to us in our
fieldwork. The characters that you will read about in these narratives – the car
thieves, the car owners, the call center operators, and the relatives of victims
– are based on reconstructions of situations and interactions as they were
actually experienced in the field. These concrete empirical situations allow us
to look at what is present rather than absent in the social world we analyze.
We aim to inductively address the chains of meaning that make violent con-
flict plausible. Two distinct and unequal criminal circuits are therefore of imme-
diate interest to us. These are the car theft circuit and the armed robbery circuit.
The distinctions between the victims and the perpetrators in these two circuits
constitute a rich seam in which to identify the contrasts by which urban violence,
a daily reality for many people in São Paulo, reproduces urban inequalities.
It has become a sociological commonplace, post Georg Simmel at least,
that conflict is a fundamental form of sociation (Simmel 1964). Conflicts are
socially productive; they exist in the space in between contending parties and
provoke reciprocal reactions between them. Conflict gives rise to social action,
even if the parties involved interact in very indirect ways that may be far
removed from face-to-face interaction. A family without any direct experi-
ence of violence may be motivated to undertake a precautionary move to a
gated community by the mere threat it represents, especially when they see it
visited upon members of their own class. The urban crime that has grown
exponentially in many Latin American cities since the 1980s has had this
kind of concrete, often indirect, effect. The representation of potential urban
violence, which is confirmed according to a kind of circular logic every time
a criminal act is committed in a public space, has changed the landscapes of
the cities where it has become endemic (Caldeira 2000). Walls have been
erected, iron grilles have appeared, as have barbed wire, electric fences, CCTV
cameras, and private security guards.1 Public security policies have followed
the trend towards “securitization.” São Paulo has become the world capital of
armored cars. Meanwhile, vehicle theft and armed robbery rates have gone up
and down, and then back up again, for decades.
The perception of urban violence in São Paulo manifests in the space that
marks the relationship between different social groups and classes. The con-
crete effects of criminal and state violence are concentrated on the poor. We
are often asked by urban middle class and elite acquaintances about the
potential dangers of our research work. The assumption that underpins the
question is that we, who are predominantly white academics, must be at risk.
Meanwhile, we have heard the opposite countless times from interlocutors in
favelas. They say that they are not afraid of being robbed or victims of vio-
lence when outside their homes because there is a prevailing order in the
favelas.
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  39

Everyday life in the city of São Paulo seems to reaffirm most residents’
view that homogeneity of class, race, and gender produces security, while
contact with difference is potentially violent. That violence sets the rich
against the poor. Contact with a specific profile of “different” people, the
poor and, especially, poor, young black men, and, even more especially, poor,
young black men who operate in illegal markets, will be potentially violent.
This reification, which takes effect as a cause, also interests us analytically and
will be approached from different perspectives throughout this book.

7 a.m. (Fiat Strada)

Tuesday, October 2, 2018. At the very same time that the Silva Costa family
was being held hostage in Campos Verdes, so that the Toyota Hilux ordered
by Aron could be stolen, Adriano was waking up in the East Zone of São
Paulo (see Figure 1.1). Adriano is a 17-year-old black male who grew up in a
favela and is considering joining the army on the recommendation of his
uncle. Adriano put on a pair of shorts, drank a cup of coffee, ate a stale cracker,

FIGURE 1.1  Map of our stolen cars’ journeys across Brazil and its borders.
Source: The authors with technical support of Bruna Pizzol, based on
data from the 2010 IBGE Census.
40  Stolen Cars

and slipped his feet into his flip flops. He then sent a WhatsApp message to
Rubem asking him to come and pick him up at his home in Jardim Grimaldi
in the East Zone district of Sapopemba where he lives with his mother and his
three younger brothers.
Rubem duly picked him up and they headed out together in Rubem’s
black VW Gol Bola2 (whose registration was pending). Their first stop was
located at 500 Avenida Pastor Cícero Canuto. They were on their way to their
work in a profession that they had been involved in since their school days.
Rubem was a few years older than Adriano and, at 20 years of age, spoke with
experience of the world of crime. When we interviewed him, he told as that
he usually carried out his first robbery of the day at 7 a.m. because there
weren’t many police on the streets at that hour. “It’s when they change shift.”
Seo Cláudio3 also woke up early, naturally unaware that he would lose his
car later that morning. Aged 65, Cláudio was the son of Spanish immigrants
who had built their lives in São Paulo. He was born in a rural area close to the
growing city. The farm where he lived most of his life would later become
Parque São Lucas, one of São Paulo’s 96 districts. He was a child in the opti-
mistic 1950s. “Brazil is the country of the future” being a popular phrase at the
time. Parque São Lucas was incorporated into the city by speculators in the
1960s and is today part of the urban sprawl.
Now retired, Seo Cláudio had inherited both his Christian and working-
class values from his parents. He had seen São Paulo grow and had believed he
could “grow with it.” You had to work hard to improve your life. And he had
worked from a very early age. From the ages of 7 to 18 he had worked “load-
ing sand and bricks” onto his father’s truck. He had attended school for a mere
four years. Then, like Adriano’s uncle, he had performed his military service
during the days of the dictatorship: “I was never one to let the grass grow
under my feet.” He had wanted to pursue a military career but his father was
murdered and since he was the eldest son of the family he was forced to put
aside his uniform to support his mother and siblings. There was a metal works
in Santo Amaro that paid better than the army so he started worked there and
stayed until 1969. He married Sílvia, who had a very similar social back-
ground but with Italian parents. Following the centrifugal forces that impelled
the city towards its margins, they moved to Sapopemba. Factory work contin-
ued to be a mainstay of Seo Cláudio’s life, now in São Paulo’s “ABC” region.4
As a trade union member, he witnessed the birth of the workers’ move-
ments that arose from the great strikes of 1979 and 1980 and the rise of Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, who went on to become president of Brazil in 2002. Seo
Cláudio was made redundant in 1992 and set up a barbecue stand at the gates
of the factory where he used to work. His union job was replaced by a small
business that was by definition precarious. The government paid him a
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  41

redundancy benefit, which was later replaced by a pension that was paid out
early due to disability. He owned the house that he had built. His children
were now adults and working themselves so he didn’t have to support them.
His daughter had even completed a degree in psychology.
Seo Cláudio felt that, considering the combined income from his barbecue
stand and his pension, he couldn’t complain. In 2014 he bought a small
pickup. It was a good vehicle for his work and nice just for just driving around
in. It was the first new car he’d ever bought. He paid the last of 60 monthly
installments in April 2018. Seo Cláudio got around his neighborhood on foot;
he kept his car locked in his garage. The thought of it being stolen was never
far from his mind. Earlier that day his wife had asked him to take the car out
of the garage so she could sweep the floor, a job that took her 10 minutes.
Adriano and Rubem spotted Seo Cláudio’s red Fiat Strada Working CS
parked on the right side of the avenue. It was just the kind of thing they were
looking for. They slowed down, cased out the area and parked about 50
meters further up the avenue. Rubem got out of the car and walked along the
road to the Strada. It was 7:10 a.m. and the sidewalk near the car was damp,
someone having hosed it down, which is common practice in Brazil. Lean
and dark-skinned, Rubem was wearing jeans and a baseball cap. He looked
around to see if there was any danger, heedless of the security cameras on the
buildings around him. He then sat down on a part of the sidewalk that was
no longer wet, right next to the front wheel of Seo Cláudio’s Fiat Strada.
And the operation began. He fiddled around underneath the vehicle,
without attracting any attention, for 10 long minutes; much longer than he’d
planned on. Adriano was starting to worry. They might have to forget about
this one. Just then Rubem managed to break the steel cable connecting the
front part of the vehicle to the cabin. He had done this with the small pair of
pliers, worn down by use, that he carried in his pocket. As he explained to us
when we interviewed him, unlocking the hood is the most time-consuming
and important part of the whole operation.
This has three functions. The first is to immediately cut the alarm wire,
which he had just done, to prevent the alarm from going on when he opened
the door. With that wire cut there is no audible alarm to worry about, even
though the car’s lights may flash. The second is to disguise the theft from the
point of view of a passer-by. He opened the hood and stood over the engine.
Anyone passing by would naturally assume that he was engaged in legitimate
vehicle repairs. The third function is to replace the electronic fuel injection
module, this being the simplest way to steal a key-operated vehicle like a
Strada. To do this, Rubem left the Strada open and walked back to his own
car, where Adriano had already selected a compatible injection module from
among the various models he had brought with him. Rubem returned to the
42  Stolen Cars

Strada and replaced the module in under 20 seconds. Opening the door of a
cheap vehicle is the simplest part of the whole process. In this case, Rubem
opened it with a bump key, the same kind used by locksmiths, in just under
30 seconds.5
The injection module is a coding device. Each car key has a specific code
that allows it to communicate with its injection module. When the injection
module is activated, the spark plugs fire, thus setting in motion the internal
combustion process in the engine cylinders. With his module installed,
Rubem started the car and the engine began to turn. At 7:25 a.m. he quietly
drove the car away from the parking space in front of Seo Cláudio’s house.
A series of contingent circumstances determine the ideal time to commit
a given type of auto theft. Vehicle type, location, pedestrian flows, and the
tools and equipment available may all favor or hinder an undertaking. But
there are always alternatives. In this case, Rubem had bad quality pliers and
therefore lost precious minutes, but he didn’t give up. Two blocks away, he
and Adriano swapped rides. Adriano now had to undertake the risky opera-
tion of driving the stolen car to its new destination. Alone in the black Gol
Bola, Rubem headed home. He needed a little more sleep. Altogether, Adriano
and Rubem would earn about 1.5 MW for their work.
While his car was being stolen from in front of his house, Seo Cláudio was
listening to the morning news on his radio and tending to some potted plants
in his back yard. When he went out to bring the Strada back inside, he
couldn’t believe his eyes. What had happened? Had his son gone somewhere
in the car? But why would he do that without letting him know? Seo Cláudio
had let his car insurance lapse in 2015. It had been too expensive. There was
no tracker in the vehicle; Seo Cláudio didn’t even know that such things
existed. He went into the house to tell his wife. He was already trembling
with shame and impotent anger as he slowly came to terms with the unavoid-
able fact of what had happened. He didn’t know what to tell his wife. Dona
Sílvia accompanied him to the front door and embraced him. She then told
him to go to the police station and report the theft.
Only then did it fully dawn on him that his car had been stolen. Seo
Cláudio took an Uber to the police station and on the way reflected on his
direct loss – at least 30 MW in market value – as well as the indirect loss that
the theft represented. How could he keep his barbecue stand going?

***

Rubem and Adriano, young residents of a nearby neighborhood in the dis-

trict of Sapopemba, stole the car and the livelihood of a working-class man
from the periphery of São Paulo’s East Zone. Neither the perpetrators nor the
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  43

victim had completed primary school. In Seo Cláudio’s youth, almost all
working-class children were deprived of schooling. Nowadays, the formal job
market is almost entirely closed to people like Adriano and Rubem who lack
a meaningful education. Rubem and Adriano will never meet Seo Cláudio
but the conflict between them produces concrete social effects that we will
analyze throughout this book.
For now, it is important to note that the 10 most frequently stolen cars in
São Paulo are lower-range vehicles. These popular cars are easier to steal because
they have fewer electronic safety components and the ones they do have tend
to remain unchanged in the same models for several years. These components
are inexpensive and known to car thieves. The logic of the vehicle market also
helps in determining which cars are stolen, with the most affordable cars being
at the top of the list. Most of the hundreds of cars that are stolen every day in
São Paulo come from this category. The value of a car on the illegal market is
linked not to its list price6 but rather to what can be earned by the sales of its
parts. Affordable cars are ideal for this. Adriano took the Fiat Strada to a quiet
street where it would “rest” for three days. It is common for a car thief to leave
a stolen vehicle parked for two or three days in a supermarket parking lot, a
quiet side street, or alongside a major road while waiting to see if there are any
trackers installed in it. If there are, an insurance company or a specialized
agency will recover the vehicle and no-one will go to jail. The thief will come
back a few days later and if it’s still where he left it, he’ll take it to its next stop.
This will be a clandestine chop-shop. Letting the car rest also avoids drawing
any unwanted attention to the chop-shop in question.

10:00 a.m. (Hyundai HB20)

A 2014 Hyundai HB20 1.0 belonging to João, a married, 35-year-old profes-

sional from the West Zone, was stolen from a parking spot near the busy
Presidente Altino commuter rail station in Osasco. Experienced car thieves
know that once a vehicle owner has entered the public transport system they
will have peace of mind and plenty of time to perform their work. João lives
in a residential neighborhood called Parque Continental next to the station
Presidente Altino. He has no children and works at a multinational agribusi-
ness company in its “new business” department. João holds a degree in agron-
omy and comes from a white, working-class family from a small city in São
Paulo state. He has always had a clear understanding of his position in Brazil’s
social structure as well as his responsibilities to his parents, who themselves
received a rudimentary education and together earn 2 MW per month. João –
who is tall, blond, and blue-eyed and has a good job – knows that responsibil-
ity for the continued financial security of his extended family lies with him.
44  Stolen Cars

He moved in with some relatives in São Paulo city when he was 17 so he

could attend a university entrance exam prep school. His uncle was wealthier
than his parents and supported him while he attended the prep school. Being
able to focus on his studies meant that he aced the university entrance test
and got into a public university at a town in the interior of São Paulo state.
He managed to strike a balance between study and his social life and gradu-
ated at age 22. He then applied for an internship at Chemical Agro through
the good offices of one of his professors. He has worked there ever since. He’s
had two promotions, one that took him to the south of Brazil and another
that brought him back to São Paulo.
That Tuesday, João had started work early while he was still at home by
answering some e-mails and making a few phone calls. He had two clients to
visit in the North Zone: one before lunch and one straight after. He suspected
that if his second visit was delayed he would have to wait for the end of his
rotation,7 i.e., 8:00 p.m., to return home. São Paulo has a vehicle rotation
system that operates during peak hours, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and
then again from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Vehicles whose plates end with the
number 4, like João’s, are not permitted to circulate during these two blocks
of time on Tuesdays. That’s why he drove to the train station. The journey to
the North Zone would be that much longer and that much less comfortable
but at least he wouldn’t get stuck in traffic on the way back.
Grandão was wearing shorts, flip-flops, a hooded sweatshirt, and a flat-
brimmed baseball cap. He was 35 years old, black, overweight, and boasted a
well-kept goatee. In his local hood he is known as a good-time guy, always
smiling as he drives around in his lowered 1998 silver GM Omega with its
alloy wheels and sound system stickers. His family is well known in the neigh-
borhood for being involved in the world of crime. His mother runs an infor-
mal shop out of the back of their house, which we’ll discuss in greater detail
later on. Grandão had also left early to “go to work,” as he calls it, and was
accompanied by one of his friends, a kid called Wellington. Grandão and
Wellington traveled from Jandira in the periphery of the West Zone in a GM
Corsa. Grandão never takes his Omega to go to work. Wellington was a nov-
ice and was being brought along to watch, learn the ropes, and take the car
that was about to be stolen to its resting place.
Grandão is much more experienced than Rubem and much faster. He
quickly drove around an HB20 that he had spotted and did a few lengths of
the street to make sure he was not being watched. Feeling safe, he walked
straight up to the vehicle and opened the car door with a bump key in under
three seconds. He opened the driver door and sat down in the driver’s seat,
with one of his legs hanging out of the car. Without even bothering to close
the door, he unlocked the hood. The lights of the HB20 flashed and for a few
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  45

moments its horn started to honk. Grandão opened the hood and discon-
nected the horn; silence ensued. He then quickly replaced the car’s injection
module. This takes practice, of which Grandão had had plenty. Leaving the
car door open, he called Wellington, and then drove off, following the GM
Corsa. The whole operation took no more than two minutes. In an interview,
Grandão told us that he did this to 8 to 10 cars a week, usually one in the
morning and another in the afternoon on working days. He gives the impres-
sion that stealing a car is easy and claims that keyless cars only make it easier:
“the more technology there is, the easier it is for us.”
João did not despair when he exited the train station at 3:00 p.m., a little
earlier than he had expected, and could not find his HB20 where he had left
it. After standing on the sidewalk for a few seconds, wondering if he really
had parked it where he thought he had, he took out his cell phone while try-
ing to maintain an air of calm. He leaned against a tree, giving no thought to
his well-ironed white shirt, blue chinos, and black shoes. João had insurance.
He called Alvorada, his insurance company, and the phone was promptly
answered. He explained the situation and the attendant8 asked if he was
alright and whether any violence had been involved in the theft. He explained
that none had. The attendant told João that he could report the theft to the
police online to save himself a trip to the station. Once he had got an official
police confirmation that his complaint had been lodged he could forward it
directly to Alvorada or his broker and his case would be assessed with due
haste. Compensation would not take long to arrive. She sent him an SMS
with a link to a checklist and even asked if he needed her to call a taxi for him.
She reminded him that his policy covered all these services.
While waiting to see whether the car would be recovered and he would
need to buy a new one, João was lent a replacement vehicle for four days.
Nothing to complain about in any of this. João was very satisfied with the
service he had received and gave a score of 10 when asked to evaluate his call
with Bianca, the Alvorada’s operator. The theft had not stressed him out too
much – he saw it as a setback more than anything else. João canceled a phone
meeting he was supposed to have with his boss at the end of the day by telling
him that his car had been stolen and he would get back to him about work
later. Stolen cars are part of life in a big city – it’s no real problem. Everything
was sorted out in 15 minutes using a cell phone while leaning against a tree.
Five minutes passed and João got a call from the Civil Police to confirm the
veracity of his report. Only after he had taken care of all this did he call his
fiancée, Marcella, who, in a somewhat more intimate tone, asked him many
of the same questions that Bianca had.
João plans to marry Marcella and start a family. She is an economist and a
graduate of the same public university as him. Her parents own a small ice
46  Stolen Cars

cream business in the interior of São Paulo state. The couple have been about
moving to her hometown and taking over the family business. But that would
depend on the opportunities available to João. He felt very much that he was
at the beginning of his professional life and that there was ample potential for
him to grow. He had already been invited to move into a job in finance. He
had considered the offer, but in the end went for Chemical Agro on account
of the greater job security it offered. He was already thinking about moving
from his uncle’s house to a quieter neighborhood where he and Marcella
could settle down. “How stupid to park the car near the station,” he thought.
“There is a favela right next door.” “But,” replied Marcella, “things could have
been so much worse for that very reason.”
They agreed that he was lucky not to have been the victim of a violent
robbery. Everything was fine, thank God. The HB20 was insured. “We’ll get
slightly more back than the market value of the car,” Marcella pointed out.
João took a cab home and on the journey thought about what kind of car he
would buy when Alvorada paid out. Grandão and Wellington headed home
too, once they had left the HB20 resting on a street as far as possible from
them but still in Osasco. Wellington walked two blocks and then waited on a
quiet corner for Grandão to come and pick him up. They had finished half
their day’s work.
João and Grandão were the same age and lived in the same part of São
Paulo but had never met. João, like most people unfamiliar with the criminal
world, imagined that his HB20 had been taken to the garage of whoever had
stolen it. Unlike Grandão and Wellington, he had no idea that the stolen
vehicle market is highly specialized with a clear division of labor. Nor did he
know that his car would quickly part company with those who had stolen it.

***

Seo Cláudio and João were victims of theft rather than robbery. There is a
decisive difference between the two. In this book, as in the tradition it draws
on, “violence” has a precise descriptive meaning: it refers either to the use of
force or the threat of force that produces an effect analogous to its use (Misse
2006). Pointing a gun at someone and telling them to hand over their car is
more effective than forcibly removing them from it. In the case of theft (as
opposed to robbery), a vehicle is stolen without the use of any threat or
weapon and without the presence of the owner. In robberies (as opposed to
thefts), the perpetrator confronts the victim in person. The perpetrator invari-
ably threatens the victim and usually (i.e., not always) carries a handgun. In
cities of the Global North car theft is commonplace but car robberies are
almost nonexistent. Why does the violence that accompanies crime occurs
mainly in the Global South?
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  47

The distinction between robbery and theft that we employ is similar to

that used in the Brazilian Penal Code: it is determined by the presence or
absence of violence. We believe that it is necessary to go beyond this to under-
stand the different ways in which the social and market circuits of robbery
and theft are structured within São Paulo’s illegal vehicle market. The theft/
robbery distinction has its genesis in the profile of the perpetrator and it
determines the journey subsequently made by a stolen car. Car theft, as we
shall see, is “clean.” It is the sophomore stage of professional induction into
illegal vehicle markets. The freshman stage almost always comprises an intern-
ship in the circuit of violent robberies. These are much more dangerous for
both victims and perpetrators.

5:15 p.m. (Fiat Palio)

Israel was wearing sneakers, jeans, a baggy green polo shirt and a new cap. On
the other occasions we had seen him in the favela he was only wearing flip
flops and shorts. He had also had his hair cut and his eyebrows done – stan-
dard practice before the funk parties he attends on weekends. We waited for
him at the entrance of a neighborhood community center where we’d agreed
to meet him for an interview. We were in Parque Santa Madalena, another
favela in the district of Sapopemba. Israel was 16 years old, had brown skin,
was no more than 1.55 m tall and very slim – but with broad shoulders.
During our subsequent discussion about the interview, we all agreed that
neither the expression in his eyes nor the stories he told were compatible with
his young age.
Israel spoke as if he had had a lot of life experience. And he had. He had
grown up in the favela. His father had left home when he was five and his
brother four. His mother later had three more children. She was a sex worker.
Life had not been easy for Israel. He told us about his involvement in the
world of crime and showed us bullet marks on the side of his head. He didn’t
remember completing a single year of elementary school; he only referred to
school because we asked about it. He used a lot of slang, so much so that at
first we found it difficult to understand him. The confusion made us laugh.
Israel started translating his slang whenever he noticed that we’d appeared to
have lost the thread. “It’s not slang, it’s a dialect,” as the São Paulo rap song
goes. We felt like foreigners interacting with someone from a different world,
even though we all lived in the same city.
We didn’t ask about it, but Israel volunteered the fact that he didn’t
know how to read or write. He became uncomfortable when we told him
what we did: PhD research, postdoctorate, university work. We explained
what those things were by setting out the sequence from elementary to
48  Stolen Cars

postgraduate education. He only knew how to sign his name, he told us –

without lowering his gaze. We commented that life experience was some-
times worth much more than going to school. We knew this to be true but
we also knew just how much education was able to break durable cycles of
inequality. Our conversation with Israel continued. We also talked to his
brother Ricardo, whom he called “Índio.” Índio was wearing flip flops,
shorts, and a shirt bearing the logo of an amateur São Paulo football team
that was several sizes too big for him.
Israel told us that he was a car thief. He didn’t like to sell drugs; that was
his brother’s thing. He liked to use drugs, however, and only sold them when
his brother needed a hand. His business was stealing cars. He was a sought-
after professional because, as he put it, he “represented.” “Representing”
means “performing well and acting as one should in the world of crime”
(Fernandez 2017). Just a week earlier, Israel and Índio had stolen a Fiat Palio.
He told us about that on Tuesday, October 2nd. After waking up at 1:00
p.m., they had left their home in Jardim Elba – a place known as a location
where drug users meet to consume crack and cocaine. Israel and Índio had
got used to selling to noias, as crack addicts are known in São Paulo slang.
Noias bring everything they can to pay for rocks of crack: watches, peaked
caps, sneakers, toys, sometimes even motorbikes. Israel said he knew it wasn’t
the right thing to do but he sometimes joined in consuming the merchandise
with his customers, who had become friends.
The pangs of hunger biting in the early afternoon, Israel and Índio stopped
to eat at a fried filled pastry stand in Jardim Elba. They snorted the cocaine
left over from the night before and smoked a joint. Evening approached and
Israel got a call from one of the managers of the local drug trade. They would
have to go to a housing project in the district of Cidade Tiradentes. They were
needed there because the biqueira9 “was out of control.”
Although nervous about going to Cidade Tiradentes, not their territory,
Israel and Índio accepted the mission to go to the huge 1980s housing project
of the type known as a Cohab.10 They had been waiting for an opportunity to
shine; this may well be their chance. They could kill two birds with one stone:
they would steal a car and use it to drive to the Cohab. They’d spend the night
dealing drugs and come back home with money in their pockets. Life for
Israel, and young men like him who enter the criminal universe early on the
lowest rung of the illegal markets ladder, is crazy.
Índio stopped by the house of an acquaintance to pick up an old, 38-cali-
ber revolver, the cheapest type of gun available to rent. The acquaintance was
a PCC “brother” that they knew from the neighborhood. The PCC, São
Paulo’s main criminal faction, regulates the arms trade in the periphery
(Feltran 2008) and someone from the PCC almost always knows which
weapons are being used by teenage thieves in each neighborhood on a given
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  49

day. The gun would have to be returned when Índio was finished with it.
Now armed, Israel and Índio walked along Sapopemba Avenue, heading east-
wards, until they were sufficiently far from their own territory. You should
never steal in the hood where you live. No Brazilian gang permits that (Biondi
2018).
During a half hour of walking down the avenue Israel and Índio had made
two aborted attempts on two different cars. The first was an HB20, whose
driver escaped by running a red light when she saw them approaching. The
second was a Ford Ecosport. Israel and Índio approached the vehicle but
then, before they had pulled out the gun or announced their intentions, they
noticed that the driver had the typical look of a periphery cop. He was aged
between 20 and 30 years old, looked strong, had brown skin, short hair and
a shaved beard, and looked into their eyes without any sign of fear. If he was
a policeman, he could well be armed. They thought better of it and asked him
for some change, which elicited a negative response.
Israel told us that after that he wanted some more cocaine. A car was cru-
cial: they needed one to get to the Cohab. It would also make it easier to get
around the local drug dens and be good to get around in between then and
Thursday. Afterwards, he’d sell it and be left with some extra cash for the
weekend. On Friday, Índio would need to pay the manager for the drugs he
would sell at the Cohab. The car would pay for that. From the perspective of
a teenager embedded in the world of crime, the risk of stealing a car seems
small compared to the benefits that a car can offer.
The walls at the corner were green and covered in graffiti. Israel and Índio
leaned against it and waited for an opportunity. Walking through the most
remote parts of the peripheries, one can cross into another municipality with-
out noticing; the Metropolitan Region consists of 39 municipalities. The
Cohab of Cidade Tiradentes is at the Eastern edge of the municipality of São
Paulo. Israel and Índio saw a silver Fiat Palio in the parking lot of a public
school some 50 meters away. The parking lot consisted of an expanse of
uneven concrete slabs bordered with weeds.
There was dust on the gutters, the walls, and the roofs of the parked cars.
There were a few trees. The asphalt was badly abraded. The school gate was
open and a Fiat Palio, with a cargo of a driver and three passengers, was in
the process of reversing out of it. Israel, as the older brother, took the lead
and headed towards the gate. The Fiat Palio stopped unexpectedly. Índio,
giving cover for his brother, saw the driver get out of the car and go back
into the school. Later we would learn that he had left his cell phone there.
The passengers remained in the vehicle. They were the driver’s wife and two
students from an evening course taught by the driver, who was now giving
them a ride home.
50  Stolen Cars

It was perfect timing, Israel told us. The key was in the ignition. All you
had to do was pull out the gun and get everyone out of the car. Israel came
out of the shadows, with Índio following behind and yelled, “This is a rob-
bery!” Índio, still in the middle of the street, brandished the gun, shouting,
“Get out, get out! Get out or I’ll kill you!”
Israel positioned himself at the driver door; Índio at the front passenger
door. After hesitating for a second, the driver’s wife and two students hur-
riedly vacated the vehicle. The driver, Sérgio, age 42, white, by profession a
university entrance exam prep teacher, exited the building with his cell phone
in hand to see his car driving off and his wife and two of his students stand-
ing in the parking lot and looking very frightened. Meanwhile, in the car,
Israel was now at the wheel, Índio was in the passenger seat, and the pair of
them were fleeing the scene. Sergio’s wife’s handbag was still in the car. Inside
it was some cash and a cell phone, which they exchanged for cocaine 20
minutes later.

***

Sérgio was also raised in the periphery of São Paulo and understood the rules
set down by the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, “the First Capital
Command”), Brazil’s paramount criminal gang in 2020. Sérgio couldn’t help
but think that stealing a car from a public school parking lot was not “correct”
according to the ethics of the criminal world. It is common in the periphery
of São Paulo for certain parties engaged in criminal activities to be responsible
for maintaining internal discipline. “Discipline” is also the term used to
describe the individuals whose job this is. The criminal world, contrary to
popular belief, is highly disciplined (Feltran 2011). Its laws may not be the
laws laid down by the State, but it is far from lawless. It is governed according
to an alternative normative regime. Being the person in charge of maintaining
discipline in a given territory or a prison (i.e., being “a discipline”) means
ensuring that “correct” attitudes are observed. The PCC’s regional networks
can easily identify the parties of a disciplinary infraction. Sérgio knew that
those responsible for discipline in the area where the robbery occurred could,
if wished them to, trigger the PCC’s internal network, which would then
quickly find the “brother” who had rented the gun to Índio and the youths
who had sold cocaine to him and Israel that afternoon. It would be straight-
forward to arrange a hearing in which the correctness of Israel and Índio’s
attitude would be judged according to the disciplinary norms of the world of
crime (Feltran 2020a).
Sérgio sought out the person responsible for the hood through his net-
works of contacts. He was given the phone number of the man in question
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  51

and called him. He introduced himself as a teacher who coached kids from
the area in a university entrance exam prep course. He says that the boys who
stole it were “stealing within the hood” and “inside the school.” The PCC
discipline listened to Sérgio carefully and asked him questions about the
details of the robbery – Israel and Índio’s appearance, age, clothes, and weap-
ons, their approach and the details of the stolen car. He then asked him to be
patient while he looked into the matter. He said, “we’re going to get to the
bottom of this.”11
Twenty minutes later, the discipline called Sérgio back and informed him
that he had identified the crime in question and discussed it with some of his
associates. Their unanimous conclusion was that there had been nothing
wrong with the way the Israel and Índio had proceeded during the robbery,
as they were acting outside their own neighborhood and had not harmed
anyone. They were just “trying to get ahead” so there was nothing that could
be done could do to assist Sérgio in this matter. He would have to report the
robbery to the police.
In São Paulo, the world of crime is a social sphere with a specific type of
sociability. It is involved with illegal markets and perpetually at war with the
“system.” As many criminologists have pointed out, the criminal universe
internally reproduces many of the values, codes, and behaviors of mainstream
society (Cozzi 2018; Sykes and Matza 2016).
“Procedure” (proceder), a concept that has been discussed extensively in
the literature on São Paulo in recent decades (Biondi 2018; Feltran 2010,
2020a; Hirata 2018; Willis 2015), is the expression used to designate the
expected conduct of individuals who are part of the criminal world (Feltran
2011, 2016b, 2020a). Although “procedure” prohibits an offender from
committing crimes against property in his own neighborhood, where he is
known to his working-class neighbors, he is free to do so elsewhere.12
In São Paulo, aggravated robbery is almost always carried out by young
favela residents like Israel and Índio. Adriano used to steal cars the same way
that they do but, as since he has had better opportunities and access to con-
tacts who knew how to steal, he has moved into the theft circuit with Rubem.
Grandão, aged 35 and boasting a robbery-filled résumé, would never rent a
weapon or run any of the risks that Israel and Índio had run for a car that was
worth less than the HB20 he had made off with in three minutes using a very
low-risk methodology.
The shell of Sérgio’s Palio Economy Fire, without half of its 1.0 engine, its
doors, bumpers, wheels, seats, and the rest of its easily removable parts would
be found a week later by the Military Police in front of Cohab Tiradentes, an
event that we will revisit in Chapter 5 (see Figure 1.2).
52  Stolen Cars

Belém, PA
(Fiat Strada pieces)

Campos Verdes, MT
(Toyota Hilux)

São Paulo

FIGURE 1.2  Distances between São Paulo and Campos Verdes, where
the Toyota Hilux was stolen, as well as between São Paulo and Belém,
the destination of the parts of Sergio’s stolen Fiat Palio.
Source: The authors with technical support of Bruna Pizzol.
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  53

8:40 p.m. (Ford Ka)

Still in the East Zone, but now on the border of the ABC Paulista region,
Uber driver Diego was sitting inside a rented 2018 Ford Ka Sedan. He had
just parked the vehicle in front of his house and sat there for a minute while
exchanging messages with the customer he was due to pick up in front of the
Sapopemba Avenue branch of the Bank of Brazil in 20 minutes. Aged 36,
white, with green eyes, and hair spiked up with gel, Diego had been a resident
of the periphery since he was born. He knew that the Sapopemba Avenue
branch of the Bank of Brazil was not the safest place to pick up a customer
but he had a star rating to retain and bonuses to earn. Diego had had his own
personal journey through the world of crime and had dealt and used drugs
from adolescence into adulthood. Furthermore, he “used to ride motorbikes,”
as he told us when we interviewed him. He would buy and sell used motor-
bikes from any source, including those acquired by theft or robbery.
One time he was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm but he said
rarely left the house armed. “I never knew how to rob people; I just don’t
know how to do it.” At this point he furrowed his brow in disapproval. “The
fact is that I don’t like it but I’ve always been from the street and have always
hung around with the guys from around here.” It was now Diego’s turn to be
the victim of crime just as he 15 years earlier he had been a perpetrator. He
told us about some of the key turning points from his past 15 years.
There was a spell in prison, then his marriage in 2010, which he men-
tioned in relation to his conversion to Pentecostalism and described as “a
blessing.” The best thing of all was the birth of his daughter in 2015. These
events together transformed him into a family man. They helped him “to get
his head straight,” as he put it. He posted family photos on social media every
day. On Sundays, he posted photos of them dressed in their Sunday best.
Diego talked a lot about the importance of the family and actively supported
politicians who promoted family values.
Before he was robbed, Diego had already become a fervent supporter of
then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro and continued to support President
Bolsonaro once he’d been elected. He told us proudly that he was no longer
involved in any illegal activity. He had been buying and selling used cars for
four years. However, when we asked if we could look into his routine more
closely as part of our ethnographic study – and especially when we asked for
more details about how his business worked – he became hesitant.
He politely declined to help us with our research at this level of detail. He
later confided to one of us that if you “start looking very closely” there is no
one in the car business who is not in some way connected to illegal activities.
54  Stolen Cars

“It’s impossible not to be.” Diego presents himself to his family, his church,
and his friends as having led a clean life characterized by unblemished con-
duct. Economically, he still depended on São Paulo’s powerful illegal car mar-
kets and, as a supplementary source of income, his work as an Uber driver.
Sometimes he bought cars that had been tampered with and had been
acquired illegally. Sometimes the cars he sold came with adjusted odometers
or illegally sourced parts. Such procedures were part and parcel of the busi-
ness, he claimed. But he didn’t steal cars – that’s a different kettle of fish. He
earned on average 3–4 MW per month as an Uber driver. On the formal
market, a car with falsified documents bought at a very low price due to its
illegal origins can earn the seller twice that amount.

***

At 8:40 p.m. during the evening of October 2, 2018, Diego was robbed in
front of his own home. He got out of his Ford Ka with a bag in each hand.
He had parked on the right side of the street so the cars passing by had to veer
into the road slightly to avoid him. It was a dangerous situation. He locked
the car door. As he turned to cross the street he was approached by four
youths. Two of them provided cover from behind the car and the other two
came towards him from either side, one brandishing a 38-caliber revolver.
The armed assailant wore flip-flops, shorts, and a sweater with the hood
down. The other of the two who directly approached Diego was wearing the
hood of his sweater over his head. He was also wearing trainers and jeans.
It was clear from the way they were dressed that one had given thought to
the way the robbery and its aftermath would play out but the other didn’t give
a damn. Let us now freeze-frame the scene and zoom in on Michael, one of
the two assailants who stayed behind the car to provide cover for the others.
Michael had brown skin, lighter than that of the two who had approached
Diego and didn’t consider himself “black.” Moreno, which means “brown” in
Portuguese, was the way that his peers described him. Paradigms of racial
identification in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, have undergone significant
changes in recent years. The dominant paradigm, based on the hegemonic
racism of the twentieth century and encapsulated by the notion of “racial ​​
democracy,” has been challenged in recent decades by a paradigm closer to the
North American “one drop rule.”
Michael is tall and extremely shy. He didn’t make eye contact with us when
we talked to him at Sérgio’s parents’ house, where he had been staying for a
while. Sérgio, the owner of the Palio, told us that Michael had arrived in São
Paulo two weeks earlier, after a fortnight spent living on the streets of the
coastal city of Guarujá. Sergio’s parents had met him there by chance and,
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  55

seeing as he didn’t seem to have the typical profile of a homeless person, had
offered help. Michael had accepted. Sérgio’s parents had brought him back
home and he had become a kind of temporary member of the family.
Sérgio’s mother had set up a bedroom for him with a fan and a mattress.
He ate meals with the family. “If there’s enough for two, there’s enough for
three,” she told us. In exchange, Michael had to go to school. This type of
popular solidarity is still common today in the urban peripheries. Sérgio’s
parents felt good helping a young man who was going through a hard time.
Michael had no idea who his parents were, nor did he know of any relatives.
As a child, at the boarding house where he grew up, he heard people say that
his mother lived in Guarujá.
He worked at the boarding house in exchange for food and accommoda-
tion until he was 18 years old. Aged 18, without any income or a complete
high school education, he was put out on the street. He only needed two
more years – or one if he also took evening classes – to “finish his studies,” as
people say when they wouldn’t even dream of going to university. In search of
his mother, or his idealized image of her, Michael had hitchhiked to Guarujá.
He found a woman he believed to be her, but they did not have the meeting
he had hoped for. Michael stayed on the streets for a few days, drinking to
stay warm – but he was out of his depth. He started hanging out with some
street kids and joined in as they did things like stealing from supermarkets.
Once he was safely ensconced at Sérgio’s mother’s house, he started hang-
ing out with some locals his own age. He was still new to the group the day
that they set off to do a “job,” whatever that meant. Michael took part in the
armed robbery of Diego’s Ford Ka, but he had had no way of knowing that
that’s how things were going to end up. The world of crime is an inclusive
space, which many unemployable people like Michael, who are excluded
from other networks, are free to enter. It is also a dangerous place, where
many unemployable people like Michael can lose their lives whether thanks
to hesitation or to adrenaline.
Diego offered no resistance. The armed assailant took his keys and got into
the car from the driver side. The unarmed assailant took his wallet and a bag
containing his belongings before moving quickly around the car and climb-
ing into the back seat. The nature of the armed robbery circuit is such that
these small objects may earn the young thieves more money than the vehicle
itself. Somewhat dazed, Michael and his partner also boarded the stolen car.
The vehicle sped off. The action had lasted less than a minute and the adrena-
line that they had felt seemed to offset their fear.
Diego was left in the middle of the street in a state of shock. Like many
other Uber drivers, Diego drove a rented car. He was well aware that the car
was insured by the rental company, which would limit his liability. Car rental
56  Stolen Cars

companies offer special insurance plans for São Paulo Uber drivers. Robberies
of this type were not uncommon in 2018. Drivers frequently commented on
the risks they faced on the job.13

Urban Violence and Market Regulation

Seo Cláudio was an elderly worker and son of Spanish parents. His car was
stolen by a young black man who was self-employed operative in the illegal
car market. Sérgio was a teacher with a PhD. He was robbed by Israel, who
was illiterate. João was a professional in a multinational company. His car was
stolen by Grandão, a professional criminal. Diego was an Evangelical Uber
driver and former criminal. He was robbed by Michael, a teenage orphan.
Vehicle thefts and robberies in São Paulo are inscribed into conflicts that set
workers in legal markets against workers in illegal markets. This is the case in
both the more violent and riskier robbery circuits and the more professional
and profitable theft circuits. The stratifications internal to the lower-class uni-
verse, i.e., inequalities among the urban working classes, show that the con-
flicts between them are expressed in the form of violence and violent crime,
increasingly so as we descend to the base of the labor pyramid – in both legal
and illegal markets.
This is one of the ways in which violence operates as a relational mecha-
nism in the reproduction of durable inequalities. The more specialized the
theft, the more likely the victim will be protected – both from violence, as we
will see in the next chapter, and from economic loss, through the ability to
pay for insurance. The poorer and less prepared the thieves, as in the case of
Michael or Israel, the more violence is inscribed into everyday events and,
generally speaking, the less protected the victims. This is also the case in eco-
nomic terms: two years after his car was stolen, Sérgio had yet to buy a
replacement. Israel could not even imagine being able to pay for a car with
“clean” money.
Sérgio was the victim of an armed robbery and Seo Cláudio of a theft, but
neither of these events was particularly problematic from the perspective of
the actors in the São Paulo vehicle market. Dealers would receive Fiat Palio
and Fiat Strada auto parts at low prices that they could sell online or send to
other Brazilian states, as we will see in following chapters. Consumers would
be able to buy them for low prices with the mere click of a mouse and there-
fore remain far removed from armed violence. That’s how markets work.
João was the victim of a theft that would not seem problematic for the
auto industry: João would buy a new car when his claim was paid out and
would be able to keep his business afloat. The theft of his HB20 would not
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  57

be a problem for Alvorada Seguros, which factors compensation costs into the
prices of its policies. As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, insurers carefully
calculate vehicle recovery rates and other financial aspects not merely to offset
the cost of paying out claims but also to make a profit by selling protection
against the risk of vehicle theft.
From the perspective of actors from other markets, robberies of the type
that Diego was the victim of are to be avoided. After a succession of Uber
drivers were robbed in the favela of Madalena, where we conducted part of
our research, the company removed it from the list of neighborhoods where
it operated. Anyone who wants to order an Uber now has to go to the nearest
major artery. Competing apps, such as 99 Taxi, continue to serve the favela.
As 99 Taxi has refused to succumb to fear and has stated its determination to
continue serving favela residents, it has become the more popular of the two
apps among the poorest Paulistanos. This has led to a class division among
the public served by each app. Uber is more targeted at the middle classes and
99 Taxi at the lower classes and is therefore less of a target for robberies.
In 2019, a WhatsApp audio message from the PCC was circulated around
the cellphones of São Paulo. According to the message, the PCC had prohib-
ited robberies of app drivers. After much debate on the issue, the PCC had
decided that, from the perspective of the criminal world, such robberies were
not correct. They make life harder for people in poor neighborhoods. The
infirm had no recourse to transport, people running late for work would lose
their jobs. Uber drivers themselves are already members of the precariat … it
just wasn’t right. “Procedure” and “disciplines” saw to it that thefts and rob-
beries of Uber drivers’ cars declined markedly during the subsequent year.
There are functionalities and dysfunctionalities faced by each of the count-
less actors involved directly and indirectly in these scenes of urban conflict.
Some try to make some money from stolen cars, like Adriano, Grandão, Israel
or Índio, even if they can’t make much. Others lose their livelihoods, like Seo
Cláudio. Whatever the case, the scenes described above present the typical
profiles of the people in São Paulo who most steal and the people who are
most stolen from. As we argued at the start of this chapter, and as will become
clearer in Chapters 2 and 5 that analyze some of the data in respect of these
markets, thefts and robberies occur most frequently in the poorest parts of
São Paulo and target vehicles at the bottom of the price range.
Illegal vehicle markets, and especially the market for vehicles stolen in
violent robberies, have a heavy impact on the city’s peripheries. Illegal money
circulates through many legal economies, such as chop-shops, insurers, car
manufacturers, and auctions. In the following chapters we will see how this
money is appropriated by actors at the city’s center. The rich seek to isolate
themselves from urban violence by positioning themselves in spaces that are
58  Stolen Cars

central to the regulation of the stolen goods supply chain. In São Paulo, those
who make real money from (il)legal automobile markets – those who we will
get to know better in Chapters 3, 4, and 7 – protect themselves from violence,
inter-class contact, and criminalization. The likes of Israel, Índio, Adriano,
and Michael face far greater difficulties in evading the law. In the years follow-
ing our interviews with them, they all did some jail time.

***

As we saw earlier, Adriano drove the 2014 Fiat Strada to place where it could
“rest” in the São Paulo East Zone. Adriano returned there on the morning of
October 4th and found the car waiting for him.14 In other words, the theft
had been a success. The street was deserted. He got into the car and drove it
to a warehouse a few miles away. Located on another quiet street, the ware-
house was unmarked by any sign or number; there was just a large sliding
door. Adriano parked in front but did not ring the bell. Instead, he sent a
message via WhatsApp. A reply came immediately. Adriano’s associate was
inside, waiting. After greeting each other with smiles – they had not seen each
other for a while – and exchanging jokes about their rival football teams,
Adriano’s associate handed him an envelope containing USD 450.00 (i.e.,
1.8 MW) in cash. Adriano thanked him, counted the money calmly, said
goodbye and hailed an Uber. The transaction left no digital footprint. Another
car was ready to be dismantled.
Adriano told us that after a while he had stopped carrying out armed rob-
beries. Riding in an Uber with a wad of cash, he’d long since discovered that
there are far safer ways of making money from stolen cars. “Things are calmer
now.” He tells us how he’d always taken the lead in the robberies he carried
out with Rubem and other partners. He said he had both the disposition and
the appetite they were expected of a young thief who wants to be respected in
the criminal world of São Paulo. Aspiring criminals need to demonstrate that
they had a go-getter attitude – but they should avoid gratuitous violence and
commit no harm unnecessarily. Aggressiveness and a penchant for violence
are not desirable qualities in aspiring thieves. Older criminals are respected
for other characteristics: strong minds that cannot be broken under torture;
intelligence; loyalty to their partners; and good conduct when dealing with
money and in missions for the PCC. After a few years of armed robbery,
Adriano started to get invitations to take part in thefts. At that time he was
entirely unaware of the techniques involved, which are in a constant state of
evolution. To begin with he only accompanied Rubem and was given the job
of leaving the car to “rest.” The greatest risks are, naturally, borne by those at
the bottom of the food chain.
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  59

Adriano and Rubem had known each other since they were children.
They had studied at the same public school in Sapopemba. In their school-
yard there was a concrete football field surrounded by four three-story
pavilions. The entrance to the field involved passing through a cage
between two fences. There were bars on all the classroom doors and win-
dows and around every piece of equipment, even if it was an old TV or an
old projector. If you’d never been to a public school in the periphery of São
Paulo and you saw pictures of one, you’d swear it was a prison. Adriano
and Rubem, being from the periphery of São Paulo and involved in crime
from a very young age, were not particularly surprised to be arrested. They
had friends from the same age cohort, neighborhood, and school who were
already in the prisons that they were sent to. The suspects and operators
involved in “urban violence” are very specific. In that respect, our research
only reaffirms the well-known fact that violent crimes are, in general, com-
mitted by young, typically black males from favelas and peripheries. But
we demonstrate that they are almost always hired by operators who do not
want to take any chances and delegate the dirty work to the Adrianos and
the Michaels. The Adrianos and the Michaels do their dirty work in
exchange for very modest payments compared to profits made in the sec-
tor, but which are large enough for them to wait in line for a worthwhile
opening in the criminal world.
As we have seen, different cars require different techniques and techno-
logical expertise, which gives rise to specialization. Rubem, who spent more
than 10 minutes stealing the Fiat Strada, might not have been able to steal the
HB20 in the way Grandão did. This is one of the reasons why cars like the
Toyota Hilux in Cáceres were acquired “by revolver” and not through theft.
Mastery of the techniques needed to steal the most expensive cars comes from
knowledge that is only shared among individuals socialized within spheres of
trust in restricted communities. Furthermore, the equipment needed to prac-
tice such thefts is more expensive and more difficult to obtain than a 38-gauge
revolver. Techniques of theft and robbery are therefore associated with differ-
ent criminal trajectories and stratified according to the distinct niches of ille-
gal markets, the profiles of workers in each niche and, of course, the payments
they receive. If Grandão earned the most when delivering the stolen HB20 to
a chop -shop, Wellington, who accompanied him in the operation, would not
earn more than 0.5 MW.
Wellington was killed a few months after our interview with him in con-
nection with the theft of a Citroën in a wealthy neighborhood.
60  Stolen Cars

Notes

  1. In traditional sociological discourse “urban violence” is used as a catch-all representa-

tion of insecurity that conflates such diverse empirical phenomena as drug use and
drug trafficking, domestic violence, crimes against property, hate crime, and so on
(Machado da Silva 1993; Misse 2006). The representation of “urban violence” is not
merely a matter of an individual or collective reaction to crime; it also seeks to play a
preventive role and is itself a manifestation of the very phenomenon it purports to
describe. In this book, therefore, we use quotation marks when we refer to “urban
violence” whereas the word “violence” is generally employed without quotation marks
and is used to refer to force, generally disproportionate force, often armed force. As a
representation we understand “urban violence” as an object that must be understood,
never as a category of analysis. Without quotation marks violence has empirical,
descriptive characteristics synonymous with “use of force.” Thus, drug trafficking can
be nonviolent, as it usually is in São Paulo, where illicit drug retail is conducted
without the use of arms. In Rio de Janeiro, by contrast, retail drug dealing in favelas
is accompanied by the ostentatious use of weapons and is therefore violent.
  2. The VW Gol Geração II is popularly known in Brazil as the “Gol Bola” (with “bola”
meaning “ball”) because of its curved shape. The model was manufactured from
1994 to 1999 and was Brazil’s best-selling car for many years.
  3. The honorific “Seo” denotes respect and is normally used by young people to refer to
those older than them. The term is widely used in Brazil’s lower classes when
addressing those who have earned respect in their community. The feminine
equivalent, “Dona,” is used in the same way.
  4. The “ABC” is Greater São Paulo’s (and Brazil’s) main industrial zone. The acronym
refers to the three cities that formed the region: Santo André (A), São Bernardo do
Campo (B), and São Caetano do Sul (C). The region is known for its working-class
history and its enormous inequality. While São Caetano boasts the highest HDI in
Brazil, nearby Santo André and Sapopemba are characterized by pockets of extreme
poverty.
  5. Different methods for opening car doors are used by different thieves in different
situations. Some take longer than others and some can attract more attention. In our
field research we heard about several techniques. The first involves activating the
remote control for an electronic gate at the moment the owner tries to close his or her
vehicle. The interference from the signal emitted by the remote control jams the
electronic lock, leaving the owner dependent on a key. The second is to hack the
electronic key code itself using a computer application. The third is to open the car
door using a fishing line with a loose knot tied in it. This is then used to pull up the
pin until the door is unlocked. Practice makes perfect and an experienced car thief
can do this in seconds. The fourth technique is to insert a narrow rubber tube into
the gap between the door and the window, which is then inflated to widen the same
gap – once this is done a wire can be used to reach into the gap and unlock the pin.
This is sometimes done using a blood pressure gauge – an alternative is breaking the
window or bending the passenger door.
 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo  61

  6. The “list price” refers to the average price of that model as per the FIPE Index. The
Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas (Foundation Institute for Economic
Research (FIPE)) publishes an index that serves as a reference for second-hand vehicle
sales, contracts, and insurance. See: https://veiculos.fipe.org.br.
  7. In São Paulo rotation by license plate number has been common practice since the
1990s, the aim being to reduce traffic and pollution. In the area known as the
“Expanded Center,” circulation is restricted according to both the last and the
penultimate number on each license plate on a given day of the week. Thus, at peak
times, 20 percent of the vehicle fleet is removed from circulation.
  8. The call center attendant at Alvorada Seguros was called Bianca. She was 18 years
old, black, and a resident of the favela of Presidente Altino. She had completed high
school two years earlier. She was saving money so that she could move out of her
parents’ house and find a place for herself and her daughter, Luiza. Her mother took
care of Luiza for her. The girl’s 21-year-old father appeared from time to time and
paid child support. Bianca would have preferred it if he stayed out of Luiza’s life
entirely on account of his being, as she puts it, “involved in drugs”.
  9. The São Paulo slang term for a drug sale point. Other terms are also used, such as
boca, loja, or lojinha.
10. Housing projects known as “Cohabs” are built by the state-owned entity responsible
for implementing state housing policy known as A Companhia Metropolitana de
Habitação de São Paulo (The São Paulo Metropolitan Housing Company).
11. The purpose of these investigations is to determine who is in the right and who is in
the wrong in a given situation. The procedure is widely used in São Paulo’s criminal
world, in particular since the PCC gained hegemony in around 2001. During the
associated argumentative performances, those involved must demonstrate knowledge
of the criteria according which justice is conceived in the criminal world (Feltran
2010, 2020a).
12. “Class” is much less relevant in this conception than “community” (Cefaï 2008).
Normative regimes focus on social conflict and regard class as a potential social
formation constructed by the ever-present “class struggle without a class” (Thompson
1978). In this sense, class works as an analytical tool since it exists empirically. In this
chapter, for instance, car theft is a phenomenon that sets working-class individuals
against each other and subverts the possibility of their making common cause.
13. In a 2019 field diary we recorded a similar situation: “I was almost at my final
destination when a car stopped in front of us in the middle of the street without
indicating. A garage door opened and the car drove in. I noticed that the driver was
pretty indignant. ‘Did you see that?’ I said, ‘the guy didn’t even indicate!’ The driver,
called Roberto, replied, ‘guys like that think they own the street. They stop whenever
they feel like it, they block the road, they don’t indicate and we’re supposed to just
wait. He should have let us past. That’s when guys like that get robbed.’ […] Roberto
says he was born and bred in the neighborhood and that’s why he accepts rides there.
But there are lots of so-called ghost rides. ‘Out of every 10 calls you receive, five are
kids trying to rob you,’ he tells me. ‘The thing is,
I know the streets around here. I soon as I see I’m headed into somewhere sketchy,
62  Stolen Cars

I’m gone. You can’t see me for dust.’ ‘Does it make a difference if you tell them you’re
from round here?’ I ask. I’d heard these ghost-ride stories before and was curious to
know whether the ‘don’t rob the neighbors’ code applied to Uber drivers. ‘No,’ he
answers. ‘It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. The young generation don’t care.
They just want money and cell phones.’” (Excerpt from Janaína Maldonado’s 2019
field diary).
14. In our fieldwork, we identified significant variations regarding this stage of the
operation. Some interviewees stated that after they had left the car to rest, some-
times with the key in the ignition, another person whose identity was unknown to
them would pick it up. Others said that the owner of the chop-shop would pick up
a car after paying the people who had stolen it. Still others would deliver their car
directly to the chop-shop. These variations indicate that the front-line actors are
generally unaware of the final destinations of the cars they steal.
CHAPTER 2

State Reaction
Gabriel Feltran1

Wellington was killed at the age of 19, five months after João’s HB20 was
stolen. This time he had stolen a new Citroën C4 Pallas in Lapa, a wealthy
region in the southwest of São Paulo. Wellington was accompanied by differ-
ent partner. The military police were informed of the theft by the victims and
immediately notified all their vehicles in the area, which was heavily patrolled.
One of them located the Citroën C4 Pallas just 15 minutes after the theft.
Wellington and his partner were surprised by a police siren sounding behind
them as they tried to escape via the Anhanguera freeway to the west of the city.
Wellington, who was driving, panicked. Instead of stopping, he acceler-
ated and took the first possible side road in an attempt to flee. A kilometer
later he lost control of the car and the Citroën plunged over the grassy cliffs
bordering the road, fell down a six-meter-high ravine and crashed into the
stream at the bottom. Stunned, but having survived the fall, Wellington and
his partner tried to escape but the police were hot on their trail. His partner
managed to make his way into some nearby bushes and get safely away, living
to tell his tale to Grandão the next day.
Wellington was not so lucky. As he left the Citroën, he was hit by two bullets
fired from a .40 automatic pistol. He fell to the ground. The policemen photo-
graphed the crime scene but only after having place an old .38 caliber revolver
next to Wellington’s body. In police jargon, revolvers planted next to corpses are
known as “velas” (candles) because they are there to “velar” (watch over) the dead
man. The official version written up in the police report contained the detail that
Wellington had shot at the police car and that the police had fired back. His
partner’s version contained the detail that it was he rather than Wellington who
was carrying a gun. That’s what he told Grandão. After the accident the two had
merely tried to escape and had not fired any shots at the police. Wellington was
unarmed.

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
64  Stolen Cars

The witness and police versions were contradictory – but only one of them
was circulated publicly. Wellington’s partner never contacted any official
entity to ask that his death be investigated, nor did his relatives. The next day,
the photos taken by the police officers were reproduced in the local newspa-
per. Such newspapers have a significant circulation among local business
people and residents but do not reach larger news networks. An image of
Wellington and his partner displaying a bottle of whiskey, taken moments
before the theft, was shared by WhatsApp groups in the neighborhood. Such
groups, which are very common in São Paulo, are almost always focused on
“security” and administered, voluntarily, by military policemen who live
locally (see Figure 2.1).
This chapter deals with the repressive police reaction to the theft and rob-
bery of vehicles in São Paulo. We argue that, contrary to what might be
assumed, lethal violence committed by police in the metropolis of São Paulo
is not “out of control” or chaotic. On the contrary, it exhibits clear, selective,

FIGURE 2.1  The crime scene; Wellington with his partner, hours before
his death; the gun planted by the police after the crime.
Source: Grandão’s personal file.
 State Reaction  65

and recurring patterns. We will outline these in this chapter by combining

our own ethnographic data with official quantitative data and looking at the
socio-economic characteristics of different regions of the city alongside differ-
ent types of criminal and police activity.2
Wellington’s was not an exceptional case. Between 2012 and 2016, 60–70
percent of homicides committed by police in the municipality of São Paulo
were related to vehicle theft and robbery (Godoi et al. 2020; Sou da Paz
2019). In the state of São Paulo, police are responsible for one in every five
recorded homicides (Bueno et al. 2019). The typical socio-economic and
demographic profile of the victims of police homicides is the same as
Wellington’s: young, black, and male. Indeed, this is the profile of most
homicide victims in São Paulo; in recent decades, all official data and those
produced by such civil organizations as PRO-AIM, SSP, FBSP, and Instituto
Sou da Paz have demonstrated that more than 90 percent of the victims of
these different types of homicides are men; 70–75 percent are young people
aged between 15 and 29; more than 60 percent of them are black; and about
80 percent of them are residents of favelas or poor neighborhoods. Even more
strikingly, this profile – young, black males from the periphery – dominates
homicide statistics not only in the state of São Paulo, but also in the other 26
Brazilian states (IPEA/FBSP 2019).
In public debate, it is common for these correlations to be attributed to a
single cause: the victim died because he was black or because he was from a favela
or because he was a thief. Although victims’ characteristics clearly contribute
decisively to a set of causalities, as will be demonstrated later in this book, our
data shows that police use of lethal force is concentrated along the boundaries
between the relatively whiter rich zones and the relatively blacker poor zones of
the metropolis. The preferred victims are young and low-skilled operators
within illegal markets. Our long-term ethnographic experience in São Paulo
shows clearly that young black men that are regarded by society as “workers” are
far less likely to be involved in lethal conflicts than their peers that are regarded
by society as “criminals.” Nor are wealthy thieves killed in Brazil – and the
political scandals of recent years have shown that these are not in short supply.
The underlying reason for the regularity in the profile of homicide victims is
surely the fact that young black men and favela residents tend to occupy the low-
est positions in the illegal markets for drugs, weapons, vehicles, and theft (Feltran
2019, 2020a; Hirata 2018). Young black favela residents, like Wellington, from
the lowest rungs of these illegal markets are far more likely to die.3 This regularity
reveals a lot about the way the military police operate. It also tells us something
about urban territories, insofar as, contrary to popular belief, these deaths are not
concentrated in the city’s poorest and blackest territories but rather along the
boundaries of the urban conflict between rich and poor.
66  Stolen Cars

Police Use of Lethal Force

Let us take the two areas in São Paulo where vehicle theft and robbery most
commonly occur to analyze the selective ways in which the police act and
deploy lethal force. Thefts and robberies, as seen in Chapter 1, involve quite
different profiles. The distinction between the two is also visible in various
regions of the city. In the 2010s, the largest absolute number of robberies, and
also the largest combined total of robberies and thefts, took place in the police
district of São Mateus, in the east of the city, next to Sapopemba, where we
conducted much of our fieldwork (see Figure 2.2).
The police district of São Mateus leads the city in the number of vehicle
robberies, with four times the average and a number significantly above even
neighboring areas, such as Sapopemba, that are also strongly affected by this
type of violent crime. The administrative region in which the São Mateus and
Sapopemba police districts are located, although mixed, is predominantly

2,500

SAO MATEUS SAO MATEUS SAO MATEUS

2,000
SAO MATEUS
JARDM MRIAM SAO MATEUS
JABAQUARA
PARQUE SÃO RAFAEL
JARDM MRIAM JARDM MRIAM JABAQUARA JABAQUARA JABAQUARA
JABAQUARA
1,500 PARQUE SÃO RAFAEL
SAO MATEUS
ITAM PAULISTA JARDM MRIAM

PARQUE SÃO RAFAEL

JABAQUARA SAPOPEMBA
PARQUE SÃO RAFAEL ITAM PAULISTA
1,000

500

Roubo de Roubo de Roubo de Roubo de Roubo de Roubo de

Veiculos - 2012 Veiculos - 2013 Veiculos - 2014 Veiculos - 2015 Veiculos - 2016 Veiculos - media
2012–2016

FIGURE 2.2  Boxplot of the number of vehicle robberies (Police Districts,

Municipality of São Paulo, 2012–20164).
Source: The author with technical support of Edgard Fusaro, based on
data from SSP/SP.
 State Reaction  67

poor. This is also the administrative region that leads São Paulo’s rankings in
robberies and thefts, both in absolute numbers and in rates per 100,000
inhabitants. On the other hand, as Figure 2.3 shows, the highest absolute
numbers of vehicle thefts, those that do not involve the use of violence, are
concentrated in one of the richest regions of the city, the contiguous area
covering Lapa, Pinheiros, Perdizes, and Vila Leopoldina, in the West Zone.
The averages here are three times higher than those of the city as a whole,
with rates per 100,000 inhabitants similar to the absolute numbers.
In the following paragraphs we look more closely at police use of lethal
force in relation to vehicle robberies and thefts in the two areas with the high-
est rates of occurrence. This is the result of careful work to harmonize data
collected by police and administrative districts in the city and was achieved by
producing cartographic layers and delineating the census districts within each
police district. We will refer to the area composed of the administrative dis-
tricts of Lapa and Vila Leopoldina, located in the West Zone of São Paulo and
forming part of the richest quartile of the city as “Zone A.” We will refer to
the area composed of the districts of São Mateus and Sapopemba, located in
the East Zone of São Paulo, forming part of the poorest quartile of the city
and where armed robberies are most concentrated as “Zone B.”

LAPA
LAPA
1,400 PINHEIROS
PINHEIROS LAPA
PERDIZES PINHEIROS
PINHEIROS
LAPA LAPA
1,200 PERDIZES
IPIRANGA PERDIZES PERDIZES
IPIRANGA
VILA GUSTAVO
IPIRANGA
1,000

800

600

400

200

Furto de Furto de Furto de Furto de Furto de Furto de

Veiculos - 2012 Veiculos - 2013 Veiculos - 2014 Veiculos - 2015 Veiculos - 2016 Veiculos - media
2012–2016

FIGURE 2.3  Boxplot of the number of vehicle thefts (Police Districts,

Municipality of São Paulo, 2012–2016).
Source: The author with technical support of Edgard Fusaro, based on
data from SSP/SP.
68  Stolen Cars

Our research team have got to know both areas well. São Paulo’s main
public and private universities are located at the edges of Zone A, as are some
of the main nightlife spots frequented by the white, educated middle classes,
business and commercial areas and the hub of the so-called creative industry,
populated by studios and cultural facilities. As such, there is a high concentra-
tion of new cars in Zone A. It is an elite space and therefore highly protected
by the forces of order, i.e., the civil and military police as well as public and
private security agents are conspicuously visible in this part of the city. Over
a period of several years, our team, already familiar with Zone A, has also
become acquainted with Zone B. Composed of poor districts that mix fave-
las, housing projects, and self-built subdivisions, the area is crisscrossed by
large commercial avenues, many of them dedicated to the trade of vehicles
and parts. It is an area that was mainly settled by internal migrants, especially
from the 1950s onwards, that has since been characterized by working-class
patterns of sociability. Zone B has a higher percentage of black residents, as
shown in Figure 2.4. This area has been the locus of intensive fieldwork

FIGURE 2.4  Map of locations of homicides committed by police involving

illegal vehicles; the areas with the highest incidence of vehicle theft (Zone
A) and the highest incidence of vehicle theft (Zone B) are highlighted
[Municipality of São Paulo, 2012].
Source: The author with technical support of Bruna Pizzol and Edgard
Fusaro, based on data from Police Reports held by the DHPP/SP and
Administrative Districts (PMSP).
 State Reaction  69

undertaken by our team for this project and various previous ones (Diniz
2016; Maldonado 2020; Feltran 2011, 2020a).
The police are less present in Zone B than in Zone A. As we shall see, their
modus operandi in Zone B also contrasts with that in Zone A. Residents of
favelas in Zone B tend to grow up fearing the police and never feel protected
by them. Upon assuming the command of the elite São Paulo military police
unit known as the Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar (“Rota”), notorious for
its use of lethal force, Lieutenant-Colonel Pedro Silveira acknowledged and
provided a justification for regionally differentiated modi operandi. He began
by stating the obvious:

It’s a different reality [in the periphery]. The people there are different [from
those in wealthy neighborhoods] and the police have to act accordingly. An
officer who approaches someone [in the periphery] in the same way he
would here in [the wealthy neighborhood of] Jardins will have problems.
He will not be respected. […] He has to adapt to his environment.
(Lieutenant Coronel Pedro Silveira, fictitious name, August 23, 2017)

Bearing in mind the different characteristics of Zones A and B, and the fact
that “different people” can be found in each of them, let us see how police use
of lethal force varies across urban space, based on an analysis of all 183 Police
Reports related to police killings involving stolen vehicles in a single year:
Figure 2.4 shows that police use of lethal force marks the boundaries of
urban conflict in São Paulo. These are boundaries of intersection between
race, income, schooling, and access to essential services and urban infrastruc-
ture. Deaths committed in situations involving the theft and robbery of vehi-
cles are not concentrated at the far edges of the city, where the population is
predominantly black and poor; they are concentrated – as in the case of
Wellington – on the tense boundaries between whiter rich and blacker poor
areas (Feltran 2008, 2011).5
Looking at Figure 2.4, we return in detail to each of the police reports on
homicide cases in Zones A and B, wherever possible supplementing this
with information gained from media coverage. The more we reconstructed
the circumstances of police killings in each area, the more we realized that a
robbery is enough to justify a thief ’s death in Zone B. Of the police killings
that year 10 of the 13 resulted from robberies of affordable vehicles, with no
further criminal activity having taken place. There were 11 police incidents
that resulted in 13 registered deaths, as can be seen in Table 2.1. In periph-
eral areas like Zone B, which have far less car insurance coverage, the theft
or robbery of workers’ cars causes significant losses. People like Seo Cláudio,
who cannot pay for insurance, are seriously prejudiced by the loss of their
vehicles.
70  Stolen Cars

TABLE 2.1  Vehicle thefts and robberies and police use of lethal force
(Zones A and B, absolute numbers, 2012)
Vehicle Vehicle Deaths Deaths Thefts by Robberies
thefts robberies following following death rate by death
thefts robberies rate

Zone A 2109 600 2 7 1,054.5 85.7

Richest
quartile
West Zone
(Lapa–Vila
Leopoldina)
Zone B 1376 2297 0 13 – 176.7
Poorest
quartile
East Zone
(São Mateus–
Sapopemba)
Source: The author with technical support of Daniel Hirata and Edgard Fusaro,
using harmonized data from the São Paulo Public Security Secretariat on Theft
and Robbery of Vehicles by Police District and from the 2010 IBGE Census by
Administrative District.

It was people like Seo Cláudio – the middle and lower-middle classes of
the peripheries – who paid vigilantes to “clean” their neighborhoods of petty
thieves in the 1980s and who in 2020 provided growing popular support for
violent police actions in these territories. It is they who comment on the news
about police actions, like the one that led to Wellington’s death, over their
breakfast in the local bakery. Penal populism in São Paulo mainly targets
these social groups and, over the course of the 2010s, it laid the groundwork
for the election not only of Jair Bolsonaro but also of a whole set of police and
evangelical politicians promoting platform based on the Old Testament prin-
ciple of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
In Zone A, much of the mainly wealthy and educated population espouses
the rhetoric of human rights and opposition to police violence, remote con-
cerns though these may be. To some degree this restrains police action, which
is technical in nature in Zone A. However, a hard core of Zone A’s elites not
only supports police use of lethal force in the peripheries but also seeks to
 State Reaction  71

militarize the security of its own neighborhoods. In Zone A, where 83 percent

of the population is white,6 the police act much more quickly and efficiently
than in Zone B. If necessary, however, they can also act in a much more lethal
way than in the peripheries. This difference is shown by the data in Table 2.1,
which lists police use of lethal force in Zones A and B, which have the highest
incidences respectively of vehicle theft and vehicle robbery.
As already noted, the police response to vehicle thefts is relatively much
more lethal in Zone A, while far more people are killed in absolute terms in
Zone B. On average, in Zone A the police kill one thief for every 85.7 thefts.
In Zone B, almost four times as many cars are stolen, and, on average, there
are twice as many robberies per police homicide. Vehicle thefts, that is, crimes
against property without violence, did not lead to any deaths in Zone B dur-
ing the period studied, even though the number of incidents is enormous. In
Zone A, it is necessary, on average, for over a thousand thefts to occur for
there to be single death. As we shall see, theft was not exactly the sole cause of
the homicides committed by police in the two cases registered. The more we
studied the situations that led to fatalities in Zone A, the more it became clear
that the killings committed by the police there did not occur after mere thefts
or robberies, as had occurred with Wellington, or as is common in Zone B.
Deaths in Zone A in 2010 resulted from thefts or robberies of vehicles that
were then used to commit more serious crimes (such burglaries, factory rob-
beries, or “lightning kidnappings” [where the victim is kidnapped just long
enough to extract a payment – about an hour]). There were only four such
cases in Zone A but they resulted in nine people being killed.
Replete with civil, military, public, and private forms of policing, Zone A
tends to be considered “peaceful” by its residents (Araujo Silva 2017). This is
not true for those who steal there. As they know there is a much higher risk
of being killed, experienced thieves have told us on several occasions that they
avoid stealing in the wealthiest areas of the city. They don’t know the territory
well and they do know that police control is much tighter. They tend, there-
fore, to carry out robberies in territories close to those where they live. A thief
once told us that “why would I go to another part of town to steal something
when there are ATMs right here?” The number of violent robberies is, there-
fore, much lower in Zone A than in Zone B. Armed robberies tend to occur
in boundary districts, where there are middle and lower-middle class neigh-
borhoods close to favelas. We can see how much more common homicides
are in Zone B and how they are distributed. The mechanism of selective State
response by territory according to population composition gives rise to adap-
tations in the world of crime that leads to demarcated urban boundaries that
are central to the reproduction of violence in the peripheries of the city.
72  Stolen Cars

In terms of crimes against property, like vehicle thefts, the comparison

between Zones A and B also reveals clear selectivity; police reactions to thefts
are less violently repressive than they are in response to armed robberies, and
these reactions are much harsher in Zone A. Property owners in Zone A enjoy
higher levels of protection of their property than do property owners in Zone
B. Insurance protects João but not Seo Cláudio, as we saw in Chapter 1. In
Chapter 3, we will also see that there is a strict division of labor between the
police and insurance companies.
In Zone A, lethal force is used to send a message and “show who’s in
charge,” as one policeman we interviewed put it. Lethal force is used not only
because a vehicle is stolen – prisons take care of that in wealthy areas and the
São Paulo police know how to avoid killing when they want to. They do kill,
however, when the codes governing the urban conflict between police and
criminals are violated. In other words, they kill when an individual has failed
to recognize “who’s in charge” in a given territory. What’s at work here is a
masculine notion of power in the community. Three of the deaths in Zone A
in 2010 occurred when three thieves first stole a car to use to commit their
second crime and then attempted to burgle the home of a police officer where
numerous weapons were being stored. They were overpowered and executed.
Two other deaths occurred after a police officer had been shot by a thief driv-
ing a stolen car; another three after a factory was robbed using cars stolen
shortly before. In Zone B, the police force is only one of the armed forces
operating in the area – and this fact is well known. Police officers definitely
“are not in charge” in the peripheries in the same way as they are in central
areas. Their actions are aimed at protecting the businesses, drivers, and more
specialized workers who support them. “[A police officer] has to adapt to his
environment,” in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Pedro Silveira. In the
peripheries, while sovereignty may not necessarily be disputed, a range of
armed actors coexist, constituting social landscapes with different sovereigns.
There are what Finn Stepputtat, a researcher who studies conflict scenarios in
a range of settings worldwide, calls “governscapes.”
In predominantly rich, white areas like Zone A, where much of São Paulo’s
wealth is concentrated, the police do not tolerate “invaders,” especially invaders
that act violently. Zone A falls under the purview of the State police, who possess
a monopoly on legitimate violence there. In liminal areas like Zone B, the police
dispute their monopoly on violence with the “world of crime,” i.e., the PCC. In
Zone B, the police are allied with the dominant local stratum, which is also
white, even if in a relatively subordinate position vis-à-vis the wealthy compo-
nent of the city’s white population. Across the entire district of Sapopemba, 57.6
percent of the population is white and 41.7 percent black; in Sapopemba’s fave-
las 28.9 percent are white and 68.1 percent black (Oliveira 2017). Police also
 State Reaction  73

control the internal boundaries between the center and the peripheries, which
separate the locally dominant groups from the poorest groups, i.e., residents of
favelas. Within Zone B, microscale inequalities separate populations on different
sides of the urban conflict.
“To adapt to his environment,” means adapting to what local elites want,
regardless of their broader social status, and to their prevailing senses of jus-
tice, be they accustomed to modern State-based legality (as in the case of
Zone A) or be they accustomed to communal, Old Testament-based under-
standings of how the world should work (as in the case of Zone B). Modern
or religious (they are almost always a mixture of the two), these concepts of
justice constitute normative regimes that in no way dispense with the use of
sovereign power over life and death. Brazilian police kill people in both rich
and poor areas, but they do so according do variable practices and variable
normative understandings. Taking into account the bigger picture, it is clear
that local specificities achieve the same effect: the protection of local, whiter,
and wealthier elites from the threats they perceive to come from the poorer
and darker populations.
It is in these poorer and darker parts of the population, and through disputes
over the material and social profits from illegal markets, that the Wellingtons,
Michaels, and Israels are recruited for violent operations. Police reactions to the
Wellingtons, the Michaels, and the Israels are based on their profiles. Thus, they
may be incarcerated or killed – they are more likely to be killed if they are
young, black, and come from a favela. The whitest people in the city control the
police force from above through their control of the state secretariat of public
security and support it from below with their endorsement of police violence;
the function of the police is to protect the whitest people in the city from the
threats against their property and their safety that come from the favelas.
It is true that young men like Israel, Índio, and Michael expose their vic-
tims to potential armed violence: murders during robberies account for 2–3
percent of total homicides in Brazil, i.e., about 1,500 murders a year. But
their subordinate position within illegal markets and their possession of fire-
arms expose the thieves themselves – poor, black youths from the peripheries
subcontracted into illegal markets as they are – to the risk of an armed reac-
tion. In the course of our research, we frequently heard of incidents of young
men with the same profile as Israel, Wellington, and Michael being killed
during the theft of a vehicle. They were shot either by the vehicle owner or
by police officers who had witnessed the crime or chased them down after-
wards. The victims have this same profile in three-quarters of homicides in
Brazil – some 45,000 murders a year.
These relationships lead to the selective reification of urban “types,” territo-
ries, and social spaces. This is one of the most direct mechanisms for the repro-
74  Stolen Cars

duction of persistent inequalities in the city. What is contextual or partial in

the field becomes durable and total in the represented and anonymous “type.”
The effects of this differential repression, which is confirmed by the reification
of these territories and their labels, go far beyond the homicides themselves.
Given that more new cars can be found in Zone A but the police there more
aggressively repress violent robberies, thieves operating there are driven to spe-
cialize much more than thieves who operate in the peripheries. Table 2.1 shows
that in Zone A more than three thefts are committed for every (armed) rob-
bery, whereas in Zone B the figure was close to two (armed) robberies for every
theft. The reproduction of differentially applied violence in these territories via
this mechanism is immediate. As we saw in the previous chapter, the more
specialized the gangs and operators, the more they opt for theft over robbery.
Theft is much less risky and much more profitable. This is especially the case
when they operate on the borders that separate white from black and rich from
poor, where crimes without violence are rarely investigated or solved.

Imprisonment

Jardim Elba, Sapopemba district, October 2, 2018, 9:30 p.m. Our research
team of four had just finished another day’s work. We were heading along the
central alley of a favela, the only one wide enough for a car to drive through,
towards a bar owned by a friend who had been an interlocutor in our research
for many years. We were flanked by shacks made of wood, Bahian brick, and
metal windows on both sides of the alley. Dogs searched for food in the gar-
bage that littered the alley. And not only dogs – some of the poorest residents
of the favela were sometimes forced to do the same. Sebastiana, our guide that
day, was no stranger to the practice.
A new white Ford Ka Sedan drove along the alley quietly but conspicu-
ously. “Forbidden” Brazilian funk music blared from its sound-system; its
windscreen was cracked. It transported four young men who were wreathed
in smiles. It pulled up at the “Confort’s” bar, which was our destination too.
Michael, in the back seat, opened his window as the vehicle came to a stop.
A cloud of smoke and a strong smell of marijuana wafted into the alley.
Michael laughed as he talked to one of his partners. When they saw us, they
called Sebastiana, whom they knew as a fellow resident of the favela, over to
the car. She went to the car window, talked to them, and came back to us.
They wanted to know who we were. They could tell just by looking at us that
we were not from there, as would be the case in any favela. Sebastiana said
that we were friends and that we had been doing research in the community
for some time. They were reassured.
 State Reaction  75

A job had just been completed: the rented Ford Ka that Diego used as his
Uber car had just been stolen. Now it was parked in front of a bar in one of
the 40 favelas in Sapopemba. This one was considered a small favela, having a
population of only 7,300 in 2019. The favela was built in a valley between two
hills in the 1960s and since has grown within the limits imposed by the sur-
rounding streets and been consolidated, gradually, as the residents improved
their self-built shacks. Improvised wooden houses gave way to brick blocks,
asbestos tiles to corrugated concrete ones; thus, the favela became part of the
urban fabric.7 The old, polluted stream at the bottom of the valley was cana-
lized by city government and became today’s central alley. On every hill there
are steep concrete stairways about a meter wide that take residents to their
homes. There is no garbage collection in the lower part of the favela. Garbage
accumulates on the slopes, carried there by the same rain that causes the col-
lapse of four or five of the shacks located in “at-risk” areas every year. Between
2014 and 2020, a time of economic crisis, many new shacks were built, some
located below the accumulation of garbage and other at-risk shacks.
Arriving at the bar, we saw young men chatting on rooftops where moments
before children had been flying kites. The same children were now playing in
the streets, watched over by black women. After five minutes, the young man
who had been driving the Ford Ka reappeared, wearing polyester Bermuda
shorts and flip-flops. He was shirtless, slim but muscular, and was now clean-
ing the floor of the bar with a broom and a bucket of water. In the hand he
was holding the broom there was a lit cigarette, which he took a drag on from
time to time. He had small, homemade tattoos on his forearms and chest. The
guy who had stolen a car worked at a bar. He had taken off the red cap he was
wearing earlier. After stealing a car with his friends, listening to some funk,
and smoking a joint, he had come to work. There was always music playing at
the bar. Listening to music in a favela is not an individual choice: favelas play
music for everyone to hear at a high volume and almost all of the time.
A pagode song – the rhythm of which is close to a samba – was playing
loudly in the bar. In the next house over, separated only by a wall, the door was
open and funk music was being played at the highest volume possible; the
sound space of favelas is always contested. We had to speak loudly in the bar,
and the screams of children, and of women telling them off, were even louder.
The steady flow of people in and out showed that this was a community space.
Sebastiana was a great host. Soon we are talking to everyone there, not only
among ourselves. It would be impolite not to speak to everyone. The young
man who drove the Ford Ka, however, kept his distance. The car was parked
in front of the bar, windows open, with no-one inside. In the following weeks,
we would see that while the young men who had stolen it remained, the car
itself had moved on.
76  Stolen Cars

For another three months after the theft, the car sat parked outside the
favela in a series of better-maintained streets. The last time we saw it, in early
January 2019, the Ford Ka was parked in front of the house of a skinny
17-year-old who was washing his car on the sidewalk. It was Adriano, whom
we met in the previous chapter and who had experience in the world of crime
that belied his tender years.
Adriano had started working as a lookout on the corner of the street where
he lived in a nearby favela. At the same time, in 2012, aged 12, he had started
stealing cell phones on Avenida Sapopemba. He never stole from his own
neighborhood of course, but he didn’t go far from it either. His universe did
not stretch beyond the neighboring districts of Parque São Lucas and São
Mateus. Adriano told us that he liked the adrenaline involved in stealing and
joined in with others who did it for fun more than anything else. It brought
in a bit of money too, which helped. A year-and-a-half later, he and Rubem
started stealing motorbikes. Rubem’s mother told us that on one occasion she
had counted 17 motorcycles lined up in the alley where she and Rubem lived.
Access to the alley was via a lateral staircase that went down to the main
entrance of the favela and therefore provided relative protection. Nobody
needs 17 motorcycles, his mother thought. It was a business.
Adriano told us he has spent some time at Fundação Casa, an institution
targeted at teenagers who violate the law. He was sent there for “33” and
“157.” Thieves usually refer to their criminal records by the relevant numbers
of the articles of the Penal Code: 33 – receiving stolen goods; and 157 –
armed robbery. As Adriano was a teenager when he committed the crimes
that saw him sent to jail, he didn’t do much time behind bars. After he had
turned 18, he was arrested for “157” and spent a few days at Pinheiros CDP,
a so-called Provisional Detention Center. However, as the victims of the rob-
bery were not able to provide positive identification of Adriano as the perpe-
trator, he was released.
Adriano and Rubem started stealing cars after they had already hardened
by their prison experience. At first, they stole cars for their own use and then
left them parked in the street for the police to recover. Only after having com-
mitted several thefts did they realize that they could make more money by
what they refer to as “doubling” each stolen car. By this they mean relabeling
the chassis and parts using numbers from a registered vehicle that is circulat-
ing normally. A “double” made this way is not the same as a “clone” – a stolen
car mounted on the chassis of a vehicle that has been written off but still has
a legal registration. In the case of a double, the chassis numbers under the
seat, on the windows, and on the head of the engine are reapplied, usually
leaving the original numbering on the crankcase (the lowest part which, the
oil sump, being difficult to inspect).
 State Reaction  77

Once a double has been assembled, two officially identical cars, with the
same registration and numbers, are left circulating around the city. An expert
would identify such fraud without much difficulty. Scratches, nonmatching
paint, signs of welding, and some parts not being fully relabeled can all be evi-
dence of fraud. But in practice it is very rare for anyone to check. A police officer
will only check a vehicle if a theft has been reported and he is sure there is a
problem. The police do not regularly inspect cars – not even a sample of them.
The state response to vehicle theft is primarily reactive. The corruption of the
police and their inability to respond to such a large-scale phenomenon help
guarantee impunity. Adriano planned to “double” the new Ford Ka, which was
resting in the favela, but had to wait for a friend, who knew how to relabel the
pieces, to get out of prison. This was taking longer than expected but the return
would make it worth the wait.
Having bought the Ford Ka, three weeks after the theft, for USD 400.00
(1.6 MW), Adriano intended to spend another 5 MW relabeling all the parts
and would then resell the car for more than 30 MW, with false but perfect
documentation. Rubem had contacts who could produce the necessary
paperwork. As the work had not yet been done, Adriano left the Ford Ka
parked on the street – never in front of his house and with nothing in it that
could be used to identify him. There was no need to alert the neighbors.
Everyone knew – as they always know in the favelas and peripheries – that if
anyone came asking no-one should say they know where the car came from,
who had used it, or who had left it where it was. Nobody knows anything.
In this case, the problem was “women,” Adriano told us. On a Saturday
night, he had gone to a local funk party with two neighbors of a similar age.
Neither of his friends had had any involvement with the criminal world. He
decided to take them to the party in a new car. They arrived at the dance at
around 1 a.m. They didn’t just park and walk in. Adriano wanted to make an
impression. As is common in these cases, they first paraded past the entrance
to the hall on a street close to Avenida Sapopemba with the car’s windows
open and music blasting out at the maximum volume. It went well enough.
Having noticed some looks the first time they went past they repeated the
maneuver. They took another turn around the block so they could drive past
the door again, slowly this time, and maybe talk to some of the girls outside.
But this time a patrolling military police vehicle, whose drivers had already
noticed them, approached with its siren blaring. A police officer indicated
that Adriano should pull over. Adriano had no intention of complying but he
did hesitate briefly. Fearing being arrested again, he decided to attempt an
escape by speeding down the avenue and going through a red light. They
hadn’t got far when a white van collided with the car.
78  Stolen Cars

The police arrived minutes later. With guns drawn, they ordered Adrian
and his friends out of the car with their hands up. This time they obeyed. The
police instructed them to lie down on the ground. They heard the sirens of
more police cars arriving. Early in the morning in the empty streets of the
peripheries, arrests are not undertaken with respect for even minimal human
rights protocols. Adriano felt the weight of the boots that crushed his face
into the asphalt, as he was screamed at repeatedly. His friends also reported
being kicked and abused. Two of them were imprisoned for eight months
pending trial. According to the National Council of Justice, more than a third
of Brazil’s more than 800,000 prisoners have never been tried (CNJ 2020).
The lawyer assigned to defend Adriano by the Public Defender’s Office
called witnesses to the trial who claimed that the young men in the car with
Adriano were “workers” and had nothing to do with the crime. Adriano was
convicted of armed robbery of a vehicle and as a repeat offender received an
eight-year sentence. He was transferred from the Provisional Detention
Center where he was being held to a prison where he would become even
more familiar with the workings of the PCC.
The insurer was notified by the police and removed the 2018 Ford Ka
from the police station yard the following day. From there, the car was taken
directly, by tow truck, to the yard of an auction of wrecked vehicles, thus trig-
gering mechanisms for the circulation of goods and money that we will learn
about in the coming chapters.

The “Clearing of Public Roads”

Israel and Índio spent the night selling cocaine in Cidade Tiradentes and
talked to the manager who had called them about the Palio they were driving.
In exchange for another batch of drugs to sell, they would be willing leave the
vehicle right there in the drug den that would help their progress. The manager
said that he wasn’t interested, as the car was too old, but that if any of the guys
there in the drug den wanted to keep the car, they could trade it with them.
He put them in touch with a contact in the area. This contact then came to
look at the car and said they “had a deal.” His uncle was a mechanic, lived
nearby, and would be interested. In exchange, Israel and Índio asked for 30
bags of cocaine worth USD 5.00 each. After a certain amount of haggling
they settled for 20. The manager had given them 40 small, tightly packed
bags of crack known as “pins” on consignment for the rest of the night’s sales,
in addition to their existing stock. Israel and Indians sold a total of 50 pins
and consumed 10 with their new friends at the drug den.
This is how the reciprocities and alliances within the community known
by the outside world as the “world of crime” or “the PCC” are consolidated.
 State Reaction  79

With USD 145.00 in their pockets, USD 100.00 from the car and USD
30.00 of commissions on drug sales, Israel and Índio were happy to buy a
round of beers for their new acquaintances. At the end of the night, they
decided rent two rooms at the Cohab Tiradentes for USD 3.00 per hour to
enjoy the company of two women they had met that night. The next day,
surrounded by beer bottles and empty bags of drugs, Israel and Índio were
awoken by the cleaning lady knocking on the door. The girls had gone. They
had to laugh. They returned home by catching an Uber to the train station at
2:00 p.m. after having had a snack at a bakery on Avenida Sapopemba. Israel
wondered how they could have spent so much money. They had almost noth-
ing left in their pockets once again. “Women …,” Índio replied pensively.
More laughter.
The circulation of money earned and spent in the marginal circuits of
criminal economies is always fast. It feeds what veteran thieves, who have
already learned a great deal about the costs of incarceration and repression,
call “illusion.” Criminal money is an illusion, according to the veterans.
Owners of breweries and cocaine distribution organizations can pay for law-
yers – sometimes lawyers from expensive practices in the chic neighborhood
of Jardins – to get them out of prison if the need should ever arise. Wealthy
drug dealers do the same. Although a lot of money passed through Israel and
Índio’s hands, “Israel didn’t even have a pair of underwear to take to jail”
when he was arrested, as one of our interlocutors told us a year later.
A week after the theft, when Sérgio was in a break between classes, he
received a call from the military police. His 2011 Fiat Palio, stolen by Israel
and Índio, had been found in front of a favela at the bottom of Cohab
Tiradentes at the eastern edge of São Paulo. The police gave him an address
and asked him to come as soon as he could because they couldn’t leave the
vehicle unattended. Sérgio was pleased. He now had one less thing to worry
about. The absence of the car in his daily life as an itinerant teacher had been
conspicuous. Still on his phone, he thanked the police and made his excuses
to his students and the school principal. The students were released early that
day, and Sérgio paid for an Uber to take him to the specified location as
quickly as possible.
Half an hour later, Sérgio spotted two military policemen leaning on the
body of a Fiat Palio that was missing its wheels, doors, windows, gearbox, and
a part of its engine. The policemen, bored were conversing to pass the time.
When they saw Sérgio get out of the Uber, they approached him straight
away with a clipboard and forms to fill out. It was an anticlimactic moment,
far from what Sérgio had imagined. It was a bureaucratic, routine moment.
The public road needed to be cleared.
By signing the various forms, Sérgio acknowledged that he was the owner
of the vehicle that had been found and that from that moment on he would
80  Stolen Cars

take responsibility for it. The police officers then explained to him that they
could call a tow truck to take the car to a public scrapyard, but that he would
have to bear the cost of around USD 8.00 per day. Sérgio could not commit,
given that he had no estimate of when the car would be ready for release.
Thirty days at that rate would add up to one monthly minimum wage. Sérgio
was still shocked by the state of his car and the thought of the difficulties he
would face to get it back onto the road. Frustration had taken the place of
contentment.
Alternatively, the policemen said, he could request a tow truck himself and
take what remained of the car back to his house. That would be more conve-
nient. The only thing he couldn’t do was to leave the car there. After signing
the documents, the owner of a vehicle assumes responsibility for removing it
from a public road. It was then that he realized that his car had become an
embarrassment. After more than an hour of waiting for a tow truck and the
loss of an additional USD 60.00 that was paid to the driver, Sérgio returned
home with the shell of his Fiat Palio, to be placed with great difficulty in the
back of his garage where it would not be in the way.
A year later, the shell of the car was still there, and Sérgio still didn’t know
if it was worth fixing. In one of our interviews with him, he offered to donate
the car to our team so it could contribute to scientific research. We could put
it back together as part of our research project and donate it to the university,
we thought. Our research funders, however, would not cover expenses of this
kind. So we gave up too. To help Sérgio, however, we looked up the prices of
the basic pieces that he would need to buy in the chop-shops of Avenida
Riacho, where we were conducting fieldwork at around the same time. Engine
parts, gearbox, doors, seats, several electronic components, tires, wheels,
bumpers, rear view mirrors, windows, locks. As we will see in Chapter 5,
dismantled cars cost much more than whole cars. Sérgio would spend at least
USD 2000.00 (8 MW) to fix his Palio, not including labor. It wasn’t worth
it. The resale value of the vehicle would not be much more than that. A year-
and-a-half later, Sérgio officially wrote off the car at DETRAN. Then he
called another tow truck that specialized in scrap metal to take the shell of his
car away. He never imagined that what was left of his Fiat Palio would be seen
yet again less than a year later after being removed from the bottom of the
Tietê River, the largest in the city, by the municipal government.

Political Legitimation

During our research, we made numerous contacts with civil, military, federal,
and border police officers. We interviewed more than a dozen highly quali-
fied professionals in São Paulo, Paraná, and Mato Grosso states. We gained
 State Reaction  81

access to valuable data on the dynamics of police activity and, most impor-
tantly, we got to hear their analysis of the entanglement of the public and
private functions involved in vehicle markets. Police chiefs and frontline offi-
cers also put us in touch with contacts in the insurance industry that we later
drew on in our research and which contributed to our understanding of
criminal dynamics and the circulation of money in vehicle markets. The more
committed to their public function the officers we interviewed seemed to be,
the more they were interested in our research and the more they wanted to
help us to understand the dimensions of the economic gains, and of the crim-
inal violence, involved in São Paulo’s vehicle markets.
On the other hand, several policemen we contacted never responded to us,
and in three civil police stations our physical presence caused appreciable
discomfort, especially after we had introduced ourselves as researchers in the
field of Urban Sociology. In these police stations we were simply ignored. We
recorded interesting observations about our experiences in these waiting
rooms but decided, in view of the ethical guidelines underpinning our inves-
tigation, not to use any of them in this book. It seemed clear to us that people
in the most corrupt police spaces felt threatened by researchers and even more
so by sociologists – a field that has become politicized in the police world as
peopled by “defenders of criminals.”8 The resistance to our work in these
police stations probably also arose from this perception.
By delegitimizing Sociology and other critical sciences as pure ideology,
the mass movement that elected Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2018,
including many strong supporters within the police force, legitimized the war
against petty criminals. It may come as a surprise to some readers, but police
use of lethal force, the policies underlying it, and explicit strategies aimed to
massively expand provisional incarceration enjoy strong social and popular
legitimacy. Individuals like Seo Cláudio, who do not have the resources to
insure their property or the right to have their car recovered by the police,
know that the thieves came from favelas and started to hate everyone who
lives in one, i.e., everyone who looks like Adriano and Rubem. Political dis-
course that claims the world has become degenerate and that promises to
restore public order, as used by Bolsonaro and his allies, sounds like music to
his ears. He feels represented.
As a result of this recently growing social and political support for police
violence, there has been no inquiry into Wellington’s death. Indeed, such an
inquiry would not even be possible. The public repercussions of such deaths
do not concern the appropriateness of police behavior. People are more likely
to discuss the photograph of Wellington and his sidekick waving a bottle of
whiskey, as proof that they were living the good life. “Dying is part of that life”
is a phrase we heard in our fieldwork. Things were different among Wellington’s
82  Stolen Cars

family, friends and neighbors. It was all anyone talked about for at least two
days. Two walls were painted with his name, which is common practice in
such cases (Cozzi 2018). His funeral and burial were, however, quiet affairs
with few people present. Where victims die while committing a crime, few
people turn out for funerals and parents feel ashamed of how their child died.
The unequal distribution of lethal force across time and space is funda-
mental to the perception among many favela residents that governments will
never protect them. Precisely for this reason, these same parts of the favela
population – especially those connected to illegal markets – consider it imper-
ative that the favelas protect themselves. Historic inequality in the implemen-
tation of State violence is therefore directly related to the emergence of distinct
sources of authority that coexist with the State and are generally overseen by
criminal organizations – in São Paulo in recent decades by the PCC.

***

A dog barked as we shouted loudly to Grandão from in front of the iron gate
of his self-built house. He was slow to answer because he had just received the
news of Wellington’s death. Grandão’s family has lived in that house for three
decades and is well known in the community. They were very poor when they
arrived but improved their lot thanks to informal work first as truck loaders
and later as truck drivers. During this period the illegal vehicle and cargo
markets helped the family move up the ladder, as Grandão’s mother and
cousin told us as we spoke to them around the kitchen table. As we have seen,
Grandão specialized in stealing new cars while some of his uncles specialized
in stealing trucks.
The family owns several houses on the same block. Grandão’s mother lis-
tens to her son tell stories about the criminal world while serving us coffee. At
the back of the family home there is an informal market that is not indicated
by any signage or other advertisement and that only the local residents know
about. “It is much more affordable,” the neighbors later told us – because
some of the products there came from cargo theft. That afternoon we had
long conversations with several members of the family. We also went to watch
a neighborhood football game.
Wellington was the first of our interlocutors to subsequently become a
victim of homicide. For the youngest researchers on the team, this was also
the first time closely following a homicide case in São Paulo. For the more
experienced researchers, Wellington was just another of the countless cases of
young people living in favelas and peripheries that were low-level operators in
illegal markets and were killed after carrying out a theft or robbery.
Each of these cases has a personal impact, forces us to reflect on death, and
adds a new layer of knowledge about São Paulo’s urban conflict (Cordeiro
 State Reaction  83

2018). Even though each case is in some ways unique, the distribution of lethal
violence across São Paulo in recent decades has followed clear, regular
patterns.

***

I hear that governments do not protect the poor, “only God does.” “He” is
always present in the peripheries of São Paulo. Representatives of local
Pentecostal churches were present at Wellington’s funeral. They held his
mother’s hands, prayed with her, and listened to her cries of pain. Women
from the church continued to make visits to her, to bring her groceries, to
cook and pray with her and to help her manage the pain. They advised her
to come to a church service when she felt ready. It is these churches more
than any public service that comfort families in these difficult moments
and thus build their social and political bases (Almeida 2019; Marques
2019).
It is no coincidence that Jair Bolsonaro and many police officers have also
become close to Evangelicals in recent years. Even though police officers kill
the children of the women who pray in church with them, what these same
policemen stress in their accounts is how hard they fight against the crime
that this victimizes the youth – among which they count their own children.
Everyone believes that Pentecostal theology is Manichean and warlike
(Marques 2015). The normative regime that inspires this movement of police
legitimation is based on war and the belief that there are only two possible
sides in such a confrontation (Leite 2012; Rui et al. 2014; Sanjurjo and
Feltran 2015). If they are on the right side of God, i.e., fighting crime, then
the other side must be the Devil (Almeida 2007; Machado 2016). These same
Evangelical policemen are then elected with the votes of the mothers of the
Wellingtons and others from the same communities. In 2020, Evangelical
police were elected by large margins to represent the citizens of São Paulo as
city councilors, state aldermen, federal deputies, and federal senators, thus
strengthening the base of the Bolsonarista movement.
This is one of the reasons why there is no demand from below for official
State investigations into police killings. “The justice of man is flawed but God
knows what He is doing,” is what many in the peripheries say. Families that
hold critical views of police killings, like some we spoke to in the favelas, do
not speak out. They are afraid and ashamed. It can be dangerous to demand
that police conduct in a homicide case be officially investigated. The police, a
politically active corporate group, can carry out reprisals. If anyone questions
the conduct of the police and asks for an investigation into the death of a
criminal it is because they are on the side of the criminal. They should there-
fore also be treated as such.
84  Stolen Cars

The police version of Wellington’s death was thus the only one that was
reported publicly and was subsequently upheld by the courts. The number of
police officers convicted in such cases across Brazil, as human rights organiza-
tions have repeatedly shown, is close to zero (Misse, Grillo, and Neri 2015).
The killing is invariably recorded as “death following resistance” or similarly,
with differences in terminology varying by state, which makes it difficult to
be precise about numbers. In whatever form police homicides are officially
registered, they are confirmed by the courts and the matter is officially closed.
Thus, the high rate of police use of lethal force in Brazilian cities is pro-
tected not only by the corporatism of the forces of order but also by their
political strength, backed up by the weapons they carry and the social legiti-
macy they enjoy. This legitimacy goes beyond the social and religious fabric
and extends to legislative influence. Such is this legitimacy that in 2020 the
Bolsonaro administration submitted an “anticrime bill” to the Chamber of
Deputies, according to which police officers who killed while on duty would
automatically be covered under an “exclusion of illegality” clause. There
would be no need for any legal proceedings. The police, considered a priori
on the right side of the war, would be definitively free to kill.9
The article that reported Wellington’s death did not use a journalistic tone.
It stated that a mala – police jargon for “thief ” – who had stolen a car was no
longer in the world of crime because he was dead. There was no other public
version of the case, nor was there any reaction from the victim’s family or
human rights organizations. Homicides by police, representing “urban vio-
lence,” contribute to order rather than disorder. Popular radio and TV pro-
grams across Brazil have been promoting this perspective on violence and
security for years. They also make demands vis-à-vis police actions. Since
2016, police marketing via social media has added to these efforts. Groups of
neighbors share photos of “suspects” whom they have seen in the street. There
is always a policeman in the neighborhood who is responsible for immedi-
ately calling his “colleagues” rather than the police institution itself to inves-
tigate or resolve the situation. Much research has discussed the militarization
of São Paulo – primarily by the military police rather than by the armed
forces (Cabanes et al. 2011; Telles 2010a); this militarization takes place in
perfect harmony with the broader militarization of politics.
This is also why whenever a car is stolen the official response takes place
on two fronts. While the police must pursue, arrest, or punish the suspects,
finding them where possible and presenting themselves as a “force for good,”
insurance companies must try to recover policyholders’ stolen vehicles. In
short, State reaction focuses on punishing thieves – with death, incarceration,
or bureaucracy – as a way of constituting a moral-religious community
inclined to occupy political space. As we will see in Chapter 3, insurers address
the same problem another way. They occupy market spaces.
 State Reaction  85

Notes

  1. This chapter was the subject of valuable comments from the research team and
especially Daniel Hirata, to whom I am hugely grateful. I would also like to thank
Evandro Cruz, Edgard Fusaro, Daniel Waldvogel, Rafael Rocha, Mariana
Giannotti, and Bruna Pizzol for the work their work on the data and maps
presented herein. Upon hearing about our research, Carolina Grillo and Rafael
Godoi kindly made their data on police use of lethal force in the city of São Paulo
available to us. We thank each of these researchers for their efforts and above all for
being part of such a significant, supportive, and collaborative research network.
Any mistakes, however, are the responsibility of the author alone.
  2. Data from the Secretariat of Public Security (produced at Police District level) and
data from IBGE (produced at census district level) was collated thanks to support
from the research team at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole (FAPESP
2013/07616-7).
  3. In the state of São Paulo, there was a steady reduction in total homicide rates of
over 80 percent between 2000 and 2020. Police use of lethal force increased over
this period. The causes of São Paulo’s exceptional trajectory vis-à-vis the rest of
Brazil, where total homicide rates increased over the period, are a source of
controversy in the academic literature. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that
the PCC played a decisive role in this process(Biderman et al. 2019; Cordeiro et al.
2017; Feltran 2010, 2020a; Hirata 2018; Lessing 2017; F. L. Santos and Cordeiro
2017; Willis 2015). However, the literature on homicides in Latin America lacks a
consistent theory for understanding how the pragmatic regulation of lethal
violence in the region takes place (Fernanda Tourinho Peres et al. 2008; Justus et
al. 2018; Kahn 2013; Manso 2002; Manso and Godoy 2014; Murray, Cerqueira,
and Kahn 2013; Peres et al. 2011; Peres and Nivette 2017; Ruotti et al. 2017).
New methodologies may sometimes reach convincing conclusions (Biderman et al.
2019; Cerqueira and Soares 2016) but in the absence of a robust theoretical model
they still risk treating correlations as explanations (Nery et al. 2014).
  4. As our interest here is in correlating use of lethal force, socio-economic conditions,
and territory, which are heavily associated with the dynamism of the vehicle
market, we present the absolute numbers of robberies and thefts rather than rates
per 100,000 inhabitants. These rates are, however, concentrated in exactly the same
areas of the city.
  5. Latin American urban studies have paid little attention to racial issues, unlike in the
United States (Duneier 2016; Goffman 2014; Wilson 1987, 2011; Wilson and
Chaddha 2010). However, urban and cultural history in and about Brazil has long
highlighted the need to add race and city to the categories that already receive far more
attention, especially class, to understand inequalities and state violence (Chalhoub
1990, 2001; 2017; Fischer 2008, 2019; Fischer, McCann, and Auyero 2014).
  6. 86.57 percent of residents of the district of Lapa and 81.36 percent of residents of
Vila Leopoldina are white (IBGE 20120).
86  Stolen Cars

  7. This is the classic Brazilian favela urbanization process, see: Cavalcanti 2007;
Araujo Silva 2017.
  8. During our fieldwork, which coincided with rise of extreme right-wing movements
among Brazilian policemen, public universities (and especially the social sciences,
previously largely unknown to the general public) became the target of endless fake
news stories and came to be seen as part of the “Communism” and “Cultural
Marxism” that Bolsonarista nationalism existed to combat (Feltran 2020b).
  9. These legal efforts have surpassed the limits of the plausible. The president’s son,
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, sponsored Bill No. 4,640 of 2019, which aims to
institute yet another exclusion of illegality, in this case designating police homi-
cides as “suicide via police officer.” Those killed by the police should, according to
the bill, be considered “suicidal” because they are responsible for their own deaths.
At the time of writing the bill has yet to achieve legislative approval.
CHAPTER 3

Designing the Market

Deborah Fromm

For the insurance sector, car theft and robbery are not just a “security problem”
but also part of the process of the “economization of uncertainty” (Lehtonen
and Van Hoyweghen 2014; O’Malley 2004). This process is understood as a
central mechanism for the reproduction of contemporary capitalism:

when uncertainty is standardized, homogenized and made calculable, it

can be given a price and it can be bought and sold. Not only has it been
economized, it has been made into an essential commodity of current
capitalism. (Lehtonen and Van Hoyweghen 2014, emphasis added)

Insurance policies are designed to minimize uncertainty for both the

insured and the insurer. But that same uncertainty is an opportunity to do
business and make profits. Insurance should be regarded as an uncertain busi-
ness (Ericson and Doyle 2004; Lehtonen and Van Hoyweghen 2014): “insur-
ance is also and always about proliferating and taming uncertainty” (Lehtonen
and Van Hoyweghen 2014).
This chapter discusses the responses of the insurance market to car theft.
These responses are shaped by efforts to indemnify their clients for losses
incurred due to such thefts. Alvorada Seguros’ responses will be our empirical
starting point. Alvorada must pay the injured parties and investigate the case
set in motion by the claim filed by João who, as you will recall, is the owner
of the HB20 that was stolen by Grandão in Chapter 1. Not having found
evidence of fraud, Alvorada must either pay out the claim or, if it is found,
return the vehicle in perfect condition.
Our argument concerns the interplay between legal and illegal and is
informed by the observation of the social and commercial productivity of car

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
88  Stolen Cars

theft. We demonstrate how a chain of other highly profitable activities and

economic circuits are developed after a theft and because of it. Such activities
as vehicle tracking and recovery, security and monitoring technologies, and
increased auto sales are linked to the stolen vehicle industry and bolstered by
insurance agency intervention. The insurance industry’s mediating role does
more than merely promote growth in the automotive market. It also lays the
foundations for a rational network that brings together property protection
and the accumulation of capital under one roof, a scheme that could only
ever be regulated by a private company. Thus, protection and insurance, fun-
damental elements of the prudential mindset underlying the Welfare State
(Defert 1991; Ewald 1986, 1991; Lehtonen and Liukko 2011) and which
underwrote the idea of rights and the public world in the twentieth century,
are now seen as part and parcel of markets, which does nothing to harm the
accumulation of capital.
Insurance conceived as security commutes the punishment of the guilty in
favor of a kind of wergild. The insurer does not concern itself with eyes or
teeth; the theft – or the car theft – leaves no traces on the moral plane. Neither
does the justice model conceived by Alvorada emulate the State legal system
(Ewald 1986, 1991). Regardless of who is responsible for the damage (and in
the absence of fraud), a claim will give rise to a payment. Repairs are eco-
nomical so risks, damages, and assets can be assigned monetary values (Zelizer
2017). The insurers’ rationality is clear: they buy risk and sell guarantees of
protection in the case of damage, theft or robbery.

***

Seo Cláudio had no insurance. Happily, for João, he had renewed his insur-
ance policy a few weeks earlier. Seo Cláudio was notably distressed in view of
the loss that the theft of his vehicle represented to the family budget. João, on
the other hand, kept a cool head and, while talking to his fiancée, realized
that having his car stolen might be a blessing in disguise; the pay-outs that
insurance companies make are usually higher than the average prices in the
second-hand car market. It was precisely the risk of having his car stolen or of
suffering a traffic accident that motivated him to keep his premium payments
up to date. When he found that his HB20 had disappeared and saw that the
risk had become a reality, João felt that his preventive stance had paid off. Seo
Cláudio was aware of the risks but couldn’t afford the insurance.1 Life in large
urban centers has its downsides – it is good to be prepared for them. Insurance
companies translate private money into collective protection.
João’s first move after discovering his car had been stolen was to contact
the Alvorada Seguros call center. Only after that first call to Alvorada did he
 Designing the Market  89

file a police report. Bianca, the Alvorada customer service rep we met in
Chapter 1, quickly directed the case to the insurance company’s Tracking and
Monitoring Center in São Paulo. The Center is responsible for the search and
recovery of stolen vehicles insured by the company and is considered an
industry leader. It tracks vehicles with and without tracking devices. In Brazil,
and especially in São Paulo, car theft is a central concern of insurance compa-
nies, which have invested considerable resources and developed technologies
for tracking and monitoring their and their clients’ cars.
The insurance industry estimates that 8 out of 10 vehicles stolen in São Paulo
have insurance coverage. Thieves target newer cars. The Alvorada insurance
group alone processes a daily average of 100 theft or robbery claims. The average
recovery rate is 50 percent and can be as high as 90 percent if the cars have been
outfitted with a tracking device. The Alvorada insurance group covers 5.5 mil-
lion cars, of which 300,000 have trackers installed. João’s HB20 was one of these
because HB20s are a prime target for theft in São Paulo. It was estimated that in
2017 for every 69 Hyundai HB20 insured, one was stolen.2 Across the industry
there is one theft or robbery claim for every 100 accidents.
At the Alvorada Tracking and Monitoring Center a team of approximately
20 technicians seated at computers direct their attention to a plasma TV where
they are able to view the real time data of open claims. The most recent claims
appear in red, the oldest in yellow, and those that have just been resolved in
green. After receiving Bianca’s e-mail, the Center team sent João’s claim details
(license plate, color, chassis, and the street where the theft occurred) to their
motorcycle-borne recovery team via a WhatsApp group. Motorcyclists closest
to where the vehicle was stolen started searching for it. This is standard proce-
dure. Alvorada has 35 “ready-responders,” young men who look for cars with
a tracker, and 25 “hunters” who recover cars without trackers. The hunters are
more experienced. Generally, hunters and ready-responders work in pairs, use
their own motorbikes and are responsible for a specific region of the city.

***

Douglas has been a ready-responder for a year. According to the WhatsApp

group message, the theft of João’s HB20 had occurred in his area. He searches
the peripheries of the West Zone, the place where he was born and where he
still lives today. Before becoming a ready-responder he worked as a motorcy-
cle courier. He prefers his current position: it’s easier and better paid. His
average monthly take home pay is 3.8 MW. He is self-employed and working
on a temporary contract that is renewable every three months. He is not for-
mally employed by the company and is not entitled to vacations, the standard
Brazilian annual bonus, or any other benefits.
90  Stolen Cars

Douglas’ routine is to wake up early and leave the house no later than 6:00
a.m. to patrol his area. The team calls this procedure a “Romeo.” He says he
prefers to leave early so that he can get out and about before his neighbors,
some of whom steal cars for a living, get out of bed. In the morning he can-
vasses the avenues and alleys where he knows thieves usually leave the cars they
have stolen to rest. He’s developed an eye for spotting “suspicious” cars: models
that don’t jive with the neighborhood’s socio-economic profile (a luxury BMW
in a favela, for instance); a popped panel (thieves usually hang a telltale trash
bag next to the steering wheel to hide the dislodged panel); a burst airbag; a
dirty, badly parked car; a car without wheels. If Douglas sees any of these signs,
he checks the vehicle’s license plate on a Federal Government app called
SINESP Cidadão. This free and publicly accessible app provides access to a
database of stolen, robbed, or cloned cars that can be identified by their license
plate numbers. From his cell phone Douglas can tell if a car is “singing.”3
The ready-responder receives USD 6.50 per case towards fuel costs.
Douglas covers about 70 km per day and incurs fuel costs of almost 0.5 MW
per month, which are paid in full by Alvorada. When he recovers a car he is
paid 0.18 MW (with a tracker) or 0.26 MW (without a tracker). He tries to
recover at least 15 cars per month. After his morning patrol, Douglas usually
lunches at home and then only goes out in the afternoon if Alvorada alerts
him to the fact that a stolen car with a tracker is nearby. That was how he
found João’s HB20.
Douglas is a neighbor of Grandão, the guy who stole João’s HB20. They
grew up in the same neighborhood on the outskirts of Carapicuíba, a munici-
pality in the western periphery of Greater São Paulo, located next door to the
municipality of Osasco. They were classmates as children but in adulthood
their distinct paths led them apart. While Douglas retrieves cars for Alvorada,
Grandão steals cars for parts. Grandão’s thieving fuels the demand for car
insurance. As one of the coordinators of the Alvorada Tracking Center puts
bluntly: “If they stopped stealing cars we’d be out of a job.” Formal jobs at the
Monitoring Center and gigs like Douglas’ depend on car theft.
Douglas finds João’s HB20 resting on a quiet street in Osasco. He fills out
an online form on a tablet supplied by Alvorada that details the condition of
the vehicle and then uploads some supporting photos. After Douglas reports
the car’s whereabouts, the Center contacts the police, a tow truck, and a lock-
smith. The tow truck and the locksmith are needed to ensure the vehicle
transfer to the nearest Civil Police station or local police chief. Douglas can-
not leave the vehicle until the police arrive, which can take hours. He watches
from a location where he can see the vehicle without being seen. The thieves
could return at any time to pick up the car and Douglas wants to avoid a
confrontation. This time everything goes without incident, the police arrive
 Designing the Market  91

and the tow truck takes the car away. João’s HB20 had a tracker, but it was
installed in the vehicle’s internal light compartment and the experienced
Grandão had located it quickly. Since he had removed the tracker, Grandão
was surprised to find the car was not where he had left it. There could have
been a second tracker – there is no way he could be sure he had removed the
only one. But Grandão had his doubts, and he had known Douglas since they
were kids. Talking to other thieves in his neighborhood who also steal cars in
Osasco, Grandão aired his complaints. Douglas’ work recovering stolen vehi-
cles was prejudicial to their interests. Grandão suspected that Douglas could
be monitoring the thieves’ comings and goings in addition to his regular
patrols, waiting for when they set out in the GM Corsa and keeping a close
eye on the spots where they leave the stolen cars to rest. This was not right.
Grandão comes from a family with deep roots in the criminal world. Like the
vast majority of favelas and peripheral neighborhoods in São Paulo state,
Grandão’s local hood is PCC territory. Grandão knows the PCC members in
the neighborhood. He asks if he could have a word with them.
The gang members go to Douglas’ house and question him politely about
the cars he was retrieving and, in particular, about the white HB20. He tells
the gang members that the car’s tracker was working and that the company
would have recovered it and called the police anyway. The gang members
reply that Grandão had removed the tracker. Douglas says there was more
than one. His response is taken at face value and, as the gang members have
no way of proving otherwise, they don’t push him further. Nonetheless, they
have delivered their message. Normative regimes are coexisting. Douglas
knows they are watching him. And he also knows that he has lied, because the
truth was that he managed to find the vehicle because he knew the places
where Grandão and the other thieves left cars to rest or did their own disman-
tling jobs on them. The gangs that operate in the criminal universe play a
regulatory role in illegal markets as well as their own protection rackets, as we
shall see in Chapter 5. The next time similar events occur Douglas might find
himself in an awkward position and he knows it.
On the one hand, police operations in the area are not good for crime.
They can result in arrests or higher costs due to bribes. It may well be better
for a local like Douglas to carry on as a ready-responder for Alvorada if that
helps keep the police at bay. On the other hand, the gang members’ visit to
Douglas’ house has revealed that there are tensions present between some of
the residents in the neighborhood. Douglas needs the work – and it is honest
work, as everyone recognizes. But he is also “from the community” and
should therefore not act against the interests of others who live in it. Workers
and thieves are part of the same community: this matters.
92  Stolen Cars

There is a fine line between Douglas being regarded by his neighbors as an

employee just doing his job (a job that may even have the benefit of limiting
police operations in the community) and his being regarded as a snitch who
rats to the police and insurance companies while impeding the work of his
neighbors. This fine line delimits Douglas’ fate as it does the boundaries of
illegal markets. In the first scenario, he is respected by the local criminal
world and is allowed to continue doing his job; in the second, he is penalized
and, in the long run, his ready-responder job will cease to exist. Many cases
of homicide start with small and community-based misunderstandings like
this. The PCC grew up within São Paulo’s poor communities during the
2000s, solving situations like these.
These small conflicts nourish negotiations between parties and give rise to
mutual regulation between auto theft and auto-recovery activities. If Douglas’
negotiation with the PCC is successful, theft and recovery activities may well
continue to coexist in his neighborhood. Alvorada will continue to recover enough
vehicles to meet its targets and Grandão will continue to steal enough of them to
pay his bills. Nobody will maximize their profits, but nobody will go without. If
his negotiation fails, violence may ensue and the stronger party will win.
The friendly conversation between Douglas and the PCC members
inscribes the lines of urban conflict. Ultimately, it is the profits of the illegal
vehicle market that are at stake, profits competed for by insurance companies
and large criminal enterprises – and on a much smaller scale by Douglas and
Grandão. It is in Alvorada’s interest that Douglas recovers as many insured
cars as possible. It is in Grandão’s interest that Douglas does not recover any.
If Douglas wins, Alvorada wins too. If Grandão wins, the illegal dismantlers
win. This community negotiation is of market interest.
Each party works with the resources it regulates. If Alvorada calls on State
actors to guarantee and increase its profits, as we will see in Chapters 6 and 7,
Grandão turns to the principal actor in the regulation of the criminal world,
the PCC (Feltran 2018). The negotiation at the door of Douglas’ house is just
a local instance of an ongoing negotiation between the larger normative and
regulatory regimes that determine the profits shared between them in both
legal and illegal markets. If the negotiation between Douglas and Grandão
fails, the conflict can quickly turn violent. Thus is the genesis of the “urban
violence” and homicides that plague the urban peripheries across the country.
If the conflict with Grandão and the PCC members escalates then Douglas
can turn to the police. State violence is normatively concerned with preventing
crime; but if he turns to the police, Douglas will have his position in the com-
munity threatened. Grandão can count on the violence of the criminal world.
This is violence that the community considers legitimate if applied unoppres-
sively in the “correct” direction. This violence has been very successfully mediated
 Designing the Market  93

by the PCC since it started operating in São Paulo’s neighborhoods in the early
2000s. Market competence becomes struggles around the legitimate use of force
that turn into political disputes.
In the case of Grandão and Douglas, there was an unspoken agreement
and a mutually imposed social distance aimed at avoiding violent conflict.
They did what they had learned to do in the hood: negotiate first. Violence
only occurs when politics fails. Between January and May 2018 when we car-
ried out our insurance company research, the Alvorada Seguros team recov-
ered 1,752 vehicles without a tracker, with a value of more than USD 17.5
million or 70,000 MW.4 The recovered cars become the property of Alvorada
Seguros once it has paid the relevant claims. Alvorada then sells these cars at
auction, as we will see in Chapter 4 or, less frequently, disassembles them in
its own chop-shops, as we will see in Chapter 5. According to the team, 2018
was a quiet year with few claims filed.
In other words, the slowdown in the vehicle theft market was causing a
corollary slowdown in Alvorada’s vehicle tracking and monitoring center. A
visionary CEO would monitor theft, robbery, and recovery rates but would
not try to stop Grandão from working.
From security to risk, from punishment to payment.

For the first time, I saw the system at my feet.

I freaked out, a grade A performance.
Money in hand, the safe was already open.
The security guard tried to be smart.
He was defending a rich kid’s property, the asshole. (shots)
If it’s insured, fuck it, so what?
(Tô ouvindo alguém me chamar, Racionais MCs)

The lyrics quoted come from a rap song by Racionais MCs – a group revered
in the outskirts of São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. The song depicts a bank
robbery from the perspective of the bank robber. In this explicitly violent
scenario, insurance plays an important role in mediating and protecting the
actors. According to the lyrics, the security guard need not have put himself at
risk but nonetheless died to protect an asset that would be replaced. Insurance
protected not only the assets of the bank but also the physical safety of the
security guard, as he had no reason to put himself at risk for the assets in ques-
tion. The bank knew that it would get its money back. The security guard did
not need to stand his ground. He did not need to die to “defend a rich kid’s
property.” The thief could commit his crime with a “clear conscience.”
Insurance de-escalates the confrontation between security guard and thief.
94  Stolen Cars

These lyrics offer a window into the criminal world’s understanding of

insurance. Of course, the crime creates costs for the insurance company. But
their risk assessments and actuarial tables accurately anticipate their potential
losses and price them into the market. Governance occurs through pricing, as
explained by the owner of Alvorada Seguros: “You can buy any risk, but
everything has a price.”
An insurer’s losses are predictable and priced into its premiums. They do
not prevent the company from turning a profit. Insurers are part of a protec-
tion market and work hand in hand with the State and the police. Insurance
companies are central to the legal normative branch of Brazilian capitalism.
They reduce costs, intervene in illegal markets,5 secure profits, and fend off
potential competitors.
However, this is not the only regime of action in town. The stolen car
market works just like the bank robbery described in the rap song. It relies on
insurance. Legally, Grandão and Wellington should be tried and punished for
stealing João’s car; judges should consider their individual responsibilities.
Wellington has been killed and Grandão has been in and out of jail since
childhood. But these punishments do not include financial reparation for
João or other car owners. Only by paying for an insurance policy does João
get financial compensation for his losses (just like the bank in the rap song).
Unlike legal logic, the rationale of insurance is pragmatic: Thefts and rob-
beries of vehicles, banks, and homes happen with predictable frequency in
urban centers. Data has to be updated as these rates change over time.
Statistical, actuarial calculations and risk analysis then become central to the
logic of insurance. For an insurer, João’s case is no longer perceived as an
individual case. It is another item in the frequency data to be aggregated and
problematized at the populational scale (Ewald 1991; Defert 1991; Lehtonen
and Liukko 2011). Insurance reduces uncertainty and replaces it with actu-
arial predictability from the moment it calculates aggregate instead of indi-
vidual cases6. Car theft can be predicted and if calculations are correct, each
theft means accumulation.

Insurance as a Mediator

As a means of indemnification and reparation,7 insurance consists of a set of

techniques and a rationality scheme that allows a stolen car to become a legal-
ized car (illegal–legal mediation) and helps João feel safe when driving and
parking his vehicle (insurance–safety mediation). Therefore, insurance has a
mediating character of different dimensions, all central to the governance of
the stolen vehicle market and its regulatory actors. Through indemnity and
 Designing the Market  95

reparation João was able to buy a new car. Through the mediation of the
insurance industry the illegal market nurtures the legal automobile industry.
Douglas’ and the Tracking and Monitoring Center’s work is the connective
tissue between public and private security, between the police and the crimi-
nal world, and between politics and markets.
This framework leads us to our second argument, which focuses on how
car theft helps us to understand the relationship between insurance compa-
nies, governments, and the State. In the Global South, these relationships are
not cemented through formal partnerships but through the private and illegal
sale of services by agents of law and order to actors in the insurance industry.
Information, knowledge, and people from the State and government appara-
tus are central to the vehicle recovery business of insurance companies.
Douglas recounts how Alvorada Seguros awards prizes, such as an iPhone
or a notebook, to the ready-responders who recover the most cars.8 According
to him, the most successful ready-responders have access to privileged infor-
mation, usually from the police. He told us about a case in which three cars
were stolen on an avenue near Congonhas Airport. In the first, a woman’s
Toyota Corolla was stolen by two teenagers. The Corolla was used to steal two
other vehicles: a Ford Eco Sport and a GM Zafira. Coincidentally, all three
cars were insured by Alvorada Seguros. None of them had a tracker. The
information arrived at the Monitoring and Tracking Center, before Alvorada
had heard from the car owners, from a hunter. The hunter knew about the
thefts early because of his contacts in the police force. After the victims made
their emergency calls, a police contact immediately informed the hunter. This
is a common practice in which the hunter and police contact share the pay-
out. Our fieldwork revealed to us that stolen vehicle recovery by insurance
companies is only viable because of the work of street cops.
To prevent the company name being associated with police corruption
scandals, Alvorada avoids both hiring ex-cops as hunters and negotiating vehi-
cle recoveries directly with the police. The company’s image must be protected
by its directors and executives, and the public does not need to hear about
Alvorada’s street-level operators who make unsavory deals with criminals and
the police. Alvorada only employs ready-responders and hunters in São Paulo.
Theft and robbery from other cities are also reported to the Center, but out-
side São Paulo recovery is outsourced to private companies. Many of those
private companies are owned by former police officers, usually retired and
between the ages of 45 and 60. The police in Brazil have accumulated political
power because of this type of private security firm. We will take a closer look
at their political role in Chapter 6. The Hyundai HB20’s journey and the
scenarios described by the interviewees at the Alvorada Monitoring and
Tracking Center suggest an outsourcing of State protection functions to pri-
96  Stolen Cars

vate sector actors, including those active in illegal markets. This is a privatized
version of the “political merchandise” described by Michel Misse (2018) that
allows “the conversion of illegality into mercantile accumulation” (Misse
2006). By law it is the State’s responsibility to guarantee public safety and
recover stolen vehicles. In practice insurers assume these functions, delegating
to the State the task of punishing, arresting and, ultimately, killing.
Throughout this book we have seen that violence circulates only among
subaltern groups – executives keep their hands clean. It is from this expropria-
tion of State protection functions, always justified by public sector inefficiency,
that the role of insurance as a pragmatic technology for governing urban conflict
is strengthened. Here we study the techniques and technology at the service of
a logic centered on actuarial calculations and risk management at the popula-
tion level – as well as knowledge of prevention and monitoring – that underlie
the governance of the markets, especially the security market, and are extremely
relevant to the different normative and urban governance regimes that are
increasingly central to contemporary cities (Courmont and Le Galès 2019).
We interviewed Castro, a former police officer from São Paulo who has
been active in the recovery of vehicles and cargo in various cities across the
country for 30 years. We suggested having lunch at a bakery. Castro demurred
and made a point of taking us to lunch at a small restaurant located in front of
the police station where his son works. Castro parked his car on the police sta-
tion grounds, greeted the police officers on duty and told us, in a slightly
menacing tone, that an arm of the former DOPS operated there.9 Castro knew
nearly the entire crowd. The restaurant was frequented almost exclusively by
civil police officers and Castro greeted each one with friendly, boisterous jokes.
He was in his community. While we were having lunch, Castro simultaneously
asked what we wanted to know about his work and avoided talking about it.
He did not answer our questions and mostly prattled on about this and that.
At one point he explained to us that his company pays police officers to
recover stolen cars. In Rio de Janeiro, police officers are paid to recover cars
that are left in slums. The amount paid varies according to how dangerous the
slum is, i.e., the pay is higher where the criminal groups reign and the police
have less standing. Castro leverages his personal networks and knows that
information must be paid for promptly or his life may be at risk.
We interviewed one of his partners, retired lieutenant Fernandez, who
described the work they do together in greater detail. According to Fernandez,
Castro has always worked in the industry but initially did so without a formal
company structure: “these people work with cash. You bring in ten thousand;
one thousand goes here, two thousand there. Tróia is a new company. It is just
starting to operate.” From his perspective, the partnership looked very prom-
ising. Castro has street experience and contacts with the police. Fernandez
would bring “entrepreneurial vision” and focus on business management:
 Designing the Market  97

I tell Castro that he no longer has to stay on the street. He has to do poli-
tics. Go to dinner with a police chief, talk to a member of Congress
about a law that needs to be done and how that law should be. (Fernandez,
interview with the author)

Fernandez explains that they only hire off-duty policemen. He said he could
not send a person without proper training to recover a resting car:

Policemen know what’s going on. One stops, photographs a car and
sends us the photo. We check and, if it’s the car, he comes back, sits in a
café and watches the car […]. If the guy arrives and puts his hand on the
door to open it, he’s just left his fingerprint there. (Fernandez, interview
with the author)

In terms of pay, he says they have a fixed value of 0.35 MW, about 50 percent
to 100 percent more than Douglas receives from Alvorada Seguros. Fernandez
describes how Tróia makes payments to the police. “The value has to be fixed
because otherwise it creates a market for the police.” Who are the main cus-
tomers of Fernandez and Castro’s company? Insurance companies, of course.
The companies contract Tróia’s services for the recovery of cargo and stolen
cars. Fernandez emphasizes that it is not possible for insurers to get involved
in recovery work. It is specialized work. He says this just before taking a call
and arranging a meeting with generals in Brasília.
According to Fernandez, and this is the most crucial dynamic in the repro-
duction of urban inequalities, in these markets, “if there’s a problem, they [the
insurance companies] can claim that they didn’t hire a police officer and that it
must have been the company that they outsourced the work to that did.”
Private businesses working in protection markets are fully autonomous links in
a chain that protect insurance companies from any stain of illegality. This is a
recurrent mechanism that reproduces urban inequalities and hoards power. It
allows insurers to claim that they “did not know anything” about street-level
dealings with the police. “They know, but they turn a blind eye,” says Fernandez.
Other fieldwork situations make it clear. In Rio de Janeiro vehicle recovery
operates in a remarkably different criminal universe than in São Paulo. The
PCC values negotiations and has created a model of a secret brotherhood with-
out armed territorial control. In Rio de Janeiro the drug gangs impose very
visible territorial control that influences the dynamics of vehicle recovery
(Feltran 2020a; Hirata and Grillo 2017). There are many cases in which the
Alvorada Seguros Monitoring Center knows where a vehicle is headed in Rio,
as the tracker continues to function and sends its signal. However, as the stolen
cars are located in crime-controlled favelas, the insurance company is unable to
send a team of hunters. These cars will be recovered by companies like Tróia.
98  Stolen Cars

Or Alvorada will arrange official police operations to recover stolen cars.

Insurance companies request police support in recovering such vehicles. During
such operations that have been arranged by private interests, it is common for
insurance representatives to go into the favelas together with the police to
recover the stolen cars. This also holds true for cars taken across the border,
especially to Paraguay and Bolivia, the latter being the fate of the Toyota Hilux
stolen in Cáceres that we saw in the Introduction and will revisit in Chapter 8.
Clearly, the use of legal and illegal State force, as well as the use of force on
the part of drug dealers and car thieves, acts as the background canvas on
which the commercial relations of vehicle recovery are painted. Analytically
speaking, violence, politics, and markets cannot be dissociated. There are spe-
cific commercial circuits of theft with violence and theft without violence, as
we saw in Chapters 1 and 2. Stolen cars that are not reported right away are
more difficult to find. This is a frequent occurrence as owners do not always
realize right away that their cars have been stolen. A technology that connects
the tracker to the dashboard is being tested in a small sample of cars. When
the dashboard is removed, the Center is alerted and advises the client to check
on the vehicle. The idea is to give the team the power to expedite searches.
That same technology also guards against fraud in cases where a claimant
arranges to have their own car dismantled. An Alvorada employee is tasked
with verifying the movements of a policyholder in the months prior to a
claim. With the help of Google Street View, the technician is able to find out
if the customer visited any chop-shops before filing the claim. In this sce-
nario, the policyholder would have ordered the car to be dismantled and filed
a false claim of robbery or theft. Fraud prevention departments have noted
the addresses of chop-shops that appear frequently in these fraud cases.
Unlike thefts, armed robberies are reported immediately to both the police
and the insurance company since by definition the driver would have been
present at the scene and suffered a confrontation with the assailants. Between
January and April 2018 in São Paulo state, Alvorada recorded 1,319 robberies
or thefts (656 and 663, respectively) of vehicles with trackers. They located a
total of 803. Throughout the 2000s, numbers of thefts and robberies remained
stable in São Paulo state. However, in Rio de Janeiro state, thefts are relatively
rare. In the same four-month period only 23 thefts were reported against 492
robberies – a total of 515. The numbers imply greater specialization within
the illegal market in São Paulo. Therefore, insurance companies are incentiv-
ized to create new technologies that alert them to thefts immediately.
Stolen vehicles covered by other insurance companies are also located dur-
ing searches, but the Alvorada hunters do not alert any other companies.
Only Alvorada has this information as it alone has access to an insurance
market database. Alvorada’s Tracking and Monitoring Center does not tell the
 Designing the Market  99

hunters which company insures these non-Alvorada cars to prevent them

from making deals on the side. They also try not to “create a market” for the
hunters and ready-responders. In any case, hunters commonly work for sev-
eral insurance companies at a time.

The Automobile Business: From the Streets of

São Paulo to the Panama Papers

João’s claim was paid by Alvorada Seguros in the amount of approximately

32 MW,10 as his HB20 was found by Douglas with the airbag and console
damaged. We know Grandão didn’t break these components; did an agent
from the insurance company? We don’t know, but the important thing is that
now João and his fiancée Marcella will buy a new car as soon as possible, as
they believe that it is not easy to live in the city without one. They scheduled
visits to car dealerships over the weekend.
Meanwhile, the Alvorada employees did some math. A HB20 insurance
policy for a client with João’s profile – male, 35, engaged, with a garage at
home and at work – costs on average 2–3 MW per year in São Paulo state. In
2018 there were a total of 319,158 insured Hyundai HB20s in Brazil.11
Approximately 18 percent were in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo.
Those 58,361 policies generate revenues of more than USD 36 million
(145,000 MW). Of the insured HB20s, only 710 were stolen in 2018. With
an average payout of 30 MW for each stolen HB20, insurers would have spent
21,000 MW on claims due to stolen HB20s in São Paulo in 2018. Even in the
city with the highest rate of car theft in the country, the insurance business is
a good business – the sector made 145,000 MW and spent 21,000 MW on
claims. Alvorada reduces its costs further still by recovering half its stolen fleet.
The recovered HB20 was sold for 24 MW to an online buyer at a weekly
auction held by the Alvorada group. The car could also have been sent to
Recicla, a dismantler belonging to Alvorada located next to the auction yard.
There are many opportunities to make money from a popular model of car.
The 21,000 MWs paid by insurance companies in compensation for theft
and robbery tend to be reintroduced into the vehicle market.
Like João, other insured people who had their cars stolen then buy new
cars and get new insurance policies. Thus, many auxiliary businesses like fac-
tories, auction houses, resellers, and insurers are direct beneficiaries. The
automobile industry accounts for 25 percent of the insurance sector’s reve-
nue.12 This was not always so; the expansion of vehicle insurance began in
Brazil in the 1980s. The nationalization of occupational accident insurance in
the late 1960s forced insurance companies to look for other revenue streams:
100  Stolen Cars

The expansion of auto insurance in the market started as a substitute for

occupational accident insurance. I remember my father and I were listen-
ing to the Voice of Brazil radio program and worried about how the nation-
alization of work accident insurance was going to work out. It would have
been and was a huge blow for [insurance] companies – especially as ­accident
insurance was offered by Brazilian insurers. (Public interview with the
owner of Alvorada Seguros, 2015)

Aware of the political and economic changes of the time, Alvorada Seguros
was one of the first Brazilian companies to venture into auto insurance.
Initially, insurance companies perceived the vehicle business as unprofitable.
In the 1970s, the automobile market began to expand and by the late 1980s
the portfolio became profitable. Currently, the annual revenue of the auto-
mobile industry is in the order of USD 8.7 billion.
The five largest companies account for almost 70 percent of the Brazilian
auto insurance market (69.5%, to be precise). The Brazilian insurance market
as a whole is an oligopoly. Only one private bank accounts for nearly 25 per-
cent of its total revenues, which amounted to BRL 9.25 billion in 2018. That
same year, the five largest insurance companies operating in the country rep-
resented more than 60 percent of the market, which is equivalent to more
than USD 23.25 billion. Alvorada Seguros is one of the five largest compa-
nies and holds 9 percent of the market, with more than 70 percent of its
revenue from auto-insurance premiums.13 The growth of the car insurance
market in Brazil since the beginning of the 1980s (the tail end of the military
regime) mirrors the expansion of the auto industry and, of course, to a cor-
responding increase in thefts and robberies of motor vehicles.
In 1979, at the beginning of this expansion, Fernando Wagner bought his
first dealership, located in his hometown in the northeast. The man who
would become one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the Brazilian auto industry
over the following decades, told one famous business publication after another
how it all started when he bought a Ford Landau. The dealer who sold him
that first Ford Landau was about to go bankrupt and couldn’t fulfill the order.
Fernando Wagner (FW), until then a well-known doctor in his hometown,
decided to buy the dealership and dedicate himself to his passion for cars. Just
six years later, the FW group was the largest Ford dealership group in Brazil.
However, its most significant growth started in the 1990s when Brazil opened
the economy to imported cars and began a transition to neoliberal economic
policies. During this period, Fernando Wagner’s company became the official
Brazilian importer of Renaults,14 Subarus, and Hyundais.
In 1999, Hyundai licensed the FW group to sell its cars, and just two years
later became the leading import brand. In 2006, the FW group became the
 Designing the Market  101

largest Ford distributor in Brazil and in 2007 Wagner opened the country’s
first Hyundai plant in the Brazilian Center-West. The factory, a venture that
cost more than a million MW (USD 250 million) to set up, was reported in
the press as “the Brazilian automaker’s dream come true”: “I am making a
dream come true. I’m not actually doing it for myself. I’m doing it for Brazil.
There is no truly independent country that does not have a car factory backed
by national capital” (National Magazine 2014). The factory earned him
“Entrepreneur of the Year” awards in the Brazilian media.
João liked his HB20, which he had bought in 2014 at one of the 170 FW
dealerships spread across the country. Also in 2014, Fernando Wagner said in
an interview with Exame magazine that: “If I were to say I had made 100 bil-
lion reais [BRL 25 billion, 100 million MW] in the last 10 years, that would
be very close to reality.” At 78 one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the
national automotive industry, Fernando Wagner is well known for his aggres-
sive demeanor and the remarkable number of lawsuits he is involved in. His
name appears all over the most well-known anti-corruption operations of the
Brazilian Federal Police (Lava-Jato, Zelotes and Anacrônicos) that are at the
center of the political crisis that Brazil has been in since 2013.
The charges against FW include purchases of Executive Orders, payment
of bribes, illegal lobbying, and tax evasion. The company was also involved in
the money laundering and tax evasion scandal known as the “Panama
Papers.”15 Hounded by investigations, Wagner has stepped back from daily
operations and says he prefers to work from home. He currently lives in a
mansion in Jardim Europa, an upscale São Paulo neighborhood with streets
named after European countries that has always welcomed Brazil’s wealthiest
businessmen and old money families. Brazil’s largest and most expensive
mansions can be found in São Paulo.16 In addition to a collection of luxury
cars, Wagner has a collection of works of art that includes everything from
eighteenth century French tapestries to paintings by Di Cavalcanti and
Portinari (National Magazine 2014). The fixtures in his bathroom are gold
plated. On the street where he lives there is a mansion similar to his for sale
with a price tag of USD 12.5 million (50,000 MW). In addition to 16 park-
ing spaces, a jacuzzi, and a sauna, the property has a video and monitoring
center; access to the four suites is protected by a heavily reinforced door.
Unlike Grandão, FW has never been to jail, even though he was accused
of a series of financial crimes and of involvement in the murder of a Swedish
businessman in the 1990s. FW was one of the main suspects in the ordering
the death of the man, who had allegedly become involved with his girlfriend.
The murder remains unsolved and there are indications that FW paid off the
police so they would drop the investigation. By controlling large sections of
the vehicle market, a single entrepreneur can redraw the line between legal
102  Stolen Cars

and illegal markets. The Hyundai HB20 is one of the best-selling and most
stolen cars in Brazil. One reason for its high theft rate is a shortage of official
spare parts, as the industry has not prioritized their production and availabil-
ity: “the functioning of ‘the system’ itself gives rise to these things,” an indus-
try executive told us.

Notes

  1. Unlike in Europe, car insurance is not mandatory in Brazil. Vehicle owners are
required to make annual payments of DPVAT (Personal Damage for Land Motor
Vehicles), which is a type of no-fault mandatory insurance aimed at indemnifying
the victims of traffic accidents. Damage to vehicles or the property of third parties
is not covered; DPVAT is a social insurance product managed by a consortium of
private insurers.
  2. According to SUSEP data, in 2017 there were 131,919 units of which 1,911 were
stolen (SUSEP 2017).
  3. This is a term used by the team to refer to cars that have been stolen and that the
police are already aware of. In cases like this where the police report has already
been filed, the Federal Government application indicates that the car has been
stolen and is being sought.
  4. It is important to note that the recovery team itself made this calculation by adding
up the price of each recovered car as quoted in the FIPE table. Generally, the
insurance company is unable to resell the vehicles at the price in the FIPE table. In
general, cars are sold at auction for less than the FIPE price; see Chapter 4.
  5. See Chapter 7.
  6. While the damage and suffering generated by the theft of a car are invariably
perceived at the individual level, the risk of having a car stolen is calculated
collectively. In this sense, according to Ewald (1991), “risk only becomes some-
thing calculable when it is spread over a population. The work of an insurer is to
cover that population by selecting and dividing risk. Insurance can only cover
groups; it works by socializing risks” (p. 203). In this sense, “insurance is pre-
eminent among risk technologies. Insurance practices operate through standard-
izing harmful events, giving them monetary value, and spreading and mitigating
their effects” (Lehtonen and Van Hoyweghen 2014).
 7. “insurance is a technique of reparation and indemnification of damages. It is a
mode of administering justice, which competes with that of legal right. It
maintains a type of justice under which the damage suffered by one is borne
by all, and individual responsibility is made collective and social. According to the
principle of right concentrated on preserving the ‘natural’ allocation of advantages
and burdens, insurance conceives justice according to a conception of sharing for
which it undertakes to fix equitable rules” (Ewald 1991: 207 – emphasis added).
 Designing the Market  103

  8. João’s HB20, recovered by Douglas, yielded 32 MW to Alvorada. He recovers an

average of 15 vehicles per month that are worth some 300 MW. In Brazil an
iPhone costs around 5 MW.
  9. Department of Political and Social Order created by the Brazilian government in
the 1920s, with a greater role during the period of the military dictatorship
(1964–1985). “DOPS” usually refers to the Political Police units in each State that
were dedicated to the repression and torture of political prisoners during the
military dictatorship. With democratization, they were disbanded.
10. 2014 HB20 value in the FIPE index in January 2019.
11. According to data from the Superintendence of Private Insurance (SUSEP 2017).
12. Data produced by Sincor–SP and published in the 2016 Insurance Ranking, see:
“Ranking of Insurance Companies points to the health sector as the main one in
the market,” July 6, 2017, available at: http://www.sindsegsp.org.br/site/noticia–
texto.aspx?id=26658.
13. Data produced by Sincor–SP and published in the 2018 Insurance Ranking, see:
https://www.sincor.org.br/wp–content/uploads/2019/05/ranking_das_segurado-
ras_2018.pdf.
14. The partnership with Renault lasted only until 1998, the others continued
throughout the 2000s. A new partnership was established with the Cherry brand.
15. An investigation carried out by the Federal Revenue and reported by Época
magazine in 2016 indicates that the FW conglomerate made transfers of billions to
accounts in Panama. “[…] the group illegally sent money from one of its units to
offshore companies and then brought part of these amounts back to another unit
of the group in Brazil. Between 2013 and 2014 alone, a period in which revenue
assessments grew by more than USD 400 million, [FW] sent USD 1.675 billion
to Panama” (National Magazine 2016).
16. Apparently, the most expensive mansion in São Paulo is valued at USD 25 million
and belongs to the Safra family, owner of the Safra bank. Inspired by the Palace of
Versailles, the area of the property is 22,000 m², is built on five floors, and
contains 130 rooms. The property tax bill alone comes to USD 228,250.00
(913,000 MW).
CHAPTER 4

Auctions and Mechanisms

André de Pieri Pimentel and Luiz Gustavo Simão Pereira

We are in an auction yard managed by Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda,

Brazil’s second largest vehicle auctioneer. It is a Tuesday morning in 2019 in
the West Zone. This is only one of São Paulo’s many vehicle auction yards and
today’s auction is only one of many auctions that occur every day. The city is
home to a large and heterogeneous vehicle auction circuit. In an immense
courtyard a multitude of cars is on display, most of them dented and scratched,
many recovered after a theft. Men circulate through the spaces separating the
rows of cars. They inspect each one carefully while talking on their cell phones
and amongst themselves. They make notes and look for good angles to take
photos that can be sent via WhatsApp to prospective buyers, business part-
ners, family members, and friends.
One of these men is called Dalton. He is tall, approximately 40 years old,
white, brown haired, and is wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and a pair of sun-
glasses pushed up onto his forehead. Dalton is from the small town of São
João in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state. He used to own a shop that dealt
in wheels and tires and before that worked as a mechanic. Neither activity
lasted long. He has recently started buying cars at auctions. He buys cars, fixes
them up, and resells them. It has paid off. Dalton has contacts in São João
that enable him to obtain counterfeit license plates and vehicle documents.
He doesn’t know anyone in São Paulo. His participation in the auction is
perfectly legal. Illegal operators in the vehicle market are often simultaneously
legal operators.
Dalton is accompanied by Osmar. Osmar is black and six inches shorter
than Dalton. He is dressed in workwear and sports steel-capped boots. He is
an assistant of sorts. He and Dalton usually attend auctions together so that
each of them can drive a car back to São João. That way they save on freight

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  105

costs. They only need to pay freight costs if they buy more than two cars.
Osmar lives in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of São João. Dalton lives
in the town center.
To the untrained eye, the salvage cars displayed in the auction yard look
like survivors of tragedies. For Dalton and Osmar, they are business opportu-
nities. They make the journey to São Paulo regularly. The São Paulo markets
are the main center from which legal and illegal vehicles and auto parts spread
outwards across the immense territory of Brazil and several other Latin
American countries.
That morning Dalton found himself inspecting a 2014 HB20 with a burst
airbag and some scratched paintwork. He called Osmar over so that they could
look at it together more closely. This was the HB20 stolen in Osasco that
belonged to João, the agronomist, who had since bought a new car at a Hyundai
dealership owned by Fernando Wagner. The new car had been recovered by
the “hunter” Douglas who works precariously as a contractor for Alvorada
Seguros. So as to recover as much of the compensation paid out as possible,
Alvorada had sent the HB20 to be auctioned by Car Auction Corp do Brasil
Ltda. The car had arrived at the auction yard via a few days earlier and was now
ready to be put on the block. Carpets, hubcaps, fire extinguishers, keys, own-
er’s manuals, and other accessories are (officially and unofficially) removed
from cars that are auctioned.1 This makes them suitable for the parts market.
Buyers like Dalton know that these items will have to be replaced before a car
can be resold. Dalton calculates how much he would pay for the 2014 HB20,
the cost of refurbishing the vehicle, and the possible resale price in São João.
He’s interested. He mentions this to Osmar and the two of them spend some
time inspecting every detail of the vehicle. They decide to bid for it.

***

We hadn’t imagined at the beginning of our research that auctions could

become one of our objects of interest. Over time our analysis of the journeys
of stolen cars took shape and we became increasingly interested in the uni-
verse of auctioneers. This is a little-studied topic but is extremely relevant to
our research (Ashenfelter 1989; Garcia-Parpet 2003; Larsen 2014; Lucking-
Reiley 2003). Auctions are positioned at the interface between legal and ille-
gal markets (Pimentel 2019; Pimentel and Pinho 2019). Many low-level
operators within the (il)legal vehicle market, like Dalton and Osmar, and
large companies, like Alvorada Seguros, conduct a significant part of their
business at auctions. Furthermore, as we will discuss later, the auction circuit
is characterized by internal ambiguities that, in our view, constitute key
mechanisms in the integration of central and marginal circuits as well as legal
106  Stolen Cars

and illegal regimes of action in the same chain of unequal accumulation. In

the course of this process they reproduce the law – and therefore the bound-
ary of the illegal – as actors in disputes over resources and not simply as
mediators of actors in dispute.
The sheer number of vehicle auctions in São Paulo is striking. These are the
two dimensions that structure our argument. Auctions are, in our view, key sites
for empirical understanding of some of the mechanisms of the reproduction of
the urban (territorial, symbolic, and economic) inequalities that condition the
use of violence in cities like São Paulo. But they are also places where these
inequalities can be measured by the comparison of urban lifestyles and the accu-
mulation practices they permit at each locus within the (il)legal vehicle market.
We attended dozens of auctions for damaged vehicles, both in person and
online. This combined ethnographic observation of auctions’ everyday opera-
tions with quantitative research that allowed us to estimate the overall eco-
nomic weight of the sector. Furthermore, there are two sides to the stolen
vehicle market, both operating at the interface between legality and illegality,
that are coproduced at auctions. Auctions provide insight into the close rela-
tionships between large auctioneers and large insurance groups, which are not
always upstanding from a legal point of view. A lot of money is at stake. They
also provide insight into popular circuits for the resale, dismantling, and
transformation of illegal vehicles into legal ones – a transformation that is
mediated by the legality assigned to insurance companies and auctions. Again,
a lot of money is at stake.
A thorough analysis of these two sides of the market and the relationships
that exist between them reveals the connections between auctions and the
institutional policy sphere, including its electoral arm. In short, vehicle auc-
tions are privileged sites for studying the reproduction of social and urban
inequalities that have hitherto been largely ignored – both by us at the start
of our research and, more generally, within urban theory literature.

***

As the auction on that Tuesday morning begins, Dalton and Osmar bring
thoughts of the 2014 HB20 into the auction room with them. Dalton’s notebook
contains ample detail on the subject of the physical condition of the vehicle and
the repairs that will be needed before it can be resold. The auctioneer announces
the items to be auctioned. In a sharp voice he starts auctioning the cars. He
describes each one succinctly, accepts bids, and encourages competition between
bidders. Now and again he makes a joke about a football team, parodies a popu-
lar song, or quips about the appearance of someone in the audience, usually an
auction regular. These all serve to lighten the atmosphere.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  107

The auctioneer holds the attention of the audience, while televisions

mounted on the walls display information about the cars on the block. The
scene unfolds like a parade. This is not a carnival parade but rather a parade
of salvage cars, a parade that produces markets and a performance of mascu-
linities. Occasionally, some illustrious guests in the form of Jaguars, Camaros,
or Porsches appear in the parade. Luxury cars attract special attention from
buyers, who are often car lovers. At every opportunity, the auctioneer makes
the engines of these cars roar. The audience members excitedly film every-
thing on their cell phones before sharing it with their friends, jointly subjecti-
fied by the demonstration of power.
The audience is heterogeneous but almost entirely male. Most of these
men work in the sale of salvage cars (like Dalton) or of used car parts (like
Maurício, whom we will learn about in the coming chapters). Many are hired
by the owners of other businesses.
In addition to those who attend the auctions in person, hundreds of others
follow the events in real time online. Cars auctioned in São Paulo may be bid
upon and bought by people outside the city or outside the state. The search
for good deals at auctions has increasingly taken on national proportions.
Bidding sessions are very dynamic; they tend to last between 20 seconds and
1 minute. In a single day, many hundreds of vehicles can be put on the block.
That Tuesday morning, in a single hour, 70 vehicles were auctioned and 33
were sold. In the space of that hour Alvorada Seguros earned 928.7 MW, more
than USD 232,000.00. The auctioneer, who is entitled to a 5 percent com-
mission on each sale, earned more than 46 MW, or USD 11,608.75.2 Dalton
won his bid for the 2014 HB20 from Alvorada Seguros for 24 MW, or USD
6,000.00, subsequently increased to include the auctioneer’s 5 percent com-
mission of 1.2 MW, as well as some other small fees. He expects to sell the car
for 29 MW, or USD 7,250.00. Considering the cost of getting the vehicle to
São João and his running costs, Dalton calculates that he will make a profit of
approximately 2 to 2.5 MW (USD 500.00–600.00). Everyone gets what they
can at an auction. Dalton and Osmar drive two cars back to São João and
Dalton clears close to 5 MW. He will pay 0.5 MW to Osmar.
All those who operate in the vehicle market sustain unequal lifestyles – in
the center or on the periphery of a small town, in the neighborhoods of the
global elite, or in marginalized urban peripheries – with what they manage to
extract from every car, legal or illegal (see Table 4.1). Alvorada Seguros and
the other insurance companies that sold cars that day earned nearly 2000
times more than Osmar; the auctioneer earned 92 times more than Osmar.
There are auctions every day for auctioneers and insurance companies. They
happen only once a week for Dalton and Osmar. When they do, small busi-
ness owner Dalton earns 10 times more than his employee Osmar. Osmar,
TABLE 4.1  Comparison between earnings, social characteristics, housing conditions, and exposure to violence among
auction operators in São Paulo

Direct Full-day Social characteristics City of resi- Housing conditions Risk of crimi-
earnings auction (class, race, mobility) dence nalization
from the earnings and exposure
108  Stolen Cars

HB20 to violence
Insurance Com- 24 MW 928.7 MW Economic elite São Paulo Luxury apartments or hous- None
pany white, global es in gated communities
Auctioneer 1.2 MW 46 MW Economic elite São Paulo Luxury house in a gated None
white, national Metropolitan community
(Fernando Wag-
Area
ner)
Resale company 2–2.5 MW 5 MW Middle-class São João, Middle-class house in city Low
Owner (Dalton) white, provincial town interior of center
Rio de Ja-
neiro
Resale com- - 0.5 MW Working class São João, Self-constructed house in Low
pany Employee black, provincial town interior of peripheral neighborhood
(Osmar) Rio de Ja-
neiro
Thief 1 - - Urban marginalized São Paulo Self-constructed house in High
(Grandão) black, local business Metropolitan peripheral neighborhood
owner Area
Thief 2 (Adriano) - - Urban marginalized São Paulo Shares self-constructed Very high
black, low-level local Metropolitan house in peripheral neigh-
operator Area borhood

Source: The authors based on observations, interviews and field diary notes from January 2019.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  109

who had earned very little indeed, felt that he’d had a very successful day. In
the course of an ordinary working day, he earns 0.05 MW. He’d earned 10
times that (0.5 MW) on the day of the auction. There is yet another relevant
dimension to this inequality. None of the operators who participated in that
day’s auction has ever been arrested or feels threatened by the police.
Grandão and his partner, the HB20 thieves who stole the car in Osasco
and began the chain of unequal gains, risked violence for an opportunity to
sell the HB20 for a cut of 1.8 MW (USD 440.00). They ended up receiving
nothing because the insurance company recovered it. Grandão has been
arrested in the past and has the typical social profile of an ex-convict in São
Paulo – a black operative working in illegal markets who lives in a poor neigh-
borhood. He doesn’t want to take too many risks, including exposure to
police violence, so outsources as much work as he can to younger men.
Adriano, the youth who helped him steal the HB20, may have already been
arrested by the time this book is published. Adriano has the profile of an
inmate in a São Paulo prison. He falls right in the middle of the age range at
which individuals in the criminal world are arrested for the first time.
Each operator earns what he can, some living in the exclusive neighbor-
hoods of the global economic elite, some in poor neighborhoods on the out-
skirts of the metropolis. Some are in and out of prison and sometimes die
violently. The poles of this abysmal inequality and armed violence have an
empirical relationship to one another in the daily life of the metropolis and
are coproduced in unexpected places, like in a West Zone auction yard on a
Tuesday morning.

Central Circuits: Insurance Companies that Sell at

Auctions3

Private vehicle auctions4 are the primary and most profitable channel for insur-
ance companies to sell cars recovered from accidents, thefts, or armed robber-
ies. Vehicle auctions in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area are the main sales
channel for such cars across Brazil as a whole. Auctions can sell between 2,500
and 3,000 cars in one week. That is to say, auctions are a nodal point in the
journeys of stolen cars and parts. Auctioneers, professional auction buyers,
insurance companies, scrap shop owners, and car wreck shops all seek to
appropriate part of the large amount of money that circulates in this circuit.
The expansion of online auctions has played an important role in these
dynamics. Online auctions began to appear in the early 2000s and become
officially regulated in 2013. This has produced significant changes in the way
auctions work. As David Lucking-Reiley (2003) has argued, online and
110  Stolen Cars

offline auctions feature different dynamics. Since vehicle auctions are held
simultaneously on- and offline, their dynamics are a hybrid. The possibility
of bidding online simplifies the processes of searching for, bidding on, and
purchasing vehicles. This enables people far from the location of an auction
to participate and has significantly increased competition in respect of certain
goods. The greater the competition in an auction the greater the final sale
price tends to be. This adds value to the whole circuit and increases the con-
centration of gain for those who appropriate the circuit’s wealth.
It is important to note that Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda’s auction yard,
one of several such venues that we visited in the course of our research and
which we chose to present in this book, is located on the premises of Alvorada
Seguros. This is no accident. All vehicles auctioned there come from Alvorada
Seguros or other insurance companies belonging to the group. Auctions are
held every Tuesday. The entity that administers them also holds another three
auctions per week in other yards in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area.
It is the second largest such organization in São Paulo. The largest auction
yard in Latin America can be found on the other side of the metropolis. The
entity that manages it is called Orlowski Leilões Ltda and the largest such
organization in Brazil. Its huge premises cover 300,000 square meters. We
made several field trips to this yard and it was there that we became interested
in the world of auctions. Orlowski Leilões Ltda also conducts other types of
auctions for public and judicial bodies and for other types of goods. Its cur-
rent focus is on private vehicle auctions. Orlowski Leilões Ltda conducts no
fewer than seven vehicle auctions per week.
Other auction companies of varying sizes and levels of activity are also
active in the São Paulo market. Between them, Car Auction Corp do Brasil
Ltda and Orlowski Leilões Ltda hold 11 vehicle auctions per week in which
they sell some 1,700 cars worth 25,000 MW (USD 6,250,000.00). The prof-
itability of these markets, largely appropriated by insurance companies and
auctioneers, fuels many other circuits including the car theft market.
Regulating circuits of this magnitude inevitably involves significant conflict.
In the following chapters, we shall demonstrate how these conflicts manifest
in the parts market via the 2014 Dismantling Act and how actors previously
little discussed – especially small businessmen and the civil police – have also
begun to demand their share.
Most of the revenue in this circuit tends to go to insurers and auction com-
panies, while marginalized groups tend to be most criminalized. The top end
of the market is, however, far from immune from illegality. In 2007, a
Congressional Committee of Inquiry into insurance companies was conducted
by the São Paulo state legislative assembly. The purpose of this commission was
to investigate irregularities in the conduct of insurance companies. The report
 Auctions and Mechanisms  111

concluded that the sale of damaged vehicles at auctions was fueling the stolen
car market, a claim we also heard from different interlocutors during our
research. With more cars being sold at auctions, more official vehicle docu-
ments enter into circulation at low prices and these can later be used to legalize
stolen cars and car parts.
In the 2007 inquiry, the main allegation was that when insurers found
themselves in possession of vehicles beyond repair that could not be resold
they would still sell them as if they were recoverable instead of following the
law and writing them off. In practice, this made it possible for parties receiv-
ing stolen vehicles to acquire them at auctions for very low prices – about 10
percent of their market value. Since the cars were not formally classified as
scrap, their buyers would leave the auctions with documents that could be
used to legalize similar stolen vehicles. This practice connected the illegal
activities of car thieves to the significant gains of insurance companies.
Reports cite cases of buyers purchasing salvage cars, taking their paperwork
with them, and leaving the vehicles behind at the auction yards.
São Paulo state legislation had yet to make provision for specific salvage
titles. Nor was there a clear legal definition regarding the procedure for writ-
ing off the documents of vehicles considered beyond repair. The public debate
on the topic became more intense and, as we will see in the following chap-
ters, culminated in São Paulo state’s Dismantling Law. As well as establishing
possible economic uses for these cars according to their degree of physical
damage,5 the law, which aimed at combating theft, introduced the process
known as “formal dismantling.” It also established insurance companies as the
main legal suppliers of vehicles for dismantling, even where these are of illegal
provenance. Later, we will see in detail what happened between 2007, when
insurance companies were accused of encouraging car thefts, and 2014, when
they became the main sponsors of a law to end them. In the meantime, let us
consider the dimensions of the São Paulo auction market.

Some Numbers
If we look at the operations of Orlowski Leilões Ltda and Car Auction Corp do
Brasil Ltda we can get a sense of the sums of money that pass through them. The
data shown in Figures 4.1 and 4.2 were collected between the end of 2019 and
the beginning of 2020 in three periods of one week each with intervals of two
months between them. We manually compiled all the information from recorded
auction lists for each week, thereby producing primary data unprecedented in
Brazil. Considering that the two auctioneers surveyed are by far the largest in
both São Paulo and Brazil as a whole, we took their total revenue as indicative of
the economic size of the São Paulo vehicle auction market (see Figure 4.3).
112  Stolen Cars

1790
Week 1
943

1315
Week 2
799

1747
Week 3
1057

Vehicles offered for sale Vehicles Sold

FIGURE 4.1  Orlowski Leilões Ltda Group sales.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

1409
Week 1
773

1056
Week 2
688

1171
Week 3
134

Vehicles offered for sale Vehicles Sold

FIGURE 4.2  Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda sales.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  113

$3,015,556.25
Week 1
$3,244,575.00

$2,821,312.50
Week 2
$2,860.175.00

$3,269,653.75
Week 3
$4,785,750.00

Car Auction Corp do Brasil LTDA Orlowski Leilões LTDA

FIGURE 4.3  Billing graph by auction organization.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

The total turnover of the two auction organizations during the three weeks
covered by the research was almost USD 20 million (to be precise, it was USD
19,997,022.50) or nearly 80,000 MW. These data do not allow us to calculate
monthly or annual sales with any precision. They do, however, allow us to
estimate the overall size of the market. According to our estimate, the vehicle
auction generates some USD 27 million per month (108,000 MW) or USD
324 million (1.3 million MW) per year. If this income were distributed
according to the patterns we described in reference to the day when our HB20
was sold, more than USD 16 million (65,000 MW) would be appropriated
annually by the two main auction organizations. The largest of these is an
association made up of seven individuals (several of them from the same fam-
ily). While each of these earns thousands of times the monthly minimum
wage, the average annual income of a low-level employee in the sector, such as
Osmar, is in the vicinity of 13 MW. The highest income in the circuit may
therefore be worth hundreds of times the value of the lowest. And we are not
even including the most marginalized actors, such as Grandão and his partner,
those who stole the HB20 for an expected revenue of 1.8 MW but in the end
received nothing.
Insurance companies are responsible for 91.71 percent of all auction sales,
according to our data. As we shall see in Figures 4.4 and 4.5, a few companies
account for a large part of sales in São Paulo, which in turn dominates the
national market. Thus, the concentration of resources in the car insurance
114  Stolen Cars

588
565
529

358
339 325

243 258
200

Week 1 Week 2 Week 2

Alvorada Seguros Horizonte Seguros Nippon Seguradora

FIGURE 4.4  Sales graph by insurance company.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

$794,412.50
Week 1 $877,700.00
$1,912,287.50

$883,300.00
Week 2 $532,355.00
$1,009,275.00

$1,086,452.50
Week 3 $851,100.00
$1,990,721.25

Nippon Seguradora Horizonte Seguros Alvorada Segros

FIGURE 4.5  Earnings graph by insurance company.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

industry, and the broader insurance market, creates the conditions for stories
like those told in the previous chapter, stories of extreme wealth alongside
extreme poverty, as well as São Paulo’s multidimensional inequalities, as shown
by the indicators.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  115

Three insurance companies accounted for 56.85 percent of sales and

49.69 percent of earnings from all auctions held by the two largest auction
companies during the period studied. Considering that two of them, Alvorada
Seguros and Horizonte Seguros, are part of the same business group, this
group alone accounted for 42.43 percent of sales and 35.87 percent of the
revenues from these auctions. That is how both income and political power
are concentrated in Brazil. The remaining 43.15 percent of sales and 50.31
percent of earnings are distributed among 18 other insurance companies,
companies in other sectors, and even some individuals. Some of these sold a
few hundred vehicles, others sold fewer than a dozen.
Clearly, the number of recovered vehicles is not the only indicator of the
economic size of these insurance companies or of the degree to which the
Brazilian insurance market is an oligopoly. However, these figures do suggest
that there is a relationship between the presence of a few large insurance com-
panies in vehicle auctions and the asymmetric relationships that are estab-
lished between them and those who buy auctioned vehicles. The few families
that own this enormous wealth live in São Paulo’s elite neighborhoods. As
there are other sectors in the São Paulo economy that are similarly thriving,
and similarly oligopolized. São Paulo has a dozen neighborhoods with average
incomes higher than those of cities like Stockholm or Copenhagen.
Brazil has a total of 210 million inhabitants, and the richest 1 percent
receives more than 30 percent of GDP. Much of this 1 percent resides in São
Paulo. Almost 10 percent of earnings from the sale of salvage cars at auctions
comes from thefts (9.3 percent).
The resale values of vehicles recovered from theft or armed robbery is gen-
erally higher than those of cars that have suffered damage from such incidents
as traffic accidents or natural events (Figure 4.6). As the latter tend to suffer
greater damage they usually also suffer greater depreciation. Vehicles recov-
ered from theft are an important economic asset for insurance companies and
auctioneers. It is no coincidence that Alvorada Seguros has its own recovery
center for stolen vehicles and is São Paulo’s (and Brazil’s) highest earning ben-
eficiary of salvage vehicle auctions. Even vehicles not recovered from theft can
stimulate car thefts through auctions. The invoice for any vehicle purchased
at auction can be used to legalize an illegal vehicle or its parts.

Marginal Circuits: Car Dealerships and Chop-

shops that Buy at Auctions

Like Dalton and Osmar, Vinícius also makes a living by attending vehicle
auctions in São Paulo. About 10 years ago he started acting as a buyer for
third parties at auctions. He receives a commission of USD 75.00 (0.3 MW)
116  Stolen Cars

1230
Collision 802
1022
137
Robery/Theft 186
103
9
Flood 27
313
15
Fire 5
8
23
Other 10
53
222
Not Informaed 293
122

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3

FIGURE 4.6  Auctioned salvage cars graph by nature of claim.

Source: Data compiled by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

for each purchase. Buyers are always present at auctions. “They are always
there at the back of the auditorium hanging around together, always on their
cell phones,” he tells us. Buying a vehicle at an auction is not a simple proce-
dure. Hiring the services of a professional buyer offers the advantage of mini-
mizing the risks involved. Even with the growth of virtual auctions, there are
still car dealerships and chop-shops who prefer to hire professional buyers.
Their expertise and personal contacts at auctions allow purchases to be made
at the lowest possible price.
About four years ago, Vinícius teamed up with Bruno to open a salvage car
dealership. A little over two years ago, Bruno’s wife, Pâmela, started helping
out with administration. The store is located São Paulo’s East Zone, in an area
with many such dealerships and other businesses operating in the vehicle mar-
ket. It’s the kind of place you go to the find wheels, tires and related accessories,
vehicle protection, brokers, despachantes, mechanics, gas stations, and so on.
More than 30 salvage car dealerships were active in the area where we con-
ducted our ethnographic research. Vehicle stores in the peripheries tend to be
small but once an area becomes known for hosting a particular circuit, profes-
sionals begin to frequent it. According to Bruno, people from all over Brazil
come to that part of São Paulo to buy salvage cars. They often come with
clipboards and lists and plan to spend a week in the area. He tells us that his
buyers come from other states, mainly Minas Gerais but also Santa Catarina,
Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Sul.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  117

If such businesses are particularly evident in this part of the East Zone,
there is no poor or peripheral area in São Paulo in which the most marginal
circuits of the vehicle market are not present in all their diversity. All experi-
enced a major expansion in the 2000s, when economic policy favored a “bot-
tom-up” growth strategy (including the expansion of popular credit, increases
in the minimum wage and, as a result, growth in both popular consumption
and indebtedness). The lower circuits of the vehicle market, especially those
linked to cars and motorcycles that have either been stolen or purchased at
auctions, have become attractive to entrepreneurs like Vinícius, Bruno and
Pâmela who are willing to act within the law.
The poorer the urban area, the more precarious these circuits and the
smaller the gains. Shells of cars and motorcycles procured illegally and pre-
cariously, like the Palio stolen from Sérgio by Israel in Chapter 1, are a typical
part of the landscape at the entrance to any favela in Brazil. At the opposite
extreme in Jardins, São Paulo’s wealthiest area, you will see dealerships show-
casing such major luxury brands as Ferrari, Porsche, and Rolls Royce. For
each urban territory, there is a different type of resident. In each territory’s
retail outlets, different profiles of sellers and buyers.
As popular economic circuits have become more specialized and territori-
alized, competition between establishments has intensified, reducing prices
and attracting customers while lowering profitability. As these are neighbor-
hoods with high unemployment, wages are also lowered – a familiar mecha-
nism that accumulates disadvantage for the poorest and serves to reproduce
urban inequalities. The internet has produced some displacement in these
economic circuits, as we will see, but it has not prevented or even slowed the
specialization and territorialization of the sector in São Paulo. Pâmela
informed us that some customers, car dealerships from other states in particu-
lar, had been buying salvage cars online for years. They usually buy them in
large quantities and then transport them homeward by truck.
Each stage of the process – the issuing of documents by despachantes, the trans-
portation by truck drivers, the recovery and resale of vehicles by entrepreneurs, the
purchasing of accessories in specialized stores – presents opportunities for eco-
nomic gains and there are innumerable small-scale actors operating formally or
informally at these different stages. In the central circuits of these markets, there is
a clear tendency towards concentration and – as we have seen – a small number
of companies selling the majority of cars, while in the marginal circuits there is a
huge diversity of actors and buyers, all with different objectives.
The business run by Bruno, Vinícius, and Pâmela initially focused on sell-
ing cars with a very affordable profile. On our initial field visits, most of the
vehicles on display were being sold for less than USD 5,000.00 or 20 MW –
the average price in Brazil for an affordable undamaged car with 7–8 years of
118  Stolen Cars

use. Some of them were visibly damaged while others had a few scratches.
According to Pâmela, the sale value of each vehicle was determined individu-
ally, and took into consideration the amount that had been spent on acquiring
the vehicle at auction, regularizing its paperwork, and carrying out repairs.
Pâmela knew that all these values – from new car dealerships to her salvage car
dealership via auctions – are listed in the FIPE table. The table is produced by
a research institute linked to the University of São Paulo and is based on each
car’s year and model. The values in the FIPE table are the basis for all prices
paid for cars in Brazil as well as for insurance claim payouts. This demon-
strates the connection between the two economic circuits. With each car she
sells, Pâmela seeks to establish an intermediate value between her costs and the
expected profit. She tries to remain slightly below the value of the competition
(also estimated with reference to the FIPE table).
In the course of our research, the partnership between Vinícius and Bruno
ended – the rent on the yard where they worked was increased to a level that
made the business unviable. Bruno and Pâmela then decided to open an
online used car dealership. In the absence of physical premises, they have had
to reduce the number of cars they work with. They therefore now work with
more expensive car models, which has increased their profit margin. They also
capture more value from the vehicles, which are no longer sold as “salvage
cars.” Bruno and Pâmela now repair them themselves and sell them as “used
cars.” According to Pâmela, business is going well. They have retained their
old clientele, their running costs have been drastically reduced, and the inter-
net works very well as a marketing tool. The experience they have gained in
vehicle auctions over the past few years has also allowed them to better calcu-
late the potential profit to be made from each car. Pâmela explains that cheaper
models tend to be sold at auction for inflated prices due to high demand.
Moving upwards from such models, profit margins tend to be slightly higher.
Bruno and Pâmela’s trajectory in the salvage vehicle trade reveals the grow-
ing importance of the internet in integrating distinct economic circuits.
Auctioneers, insurance companies, and a myriad of used car and part dealers
from the marginal circuits are increasingly using virtual platforms. This has
strengthened their market and territorial integration. A few years ago it was
impossible for a buyer from Pernambuco, 3,000 km from São Paulo, to buy
from Pâmela; in 2020 it is a common practice. Figure 4.7 shows how most
auction activities today take place online.
From the center to the margins, the internet presents opportunities for busi-
ness expansion and economic dynamism. Above all, it serves to further inte-
grate these circuits at the urban, national, and international scale. Reduced
operating costs and increased customer numbers impel these markets forward.
Competition within them and between them and other markets likewise grows,
 Auctions and Mechanisms  119

100.00%

80.00%

60.00% 81.77% 83.32% 81.40%

40.00%

20.00%

18.23% 16.68% 18.60%

0.00%
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3
In person Online

FIGURE 4.7  Percentages of offline and online buyers.

Source: Data produced by the researchers between the end of 2019
and the beginning of 2020.

progressively concentrating central circuits and diversifying marginal circuits.

In this way, the reproduction of inequalities is intensified.
Regarding illegalities, which can further contribute to reducing costs and
increasing market efficiency, and which can also occur online, there is another
point of direct contact between auctions and stolen vehicles. As we have seen,
there are two possible destinations for a stolen vehicle bought at auction. If it
is not classified as being “at the end of its useful life” it can re-enter circulation
once its paperwork has been legalized and any damage repaired. In such cases,
it can be dismantled and its parts resold. In the first case, proof of purchase at
auction can be used to make a “double” by legalizing another vehicle. In the
second, proof of purchase at auction can be used to prove the “legal origin” of
stolen parts. In both cases, buying stolen vehicles at auctions is not only an
entirely legal practice, but creates clear opportunities for further illegalities.
Buyers depend on a salvage cars paperwork to be able to legalize stolen cars
and their parts.
The supply chain is fed at one end by stolen vehicles that make an eco-
nomic and physical journey through the more elevated circuits of the econ-
omy, which includes stops at insurance companies and auctioneers, and come
out at the other end entirely legal. The back and forth across the legal–illegal
boundary that is specific to this circuit works to produce price differentials
that draw distinct actors into the same market.
120  Stolen Cars

The operators in this market are aware of this. Auctioneers and insurance
companies are periodically accused of fueling vehicle thefts – as they were in
the 2007 inquiry into insurance companies. They defend themselves on the
grounds that they cannot control what buyers do with their vehicles after
they’ve bought them. They themselves are not doing anything wrong. If there
is one thing that historically characterizes Brazil’s elites, it is their indifference
to the whole, to the public, and to wider society. Brazilian elites feel they
deserve to be at the top of the pyramid for having won in life. This they
understand as having defeated others.
While denying any responsibility for the wider market chain from which
they profit, they seek to control the market even at its margins. A series of legis-
lative initiatives led by insurance companies and made in the name of combat-
ing vehicle theft demonstrate this empirically, as we will see in Chapters 6 and
7. Auctioneers and insurance companies, economic agents that present them-
selves as “legitimate,” have seen their incomes increased in recent years by the
implementation of regulatory mechanisms that we will discuss in detail later. At
the other end of the supply chain, the implementation of these mechanisms
reinforces the criminalization of small establishments in marginal circuits.
If the insurance market can be understood as representative of a specific
governmental rationality linked to the expansion of neoliberal governmental-
ity in recent decades,6 the way salvage vehicle sales are regulated reveals how
this rationality produces connections with the State and political elites. This
rationality does not replace State rationality; the two are coproduced and are
codependent. The dialog between governmental rationalities has two effects.
One is that protection of property becomes marketized (a central element in
the construction of “public security” as a public problem in Brazil). The other
is that political elites become linked to the key operators in asset protection
markets. If the State is unable to guarantee the protection of property (as
actors linked to the insurance market claim), strengthening the capacity of
the insurance market nonetheless depends on a dialog with the State, espe-
cially with State agents responsible for the creation of legal instruments.
The regulation of vehicle auctions in São Paulo is illuminating for think-
ing about the practical production of “the folds of the legal and illegal” (Telles
2010b) and how the different normative regimes identified in this book inter-
act with these circuits. The fight against so-called illegal markets remains cen-
tral to government discourse, while the main organization in São Paulo’s
criminal world helps to sustain itself through its involvement in accumula-
tion in this market. In both regimes – accumulation guaranteed by state laws
and accumulation guaranteed by criminal gangs – central and marginal cir-
cuits are produced, as we will see in Chapter 8 and in the Conclusions of this
book. Both the conflict and efforts to formalize these markets (the theme of
 Auctions and Mechanisms  121

Chapter 6) produce and reaffirm the relationality of the two sides of the
­economic circuits and of the two sides of the normative regimes in question.
While the legality of the operations of the insurance and auction companies
results in the growth and concentration of their incomes, for buyers such as
Dalton or Pâmela, and especially for the chop-shops, whom we shall learn
about in Chapter 5, the possibility of criminalization increases with the
advance of state regulation.

Auctioneers: Economics and Politics

The discussion so far raises an important question: if the auction circuit occu-
pies such an important strategic position as a mediating space for a plurality of
economic circuits in the vehicle market – legal and illegal, central and mar-
ginal, “superior” and “inferior” – how is the auction circuit itself internally
regulated? What actors are involved in producing this regulation and what
kinds of conflicts do they generate?
Responsibility for regulating auctioneers lies with the Company Register of
each Brazilian state. The profession of auctioneer was first regulated in Brazil
in 1932 by means of a presidential decree. Except for a few amendments in
1933 and one relating to online auctions in 2013, the decree of 1932 remains
unchanged and in force in 2020. The so-called Auctioneer Law determines
that auctioneers cannot formally act as traders or entrepreneurs but only as
intermediaries and only on an individual basis. Auctions, then, are formal
economic transactions involving individual auctioneers, so that those who
place goods on the block for auction are, legally, the “brokers” of those goods
rather than their owners. Even so, the “brokers” pocket the full amount paid
for the good: the auctioneer’s 5 percent commission and other charges involved
in the purchase are paid by the buyer. Paradoxically, these amounts are never
paid directly to the individual auctioneers. Payments are always made through
the intermediation of a financial institution, via a bank payment or transfer.
Legally and institutionally, the role of the auctioneer is a dubious: a seller
who cannot be an entrepreneur, a private service provider who at the same
time exercises a “public function,” a mediator who is at the same time the rep-
resentative of one of the parties involved in the negotiation. We should be in
no doubt that it is this dubiousness that allows the abysmally unequal accumu-
lation to occur. It is not in the interests of the traditional auctioneering elite for
things to change, and that is why the profession has been regulated by the same
laws for almost 90 years.
In this sense, a brief history of the two largest auction companies in Brazil
is very illuminating: we found that before they specialized in the economic art
122  Stolen Cars

of selling, the auctioneers had specialized in the political art of defending their
sales spaces. It is indicative that Augusto Orlowski, the largest vehicle auction-
eer in Brazil, was able to become a senator. He became a senator representing
Duvidônia, far from São Paulo, without receiving a single vote. In every way,
this was perfectly legal.
Let us start with the trajectory of the Orlowski Leilões Ltda organization,
which was formed in the late 1970s by the São Paulo auctioneer Augusto
Orlowski and his brother Marcos. Initially, Augusto invested in auctions for
scrap iron left over from industrial production, his inspiration to do so com-
ing from scrap auctions in the United States. Back then, auction companies’
main customers were public companies, since the private sector had a certain
“stigma” attached to it (being closely associated with the sale of assets of bank-
rupt companies). Until that point, the State had been the main source of the
wealth extracted by elites through auctions, which acted as a mechanism for
converting judicial expropriation into economic expropriation. Gradually,
however, the private sector expanded and diversified and private companies
began to enter the market. In the mid-1980s, after Orlowski Leilões Ltda had
become involved in the sale of industrial scrap (considered a major innova-
tion), its customers represented 50 percent of the industrial concerns in São
Paulo state. Orlowski Leilões Ltda then made a pioneering move into the car
auction business.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period in which Brazil was in recession
following the end of military rule, Augusto decided to focus specifically on
vehicle auctions. He believed vehicles were goods in respect of which supply
and demand would remain high even during economic or production crises.
After all, what are crises for some are opportunities for others. In the 1990s
the organization grew significantly, largely due to the expansion of vehicle
auctions. In this context, Orlowski Leilões Ltda acquired the site measuring
over 300,000 square meters that is today its main auction yard and currently
has five other yards, four in the interior of the São Paulo and a fifth in another
state in the south.
Augusto entered politics in the mid-2000s. The Orlowski family was the
largest donor to Saulo Rezende when he ran for re-election as governor of the
state of Duvidônia. The donation was worth USD 200,000.00 (800 MW).
He won in the first round. That same year, Augusto became “reserve” for a
senator representing Duvidônia by the name of Odílio Alcântara. Augusto
had never resided in Duvidônia. For four months in the early 2010s, Augusto
acted as senator of Duvidônia while Alcântara was otherwise occupied in a
campaign to be elected Grand Master of the local Freemasons chapter. Modern
political networks in Brazil are always based on pre-modern political net-
works. Individuals running for public office are obliged by law to declare their
 Auctions and Mechanisms  123

assets. Augusto claimed that his was worth USD 5.25 million (21,000 MW).
His estate included a collection of 21 luxury cars. Elites in Brazil know that
assets must officially be distributed among family members and other trusted
individuals to circumvent electoral and fiscal rules. This is understood as a
form of protection. The only wealth that Augusto declared was the part regis-
tered in his name as an individual. He most certainly holds bank accounts
abroad and his real personal wealth is much more than USD 5.25 million.
He has been investigated by the Federal Police for alleged fraud committed
at an auction held in the late 2000s, in which a building was sold for the price
of USD 21.25 million (85,000 MW). The suspicious events surrounding
Augusto at the time of his foray into politics did nothing to harm his image
as a successful entrepreneur and an example to be emulated. Augusto contin-
ues to be highly respected by his peers, something that came out clearly in our
interviews and secondary material we had access to. Within the auction cir-
cuit, the image of the Orlowski brothers is that of trailblazing pioneers, who
won in life by “beating the gavel,” contributed to the growth of the Brazilian
auction circuit, and embodying its development.
Not everything in the auction world is characterized, like Brazilian elites
themselves are, by a combination of modern and traditional. Car Auction Corp
do Brasil Ltda is the local subsidiary of Car Auction Corp, a multinational auc-
tion organization founded in the 1980s in the United States. Car Auction Corp
do Brasil is owned by three partners, Júlio Barbosa de Melo França and two
holding companies controlled by Car Auction Corp. Specializing in vehicle
auctions, Car Auction Corp currently manages more than 200 auction yards
located in nine countries around the world.
The company started its Brazilian activities in the early 2010s after buying
an auction yard in a municipality in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area. Car
Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda currently owns two other auction yards in
greater São Paulo, one of them in the West Zone (that’s the one mentioned in
the beginning of the chapter), two in the interior and three others in other
states. In a few years, Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda went from having one
auction yard to eight, which shows how profitable the sector is. The compa-
ny’s São Paulo operation is distributed across its three different yards. The
mechanisms for reproducing inequalities and violence linked to car theft are
therefore not limited to one city, one state, or one country. Resources extracted
from the resale of legal cars with illegal origins also circulate in the economies
of the United States and nine other countries.
As we verified empirically in our research, the expansion of Car Auction Corp
do Brasil Ltda is closely linked to its relationship with Alvorada Seguros, its larg-
est client and the largest insurance company in the Brazilian vehicle insurance
market. A symbol of this relationship is the fact that one of the company’s main
124  Stolen Cars

auction yards – the one where Dalton and Osmar bought the 2014 HB20 that
had been stolen from João – is located inside Alvorada Seguros’ premises.
Alvorada Seguros is the sole seller of vehicles at this yard. Many salvage vehicles
from Alvorada Seguros can be found in other auction yards.
This intimate relationship raises awkward questions. In 2019 it gave rise to a
controversy in the vehicle auction circuit. According to the Auctioneer Law,
auctions are economic transactions conducted by individual auctioneers. By
definition, then, an “auction company” may not legally exist. At the end of
2019, an auctioneer, operating in a yard managed by Car Auction Corp do
Brasil Ltda in a state in the southeast, was accused of improper conduct in the
exercise of his profession. According to the complaint, the auctioneer in ques-
tion was abusing his public role as auctioneer by acting as an agent for Car
Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda. Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda received pay-
ments from sales made at auctions and would then pass them on to the auction-
eer. According to the Auctioneer Law, the auctioneer should have received them
directly. Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda partner Júlio Barbosa de Melo França
could be held criminally liable if it is proven that this conduct is illegal.
The trajectories of these two auction companies raise questions about the
transnational politico-economic machine into which our 2014 HB20 entered.
One of them is this: since auctioneers are not legally companies and cannot
legally act as service providers for other companies, how do their relationships
with other companies produce boundaries between legal and illegal business
practices? The conduct of Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda can be seen as led
by insurers rather than from within the auction world in order to ensure that
their auctions operate for their benefit. In practice, Car Auction Corp do Brasil
Ltda acts as a service provider for the insurance group led by Alvorada Seguros.
This practice has run up against considerable resistance from non-Car Auction
Corp do Brasil Ltda auctioneers, given the implications for their profits.
Unlike the market innovations developed over time by Orlowski Leilões
Ltda, the practices of Car Auction Corp do Brasil Ltda are seen as breaking
with notions of legality as understood by the traditional auctioneer elite.
Retaining their monopoly over the legal sale of salvage cars is crucial and the
dispute over the control of resources also involves a dispute over the produc-
tion of regulations and legalities. Legislating through congressmen and sena-
tors is part of, not a means of mediation between, the parties in conflict. As
Daniel Hirata argues in the afterword of this book, the law is another locus of
political dispute. For the traditional, national auctioneer elite, represented by
the Orlowski brothers, it is necessary to defend the boundaries that preserve
their control of the market against the intrusion of “external forces” such as
insurance companies or even transnational auction companies.
 Auctions and Mechanisms  125

The expansion of auctions in Brazil, strongly driven by the expansion of

private vehicle auctions, reveals broader historical developments at the interface
between economic elites, the state, and marginalized popular economies. These
auctions produce and move huge volumes of resources and money. The control
of these markets is disputed by traditional and modern, as well as national and
transnational elites. When he stole the HB20, Grandão never imagined that all
this lay behind his subversive and immoral desire to steal.

Notes

  1. Safety components removed before an auction must be replaced by law. It is quite

common for other parts to be removed unofficially.
  2. Data collected during research at an auction in January 2019. According to the
relevant legislation, the buyer of any item bought at auction must pay the full
amount of the highest bid offered (this amount being passed on to the owner of the
item), plus a commission of 5 percent of the value of the bid to the auctioneer and
a series of administrative expenses that are specified in the rules or the auction
catalog. Other charges may be added as fines if the buyer breaches any of the
conditions established in the purchasing procedure. These numbers only include
actual sales. Sales approved on a conditional basis – which could also increase the
revenues of the auctioneers and insurance companies – were not included.
  3. Milton Santos (2017 [1975]) long ago proposed that spatial divisions in São Paulo
should be regarded in a relational and nondualistic way, based on economic circuits
that he described as an “upper circuit” and a “lower circuit.” His work is inspiring
and has been used by authors like Silveira (2009) to think about globalization for at
least a decade. Our approach, based on normative regimes, adopts a slightly
different and more descriptive notion of circuits (intertwined positions in which
money directly circulates) to reveal the coexistence of wealthier (central) actors and
poorer (marginal) actors in the same economic chain. Despite being interconnected,
marginal circuits spread lots of money in small amounts to many actors while
central circuits concentrate lots of money in huge amounts to few actors.
  4. There are also public auctions in which vehicles recovered by State agents such as
the Civil Police and DETRAN-SP (the São Paulo state department for transport
oversight) are put on the block. The auctioneers who hold private auctions also hold
public ones, although less frequently. We chose to focus on private auctions because
they are more politically and economically significant and crucial for understanding
markets linked to car theft.
  5. Since 2008, insurance companies have classified vehicle damage according to a
three-level salvage title scale. The levels refer to the possible subsequent uses of the
vehicles. Cars classified as “minor damage” can be regularized without any mention
in their paperwork that they came into the possession of the insurer by way of a
126  Stolen Cars

claim. Cars classified as “medium damage” can be legalized but the condition of the
recovered vehicle must be reported in its paperwork. Cars classified as “major
damage” vehicles are those “at the end of their useful lives.” Prior to 2014, before
the implementation of the Dismantling Law, no clear definition was laid down in
the legislation on the possible economic uses of salvage cars. With the promulgation
of the law, it was established that “major damage” vehicles were eligible for
dismantling and no other purpose.
  6. For discussions about neoliberal governmentality, see Burchell, Gordon, and Miller
1991; O’Malley 2009.
CHAPTER 5

Dismantling a Stolen Car

Isabela Vianna Pinho, Gregório Zambon, and Lucas
Alves Fernandes Silva

Maurício was standing behind the large counter at Stratus Desmonte when the
tow truck arrived carrying a beaten-up white Ford Ka Sedan 2018 – the same
car that had been stolen from Diego. Maurício is the owner of Stratus. He is a
tall, white, with green eyes, a long brown beard and well-combed hair. He is
the son of a Brazilian-born mother and Portuguese-born father who arrived in
Brazil in the 1960s. At 33 years old (in 2020) Maurício is the youngest of the
couple’s three children. Born and raised in São Paulo, Maurício has always
lived in the middle-class neighborhoods of the South-Central part of the city.
An engineer by training, Maurício is articulate and opinionated. He was
one of our primary interviewees as we sought to understand the segmented,
stratified, and diverse world of vehicle dismantling. At one pole are the large
industrial dismantling operations owned by insurance groups and infused
with a rhetoric of corporate social and environmental responsibility. At the
other pole is the myriad assortment of clandestine warehouses and illegal
chop-shops. Further afield still are the open-street operations where cars are
dismantled in broad daylight at the back edges of the favelas. Stratus Desmonte
is located at some point in between these poles.
Maurício supplies the Brazilian market for used, original auto parts sourced
from wrecked or stolen cars. It is a market valued at USD 2 billion a year.1 The
vehicle parts market employs integrated practices thanks to online sales plat-
forms, among other factors. A vehicle dismantled in a chop-shop on the out-
skirts of the city, its parts sold online individually, creates competition both for
the large automakers who sell original parts and for the large industrial disman-
tlers. In 2019, according to the Brazilian Union of Dismantlers Owners (SBD),
80 percent of auto-parts sales were made on the website “Mercado Livre.” Auto
parts from stolen cars are often sold on this platform.

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
128  Stolen Cars

In this chapter we shall demonstrate empirically how highly unequal

agents located somewhere along the legal–illegal continuum survive in an
urban market that is global, highly lucrative, tentacular, and competitive.
There are State and non-State regulatory actors that are arranged along this
same legal–illegal continuum (Motta 2019a). They mediate market conflicts
that if left unresolved would quickly turn violent. Different normative regimes
of intervention regulate these conflicts.
Central actors, like automakers and insurance companies who leverage
their access to the highest echelons of Brazilian politics, expect that the selec-
tive criminalization of small chop-shops and junkyards will control the sup-
ply of auto parts. Marginal actors such as street-level policemen, car thieves,
truck drivers, and clandestine chop-shops thwart those efforts on a daily
basis. They ensure auto parts are priced low by flooding the market with parts
from stolen cars. Those on the margins of the market bet that theft will con-
tinue to keep costs low and don’t expect effective intervention by the mecha-
nisms of law enforcement or the State. The social, political, and economic
coexistence of these actors generates considerable urban conflict. At the same
time, their coexistence feeds a dynamic metropolitan economy.

***

Maurício told us that the 2018 Ford Ka that arrived at Stratus Desmonte, on
a Wednesday in January 2019, had come from the Car Auction Corp yard in
Guarulhos and that it had been purchased by professional buyers. Busy as
always, he tells us that these specialized professionals are worth their price. As
we saw in Chapter 4, good deals at auctions can be found with an experienced
eye. Maurício tells us that it was necessary to modernize his own operation
even if at first he didn’t want to. It is a noteworthy operation for its sheer size
and organization. Also noteworthy, as we will see in Chapter 6, is the partici-
pation of Maurício in SBD, a group of businesses in the dismantling industry
that work to remove the stench of illegality from the sector.
Stratus is one of many dismantlers lined up on Avenida Vitrine, in the
south of São Paulo. Vitrine is a major avenue with heavy traffic in both direc-
tions that connects the neighborhood of Ipiranga, the oldest in the city of São
Paulo, to the ABC Paulista and the coast. A subway line crosses the avenue in
addition to many high-intensity bus lines. The area has excellent public trans-
portation infrastructure. Along the avenue are residential middle-class neigh-
borhoods and new upper-middle-class apartment buildings dating to the most
recent real estate market boom of the late 2000s. They stand now where low-
income housing stood before. As we shall see, Maurício takes a very optimistic
view of his future business growth prospects.
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  129

We were lucky on that hot summer day that it was not a long walk from
the subway station to Stratus. Along the way we passed auto-parts stores, deal-
erships, tire repair shops, auto-repair shops, tire stores, and many other indus-
try specialists. The familiar orange walls of the front façade of Stratus welcomed
us back; we had been interviewing and observing at the location for a few
months. The sign at the entrance is unusual: “Stratus Desmonte: trade in used
auto parts.” The words desmonte or desmanche (both meaning “dismantle”)
rarely appears on a store’s façade – here it is a matter of honor. Stratus occupies
a good part of the block in an area of approximately 3,300 square meters. The
three floors with auto carcasses stacked high on tall shelves can be seen from
afar. At the entrance of the store there is a large counter for customer service
and two smaller ones that separate the engine and lighting sales sections.
As usual Maurício wore a safety helmet and a green shirt with the name of
the company embroidered on the chest. He talked on the phone with a cus-
tomer, fiddled with the computer and talked to one of his employees. In
2019, there were 15 people working at Stratus, all wearing store-issued t-shirts
and helmets. The day was already busy; yet another car had arrived to be
dismantled. On average four or five arrive each week. Maurício saw us, waved
from afar and signaled for us to wait. Ever the curious researchers, we stayed
on the sidewalk in front and looked around.
As the Ford Ka was being unloaded a police car parked on the street in
front of Stratus. Two policemen got out of the car and headed for the counter.
One of them asked Maurício about a particular part and he quickly replied
that none were available. He then sent them to another shop to try their luck.
The tone of the conversation was friendly; the policemen thanked him and
returned to the vehicle. Even though the interaction was unexceptional, the
presence of police officers in a chop-shop is always a cause for concern. By
observing Maurício and his employees during the interaction, it was clear to
us that everyone was on alert.
It is common for policemen in uniform to perform small tasks in the
midst of their work shift, such as coffee breaks at local bakeries, trips to the
bank, or some shopping. While running these errands they develop their
networks of contacts that in other contexts could be confused with extortion
networks (Whyte 2005). Knowing how to play different games on different
boards is the main weapon for effective policing (Almeida 2019; Das 2007b).
In this case, they could have been looking for parts for their cars, but they
could also have been taking note of anything unusual in the shop. Dismantling
has long been considered a problem for law enforcement, even though dis-
mantling activity was not officially regulated until 2014.
Passionate about cars and motorcycles, Maurício has always dreamed of
working in the automotive market but never of owning the family’s chop-shop.
130  Stolen Cars

“It’s a stigmatized market,” remarked his father, Seo Joaquim. Dismantlers are
where stolen parts come to. Maurício himself knows that thefts continue to
supply chop-shops of different types, but even though he accepts stolen cars,
like our Ford Ka, he wants to differentiate himself from the competition. The
technical, bureaucratic, and legal requirements for the operation of a fully
legalized dismantling plant are several times more onerous than those the less
legal operations burden themselves with. Also very different are the organiza-
tion of the physical spaces and the sheer scale of their operation. This hetero-
geneity in practice, but with sector-wide homogeneous representation of
illegality since 2014, has produced differing classifications and processes of
criminalization of dismantlers. For this reason, signs like the one that hangs
above the entrance to Stratus are a direct reproach to the negative stigma.

Family, Market, Politics

Maurício tells us that it was in the early 1980s that his father closed the bakery
he had at the time and opened the establishment on Avenida Vitrine. Seo
Joaquim’s junkyard has changed over time. All four of his children, three men
and a woman, have worked with their father at some point. The daughter
worked in human resources, while the eldest son, Chico, currently owns another
chop-shop on the avenue. It was the youngest, Maurício, who took over Stratus
and slowly grew the business. Today he is the sole owner. He worked with his
father while studying mechanical engineering in the mid-2000s:

I’ve always had memories of my father working with this. For me, he
always worked with this. […] I really started working when I was 18. [...]
You become interested, over time you change, then you really get into it.
Shortly after I finished college, at 23 or 24 years old, I started to really
take on the responsibilities at Stratus. My father stayed for a while, but
then he left. (Maurício, personal interview with researchers)

Stratus is not the only chop-shop that has passed “from father to son.” It is
common for chop-shops in São Paulo to be family businesses, inherited and
bound to the male leadership of the store and the corresponding leadership of
the family. The owners are usually white men and the employees are usually
not. Family and extended family do the administrative work, as with Joaquim’s
daughter in Stratus. The knowledge and industry expertise passed down
through the generations are essential for success in this business full of pecu-
liarities. The know-how acquired by the children, who start helping their
parents at a very young age, drives the family inheritance model more than a
nostalgic desire to continue a family legacy.
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  131

Maurício learned the trade “by osmosis” as he says, but more importantly,
he learned to deal with the negative stigma of the industry, and its impact on
his personal and business life. The modernizing of his father’s old dismantling
shop is driven by Maurício’s understanding of that harsh reality. And that is
why he is so actively involved in the business. He takes courses, studies spe-
cializations, travels abroad to see first-hand other industry models and learns
languages. He is also active in the SBD, an institution that he helped create.
In the early 1990s, in order to access the dismantling space in which a
maximum of 60 cars could be processed, it was still necessary to go through
a gate and up a diry ramp, which ended in an open car yard filled with dented
and picked-over cars (see Figure 5.1). Stairs that access the second floor and
large metal structures that divided the administrative space into small squares
have since replaced an asbestos tiled hovel. An entire floor is occupied by
computers that make for quick access to the inventory and shelves for orga-
nizing the many small parts. Next to the hovel of yesteryear there was a tap
for handwashing or getting a drink of water. Countless beaten up and dusty
cars were stacked upon each other and spare parts scattered on the floor made
up the landscape. Hoods, doors, and bumpers were piled on top of other cars.
Stratus has grown and changed a lot since then. Today the yard can handle
200 vehicles. On the January day of our visit, and as was usual during our ses-
sions together, Maurício invited us inside after a short conversation. We put

FIGURE 5.1  Stratus Desmanche in 1994.

Source: Maurício’s personal archives.
132  Stolen Cars

safely helmets on and walked inside slowly. The area was posted with access
restriction signs and reminders of the many mandatory safety and operating
procedures (see Figure 5.2).
Maurício proudly showed us the renovated space and explained how the
2018 Ford Ka would be dismantled. After being dropped just behind the
counter by the tow truck, the car is sent to the back of the store. Here the
space is organized into specific areas: a) a wide, open space intended for
heavier disassembly; b) a roofed area with three floors of metal shelves, those
seen from the sidewalk, with car bodies, mainly being popular models; c) an
outdoor disposal area, in which materials are separated: liquids such as oil and
gasoline, plastics, glass and other non-marketable components, organized to
be sold to scrap or recycling companies; d) a large shed with the parts removed
from the stripped vehicles, systematically organized onto smaller shelves. The
entire space is tidy and well organized, especially the covered areas.

FIGURE 5.2  Stratus Desmonte in 2019.

Source: Lucas Alves’s archive of ethnographic research. Green sign:
“SAFETY. Mandatory use of PPE.” Blue sign: “WARNING. Restricted area.”
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  133

Between 2010 and 2015 Stratus experienced its period of greatest growth.
Although Maurício is very critical of Brazil’s former center-left federal gov-
ernments, he recognizes that Stratus benefited greatly from that period of
economic growth and, above all, from the increased accessibility of the auto-
motive market. This is thanks to specific lines of credit that were made avail-
able to relatively poor Brazilians during the period that he calls, between
chuckles, Lulocrescimento – “Lula-growth”:

It was a time of big profits, big returns on investment, lots of sales and
lots of hires. We were not growing – we were exploding. Like it or not,
we had a high return on investment; that’s the most important thing.
How much you work and how much you get out of it. We achieved a
lot. I managed to grow; I’d say about 70 percent of what you see here
today [is from this period]. […] The biggest growth here was from
2010, when it started to verticalize. It has changed a lot. (Maurício)

Maurício tells us that the upgrading of the car yards was a business priority
even before the Dismantling Law of 2014. The law represents a landmark for
the sector, the conflicts around and impacts of which we will discuss later in
this chapter as well as in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7.

It can’t be the same as it used to be. Before it was simpler. Nowadays, with
all the bureaucratic burden and also the demand from customers … you
have to computerize, create some processes, control inventory … over
time we are modernizing. Bringing what was an informal economy, an
informal way of working, to a formalized economy. And when I’m saying
it in formal and informal terms, I’m not talking about bureaucracy, but
about the way of working. You make the oversight work a bit more pro-
fessional and so on. Good dismantlers are hard to find. (Maurício)

According to Maurício, the law “made it difficult for those who do the right
thing and changed nothing for those who do it all wrong.” With the industry
modernization process, employees who have what matters most in a disman-
tler, i.e., experience, have become less common. The expertise required to get
good deals, to price parts, to deal with the police, or to throw them off a trail
are all increasingly rare.2 These are the costs you pay to distance yourself from
a negative image and to position yourself alongside honest actors in the sec-
tor. It is not enough to be honest. It is also necessary to appear honest – and
that requires important economic investments. A messy courtyard with
stacked cars stinks of illegality. A well-organized yard with modern technical
and bureaucratic processes will come across as above board even if it trades in
illegal parts.
134  Stolen Cars

After the enactment of the Dismantling Law, the São Paulo state govern-
ment initiated an intense offensive against illegal establishments. Many chop-
shops were closed, and the operations were widely reported in the press.3 The
offensive was the end result of political conflicts that we will learn about in
Chapter 6 and was part of a broader strategy by the state government to
increase the profile of the Secretary of Public Security, Alexandre de Moraes.
He subsequently became Minister of Justice in 2016 and a Supreme Federal
Court Justice in 2017.
Even though Maurício wasn’t involved in illegally operating a car disman-
tling business, stolen though the cars he dismantled may have been, he fol-
lowed the operations nervously, as any repercussions would ripple across the
sector. Even though he welcomes the increased activity of the Government of
São Paulo in the fight against crime, and specifically in dismantling, Maurício
has reservations about the requirements that accompanied the 2014 Law:

It is a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucratic time-wasting. There’s a lot

and it’s really difficult, for those who don’t have a way of coping, a criti-
cal sense, some common sense, it’s a real nuisance. You have to have
common sense when dealing with some situations, some out there
within the system. Unfortunately, if you stick 100 percent to the letter
of the law, the system itself will block you. The legal system itself, they
don’t give you answers to what you should do, what you might need. So
you have to find your own way to get there, otherwise you are lost. […]
I don’t have the view, as many people do, that the dismantling industry
today is much better than it used to be. It’s not. Sometimes you do not
have the need for the business to modernize in such a way, unnecessarily,
it is almost an aesthetic issue. I don’t see the need to change that much.
You can look at other countries, the USA, Canada, Portugal … they are
more archaic than us. It is because there is no need for modernization.
Here, we paid the cost of a type of modernization that, in fact, did not
bring a return to those who were most interested, which is the customer.
[…] They are bureaucratic investments, like it or not, that do not gener-
ate a return. A waste of time, loss of money. Unlike when you make an
investment, and that investment leads to the efficiency of the process, it
generates something, like some work tool. Now when you only invest to
comply with legal norms, it usually doesn’t do you any good. (Maurício)

Maurício understood that adapting to the law is important, but less for
economic efficiency and more for the appearance of legality. He understood,
even more deeply, that it is necessary to deal with the law strategically. He
took care of all the necessary upgrades – installing the new floor, the oil tanks,
and the water tank system – and took charge of keeping the dismantling work
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  135

within legal requirements. This has been a live issue in the reorganization of
the dismantling market since the 2014 Law.

Between Extremes: From “Recicla” to “Sheds”

With much more money than Maurício to invest, Recicla Desmonte Sustentável
(“Recycle Sustainable Dismantlers”) is a vehicle dismantling company belong-
ing to the Alvorada Seguros group. Recicla’s public image is built around envi-
ronmental sustainability. On each of our visits to the company’s headquarters
we were met by uniformed managers, mostly white men aged between 30 and
40, who were fluent in the corporate rhetoric of social responsibility. On each
of the visits we made to Recicla, over a period of two years, these managers
unfailingly emphasized the distinction between their employer and most chop-
shops. They stressed that they are registered with the competent authority, their
employees are legally employed and highly qualified, they strictly follow envi-
ronmental regulations, and they operate fully within the law.
They also emphasized their concern for safety and customer satisfaction,
guaranteeing the origin of the parts. Recicla is located in the West Zone, right
next to the yard where Auction Corp auctions Alvorada cars. Large transpor-
tation hubs and the distribution centers of large companies distinguish the
area. Recicla’s location is strategic, just a few meters from a Highway and a
few kilometers from the Marginal Tietê – the main expressway in the city of
São Paulo. As we travel the streets and avenues around Recicla we see large
sheds and truck yards filled with cars and trucks.
The façade of Recicla is carefully painted with its name in yellow and blue,
there are some large trees and a well-kept lawn. Upon entering the grounds, we
climb the stairs of the two-story building, where there is a reception and, next
to it, a large exposed BMW engine. Recicla dissassembles all types of cars from
popular inexpensive models to imported high-value cars. The parts are sold
through their website or the WhatsApp application, and can be delivered all
over Brazil. Engines are their bread and butter. A Mercedes-Benz engine can
cost at the dealership USD 17,500.00 (70 MW). At Recicla, an engine from
the same year would cost USD 4,500.00 (18 MW), 25.7 percent of the value.
On our first visit, the first area shown to us was the spacious and clean shed
where the cars are disassembled. The area is detailed in yellow while the floors
are white and waterproof with a collection system for car fluids. Only uni-
formed personnel are allowed to enter this place, dressed like the employees
we met on that first day. The car that arrives at Recicla to be dismantled first
goes through the documentation process, the registration of the vehicle with
the regulatory body known as DETRAN. Then it goes to the decontamina-
tion section inside the shed where the fluids are removed, and it is cleaned.
136  Stolen Cars

After that it goes to the primary disassembly section where the v­ehicle is
mounted on hydraulic elevators and the “large assemblies” are removed. Then
the car goes to the secondary disassembly and the “break down” occurs.
At that point, parts of the “large assemblies” such as the engine and the
gearbox, are separated. Safety items that cannot be sold to end consumers are
also removed. The removed parts are graded according to their level of dam-
age; they are classified and labeled as minimal, average, or expendable. Finally,
they move on to the large and itemized inventory. The shelves are tall, metal,
and green. The parts are placed on pallets. To make it easy for employees to
find the parts each part is kept in its appropriate location and inventoried in
a computer system.
The processes at Recicla, therefore, appear more “legal” than even the
modernized version of Stratus Desmonte. At Recicla, there are no threats of
police investigations and the requisite kickbacks. At Stratus things are still
very different. All the dismantlers on Avenida Vitrine still need to deal with
the police, although in very different way from the undisclosed, secret dis-
mantling of the past. All the dismantlers face the threat of fines and even
closure. The shop owners call the avenue an “auto-parts shopping center”
precisely because there is more “inspection” here than in other lesser-known
and lower-profile chop-shops. In this case “inspection” not refers only to its
standard definition of examination, scrutiny or review; it is also the emic term
that designates the regular trading of “political merchandise” in the protec-
tion markets (Misse 2006). For each illegal market there will be a protection
market. We will study them in detail in Chapter 6.
“There’s no other way. Everyone pays a caixinha [a regular bribe to police
officers, both civilian and military]. You have to pay it if you want to work
easily,” a worker who dismantles cars at Stratus once told us. Every morning,
this same employee takes a walk around the yard to check that the police have
not thrown stolen parts into the yard. The police have done it before and then
demanded large payments to not close the chop-shop and arrest employees
for “receiving stolen parts.”
Maurício fiddled with a bullet-shaped pen while he was telling us these
stories about the transformation of the family’s dismantling business in his
spacious second floor office. Shooting is one of his hobbies and one of his
passions. The office is decorated in a combination military, automotive
motif. A miniature of a white Ford Corcel sits on the work-table as an hom-
age to his father who owned a similar car. Maurício tells us that he highly
values family, is conservative, and sympathizes with the Brazilian “new right,”
protagonists of the political scene since 2013. Incredible as it may seem those
same political sensibilities are shared with the corrupt policemen who haunt
Stratus Desmonte.
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  137

The young businessman says he supports neoliberal thinking. When com-

plaining about bureaucracy and taxes, especially after the implementation of
the Dismantling Law, he argues that State agencies should interfere less in his
business. Paradoxically, he supports more State intervention in industry
inspection and the punishment of those involved in illegal dismantling.
Supporters of the “Brazilian new right” like Maurício divide the world into
honest and dishonest men, upstanding citizens and bandits, and want a State
that prioritizes security and justice. Everything else should be left to the free
market. This ultra-neoliberal thinking about the economy that is socially
conservative and punitive in matters of security is not, therefore, an individ-
ual characteristic of Maurício.
This thinking has dominated public debate and been a central tenet of
government policy since 2016 and above all since the election of Jair Bolsonaro
to the presidency of the republic in 2018. This political posture not only
demands, but also legitimizes a repressive and lethal police response to the
theft and robbery of vehicles, as we saw in Chapter 2. Maurício also believes
that there are good men in the police who would put an end to police corrup-
tion if they had more power. Friend/foe thinking leaves no room for nuance.
Maurício does not feel like he encourages car theft or makes money from it
because he works within the letter of the law. Maurício is dismantling the
2018 Ford Ka violently stolen from Diego but the car has already gone through
a process of legalization. It has already been bought and sold by insurers and
auctioneers. The moral problem, in Maurício’s perspective, would be to dis-
mantle illegal cars in respect of which no official “bribe” had been paid to the
“elites.” “We are honest here,” say our interviewees on Avenida Vitrine when
differentiating themselves from the chop-shops registered in other more crim-
inalized regions of the city.
We also conducted field research on Avenida Riacho, one of the roads with
an image of illegality. It was not difficult to hear reports that many of the parts
sold there “had blood on them.” In one of the site visits, we found an HB20
2014 engine, 1.0, like João’s, stolen by Grandão and Adriano and recovered by
the insurer. The engine could be purchased, in a dark, dusty chop-shop, for
just USD 375.00 (1.5 MW). At the dealership, it would be at least four times
more expensive. We talked to Maurício about the price the next day. Upon
hearing the amount, he opened his eyes wide and quickly asked for the invoice.
“Did you ask to see the invoice?” That same engine was sold at Stratus for at
least USD 800.00, or 3.6 MW. If it had low mileage, it could sell for as high
as USD 1,000.00, or 4 MW. “That price is very strange,” Maurício warned us.
He’s right. Imagining that we wanted to change a damaged engine, the
Avenida Riacho attendant had asked us to bring our “block” (the base of the
engine) with us when we went to buy theirs so they could retouch the original
138  Stolen Cars

chassis numbering. He said this as if it were something ordinary, absolutely

normal, a service commonly provided. Seeing our look of surprise – the prac-
tice of renumbering chassis is completely illegal – the attendant offered a
justification. He said that if we were to officially retouch the number, as
required by law, we would have to spend between USD 200.00 and USD
250.00 more, in addition to wasting a lot of time dealing with government
bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, extra money – for what? At the shop on Riacho it
was uncomplicated, cheap and the part would be perfectly retouched.
Owners and employees of shops on Avenida Riacho told us that working
with stolen parts is just part of doing business. If you don’t use stolen parts, you
can’t compete. “How is it going to stop, in Brazil, if the example comes from up
there?” “Up there” referred to the corruption in the upper echelons of Brazilian
politics. Widespread public corruption legitimizes small-scale corruption.
There are shops open for business on Avenida Riacho, albeit illegal ones. The
shops provide invoices to customers, even if they do not have invoices for the
original procurement of parts. Considered even more illegal than Avenida
Riacho are the auto parts that come out of the so-called sheds with their clan-
destine dismantling, generally located on the outskirts of the city.

***

Far from Avenida Riacho, in the East Zone, a small door between tightly
clustered houses hides the back entrance to one of these sheds. We are in the
same place where Adriano had taken Seo Cláudio’s Fiat Strada, stolen in
October 2018. The car had already been dissembled and its parts were bun-
dled into what is usually called a “package” in the sector. A package is a set of
disassembled parts packed together and wrapped in bubble wrap or card-
board. For deliveries within the metropolitan area these packages are trans-
ported in Volkswagen buses and old but normal-looking trucks that will not
arouse suspicion. For trips outside the state, they are shipped in trucks.
An auto-parts store in Belém, Pará state, 3,500 km from São Paulo, had
contacted Guto about getting parts from popular car models. Guto is a thin,
dark, male, of medium height, aged 48, from São Paulo’s outskirts. He parks
his truck in front of the shed but does not get out of the vehicle. Wearing jeans
and a black shirt, he is agitated, impatient, constantly fiddling with his cell
phone. He has three teenage children, attends a Pentecostal church, and just
over two years ago, he lost his steady job as a driver for a major transportation
company. He had then resolved to pull the money together to buy his own
truck – a long-held dream of his. Guto didn’t want to have a boss anymore.
Considering the country’s economic crisis, owning his own truck might be his
best alternative. Most of Brazil’s transport is by road and he would no longer
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  139

be an employee; he would be an entrepreneur. He spoke about his decision in

the church and received the support of his fellow church-goers. With the sev-
erance pay from his previous job Guto put down money on a used truck – a
2011 VW 2426. He financed the rest of the amount with a loan.
Guto knew that many truck drivers were involved in illegal schemes. He
heard the gossip from neighbors and former coworkers in the East Zone. He
avoided illegal work as best he could but after a year of struggling to find jobs,
he decided to accept an invitation to transport parts of stolen cars to outside
the state of São Paulo. That was why Guto had arrived at the shed: to load the
stolen parts that were to be taken thousands of kilometers away, to Belém do
Pará in northern Brazil.
Not all “loading” situations are as tense as this one. It is usually a relaxed
affair and done in broad daylight as clandestine dismantlers protect them-
selves by arranging payments to the local police. In most cases there is com-
plete trust among those involved in the operation and vehicles can pass
through the streets with no fear of legal repercussions. But in this case Guto
had been informed at the last minute via WhatsApp that he should bring the
truck inside the shed. As this had not been discussed earlier Guto thought it
could be a trap. But seeing he had no choice Guto went around the block and
came to a bigger door that was already open. He entered. The moment was
fraught with tension, he tells us.
Guto liked none of this but for a freelancer like himself it was always the
illegal freight that paid the best. Despite the risks involved, minimized with
counterfeit invoices and police bribes, these were the jobs that paid his bills
– including the load on this truck itself. With time and his situation improv-
ing Guto planned to carry only legal cargo. Who knows, with more time, he
might even own a small transport company. We took note of several situa-
tions during the course of our field research where small shops and enterprises
expanded the legal side of their business by investing profits earned in illegal
activities. Therefore, illegal markets also often provide the seed capital for
legal businesses.
On that day packages from 20 different cars were loaded, almost all pro-
cured from theft. The traceable parts (such as the transmission and the
engine, which have serial numbers) are organized so that they are in the
middle of the truck, more hidden. Benches, upholstery and other pieces that
do not have numbers are loaded closest to the truck door. The practice
makes it more difficult for inspectors to find anomalies easily. The disman-
tled Strada was loaded quickly and then shipped thousands of kilometers to
the north of Brazil. Seo Cláudio would never know how many cars, in how
many regions of Brazil, would use the parts from his stolen Strada in the
following years.
140  Stolen Cars

Guto’s trip to Belém went smoothly. Incidentally, in all of 2019 Guto

never once had a problem with inspection. If he does get inspected on his
travels, he knows he needs to try to bribe the police or the weigh station staff.
There is a good chance that it will work. Anyway, it was not long before Guto
realized that he could avoid making these trips himself yet continue making
money from the work. In 2020, Guto began hiring other people to transport
the stolen parts and moved into a management role: he talks to one guy,
negotiates with another guy, and arranges all the logistics. The activity is
extremely profitable and tempting, especially for those with a lot of debt, as
is the case with him and one of his main partners. As we have already seen
several times in this book, the most experienced operators and those in a bet-
ter financial position outsource the greatest risks to some poorer individual
who has no choice but to face them.
On that trip to Belém, Guto received 12 MW (USD 3,000.00) and it cost
him a week of work. For gas and tolls he paid almost 2 MW (USD 500.00).
In talking with Guto we find that the packages’ final destinations are varied.
São Paulo is the most important city for the national auto-parts economy and
hub of the international market. Throughout the year Guto traveled to Bahia,
Espírito Santo, Rio Grande do Sul, Pará, Maranhão and Mato Grosso. Within
his network, many people occupy many different roles in the same supply
chain. There are people who only place orders for thefts or steal vehicles,
people who only dismantle or make agreements with the police. Once en
route there are those who are “scouts” who watch the sheds and there are
those who transport the “little pieces” (as operators call auto parts to avoid
arousing suspicion), there are those who issue the false invoices, those who
sell and those who take care of logistics. These operators do not necessarily
know each other, and each one gets a payment agreed upon by the appropri-
ate parties and according to the needs of each trip. For each new enterprise
the risks and benefits are recalculated.
Guto explained to us that he made a habit of traveling with valid invoices
for parts of legal origin as a way to appease inspectors. He would get the
invoices from a legal chop-shop. Guto also tells us that in 2020 he finished
paying off his first truck and bought a second one, this time a Scania that cost
him USD 75,000.00 (300 MW). Business is going well. The parts from Seo
Cláudio’s Fiat Strada, originally packaged in the eastern part of the city are
now circulating in different cities in the interior of the Amazon region. The
money that Seo Cláudio lost when his car was stolen has since been paid out
to each of the operators in the long illegal supply chain. His loss also subsidizes
underpriced auto parts all around the country. It gave a needed economic
boost to various small businesses and created income for several families.

***
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  141

Maurício draws a clear distinction between himself, the warehouses of Avenida

Riacho, and the illegal sheds. The former is a place for men who honor hon-
esty, rectitude, and legality. Although our stolen Ford Ka left some money at
Stratus, and not all of his avenue’s dismantlers are fully “legalized” and regis-
tered – some were even shuttered until they met the requirements of the new
law – the rhetoric of our interviewees on Avenida Vitrine unfailingly stressed
the importance of legality. They are well aware that illegality opens the door
to increased criminality in all aspects of their business dealings and conse-
quently the need to deal with the police on a daily basis.4
On the other hand, illegal activities are at the core of the economic effi-
ciency of this market: they pull prices down and push profit rates up. Illegal
activities also develop talented tradesmen. Employees who cut their teeth in
illegal sheds can dismantle a car and produce a highly priced package in less
than two hours. The parts are often already packed before the owners even
realize their car has been stolen. Professionals of that caliber are also interested
in work in the formal market. At Stratus, some of the employees have worked
dismantling stolen cars, where they honed their skills. Maurício, in his long
experience in the sector, is familiar with how illegal price reduction “schemes”
work and is able to recognize the origin of parts by their sale prices alone.
Illegality creates a more vibrant, dynamic economy for the dismantlers and
used auto-parts tradesmen. Theft makes for a more competitive market.
Consumers want the low prices for the usually new, quality, and original auto
parts. Maurício says with certainty that illegal dismantling is the most profitable
and the most economically efficient. His sympathy for a more punitive treatment
of illegality is mostly driven by his great competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the
illegal chop-shops. If clandestine dismantling in sheds is more profitable than
legal dismantling at Stratus, what can we say about Recicla? We were accompa-
nied to his shop by German researchers when Maurício tells us in English that
Recicla “is not able to make a profit.” With their sophisticated and costly opera-
tion Recicla makes a loss and can only work “in the red.” Recicla does not need
to make agreements with the police and as part of a large insurance group they
can get cars for much cheaper prices than Maurício. But those cars are not cheaper
than the stolen cars procured by clandestine chop-shops.
In an interview with a former Alvorada vehicle insurance director, he said:
“We see Recicla as a manifestation of corporate social and environmental
responsibility. It serves our brand and our image. We are not looking to make
money from it.” However, when we repeated that comment to the manager
at Recicla in early 2017 he laughed out loud: “Sure, our boss usually says that
to an outside audience, but to us he says it is a business and that we have to
make a profit.” It is not by chance that Recicla was created in 2013, at a time
of wide debate about the Dismantling Law and served as a model for the
legislation supported by the insurance sector.
142  Stolen Cars

The ecologically sustainable image of Recicla is important to Alvorada

Seguros, and it contributes to society by creating good, legal jobs. But beyond
the corporate rhetoric, Recicla has tried to build a legal business model that
can compete with the illegal dismantlers and become profitable by scaling up.
The Recicla manager said that in 2017, 15 cars were being scrapped per week
and that the goal for the following year would be to dismantle 400 cars per
week. The manager spoke to us several times about the size of the auto-parts
market in Brazil, and how these billions of dollars were in the hands of “ban-
dits” today. In those conversations, these “bandits” were framed as market
competitors and their illegality was not negatively judged in moral terms.
This same manager at Recicla was well versed in the intricacies of illegal
markets. He knew how to identify a thief by his “specialization” and the way he
committed his crimes. His perspective was very different from the dominant
public debate, in which thieves are considered savage, immoral, irrational, and
violent. For managers we spoke with in 2017 and 2018, Recicla’s main competi-
tor was the illegal automobile industry, the “Robauto” as they called it. They
tried to face off against illegal actors with recourse to economic competence.
However, on our last visit to Recicla we found that the competition had
proved to be too strong. In 2019, Recicla dismantled a mere 20 cars a week, 20
times less than its capacity. The business was in crisis – although the environ-
mental rhetoric flowed unabated. Since it was linked to a very profitable busi-
ness, Recicla could afford the losses and had not yet closed its doors. The “should
be” of the dismantling world, long idealized by the Government and mainstream
industry leaders, was no longer an economically viable company. Despite all the
efforts by large, legal, and mainstream economic actors in the industry, “Robauto”
continued to be the economic center of the auto-parts market.
It seems that the civilized capitalist Dr. Jekyll dismantlers had yet to
move in and edge out their violent Mr. Hyde peers. The ambiguous role of
the police forces, with their protection rackets, have played a key part in
keeping things as they are. The continuum of police behavior, from the
most above-board to the most corrupt, corresponds to dismantler profiles,
from the most legal to the most illegal. In Maurício’s ideal world, he would
avoid criminal elements and run a shop that “appears” legal. He would also
look for an economic boost for the business, something illegal parts provide
like nothing else. We don’t know if the Avenida Vitrine chop-shops sell
illegal parts, but we do know that our stolen 2018 Ford Ka was being legally
dismantled there. We also know that some of those shops had been closed
for running afoul of the law and we know that civilian and military police
patrol the area and frequently find stolen parts. In an attempt to avoid
police patrols, Maurício participated in the creation of the SBD, an organi-
zation that aims to remove the stench of illegality from the sector while
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  143

maintaining its economic efficiency. Its members know that to develop the
SBD it is necessary to become involved in politics, as the high operators
already do, as we will see in later chapters.

Prices and Stratification

Maurício needs to be more economically efficient than Recicla and more legal
than the most clandestine chop-shops. Stratus must look like the former and
compete on prices with the latter. But it is very difficult to compete with both
of these opposing business models. Recicla is backed by a large insurance
company and the police. The chop-shops and sheds are backed by a large
criminal organization, the PCC, and its weapons. Maurício competes for the
space in-between different groups and different power regimes.
Maurício does not offer a standard price list in Stratus. The price of a part
is decided at the moment of sale and is at the discretion of the salesman.
Exchanging parts between models is common in the automobile industry. It
is common for a Ford Ka part to fit into a Ford Fiesta, or for the same manu-
facturer to sell to different brands and automakers. For this reason an experi-
enced salesman well versed in such minutiae is worth his weight in gold.
Monitoring the operation at Stratus we noted sale prices for the 2018 Ford
Ka parts compared to sale prices in other chop-shops (see Table 5.1).
While Maurício can’t compete on prices with the small illegal chop-shops
that are found throughout the city and dismantle the majority of cars in São
Paulo, his sales strategy is to differentiate himself from the shops that sell
“parts with blood on them.” A dismantler like Stratus operates in a market
determined by unique social and economic dynamics. Prices are determined
not just by legal markets or state intervention but also by competition with
illegal markets that are regulated by criminal gangs and are at the mercy of
police discretion.
It is important to note that street-level police officer behavior is not to be
confused with the official policies set by the police institution itself. Street-
level police officers work at the point of interface between legal norms and
criminal codes of behavior and must know how and when to act under one
set of rules or the other. The paramount role of the police in classifying dis-
mantling establishments through selective enforcement and the impact of
that classification on daily business, underscores the interface between a
properly legal regime and a properly criminal one. Police groups that sell
protection to chops-shops, such as militias in Rio de Janeiro,5 extort both
legal and illegal owners. The genesis of their protection is their control of
deadly weapons.
TABLE 5.1  Comparison between prices for identical parts by type of dismantling operation in São Paulo.
144  Stolen Cars

Authorized Ford Recicla Stratus Des- Stratus Des- Illegal warehouses

dealership Desmonte monte monte [online,
[new part] Sustentável [physical store, [online, used part,
[used part] used part] used part] lowest price found]
Air compressor 733.75 225.00 137.50 125.00 13.80
[2018 Ford Ka – USD]
Air compressor 2.94 0.90 0.55 0.50 0.045
[2018 Ford Ka – MW]
Price difference 100 29 19 17 1.8
[percentage]
Price difference 53 16 10 9 1
[multiple]

Source: The authors, based on ethnographic data obtained from dismantlers, complemented by online search (2018–2020).
 Dismantling a Stolen Car  145

Without the normative regimes’ approach, it would be very difficult to

understand how the system works. State/legal, criminal and police normative
behaviors coexist in the dismantling market. Their very different logics of
regulation design the market. This normative triangulation between the State,
the world of crime and the market agents defines daily life and its discourses
in the city’s peripheries (Beraldo 2020). Each regime defines its own moral
code – different ideas of justice and acceptable behavior. Maurício feels com-
pletely removed from the theft of the Ford Ka even as he disassembles it.
Recicla could be doing the same. The regimes don’t just operate in the moral
and administrative realms that create codes of conduct and a sense of justice.
They also operate in monetized markets. If Maurício does not pay the police,
his business could be inspected by the state administration, his livelihood
could be put in jeopardy and he could face legal sanctions. If Guto and his
drivers do not pay off the cops he too could face arrest and prosecution.
Money in these cases clearly plays a fundamental role in mediating urban
conflict (Feltran 2014).
However different Recicla is from the illegal sheds that send parts to be
resold on Avenida Riacho, however distant Stratus is from illegality, they still
share the same market. They also share the same city, country and world, all
of which are connected by these markets. A disconnection from the roles we
play in this system seems to be a prerequisite for defining violence as belong-
ing to “the other” – especially those who “look like” criminals. Maurício’s
employees are unlikely to be victims of the spectacular police operations so
common on Brazilian police television programs or YouTube. Their faces will
not be broadcast to millions as heavily armed police ask if they already have a
criminal record. The employees at clandestine chop-shops and sheds are those
that appear on these programs, as we will see in Chapter 6.
During our first field visits, our interviewees classified dismantlers into
two types: legal and illegal. Our research reveals a more complex, situational
tapestry. João’s stolen HB20 generated a lot of money for auctioneers and
insurance companies, as we saw in the previous chapter; the Ford Ka stolen
from Diego helped Stratus Desmanche to distance itself from the “world of
crime”; the Fiat Strada stolen from Seo Claudio gave Guto’s legal enterprise a
needed boost; and the Fiat Palio stolen from Sergio earned Israel some money.
On the distant Avenida Riacho, in February 2019, the eve of Carnival, we
asked a young black employee when the chop-shop could deliver us the HB20
1.0 engine with the retouched chassis serial numbers. Neither the black
employee, nor two other black employees could answer – they immediately
looked at a white man, around 50 years old, the owner of the store. He answered
for them – “our associates don’t work during Carnival … come back after Ash
Wednesday when things are back to normal.” The engine would be ready. The
146  Stolen Cars

owner used the verb “to work,” often used in the São Paulo criminal world as a
contextual substitute for “to steal.” Maurício understands this multiplicity of
normativities, interests and actors in the struggle. He understands how politics
defines these situations and he also understands that politics are often practiced
outside official channels.

Notes

  1. These figures were given to us during interviews with two executives from Alvorada
Seguros. They did not provide details, citing a need for market secrecy.
  2. One of the employees at Stratus told us that he used to do a specific job of remark-
ing engine part serial numbers, a job they call “pinout.” The engines arrived at the
chop-shops for resale and he had to remark the parts using metal pins. He doesn’t
know anyone on Avenida Vitrine who does that.
  3. The Civil Police talked about “Operation Dismantling” and the press improved the
image of the then Secretary of Public Security: http://www.folhadomotorista.com.
br/index.php/sao-paulo/1792-operacao-desmanche-apreende-mais-de-r-6-milhoes-
em-pecas.html.
  4. It is well known that clandestine dismantlers are not only hidden in large sheds in
industrial areas, but also in small garages or backyards, at the back of houses in the
periphery or even in wealthy regions of the city. Rubem, whom we know from
Chapter 1, delivered stolen cars as a teenager to the heart of the Avenida Paulista
area, one of the most traditional, wealthy, and protected neighborhoods in the
capital.
  5. The contexts of the “world of crime” in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are very
different. In Rio, for four decades, armed conflict between criminal and police
groups has produced an urban war (Arias and Barnes 2017; Grillo 2013; Lyra
2013). In São Paulo, especially from the 2000s onwards, the legitimacy of the PCC
in the slums meant that it was less violent; the lowest members of the gang are not
even armed (Feltran 2011; Hirata 2018; Willis 2015). A productive comparison
between illegal markets and their forms of regulation in the two richest states in
Brazil was made by Hirata and Grillo (2017, 2019).
CHAPTER 6

Regulating an Illegal Market

Luana Motta, Janaina Maldonado, and Juliana
Alcântara

The car recycling market has recently undergone several changes. These
changes result from laws that could have destroyed our sector, but we
have reacted with the aim of defending the livelihood we have relied on
for years, if not generations. Our goal has always been to show society
that there have always been companies that have acted legally, ethically
and with appropriate values. With that in mind, we have been able to
create the conditions to show who is working within the law and who is
not. Today, we are partners with [transit regulator] DETRAN-SP.
Through the organization of our market, it has been possible to reduce
the number of thefts in São Paulo state. (SBD Magazine, 2017)

Around 2003, the trade in stolen cars and parts became a “public problem” in
São Paulo. Thefts were on the rise so economic and political elites organized a
response. Regulation and/or closure of the used-car-parts market emerged as
the main solutions to the problem. It took a decade before the conflicts and
political alliances concerning the regulation and/or criminalization of the
market finally led to the Dismantling Law of January 2, 2014.
Its objective was to reduce car thefts in São Paulo state. It was drafted as a
means of controlling the entire market chain connected to the dismantling
yards and resale stores where so many of the cars stolen in the state end up.
Once it had come into force in São Paulo state, significant political efforts
were made to turn it into a federal law. This was achieved at the end of 2014.1
As we have seen, the owner of Stratus Desmanche (which we will refer to
as “Stratus” from now on) is Maurício, one of the new generation of Brazilian

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
148  Stolen Cars

entrepreneurs who claim to be economically liberal and socially conservative.

He was in favor of the dismantling market being regulated even though he
had been negatively affected by the Dismantling Law. The requirements that
the law placed on small and medium-sized warehouses and dismantling plants
had put many out of business. Maurício found a way to respond to the law
through politics – and not through the invisible hand of the market. He was
a founding member of the Brazilian Union of Dismantler Owners (SBD).
The SBD claims to “organize” the vehicle recycling market. In practical terms,
this means putting pressure on politicians and government agencies so that
the sector can continue to operate while sharing the know-how needed to
modernize the dismantling operations that it describes as “old-fashioned” and
“junkyards.”
In this chapter, we consider the Dismantling Law through the journey of
the Ford Ka stolen from Uber driver Diego in the East Zone. The car arrived
at Stratus and underwent registration and the labeling of its parts for resale.
Traceability labels are the main technical device for the implementation of the
Dismantling Law. We seek to reveal the power struggles and money battles
behind the Dismantling Law by focusing on traceability labels. Prior to the
Law, the dismantling market was highly susceptible to illegality, as might be
expected from a market in stolen car parts. This has led to a conflict between
actors competing for economic and political gains from illegal money.
This conflict determines the workability of any law that seeks to govern the
market in question. Legal and illegal actors are equal participants in the forma-
tion, enforcement, and practicality of such a law. This conflict surrounding the
Dismantling Law transformed police officers (as opposed to the police as an
institution) into privileged actors in the regulation of dismantling markets. The
power ceded to them by this and other laws has become more visible in recent
years as the police gain greater autonomy and importance as political actors in
urban Brazil. It is no coincidence that far-right police officers have been one of
the main pillars of support for state and federal governments since 2018. Their
political base is well constructed and they have the material means to impose
the normative regime that is their political project. As Michel Misse explains
(Misse 2006, 2008), for an illegal market to work, there must always be an
directly associated protection market trading in “political merchandises.”
As a last resort, and in order to safeguard an illegal market by providing it
with the necessary guarantees for its operation, the use of force can be hired
to ensure continuous accumulation. For Misse, the trade in “political goods”
implies the expropriation of the function of the use of force and arms, which
is normally the prerogative of the State. In other words, illegality is trans-
formed into a market activity that involves the private appropriation of, and
trade in, the State’s primary function of monopolizing the use of legitimate
 Regulating an Illegal Market  149

force in a given territory. The actors best able to effectively sell these political
goods in exchange for money are the front-line (individual) police officers,
who are in the process of being organized institutionally by their superiors
within the (corporate) police force.
The day-to-day experience of the Dismantling Law that we have observed
ethnographically allows us to discuss both the regulation of illegal markets –
an important theme that remains little studied – and the unintended political
effects of market regulation. The term “regulation” as we use it here is not
simply imposed by the State in a top-down fashion. Rather, it constitutes a
play between the rules of the State and the way in which different normative
regimes respond to those rules. Regulation arises from everyday power con-
flicts and interactions between ordinary people and actors specialized in eco-
nomic activities, laws, bureaucratic structures, the State, religious activities
and criminal activities, among others.
When the law changes, the boundaries of enforcement and trade in politi-
cal goods also change, as we saw in the previous chapter. As a result, “differ-
ential management of illegalisms” (Foucault 1999) redraws the boundaries
between legal and illegal, as well as the ways force is used to protect illegal
markets. When the law changes, the Avenida Riacho dismantling yards that
have a legal façade and even people like Maurício, who really are looking to
maintain fully legal operations, have to restructure both technically and
administratively. The political conflicts underlying this restructuring concern
the control of the impacts of the law on the ground, manifested in relations
with street-level bureaucrats. Technical details vis-à-vis such minutiae as
traceability labels are politically important for the mechanisms that reproduce
social inequalities and urban violence.

A Brief Chronology of the Dismantling Law

The origin of the Dismantling Law goes back to 2003, when state assembly
members from the PT (Worker’s Party), then in opposition, sponsored a bill
that provided for car parts traceability labeling. The political conflict between
the PT and the PSDB, the hegemonic party in São Paulo, meant that the bill
was not passed until 2007. The 2007 bill didn’t stick. A new bill on the same
subject emerged in 2010 but was voted down. Punitive and neoliberal political
groupings had by this stage taken command of the Assembly. The 2014 passed
into law and then “stuck” thanks to political articulation from a series of other
major interests, only one of which was the State (see Table 6.1). The lack of this
type of political articulation was the reason for the failure of previous attempts
to regulate the dismantling market.
150  Stolen Cars

TABLE 6.1  Timeline of the Dismantling Law.

Year Action
1986 The law established only that the repair shops that carried out
vehicle dismantling had to register in the
Criminal Investigations Department (DEIC).
1997 The Brazilian Traffic Code is approved. Procedures are es-
tablished for disposing of salvaged car parts. The DETRANs
become responsible for inspection.
2003 1st Dismantling Bill, proposed by center-left congressman. It
is vetoed by the governor, who is linked to liberal conservative
sectors.
2004 CPMI of the “Saved Cars.”
Over the course of a year, senators and federal deputies listen
to several actors to investigate complaints from one of the most
important newspapers of the largest television network in Brazil
about the commercialization of stolen parts and the legalization
of stolen cars. Insurance companies, dismantles, auctions and
supervisory bodies would be involved.
2007 After pressure from the legislature of the State of São Paulo,
the Law of 2003 is passed. But it’s a law that doesn’t work in the
practice.
2009 CPI Insurance.
It investigates fraud committed by insurers resulting in the con-
viction of executives linked to one of the largest insurers in the
country.
2010 The disputes between the two alternatives for dismantling are
deepened: pressing stolen vehicles or regulating markets by
tracking pieces.
2011 A right-wing congressman presents at the federal level a bill to
regulate the dismantling.
2012 At the federal level, a bill is proposed in favor of pressing ve-
hicles and selling as scrap. The proposal is prepared by sectors
linked to conservative and punitive sectors.
2013 The governor of the State of São Paulo determines that all
severely beaten up vehicles in the state must be sold as scrap.
In reaction to the governor’s decree, businessmen in the dis-
mantling sector create the SBD.
2014 Enters into force the approved “Law of Dismantling” in the
State of São Paulo based on the 2011 project.
2016 Traceable labels are implemented as the technological device
for inspecting parts sold in dismantles.

Source: The authors.

 Regulating an Illegal Market  151

Nonetheless, the regulatory model established by the Dismantling Law did

not receive unanimous support. Diverse and divergent economic and political
interests were at stake. Disputes over market regulation are not just centered
on the State. Various power regimes compete to define the nature of the mar-
ket and how it should function. Each new bill presented to the Assembly
frames the day-to-day experience of dismantling activities and the potential
for accumulation of the parties involved. The debates on the Dismantling Law
have given rise to two schools of thought on the matter:

School of Thought No. 1:  All salvage vehicles should be crushed so that
they can only be sold for scrap. According to the hypothesis underlying
this view, scrapped cars cannot return to the market, this leads to the
supply of parts to dismantlers being reduced and this leads to the stolen
car parts circuit being restricted;
School of Thought No. 2:  The used-car-parts market must be regulated and
dismantlers brought to heel by means of regulatory standards enforced
through parts traceability labeling. According to the hypothesis underlying
this view, the auto-parts market is a thriving market that creates jobs, profits,
and taxes and therefore should be regulated to prevent illegal activities.
As debates over the regulation of the market have developed, its under-exploited
economic potential has become increasingly evident and disputes over it have
intensified. The proposal to crush salvage vehicles and sell them as scrap threat-
ened the very existence of the dismantling industry, and thus the livelihoods of
Maurício and his peers. The SBD was created specifically to challenge it. The
SBD became an important opposition voice and source of alternative propos-
als. Auctions were also threatened by the proposal, as crushing salvage cars
would reduce their revenues. Even though scrap metal is also auctioned, prices
are much lower than for whole cars and auctioneers live on commission.
Another relevant actor, the insurance sector, was interested in finding more
profitable ways of disposing of its salvage cars and reducing both repair costs and
compensation payments, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7. Indeed, the
sector was interested in controlling the entire vehicle dismantling chain.2 In
2014, large insurance companies had already had positive experiences gained
from pilot initiatives in the sector that had led to salvage cars not needing to be
auctioned for purchase by chop-shops. They could do the job themselves instead
and thereby greatly increasing their income. Companies like Recicla, discussed
in Chapter 5, served as a model for the development of the Dismantling Law.
The proposal to crush all salvage vehicles was widely loathed. In practice, it
would have radically reduced demand for and the circulation of used car parts
and strengthened the oligopoly of major brand concessionaires. Despite its
promise to reduce vehicle theft, the bill had no economic appeal to small-scale
152  Stolen Cars

actors like Maurício and Stratus and big businesses like the insurance companies
and auctioneers who make large profits from salvage car sales. Insurers would be
the most affected as they would have to pay out claims without being able to
recover part of the outlay through salvage vehicle auctions. Industry representa-
tives argued that the price of insurance would increase and become unaffordable
for many. A law that could preserve the economic activities of all the actors
involved and regulate but not suppress the criminal component of the market
through traceability labeling would be a more palatable alternative.
This was the alternative that won out in 2014. Although economics and
turf battles over markets were central to the debate, it was public security
above all else that saw the dismantlers defined as a problem and promoted the
idea of traceability. The logic was simple: if the circulation of stolen parts
through chop-shops and parts stores could be inhibited, vehicle theft would
no longer be profitable and, as a consequence, violent crimes linked to this
circuit would decrease. In a country where public security is widely under-
stood as the exclusive domain of the police, it is not surprising that the police
emerged as a key political actor in the power games surrounding the various
proposals.
A close look at the efforts to have the legislation approved also revealed
actors who stayed under the radar and went largely unnoticed. Legislators
linked to former and active civil and military police officers, representatives
of the Office of the Public Prosecutor (which, in São Paulo, is very close to
the police) and, to a lesser extent, insurance companies all supported trace-
ability labeling. Why would the legislators closest to the police defend a pro-
posal that was less likely to reduce vehicle thefts?
They were won over by the prospect of traceability labeling with QR codes
linked to the São Paulo DETRAN database. This blurring of technology and
politics lies at the heart of everyday experience of the Dismantling Law. In the
next paragraph we take a closer look at how traceability labeling works. The
“strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals,”
given the moniker “technopolitics” by Gabrielle Hecht (2011), is a useful
concept for illuminating the effects of the Dismantling Law on the webs
power that we are exploring.

Old Practices, New “Political Merchandise”: The

Everyday Experience of the Dismantling Law

When our Ford Ka Sedan arrived at Stratus Desmanche in Chapter 5, some

parts of the story were left out. It’s time to return to them. It was January 2019,
five years after the Dismantling Law first came into force. Maurício left the
counter to personally watch the car being unloaded at the Stratus entrance
 Regulating an Illegal Market  153

while his employees helped the driver bring it inside. At this point everyone
inspected the vehicle. They considered at the brightness of the paintwork, the
presence of scratches, and the various components of the engine – all with an
eye to the economic potential of the almost new but badly damaged car. Each
and every part needed to be priced. It would soon be time to sell them in accor-
dance with the legal requirements. There were only a few bureaucratic techni-
calities to attend to and Stratus’ employees would ordinarily do that. On this
occasion Maurício decided to do it himself so as to show us how the traceability
system works. As we observed the process, we realized that it was not a matter
of “a few bureaucratic technicalities.” The loopholes in the Dismantling Law
were very much apparent in the process of labeling the part of the vehicle.
Maurício accessed the DETRAN website. He then entered the login and
password for Stratus Desmanche, which has been registered with DETRAN
since 2016. The process included proving that he did not have a criminal
record. He entered the information that proved that the Ford Ka Sedan was
purchased legally at an auction: its license plate number, its chassis number,
its National Motor Vehicle Register number and then the name of the
employee providing the above information. All fine.
The fact that the car was stolen no longer matters as it has since been legal-
ized. He had provided four photos of the car from different angles: one from
the rear, one from the front, one with the hood up and one of the chassis
number. But only two of the four photos could be saved to the DETRAN
website. Brazilian government websites never work properly. So he only
uploaded the two photos he felt were the most important. In the covered
decontamination area of the cutting shop, which, as required by law, has a
completely impermeable floor, Stratus employees were hard at work remov-
ing lubricant residue from the gearbox, the air conditioning unit, and the
engine. The residue is disposed of by means of an L-shaped gutter that leads
into a separator. Lubricant residue must be disposed of appropriately to avoid
soil contamination and other environmental problems. Some of the parts
being cleaned bore labels, others did not.
The engine was removed and placed on a surface with no direct contact
with the ground in another covered area. The rest of the car was taken to a
large yard, where it would be dismantled by a specialist employee who had a
long career in car theft and clandestine dismantling. Within five days of reg-
istering the Ford Ka, Maurício must upload a technical report to the
DETRAN website. This report describes the condition of 49 vehicle parts
that must be correctly labeled before they can be sold. These 49 parts have the
highest commercial value according to DETRAN. It should be remembered
that a car like the Ford Ka has an average of 10,000 parts.
154  Stolen Cars

Being an engineer, Maurício can produce the technical report himself.

Chop-shops that do not have one on staff must pay someone else to produce
the report. Before the five-day interval had elapsed, Maurício logged back into
the website and searched for his 2018 Ford Ka Sedan. He found it and clicked
on it. A new screen containing a list of the 49 items opened up. All the other
parts of the vehicle, with the exception of safety items, can be resold without a
traceability label. Maurício began by identifying the status of each of the parts
on the website. Each has to be categorized as reusable, potentially reusable,
non-reusable, non-existent, or not disassembled. The criteria for defining the
status of each part are not at all precise. This leaves open the possibility of
claiming that a part is reusable when it does not exist or has not been disas-
sembled and allocating the resulting label to another part as if it had come
from that car. Thus, a label would confer legality on a potential illegal part that
could then be sold. That is why many of our interlocutors said they used a
single invoice to legalize parts from multiple cars of multiple provenances.
Only those who know the details of the system can understand both its loop-
holes, which allow for illegality, and its ability to build a façade of legality.
After categorizing all the parts, Maurício clicked on “Finalize Report.”
A new window opened and he entered the label pack code assigned to Stratus
Desmanche that he will use for the Ford Ka parts. The next step was for
Maurício’s employees to label the resaleable registered parts from the Ford Ka.
Each label, made of destructible white vinyl, bears a QR code that anyone
with a cell phone reader can scan to learn the origin of the part. All fine, all
clear. Many loopholes can be used for legalizing a stolen part in different
ways. We learned from Grandão that thanks to corrupt DETRAN employ-
ees, it is possible to obtain entire boxes of original labels without having to
register a single car on the DETRAN website (see Figure 6.1). We have also
seen many counterfeit labels that can lend auto-parts shops a façade of legal-
ity in the eyes of customers in a hurry, but not to the police officers who know
how the market works and accept bribes from dismantlers.

FIGURE 6.1  Traceability label pack.

 Regulating an Illegal Market  155

Our ethnography demonstrates what our interlocutors already know: in the

day-to-day operations of the Dismantling Law, labels are a critical artifact. Labels
normalize the dynamics of the second-hand parts market by giving the impres-
sion that it is regulated by the State alone while leaving room for many other
regulatory actors to sell illegal parts and develop protection markets (Hirata and
Grillo 2017). Through the artifact of the label, a real or fictitious link – a loop-
hole – is created between the part that Stratus has in its possession and a legal car.
The parts taken from a huge number of stolen cars dismantled every day
in the state of São Paulo appear to be traceable, adjustable, classified and
regulated. When you look closer, you realize that such technical interventions
do not stop the illegal market but allow it to work under the aegis of legality.
Moreover, the interplay between legal and illegal selects the actors most apt to
stay in the game, i.e., those with the best access to illegal networks, State
resources and violence. This is one more way to reproduce very profitable
markets with all their internal inequalities.
During negotiations on the Dismantling Law, Alvorada Seguros proposed
a tracking technology based on coded nanoparticles that would have made
counterfeiting difficult. Various actors, including the police, spoke out against
the proposal, saying that the technology would be too sophisticated to be
inspected and the government would not be able to bear the costs of imple-
menting it. These interests needed to be mediated. Labels that link disman-
tlers to the law would be enough to provide proof by way of an image of
legality. When untrained State agents or journalists visit places like Stratus,
they look for traceability labels and if they find them conclude that they are
in a perfectly legal business. That is why labels were established as a practical
device for the differentiated management of illegality by inspection bodies.
They delineate the boundaries between legal and illegal in a way that seems
technically accurate but is in fact fictitious. Trained police officers know how
this works and can profit from their knowledge.
The experienced Stratus employees continued labeling the parts of the Ford
Ka, while we inexperienced observers tried to understand what was at stake in
the labeling process. It took time for us to understand. The presence of a label
conditions the actions of most actors involved in the market and selects poten-
tially privileged ones. The label system reminds us that “instruments are less
inert intermediaries than partly autonomous actors that contribute to orient-
ing actor’s behaviors” (Amicelle, Aradau, and Jeandesboz 2015, p. 302).
Only highly qualified professionals such as Maurício have the knowledge
and technical-bureaucratic status necessary to carry out the legalization pro-
cess. The process depends on access to the website, mastery of computers, cell
phones and photography, as well as the ability to separate toxic waste. This
selects a particular professional profile. These requirements call for a certain
156  Stolen Cars

level of training, which Maurício has but which many of the other disman-
tlers with whom we have also done fieldwork do not. His profile differs from
that of most of our interlocutors in dismantling workshops and perhaps this
allowed him to gain influence in the SBD. Adaptation to the law has required
a significant financial investment on the part of our interlocutors. Many own-
ers and employees of chop-shops we spoke to estimated that after the
Dismantling Law came into force the costs to open a new business or make
an existing compliant are around USD 10,000.00 or 40 MW.
Paulo, who owns a small dismantling yard in Avenida Vitrine, spent
60 MW to make his business compliant after having his operating permit
suspended for 18 months between 2014 and 2015. This did not happen
quickly owing to the slow pace that DETRAN works at. While his permit
was suspended he had to accept occasional work as a salesman, as did some of
his employees who were specialized in dismantling cars. Large investments
had to be made to pay the necessary fees, work through the bureaucracy, and
adapt the physical infrastructure of the premises so it met the environmental
regulations. For many, there is also a great mental effort to understand the
requirements, to comply with each bureaucratic step, to make the State’s
demands for the regulation of his activity “legible” (Das and Poole 2004).
Many feel like they are trapped in a kind of legal labyrinth in which effort
expended on bureaucratic procedures comes at the expense of their business
activity (Hibou 2015). This disguises the dynamics of supposedly neutral
“technicalities” and conceals their political dimension. For instance, they alter
the amounts that must be paid to the police.
Complaints like Paulo’s are commonplace. The feeling among many own-
ers of smaller chop-shops is that the Dismantling Law benefits those who
already possess significant economic and political capital and is ineffective as
a means of deterring illegality. Those who work illegally can offer lower prices
and find ways around the rules. Small legal dismantlers are the most affected.
From this perspective, technicalities matter a great deal. Disputes over control
of the political agenda vis-à-vis the regulation of the used parts market and
the implementation thereof take these technicalities into account. The effects
of their application are clearly not neutral. There is an unequal distribution of
burdens, gains and opportunities among the actors interested in participat-
ing, living from and extracting wealth from the market.
The technopolitics of the regulation of this market, justified by the prom-
ise to curb sales of stolen parts, seeks out cleavages between different busi-
nesses and actors to reproduce old inequalities. For some of our interlocutors,
it removes the market advantages accruing to subaltern actors who have accu-
mulated experience in the sector. Others think differently. The point is that
this technopolitics is not made through only one normative regime. On the
 Regulating an Illegal Market  157

contrary, it seeks to accommodate several different interests distributed in dif-

ferent normative regimes. The Dismantling Law is the result of the struggle
between different logics, each of which use loopholes to contest the others.
The different forms of coping with official standards are political and woven
into the daily routine of technical operations. Legal rhetoric, illegal disman-
tling practices and protection markets coexist under the umbrella of legality.
The process of regulation of certain activities operates on a logic of the
legalization of certain activities but not necessarily of the subjects engaged in
them (Rangel 2019a). This is what Felipe Rangel calls “exclusionary legaliza-
tion” (2019b). In the Dismantling Law timeline (Table 6.1), the push towards
legalization passed from the PT to the representatives of big insurers and auc-
tion houses. The exclusion of individuals with criminal records (for any
crime) and of all those working in dismantling activities considered to be
illegal (either because they are not properly registered or because they are sell-
ing illegal items) are not only political but also commercial acts. Any indi-
vidual who has already been arrested for stealing or receiving stolen vehicles
will never again be able to formally operate in the sector. The individual will
be barred from operating legally in a sector in which they are a specialist. In
an unequal city with rising unemployment, this individual is likely to operate
in the illegal market. Lower income and greater risk for some, better oppor-
tunities for others. In the Afterword to this book Daniel Hirata discusses the
theoretical implications of those connections.

***

As well as driving the expected “gentrification of activity” (Rangel 2019b)

that unexpectedly boosts criminal activities, the Dismantling Law reorders
the relationship between chop-shop owners and actors who sell illegal protec-
tion, especially police officers. Maurício told us that he once refused to pay
the police because there was nothing illegal in his business. But that changed
the morning he found a broken car windshield inside his yard. According to
him, the object had been thrown in from outside. Maurício quickly picked
up the shards and got rid of them. A few hours later some police officers
arrived on a supposedly routine inspection, looking for stolen parts. He
understood that this was not a coincidence.
The Dismantling Law, of course, is a key parameter for the exchange of
“political merchandises” in the protection market (Misse 2008, 2018). Police
officers, as street-level bureaucrats who operationalize the regulations (Lipsky
1980), operate “(also illegal) political markets that parasitize the illegal mar-
kets and significantly shape how they are organized and distributed across
urban space” (Telles and Hirata 2010, p. 42).
158  Stolen Cars

The daily experience of the Dismantling Law reveals a new scale of legal/
illegal, formal/informal interactions that provide new reference points for the
“differential management of illegalisms.” From this point of view, the theoreti-
cal interest on the legality/illegality boundary lies in its relation to coproduc-
tion. The legal–illegal dualism is made to moderate illegal activities rather than
to control them. The technical apparatus of the boundary displaces the refer-
ence points of politics into daily life and its power games. As urban ethnogra-
phy has shown, the law and police departments do not have the primary
function of suppressing illegality. William Foote Whyte, in his analysis of daily
activities in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Boston’s North End in the
1930s, explained that “the main function of the police department is not to
enforce the law, but to regulate the illegal activities” (Whyte 2005, p. 154).
From this perspective, illegalisms are not gaps or imperfections in the way
the State functions, but are zones of contestation over concrete, every-day
and pragmatic forms of power. São Paulo has large zones of this type that are
clearly visible (Das and Poole 2004). They seem to be there in many situa-
tions (Telles and Hirata 2010). If illegalisms are differentially managed, there
is a situational specificity in the way that political merchandises are traded
between police officers and dismantlers.
In the case of Maurício, visible police raids are rare, because Stratus is
located on an avenue with a “good reputation” in a well-off area in the south-
west of São Paulo but also because he has a college degree and his business is
well-organized, clean and aesthetically pleasant. All of these factors, both sub-
jective and objective, contribute to practical, everyday disputes over who
extracts the profits from an illegal market. All of these criteria contribute to the
reproduction of inequalities. For State agents, and especially for police officers,
these dimensions are indicative of the space in which they can act as sellers of
protection. That’s why they have made good use of the Dismantling Law.

The Political Centrality of Police Officers

On a Thursday afternoon 2019 another episode of the program Pelo Fim do

Crime [For the End of Crime] is about to air. This is a police reality show broad-
cast on one of Brazil’s main TV stations. The presenter, a former police chief,
appears in a suit and tie, sitting at a table inside a large metal cage. The table is
decorated with the Brazilian flag and copies of Brazil’s Penal Code. The aesthet-
ics of the scene are reminiscent of the videos of terrorist organizations, the penal
code taking the place of sacred scriptures, with rifles and men in military cos-
tumes as key visual references. The episode begins in a menacing tone, with
suspenseful music playing in the background:
 Regulating an Illegal Market  159

Crooks who insist on earning easy money by selling stolen car parts in
clandestine chop-shops run the risk of going to jail at any moment. The
São Paulo Special Group is about to raid yet another establishment,
which, according to intelligence, is seeking to sell [stolen] parts from
imported vehicles.

As the presenter speaks, images of the police operation that is about to be

broadcast start to roll on large screens suspended on the walls of the studio.
Soon after, an acting police chief, the head of the Special Group, known for
his role in the fight against vehicle theft and the illegal-car-parts market, as
well as two other police officers, all appear wearing black t-shirts branded
with the police logo. These officers, from the Civil Police, have guns secured
in their holsters and their arms placed behind their bodies in a military pos-
ture. The police chief wears a bulletproof vest and says:

We are now going to carry out an operation against dismantlers, where

there are probably hundreds of unidentified parts. We are going to fight
the crimes of those receiving these goods, who are the main fomenters
of vehicle thefts. The head of the Special Group, via the chief investiga-
tor, was able to obtain their addresses. Let’s go and see if we can arrest
some criminals.

Such operations produce and perform narratives of combating clandestine

businesses and enemies of public order. The owners of these establishments
are said to be “crooks who insist on making easy money” selling parts without
traceability labels. The police must fight them. On one side is order, on the
other, crime. On one side is good, on the other, evil.3 However, nothing could
be further from what we found empirically when researching these markets
and those operating within them. In the TV version, there is no exchange of
“political merchandises.” Civil Police officers, including some from divisions
specialized in combating such crime, do not receive systematic bribes for ille-
gal dismantling in exchange for informal operating permits (Hirata 2018).
Regardless of what we have seen, we know that the chief investigator would
not have to “obtain the addresses” of the establishments from police intelli-
gence experts. They have been known to the police for a long time and can be
produced upon demand for a TV program.
The video cuts to police officers, armed with revolvers and rifles, walking
through a door. The room is dark, small and dirty, with car parts scattered
across the floor and hanging from the walls. Many parts are stacked in tall piles,
tied to a metal ladder with electric cables. Representations associated with crime
and violence gain materiality through such images. The officers walk around
pointing at the pieces, while the police chief explains to the viewer:
160  Stolen Cars

This would have a DETRAN label if it were legal but it’s been scraped
off. They scrape the labels off because they are identifiers.

In the next scene, we see an open yard littered with the remains of dismantled
vehicles. Four men stand in line with their hands behind their backs, their
heads down and their faces pixelated. Three of them are black, aged between
30 and 40 years, wearing grease-soiled clothes. The fourth, white and from
the same age group, is the owner of the chop-shop. The police chief walks
along the line formed by the four men. As he passes each of the suspects he
harangues them aggressively about their criminal records.
This is the spectacular war on crime. Brazilian TV broadcasts around
35 hours a week of such programs. Their effects are diverse (Aderaldo 2008,
2013), but one is the legitimization of the police perspective on security,
which associates poor urban neighborhoods with violent crime. This is a
mechanism that has long been debated in urban theory, since at least the
work of William Foote Whyte (2005).
It is important to note that the emergence of the police as a key actor in the
dispute over how the Dismantling Law should have been formulated and
enforced is directly related to the way Brazil’s urban conflict has come to be
represented. In fact, over the past three decades, this conflict has radically shifted
from a focus on the problem of integrating the working classes of the urban
peripheries to a focus on the violence supposedly emanating from these spaces
(Feltran 2014; Motta 2019b). Violence is now at the heart of debates about
urban poverty; social conflict translates into criminal conflict. The police are in
a position to moralize because they are seen as targeting the criminal face of the
social conflict.4
Through these aesthetics, which have become political aesthetics in São
Paulo, attracting large numbers of votes at elections, there is a radicalization
of alterity, a moral polarization of the city, in which the possibility of integrat-
ing “criminals” disappears beyond the horizon of plausibility. Instead, they
must be eliminated. As a result, punitive practices have come to appear as a
more efficient means of a creating a better future, and, as a result, win grow-
ing support. It is no coincidence that war has emerged as a metaphor for
understanding and representing this urban conflict, not only analytically, but
also in everyday political discourse, such as that used in television programs
or those of the “wars” on drugs and crime, widely studied in Brazil (Grillo
2019; Leite 2012; Motta 2017). In this warlike logic, the police have consoli-
dated their position as legitimate agents for producing urban order indepen-
dent of any governmental or political oversight. The police have gradually
become another normative regime, in addition to that of the State regime
based on laws and democracy (Feltran 2010; 2020a). In this regime of w ­ arrior
 Regulating an Illegal Market  161

policemen, politically autonomous and spectacular in its activities, even the

most violent and lethal practices are valued.
This process has been accompanied by the growth of police officers occu-
pying institutional spaces. In Brazil, ever more elected parliamentarians are
linked to the Civil Police, the Military Police and the armed forces. According
to data from Brazil’s Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Higher Electoral Court,
“TSE”; n.d.) on the 2018 elections, five Federal Congressmen out of the 70
elected to represent the state of São Paulo, 10 State Assembly members out of
94 in the state assembly and one senator (out of two) were directly linked to
the police. Between the 2014 and 2018 elections, the number of police and
military officers elected to legislative positions went from 18 to 73. It is also
important to note that in recent elections the police and military sectors have
been closely associated with Pentecostal religious groups, allowing them to
form majority blocs in several policy areas.
It is in this institutional context that police repression, centered on puni-
tive measures and sensationalized on TV, has become the political device par
excellence for reifying understandings of the everyday regulation of the car
parts market in São Paulo. Traceability labels act as the technical device that
gives materiality to the same understanding. “The appropriation of security
devices does not just represent the more or less accurate implementation of
pre-existing political decisions. It is also a crucial part of the ongoing process
of (in)security production as such” (Amicelle, Aradau, and Jeandesboz 2015,
p. 302). These elements – institutional, moral, technical, spectacular –
contribute to the legitimation of an authoritative moral language in the
sphere of public debate. This purportedly technical language, that appears
morally irreproachable, has become central to proposals for addressing the
problem of “urban violence” in São Paulo and many other Brazilian cities.
This displacement, heard far beyond the local level, is at the heart of contem-
porary governance of illegalisms. This displacement is the mechanism that
simultaneously reproduces inequalities and violence in the metropolis.

Police Regulation and Violence

There are always two possible paths for state regulation of illegal markets in
competitive capitalist economies. The first is the state model of regulation, as
was adopted for marijuana in Uruguay. The second is the regulatory model of
the market. In the latter case, legal companies take over activities that were
previously conducted illegally (selling weapons, drugs, abortions, sex, etc.). In
the way these are discussed in public debate, it is rarely acknowledged that there
are huge inequalities between market players (between insurance companies
162  Stolen Cars

and small dismantling businesses, for instance) or that there are multiple gov-
ernance regimes, which include criminal actors and protection markets, usually
operated by police officers, that provide de facto regulation of these activities.
Nor is it recognized that actors will participate actively in processes of
legalization.
It was no different in the case of the regulation of São Paulo’s used-car-parts
market, which produced numerous unforeseen consequences. In fact, “the
core of the economies and dynamics of our cities are gravitational fields in
which […] the meanings of law, justice, order and their opposites are at stake”
(Telles and Hirata 2010, p. 42). If until the 2000s dismantlers were treated as
a “police matter,” the daily experience of the Dismantling Law that was meant
to regulate them reveals that the “public security problem” was less significant
than the economic problem that sometimes produced violent confrontations
between regulatory actors. Ultimately, it was the police who were most
strengthened by the regulation – more so even than the big insurance inter-
ests. They were able to extract additional resources from the dismantling mar-
ket by illegally charging for protection, even as their public image as actors
morally able to combat violence was enhanced.
This shift has been justified by the Dismantling Law itself, which, along
with the traceability labels, empower police officers to classify dismantling as
legal or illegal. Clearly, they are not only guided by the rules, but also by
familiar economic, gender, racial, territorial and aesthetic factors. However,
they now enjoy the greater appearance of legality and technicality. In their
daily efforts to profit from these markets, State agents reproduce primordial
associations between crime and poverty and reinforce these classifications in
relation to the vehicle dismantling sector in São Paulo, traditionally viewed as
“dangerous.” To analyze the problem of public security and violence from this
perspective, then, we must classify dismantling not only according to the
Dismantling Law but also according to practical police knowledge, informed
both by stereotypes and the protection market.
The construction of dismantlers’ profiles, which, as described in Chapter 5,
are classified along a continuum from legal to illegal, is reflected in a corre-
sponding continuum of State practices considered more appropriate for each
of those profiles (Motta 2017). Concrete police activity, at the urban margins,
is based on these continua, stretching from the training of police officers in
human rights at one end to the authorized use of lethal violence at the other,
passing along the way through tolerance, punishment within the law, bribery
and extortion.
The extralegal exchange of political merchandise and other abuses of the
Dismantling Law by the police are not, analytically, failures, dysfunctions, or
deviations, as argued by normative theories that center the reified concept of
 Regulating an Illegal Market  163

“organized crime.” The extralegal practices of police officers at the margins of

global capitalism are not activities that merely evade State laws and institu-
tions and can thus be corrected by these very laws. On the contrary, the
Dismantling Law itself produces these spaces, in which the State’s unequal
administration of urban life and conflict are revealed.
In this regard, everyday experience of the Dismantling Law not only pres-
ents new elements for thinking through the stratifications and inequalities
that characterize (il)legal markets, but directly reproduces pre-existing
inequalities that have shaped histories of urban segregation in São Paulo and
other metropolises in the Global South. Certain aesthetics of dismantling
businesses – ruins useful to big capital – and those that separate the profiles
of businessmen and criminals (skin color, accent, level of education), are also
reproduced in these technical, political, and power devices.
The face of de facto regulation, as revealed by ethnographic investigation, is
the way it inflicts violent repression on previously marginalized subjects, terri-
tories and establishments with the pretense that it is possible for them to work
within strict legal parameters and that such repression is more likely to bring
this about. This double face delineates a particular space for those outside the
law: as they have had the chance to legalize their operations but have not taken
it, the only plausible action is violent repression. Violence then takes on clearer
contours and objects. In the way that this double face operates, the centrality of
police officers and the sensationalization of actions to bust dismantling busi-
ness are not accidental. It is symptomatic of the aesthetic, political and norma-
tive way of constructing a public problem: urban violence and crime.
As would be expected, the 2014 Dismantling Law did not reduce the num-
ber of stolen cars circulating in São Paulo, although violent robberies did slightly
fall over subsequent years as gangs specializing in theft became more sophisti-
cated. Instead, São Paulo remained the hub of an increasingly transnational
car-parts market. Countless Hiluxes, Ford Kas, HB20s, Stradas and Fiat Palios
continued to pass through dismantlers, both legal and illegal, in the city of São
Paulo. Maurício organized his business to work within the law to the extent
possible; he continued managing a successful business, Stratus, while studying
free market economics and the evils of the interventionist State and acting polit-
ically in the SBD, which he conceived as a market-based community.
Paulo faced far greater difficulties. Many chop-shops like his have closed or
been condemned to operate in the illegal market. As we spoke to Maurício, he
told us that he continues to pay officers from the Civil Police every week, so
that they do not treat Stratus as an illegal chop-shop. From time to time, he
also pays the military police. He also identifies the most important conse-
quence of the Dismantling Law: the centrality that the police have gained
under this regulatory model: “even if I’m doing everything right, a police
164  Stolen Cars

officer could plant a stolen license plate here, come in, close the entire estab-
lishment and arrest me.” Yes, in São Paulo, he could. Police officers also exer-
cise influence over the judiciary, the Office of the Public Prosecutor and the
legislature. Historically, São Paulo has often foreshadowed tendencies in
national politics.

Notes

  1. The law was approved at the Federal level, but it didn’t “stick.” When Brazilians say
that a law didn’t stick, they mean that it only exists on paper. A striking example of
what happens when a law does stick is the so-called Dry Law of 2008. Prior to
2008, there were no tests or sanctions for drunk drivers (then defined as a blood
alcohol level of up to six decigrams per liter of blood, equivalent to about two
glasses of beer). It has never been legal to drive under the influence of alcohol in
Brazil, but before 2007 the alarming number of car accidents involving drunk
drivers had not attracted political attention. The government, the media and public
safety agencies began promoting awareness campaigns that made the issue a public
problem. This conferred and generated support for the law, lent it legitimacy and
made it effective (Gusfield 1981). Breathalyzers and police blitzes have since been
introduced into the Brazilian Road Code. The foundations for the bill had been laid
before 2008, so once it passed into law, it stuck.
  2. According to the SBD, the 2003 “RUDAC” law that regulates dismantling and
used-car-parts markets in Argentina provided the model for the Brazilian bill. The
final texts of the two laws are indeed very similar. RUDAC regulates the commer-
cialization of car parts through traceability labels applied to vehicle parts. For more
information on the car parts market in Argentina, see Rodriguez 2013.
  3. The Penal Code on the table could easily be replaced by the Bible: the Christian
dichotomy between sacred and profane is explicitly invoked in these programs.
References to God, who is a force for “good” as represented by the police, are frequent.
  4. The association of poverty with violence in Brazil is not new and has already been
extensively discussed in the literature on urban violence (Feltran 2014; Machado da
Silva 2010, 2011; Misse 2008; Zaluar 2000). See the Introduction to this book.
CHAPTER 7

Not Criminals, Legislators

Deborah Fromm and Luana Motta

As markets are set in motion by the thefts of the HB20 belonging to corpo-
rate employee João, of the Ford Ka belonging to Uber driver Diego, and of
the Hilux belonging to the Costa Prado family from Campos Verdes, the time
has come for us to head to the luxurious offices in the steel-and-glass towers
of São Paulo’s financial district. We are also going to pay a call on the neigh-
borhoods of gated communities built by large corporations and to central São
Paulo, where the open-air crack market known as “Cracolândia” (“Crackland”)
and the headquarters of a major insurance company stand just meters apart.
Above all, we will take a look at the fierce conflicts within the National
Congress where insurance industry lobbyists from the wealthiest neighbor-
hoods of São Paulo face off against representatives of the Vehicle Protection
industry based in the urban periphery.
It is December 2018 and we are in the office of Antônio Paulo, the retired
CEO of a European insurance company located in Alphaville. The well-
known upscale planned community on the outskirts of São Paulo was built in
the 1970s just as the construction company Albuquerque Takaoka was taking
shape.1 The Albuquerque Takaoka construction company grew quickly by
building low-cost public housing, an industry that benefited from São Paulo
state government financing. From these relatively humble beginnings,
Albuquerque Takaoka went on to become Alphaville Urbanismo S.A., the
largest property development company in Brazil. Known for its luxurious
gated communities and high-end commercial buildings, Alphaville has
become a mecca for a significant portion of the city’s corporate elite.
Alphaville is a symbol. It represents the genesis of the fortified enclaves
discussed by Caldeira (2000). It is home to a disproportionate share of São
Paulo’s wealth, even when compared to other gated communities in the city.

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
166  Stolen Cars

It’s famous for its complexes that aim to produce “true cities” away from, and
protected against, the violence and other problems common to the metropo-
lises of the Global South. Antônio Paulo maintains his personal office on the
10th floor of a commercial building. The sophisticated architecture of the
office is divided into three spaces by glass partitions. At the reception there is
a small desk for the secretary. Next to it you can see a meeting space consist-
ing of an oval table with six seats and a plasma TV. At the back sits a larger
room decorated with art work and high-end furniture. This is called “Top
Class Decoration” by the company that manages the building. Customers can –
via a real estate website targeting the business class – rent a commercial space
with a similar layout (100 m2) for approximately USD 2,500.00 (or 10 MW)
per month.
Antônio Paulo invites us to sit on the sofa in the back room. His secretary
brings us each a glass of water and a cup of coffee. In the meantime, he asks
if we had trouble finding his office. He sighs with relief when we mention
that we had come from Campinas. Although a longer journey as the crow
flies, coming from Campinas on the highways avoids the ever-present conges-
tion between the most central areas of São Paulo and Alphaville. Some execu-
tives prefer to travel by helicopter to avoid the heavy traffic. The routes offered
by air taxi companies connect Alphaville with the other two main corporate
centers of São Paulo, Avenida Paulista and Berrini. The air shuttle service is
available during rush hour and prices start at USD 60.00, i.e., 0.25 MW per
leg. São Paulo has the largest helicopter fleet in the world.2

***

In this chapter we describe and analyze the upward journey of cash created by
lower-level illegal activities and markets that eventually reaches Alphaville
and Antônio Paulo’s office. This journey is strictly dependent on the relation-
ships that economic elites establish with the State. More specifically, we
describe the efforts of said elites to win over accessible markets and how they
relate to the State and become part of it. Market disputes and the creation of
regulations are therefore both inseparable and central to any understanding of
the mechanisms for hoarding opportunities.
Two months before our visit, in October 2018, the presidential elections
produced a victory for Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate supported by
the military, the police, and religious organizations, most notably Evangelical
churches. Urban and financial elites took a little while to warm up to him. In
the months leading up to the election, Antônio Paulo met with each presi-
dential candidate so as to present the insurance industry’s legislative priorities.
Only the PT candidate, Fernando Haddad, refused to meet with him. In the
 Not Criminals, Legislators  167

words of the retired executive, “Haddad refused to meet with us. He refused
[by saying that] he didn’t have the time. Time is a matter of priority.”
According to Antônio Paulo, although the Bolsonaro team embraced his
proposals, Geraldo Alckmin, former PSDB governor of São Paulo, was the
best choice for the job. “Alckmin understands the topic [of insurance]. We
talked about the Dismantling Law. He knows it – he was the one who drafted
it.” However, the polls predicted a resounding defeat for Alckmin, who in the
end received only 5 percent of the vote and did not make it to the second
round. Antônio Paulo and his peers therefore chose to support Bolsonaro as
a bulwark against the PT: “Our candidate was Alckmin, but we also have
other priorities.” In the final stretch of the election, Bolsonaro was supported
by Brazil’s financial elites.
Time is a matter of priority and all priorities are economic ones for Antônio
Paulo. As revealed in personal conversations with us and as summarized in the
proposals from the insurance sector presented to the presidential candidates,
three insurance sector priorities are directly linked to vehicle-theft markets:
1) the de facto implementation of the Dismantling Law in all states of the
federation;
2) facilitated and expanded access to inclusive and low-cost insurance through
more permissive legal regulations; and
3) a curb on the informal insurance products offered by low-income opera-
tors by means of criminalization and punishment.
These priorities, discussed directly with the presidential candidates, can
only be understood if we are aware that market formalization and economic
regulation processes are necessarily concomitant with incrimination pro-
cesses. The Dismantling Law showed us how that works. Incrimination can
include the use of force but, above all, incrimination of market competitors
establishes the legal parameters for “free competition” within the market.
Observing the elites represented by Antônio Paulo and their drive to domi-
nate markets reveals how corporate economic logic overlaps the Habermasian
argumentative world and becomes a constituent part of the State machine
itself. This chapter looks at the overlapping and obscure character of the dis-
tinction between State and private (Wedel 2003). It also considers how the
processes of (re)creation of durable inequalities (Tilly 1998) are inscribed and
concretized in the urban territory (Feltran 2020a). The creation of “true cit-
ies” inside the variegated urban fabric is territorialized in São Paulo by
Alphaville. Many other very unequal cities, especially in the Global South,
have similar territories. These “true cities” come into existence by taking aim
at the State and low-income classes. Antônio Paulo doesn’t want to talk to the
President for nothing. He knows that the path to protection for his wealth
168  Stolen Cars

passes through the State. He also knows that the path to protection for his
wealth passes through the poor population.
Auto insurance in Brazil is an expensive product targeted at the middle
and upper classes that own newer vehicles. The average cost of an insurance
policy for a Ford Ka is USD 437.50. For an HB20 it is USD 642.00. These
figures correspond to 1.25 MW and 2.56 MW respectively per annum. Low-
income earners, like Seo Cláudio or Sérgio, the owners of the Strada and the
Palio stolen in Chapter 1, cannot generally afford to insure their cars. Such
individuals pay the cost when their cars are stolen. It is even less advantageous
to take out insurance for vehicles with more than five years of use. Such poli-
cies are priced higher because of the higher cost of replacement parts.
For this reason, only 30 percent of the Brazilian vehicle fleet is insured.
The insurance sector wants to increase this ratio. With a focus on low-income
customers, the insurance sector has proposed the creation of new types of
insurance (and not just for cars) that are described as “affordable” or “inclu-
sive.” This financial expansion into the low-cost market is our heuristic object.
Squabbles over new market niches are centered on netting low-income cus-
tomers who were not previously serviced by the insurance and property pro-
tection sector due to being considered risky and/or having limited purchasing
power. In a country where 72 percent of workers earn up to 2 MW, the
expansion of insurance services is dependent on a lowering of prices. Antônio
Paulo explains how this is formulated in a video aimed at his peers:

We have to act on two fronts for liability and property insurance to

become more inclusive. Firstly, education through campaigns that
explain the advantages of insurance using appropriate language and
communication. Secondly, people need to have enough income to pur-
chase our products. We also need to broaden and expand our offer as a
means of lowering prices as a way of bringing about inclusion and
increased protection to society as a whole. (online video, 2018)

To achieve this expansion, the insurance industry must actively engage in

the creation of laws aimed at regulating car theft coverage. Studying the insur-
ance sector sheds light on the relationship between the State and the market in
contemporary capitalism in which competition within low-income markets,
traditionally considered informal or illegal, has gained centrality. Expansion
into affordable markets represents potential growth for construction companies
like Albuquerque Takaoka and large insurance companies like Antônio Paulo’s.
To examine the conversion of poverty into capital (Roy 2010) we consid-
ered two empirical cases: i) a new insurance product aimed at expanding
Brazil’s car insurance coverage, namely “Affordable Car Insurance,” introduced
 Not Criminals, Legislators  169

on the coat-tails of the Dismantling Law; ii) the dispute over a bill to c­ riminalize
the so-called Vehicle Protection sold by small- and medium-sized businesses
that is known to brokers and large insurance companies as “pirate insurance”
or “parallel insurance.” Our investigation of these specific cases has enabled us
to track how relations between the market and the State take place in the regu-
lation of informal and illegal markets. We then describe the ways in which
structural advantages and resources accumulate, thereby reproducing and
intensifying urban inequalities.
Some authors have already demonstrated that expansion into low-cost
markets is at the center of global capitalism (Rangel 2019a; Roy 2010).
However, little has been written about the criminalization of low-level players
who traditionally operate in these markets as a strategy for dominant eco-
nomic groups to conquer new market niches and/or to preserve their domi-
nance. Criminalization would seem to indicate a radicalization of processes of
resource hoarding; the cases addressed here also inspire reflection on the con-
flicts between global financial elites and local economic groups, each manag-
ing their own normative regimes. Violence is integral to this game. It is not
by chance that we analyze the participation of militias in small informal
insurance associations and global elites rewriting the laws to redirect the use
of State violence. We argue that urban conflict is interwoven with political
and economic conflicts that involve both global actors central to the economy
and peripheral actors linked to low-cost markets.

New Laws, New Markets

The approval of the [Dismantling] Law was a step on the path to pro-
viding a product to a part of the population that does not have access to
traditional insurance due to its high cost. We are expanding Affordable
Car Insurance to several regions in Brazil and seeing strong support on
the part of brokers and customers. (Gabriel Pereira, Horizonte Seguros,
May 2018)

Before the promulgation of the Dismantling Law, insurers could only use
genuine parts to repair damage caused by collisions, a fact that made policy
costs prohibitive for owners of older vehicles, which are more subject to the
mechanical failures that can cause accidents. With an eye to increasing the
fleet of insured cars, the numbers of which have been stagnant since 2006, the
insurance market created “Affordable Car Insurance” as a cheaper and more
competitive product.3
170  Stolen Cars

Publicly, insurance companies describe this new product as the “democra-

tization of access” to insurance and an increase in insurance coverage across
the board. Expanding the insurance market through cost reduction is also
justified as a means of job creation and a potential engine of economic growth.
The Dismantling Law is once again a central element of the game. The Law
expands supply and lowers the cost of replacement car parts via legalized dis-
mantling, which in turn reduces insurance costs. Stolen parts are part and
parcel of legalized dismantling and insurers benefit from the low cost of sto-
len parts. A law that aims to prevent thefts opens new niches for their
circulation.
The connections between Affordable Car Insurance and the Dismantling
Law reveal the influence of the insurance sector in creating institutional poli-
cies that meet its interests. In the words of former Congressman, insurance
broker, and former president of associations and federations in the insurance
sector Adam Guimarães, when discussing his bill in the National Congress:

If insurance companies can utilize a used but certified part with a guarantee
of origin to repair vehicles, with four, five, six or seven years of use, insur-
ance costs will fall. Thousands of vehicle owners who today cannot afford
insurance because it is too expensive will be able to afford it. I am abso-
lutely convinced that the price of auto insurance will drop by more than 30
percent with the approval of this bill. This will be a side effect. Our real goal
is to reduce violence and theft of vehicles in Brazil. (Speech by Former
Congressman Adam Guimarães, Congress, June 2013, emphasis added)

The official argument is consistent with that of the insurance experts: any
decrease in insurance prices depends on a decreased rate of theft and armed
robbery (thus reducing claims) and on a decrease in the cost of replacement
parts. As Adam Guimarães argues, these two aspects comprise the impact of
the Dismantling Law. The law received widespread support from insurance
industry entities and lobbyists – who had in any case been involved in draft-
ing it. Obviously, there is a contradiction here. One measure aims to reduce
thefts and armed robberies while the other encourages the circulation of sto-
len parts. Therefore, a balance must be struck between money and violence.
The marked increase in vehicle theft rates increases the price of insurance,
negatively impacts insurance sales, and blocks access to the market for low-
income car owners. Keeping vehicle theft rates under control, now at just 1
percent of total insured cars, ensures predictability for insurers. The need for
insurers to repair a high volume of damaged vehicles is much more economi-
cally significant. Almost 10 percent of insured cars are involved in some kind
of collision over the course of their insurance coverage. Creating a network of
 Not Criminals, Legislators  171

“authorized garages” mitigates related costs. Because insurance companies are

big customers in the auto-parts market, they can force garages and parts sup-
pliers to work for lower prices. The markets connect. To repair their custom-
ers’ vehicles, insurance companies and agents depend on purchases of a large
quantity of genuine parts, usually procured from dismantlers (in theory legal
in origin but often stolen).
Analysis of the auto-parts sector reveals the connection between insurance
markets, dismantling, vehicle theft/robbery, and the industry interests written
into law. According to a Civil Police chief and one of our interviewees, entities
representing authorized car repairers argue that they are pressured by insurance
companies to carry out repairs at the lowest possible cost. Legally, however, they
must always use genuine new parts in repairs made for insurers. This is a diffi-
cult balancing act for the garages, who tend to be small operations. They need
secure contracts with insurance companies and their steady supply of reliable
customers, as well as new parts at lower prices than those sold by official dealer-
ships. The illegal auto-parts markets, fed by stolen cars, are the solution.
As we saw in Chapter 5, garages look for the parts in chop-shops, be they
legal, illegal, or anything in-between. In Chapter 6 we saw how stolen parts
arrive clean and invoiced. Chop-shops order “packages” of parts that corre-
spond to the models for which they have invoices (previously obtained by
purchasing identical vehicles at auctions) from car thieves. As a Civil Police
chief who is well versed on the topic said, “The law is an alibi that gives an air
of legality to those who are doing everything wrong.”

Illegal Markets, Microfinance, Corporate

Philanthropy

The creation and expansion of Affordable Car Insurance was the great hope
of agents in the insurance sector – alongside the new federal law. They aimed
to popularize or massify access to car insurance by reducing vehicle repair
costs by using “used” auto parts. This model is not exclusive to the automo-
bile industry: the commitment to creating and expanding sales of so-called
low-cost insurance can be found across the Brazilian market:

what improved in Brazil was low-cost insurance. Today insurance covers

all types of consumers with all types of policies, from basic and cheaper
benefits to more expensive and more sophisticated products. This did
not happen 10 years ago. What has changed is that insurance companies
have created a series of new products and new benefits to be able to
reach a Brazilian population that did not previously consume insurance
products. (September 2015, ex-president of the Brazilian Insurance
Agency, emphasis added)
172  Stolen Cars

“Microinsurance,” “low-cost insurance,” and “inclusive insurance” are a part of

larger microfinance strategies that consist of offering financial services to low-
income populations (microcredit, microsavings, and microinsurance). Ananya
Roy (2010) states that the foundational idea behind microfinance, as conceived
by Muhammad Yunus in the 1980s,4 was the notion that credit is a human
right and can improve the lives of the poorest. Conceived as a tool to alleviate
poverty, microfinance could be considered an example of democratization of
capital (Roy 2010); “It seeks to transform hitherto exclusionary systems of
finance into those that include the poor” (Roy 2010: 3). However, in the words
of Roy (2010), although Yunus framed his views on microfinance in the lan-
guage of human rights, his ideas are cut through by concepts of entrepreneur-
ship and guarantees of opportunity rather than redistribution of resources or
equality: “His fierce emphasis on self-reliance creates a model of poverty allevia-
tion that is simultaneously poor-centric and anti-welfare” (Roy 2010: 24).
Yunus recognizes the failures of the market and pursues an alternative
strategy for economic development. By contrast, “creative capitalism” is a
model that strongly opposes Yunus’ vision. Bill Gates is the principal propo-
nent of creative capitalism, a model popular among our interlocutors in the
insurance sector. This model relies on the market’s unique ability to improve
the welfare of the poor:

It is mainly corporations that have the skills to make technological inno-

vations work for poor… We need a more creative capitalism: an attempt
to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit
from doing work that makes more people better off. We need new ways
to bring far more people into the system – capitalism – that has done so
much good in the world. (Gates 2008)

Bill Gates contends that there are markets around the world that are still
untapped, having been overlooked by the business world. He argues that the
poor constitute a particularly important and profitable market (Gates 2008;
Roy 2010). Creative capitalism thus requires a type of microfinance more
committed to financial than social returns (Roy 2010). In both perspectives,
the development of a profitable global microfinance industry is a precondition
for transforming the lives of the billion people who live at the bottom of the
social pyramid. As evidenced by (well-known philanthropist) Bill Gates’ com-
ments above, Jéssica Sklair (2017) argues that “most elite philanthropy is ideo-
logically committed to the reproduction of the global capitalist project, and
[…] its strategies are based on the assumption that the most effective way to
eradicate poverty is by further entrenching the capitalist project – and by
entrenching the poor more deeply within it” (Sklair 2017). Low-cost insurance
 Not Criminals, Legislators  173

can also be seen as a way of extending protection to low-income people and

creating a new market segment for insurers (Matos 2008). There should be no
contradiction. Furthermore, Affordable Car Insurance should allow for a cer-
tain autonomy and cost savings for insurers by making the relevant legislation
more flexible and allowing the use of used parts (at least in theory legal) to
repair damaged cars. With these savings insurers could in turn practice more
philanthropy.
Some companies envision the expansion of their businesses into the disas-
sembly market in addition to creating philanthropic centers in which “social
businesses” are incubated. Alvorada Seguros is one of them. In addition to
enabling the regulation of Affordable Car Insurance, Alvorada took advan-
tage of the Dismantling Law and opened “Recicla,” discussed in Chapter 5.
As a result, vehicles brought in because of collisions, flooding, write-offs, or
theft can be dismantled by the insurance group itself. Their parts can be sold
to the general public via the internet or used to repair the cars of the compa-
ny’s own customers under the Affordable Car Insurance model.
In this model, carefully formulated with an eternal air of positive social
transformation by coaches and consultants, we see the consolidation of an
entire supply chain. It would even be feasible for some companies to create an
internal system to supply their own demand for auto parts without depend-
ing on the external chop-shops. A claim would lead to a pay-out but the
amount could be recovered using parts from the wrecked car for repairs in
another claim or for resale in the company’s auto-parts business. This circular
accumulation produces the excess capital that funds social entrepreneurship
philanthropy that in turn creates new businesses and revenue streams for the
business group.
As we saw in Chapter 6, with the creation of the Dismantling Law insurers
began to compete in activities that traditionally belonged to informal chop-
shops that had become criminalized. Because the chop-shops had no eco-
nomic or political resources or even an interest in adapting to the new system
for controlling the origin of parts, many of them were losing market share. If
Maurício hadn’t acted fast, modernizing Stratus and taking part in the c­ reation
of the SBD, his operation wouldn’t have survived. Competition in low-cost
markets therefore implies much more than winning over “low-income” cus-
tomers. It effectively implies taking the profits now shared by a large number
of marginal actors and funneling them to a small number of large economic
actors (as demonstrated in Chapter 4 in relation to auctions and in Chapter
8 in relation to global capital flows). The logic of concentrating capital is
therefore quite evident: small independent businesses who traditionally oper-
ated in vehicle-related markets, for example traditional dismantling, become
precariously employed workers if they want to continue in the industry.
174  Stolen Cars

Considering that the aggregate value of the parts of a disassembled car can
vary from three to five times more than the price of an assembled car, the law
was made to allow large insurance companies to start competing with the
illegal auto-parts market. In moving to control the entire supply chain (insur-
ance sale – accident – disassembly – sale of auto parts – repair of damaged
cars), insurance companies tried to aggregate the innumerable small, infor-
mal, and illegal links of the chain and keeps profits for themselves.
“Exclusionary formalization” (Rangel 2019) becomes a strategy for the cre-
ation of bureaucratic and economic barriers to small entrepreneurs. These
barriers, with the support of law makers and enforcers, filter those who can
and cannot continue acting in legitimized markets. Such are the mechanisms
that concentrate wealth and hoard opportunities through “formalization.”

Action and Reaction

Not everything always goes as the dominant actors expect, however. The
struggle continues. The insurance sector may have influenced the drafting of
the Dismantling Law and its relentless political lobbying may have ensured its
implementation, but it had no way of enforcing it across the sector. The
enforcement of laws depends on different normative regimes. It depends on
both State agency and the kind of resistance put up by other interested actors.
The vehicle inspection bodies of each Brazilian state (“DETRANs”),
together with the military police, are responsible for enforcing the Dismantling
Law and inspecting chop-shops. Antônio Paulo tells us that there are many
DETRANs that have refused to implement the law. In Rio de Janeiro, for
instance, the law has been rarely enforced due to the fact that most of the
chop-shops are informally owned by Civil Police officers. The marginalized
actors that we saw in the previous chapters paid attention to the changes pro-
posed by powerful central actors. In the loopholes of each new piece of legis-
lation lie ways to continue extracting resources from markets in spite of the
dominant interests.
Antônio Paulo, together with an organization representing the insurance
sector, demanded that the 2018 presidential candidates promised that the
DETRANs would work under a single designated national agency to enforce
the Dismantling Law in each state. The current autonomy enjoyed by each
state DETRAN wasn’t working; the so-called Federal Pact should be reviewed.
In Antônio Paulo’s words: “that way we won’t have to depend on local ‘sher-
iffs.’” Antônio Paulo knows that local sheriffs’ interests may conflict with his –
they want to keep capital accumulation relatively dispersed so that they too can
benefit from it. Local sheriffs (in this case police and corrupt state agents)
 Not Criminals, Legislators  175

could block the ever-greater concentration of wealth along these market chains.
Since they don’t wield influence in the halls of Congress, they need to control
the enforcement of the law at the local level. The strategy seems to work.
As of 2020 and despite the efforts of big insurance companies, few local
insurance companies offer Affordable Car Insurance. According to Antônio
Paulo, Affordable Car Insurance “didn’t catch on.” In addition to problems
with the DETRANs, there were problems with the consumer protection
agency (“PROCON”) related to the use of “original” and not “genuine” parts.
“Original” parts are identical to and come from the same factory as “genuine”
ones, but the latter are stamped with the logo of the automakers (Ford, Fiat,
Hyundai, etc.) and this lends them credibility and a guarantee. Use of origi-
nal parts is negotiated with large intermediaries. This can increase final prices
by 40 percent (or even more, as we saw in Chapter 5).
Furthermore, according to Antônio Paulo, “The automakers certainly did
some lobbying. You can be sure the genuine parts requirement suits them.” No
question. The insurers found themselves immersed in conflicts that they
couldn’t handle and had to back down to preserve their reputation with cus-
tomers: “They’ll report this on television! And we’re only talking about original
parts – imagine used parts [with their greater likelihood of being stolen]!”

Parallel Insurance and the Protection Market

The traditional elite is being challenged in contemporary Brazil. Antônio

Paulo and the big insurance companies face additional struggles as they
attempt to gain share in the low-cost asset protection market. Other insur-
ance entities, especially informal ones, have begun to expand their product
offer to the poor. Insurers have encountered huge competition since the cre-
ation of “Vehicle Protection,” a new “accessible” product on the market. Since
it has always been impossible to buy insurance from large financial institu-
tions, the poorest have opted to buy property insurance from local groups or
associations, often run by individuals from their own communities. That’s
what Vehicle Protection is and that’s why the legal disputes around it end up
falling to regulatory bodies. According to data from the IBGE (Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics) and the Serasa credit ratings agency:

The worsening of the Brazilian economic and political crisis that began
before the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff […] has led to an historic
number of defaults. […] The second semester of 2017 opened with
more than 61 million Brazilians listed as defaulters by credit rating
agencies. This represents 39.19% of the economically active population
[…]. Obviously, these Brazilians are automatically removed from the
176  Stolen Cars

conventional insurance market, given that defaulters represent a risk to

insurers. Among these more than 60 million defaulting Brazilians, at
least 24 million are motor vehicle owners. These consumers suffer the
effects of the economic slowdown, falling consumption levels, disap-
pearing work opportunities, increasing unemployment, rising interest
rates, decreasing availability of credit, while being excluded from the
insurance market, which leaves their assets vulnerable to the risks of
theft, robbery and damage, given that they have no means of taking out
conventional insurance policies. Their only alternative is to seek sup-
port in associations and cooperatives made up of members of their
local church, community or economic or professional group, in
order to protect their property through mutual assistance. (Published
in the Magazine of the Union of Mutual Property Protection, Vehicle
Protection providers, emphasis added)

Vehicle Protection is sold by mutual associations throughout Brazil, espe-

cially in the southeast, which comprises the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro,
Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo and is the country’s most prosperous region.
How does the mutual asset protection market work and why is it most devel-
oped in the southeast? It is a mutual responsibility contract, in which associa-
tion members do not pay a fixed amount for a policy but share such costs
arising from such accidents as may occur in a given month. This is how Lloyds
was created in the seventeenth century: a system of mutual support that works
on the basis of solidarity among its members through the socialization of the
risks of property damage.
These associations contend that the owners of assets have the right to orga-
nize a system for ensuring the mutualized protection of such assets. The asso-
ciations create their own funds, whose resources are used to prevent and
repair such damage as may occur to their possessions. Automobiles are the
highest growth market within these associations, which protect against the
risks posed by theft, robbery, and damage. If a member’s car is stolen, the cost
of indemnifying that member is shared among all members of the association
that month. There are no shareholders that extract profits. Churches, neigh-
borhood associations, and various other local actors establish these associa-
tions, and they have worked with considerable success in the communities
where they operate.
According to entities representing the traditional insurance sector:

the products offered by Vehicle Protection associations can be mistaken

for insurance since all the necessary elements of an insurance contract are
in place, i.e.: (a) risk as an uncertain and future event; (b) the transfer of
said risk to an institution that is not recognized [by insurance regulator
 Not Criminals, Legislators  177

SUSEP]; (c) premiums to be paid; (d) an institution assuming the risk

undertakes to indemnify the assignor; (e) in the event of a “claim”.
(Excerpt from the text published by the National Insurance Academy,
by a lawyer from the National Insurance Federation of Brazil)

Vehicle Protection costs are on average 70 percent lower than insurance poli-
cies offered by big companies like Alvorada. Some cooperatives even include
free vehicle tracking, life insurance, and funeral assistance as part of a Vehicle
Protection contract. In addition to lower costs and supplementary services,
Vehicle Protection associations’ pricing methods are also very different: unlike
traditional insurers they do not perform credit checks on members. It’s not
just that their prices are accessible. Important community values also make
them popular – they accept all customers, from all profiles and treat everyone
the same. Even those considered “high risk” (such as the highly indebted,
defaulters, truck owners, old car owners, residents of neighborhoods with
high theft rates) and not accepted by traditional insurers are welcome.
One of our researchers was not able to insure his 2013 Gol, which had
been purchased at an auction by the previous owner. Over the course of our
investigation, more than 12 large and medium-sized insurance companies
refused to sell him insurance. Alvorada Seguros finally offered a policy but for
a very high premium that was equivalent to 25 percent of the car’s value. This
was clearly impractical. He could buy Vehicle Protection, however, for a very
competitive price. One of our interlocutors, who owns a shop that resells cars
bought at auction, confirmed that his customers also have difficulty in insur-
ing their cars. He himself was unable to insure his own car, a 2017 Hyundai
Creta, via traditional insurance companies. The insurer claimed that there
was a serious structural problem with the car that had not been detected by
other mechanics – the most likely real reason was the fact that his car had
been bought at auction.
What did our interlocutor do? He contracted Vehicle Protection for an annual
cost similar to that of traditional insurance but with the installation of a tracker
that guaranteed 75 percent of the vehicle’s value in the event of theft or robbery.
The core legitimizing tenet of Vehicle Protection is the offer of alternative prop-
erty protection products that are interesting to low-income consumers and unen-
cumbered by the bureaucratic demands imposed by large insurers. Vehicle
Protection is an “inclusive” and “democratic” product. These are the same words
used by traditional insurers who defend Affordable Car Insurance. Clearly, tradi-
tional insurers created Affordable Car Insurance to compete with Vehicle
Protection. Both Vehicle Protection associations and traditional insurance com-
panies contend that “cheaper” equals “more democratic.” Both contend that
democracy is broadened and deepened within the market.
178  Stolen Cars

Our primary interlocutors from Vehicle Protection associations reiterated

that in addition to democratizing access to property protection, they embody
the constitutional right of free association:

Many citizens prefer to protect their property through the mutual sys-
tem as a matter of free choice and therefore exercise their constitutional
right of free association for lawful purposes in order to protect another
constitutionally guaranteed right, that of private property. It is a right of
free choice, in which, about which and against which the State cannot
and should not interfere. Many other citizens, however, do not have that
free choice. They simply have no alternative. They are excluded, jetti-
soned from the process, rejected by the conventional market. The only
alternative is to make use of their constitutional right to associate with
other citizens with whom they share a social, professional, religious or
similar relationship, so as to socialize the risks to their assets. […] SUSEP
intends to end the activities of all these associations. In the remote and
improbable chance of this being achieved, what would it do for this
mass of citizens, consumers and taxpayers? Nothing. There is no way to
absorb, support or accommodate them in an insurance scheme. (Text
published in the Magazine of the Union of Mutual Property Protection)

A direct clash between “traditional insurance” and “Vehicle Protection” is

inevitable. What advantages do insurance companies have in the coming
battle that Vehicle Protection associations lack? Only one: the right to crimi-
nalize their opponent. Vehicle Protection associations say that they are being
pursued by SUSEP, the federal agency that regulates the insurance sector and
is controlled by representatives of large insurance companies. While Vehicle
Protection associations present themselves as more inclusive and democratic
since they accept the “rejected” and the “excluded” and offer protection to
those that are more “victimized” and “vulnerable,” traditional insurers present
themselves as victims of “illegality” and “piracy”:

The Brazilian insurance market faces a dangerous pandemic from vehicle

protection associations and its brethren who have decided to offer personal
insurance. Piracy has become a serious pandemic and is in danger of destroy-
ing our insurance market forever. If this continues it could be the death of
the sector. (Excerpt from Revista do Setor de Seguros, 2017, emphasis added)

Faced with the expansion of Vehicle Protection, actors in the traditional

insurance industry have argued that it is a “parallel” or “marginal” activity
that functions only where enforcement is absent. It engages in “unfair com-
petition” because Vehicle Protection associations are not subject to the same
 Not Criminals, Legislators  179

rules as insurance companies. The inherent costs of playing by the rules –

such as guarantees for provisions and technical reserves, minimum capital,
guarantee funds and solvency margins – make competing impossible.
Insurance companies argue that they bear high compliance costs not borne by
Vehicle Protection associations. All this significantly impacts the values of its
products, making them less competitive compared to the “shadow market” of
Vehicle Protection (see Onto 2017, 2019).
As nonprofit organizations, it is a fact that Vehicle Protection associations
are not inspected by industry regulators and are exempt from business taxes:

We hear more and more stories about associations that, in defiance of

the authorities, act openly outside the law […]. They violate competi-
tion law, thereby committing a crime against consumers who, attracted
by unrealized amenities and reduced prices, are exposed to risks and
untold financial harms without the necessary and essential guarantees
offered by real, official insurance, without the competent management
of a true insurance company without which the solidarity sought is not
at all effective and never attains the eminent social function of insur-
ance. (Excerpt from the text published by the National Insurance
Academy, lawyer of the Federation for Insurance of Brazil)

Morals are clearly entangled with markets. A series of moral, virtuous, and
legal justifications are deployed in this debate. There is a conflict over the
capture, expansion, and/or maintenance of markets aimed at low-income sec-
tors. Interests become worldviews and therefore this conflict is also about
moral considerations in respect of what is legal or illegal, formal or informal,
legitimate or illegitimate. We heard interviewees from the traditional insur-
ance industry describe Vehicle Protection association owners as “bandits.” At
public debates with the Mutual Property Protection Union, Antônio Paulo
himself was heard describing members of Congress who support the associa-
tions as “mafiosi.”
One also hears stories of some associations using criminal and militia
groups to recover vehicles. In Rio de Janeiro, the recovery of stolen vehicles
has become a profitable business for militias linked to police groups.
Investigations are ongoing and phone recordings confirming these connec-
tions have been made public.5 There is no doubt that private companies have
recovered vehicles for insurance companies for decades and this work is
mainly done by retired police officers and their networks. If these “recovery
companies” have the knowledge and networks necessary to guarantee the
recovery of a stolen vehicle, why not sell Vehicle Protection to the mass of
potential customers rejected by the traditional insurance market? This is what
they have really done for years.
180  Stolen Cars

Two distinct analytical dynamics feed these conflicts, both highlighting

the virtues of the “free market.” Firstly, moral justifications linked to the ben-
efits and virtues of Vehicle Protection (free association, democratization of
access, etc.) and moral accusations that associations are deceiving consumers
and are linked to militias and other criminal groups. Secondly, we see how the
case for market regulation and “free competition” is made in the margins: on
the one hand, Vehicle Protection claims to be a defense of freedom against the
traditional insurers that actively exclude certain customer profiles; on the
other hand, the traditional insurance industry criminalizes the opponents it
accuses of “unfair competition.”
The synthesis between thesis and antithesis is a narrative about a free mar-
ket that ultimately aims to gain and retain low-income customers by integrat-
ing them into this mercantile “freedom.”

***

In 2016 the Congressman and evangelical pastor Wilson Pereira6 drafted a bill
that sought to formalize and regulate Vehicle Protection and protect it from
SUSEP “persecution.” However, after contentious debate, Congressman Matt
Guimarães, son of Adam Guimarães and an ally of the insurance industry, was
appointed as the bill’s rapporteur. He quickly made his disapproval clear:

On its merits, we can say that this system of “property protection,” like
the well-known and illegal “vehicle protection,” is being disseminated
willy-nilly, irregularly and illegally in various locations around the coun-
try […]. Thus, the parallel activity of exploiting products analogous to
insurance takes place in the form of unfair and predatory competition
against the traditional insurance market itself.

The bill was shelved. Congressman Guimarães proposed one of his own
that would criminalize the activities of such associations (PL 3139/2015). This
bill would hold the associations to the same standards and regulations imposed
on traditional insurers by SUSEP, thus making small mutual associations unvi-
able. Congressman Guimarães’ sponsorship of the bill is understandable given
that Vehicle Protection is a product that does not need to be sold by an insur-
ance broker and insurance brokers make up a large part of his electoral base.
The insurance sector, via SUSEP, has allied itself with insurance brokers; two
otherwise competing interest groups thereby find common purpose:

We cannot be distracted by minor disagreements. We have to mobilize, and

show the State and the legislature the importance of a highly regulated sec-
tor, which is significantly different than these marginal activities. (President
of Insurers’ Union, October 2018)
 Not Criminals, Legislators  181

By leveraging their capital and economic and political importance, insurance

groups directly lobby the Presidency of the Republic.7 Antônio Paulo explains
to us that the sector does not need to have members of Congress who speak
on their behalf:

That business is for brokers. The largest insurance groups today are
banks. Banks don’t do this. [They speak directly to the Presidency.] The
whole thing could come back to bite us. (Antônio Paulo, in an interview
held in 2018)

The Law that Governs the Market, the Market

that Governs the Law

The importance given by the government to the [insurance] sector is not

proportional to its size. We have to put the insurance sector at the center
of public policy debate in Brazil. We are not talking about protectionism
but laws that important for both the sector and society. (President of
Brazilian Insurance Agency, at an industry event, October 2018)

Charles Lindblom (1977) argues that businessmen in government and politics

enjoy a privileged position. He is not referring to corruption or inappropriate
behavior but rather to the entitlement or guaranteed immunity associated
with a given position. Businessmen are responsible for significant decisions
that impact public well-being and are mediated by the market.8 To a large
extent, such decisions are not made by the government or by politically con-
structed processes but are delegated to businessmen. These decisions impact
everyone’s life and economic security, income and employability, as well as
matters of innovation and technological development and nearly every aspect
of the production and distribution of goods. One example includes decisions
about what should be produced and the allocation of resources and the work-
force in a given production line. Businessmen and corporations should not be
regarded as mere interest groups that may or may not be favored by a particu-
lar government official. Governments change; businessmen remain.
The fact that government officials include businessmen in some decision-
making does not mean that their actions are not oriented towards the well-
being of society as a whole. Entrepreneurs are consulted in decisions related
to the market and the economy because they are considered important actors
in privileged positions. Several times during our investigation we saw this
governmental deference to important businessmen first-hand. This is not
182  Stolen Cars

necessarily a question of bribery, pressure, or uncritical admiration of the

market or business class by government officials.
The regard government officials have for businessmen is part of their defer-
ence towards the market as a whole, which, according to Charles Lindblom,
should always be invited to participate in decision-making in liberal democra-
cies. Our interviewees from the insurance sector understand this clearly and
insist on exerting influence on national economic development, public policies,
and strategic decisions. This holds true for other topics. The insurance sector
has been a central player in the processes of reforming Brazilian social systems
and in the field of public insurance. In both cases efforts have been made to
orient public policies towards the adoption of private insurance schemes.
The capacity of the insurance sector to influence political decisions is
boosted by societal consolidation around a “neoliberal rationality” (Dardot
and Laval 2014) that justifies the privileged corporate position as an indexer
of social and political relations and practices. The corollary of this grid of
intelligibility is that the State must function as a company and market inter-
ests must guide political choices and societal policies. Our research demon-
strates that the insurance industry has successfully reset these boundaries in
its favor. It is not a question of less State and more market. What we have seen
is an increasing demand for the State to ensure that the market, its logic, and
its mechanisms work without hindrance.
The insurance sector demands that the State produce regulations and
sanctions to protect the mechanism of legitimate competition. Compliance
with the rules is beneficial to the sector and protects the businesses involved.
The regulations created under heavy influence from insurance companies and
their executives create barriers to entry for new competitors (associations,
religious institutions, militias, or drug gangs) and criminalize traditional
informal market operators (such as owners of traditionally illegal chop-shops).
In the case of the insurance market, although the relationship between the
business class and the State is not necessarily one of bribery and pressure,
businessmen are socially and economically well positioned. In addition to
their interests, their worldview inspires them to lobby for the implementation
of ultra-neoliberal State policies.
This has reinforced and fed the retreat of the social role of the State and
expanded the role of the market as a mediator of social and political relations.
In keeping with this rationality, cheaper products are more democratic. More
market participation means more democracy. Market expansion equals
resource distribution. That logic holds until the insurers, who are consis-
tently invited to help manage the State, realize that they are put at a disad-
vantage. When community associations challenge their unfettered capital
 Not Criminals, Legislators  183

accumulation, undemocratic mechanisms – hard-core criminalization – are

employed to maintain their position at the center of power.
When looking at the journeys of stolen cars and understanding the cen-
trality of the role of insurance companies, it is clear that the economic capital
and political prestige of actors in this sector are directly and intrinsically
linked to the exploration of markets related to car theft. Erik Bähre (2014)
researched the process of regulating taxi cooperatives in Cape Town by the
South African government in the post-Apartheid period. The process was
accompanied by regulations requiring fleet renewal, mandatory insurance,
tax payments to the government, and bribes to the police. Bähre referred to
the notion of trickle-up economies to understand the dynamic of capital
accumulation. This is the exact opposite of the idea of the trickle-down econ-
omy – also known as “Reaganomics” – which argues that tax breaks and the
shrinking of the welfare state benefit low-income people (since “the money
from the wealthy eventually trickles down to the poor”; Bähre 2014: 590).
The idea of trickle-up economics is that the flow of resources tends to accu-
mulate at the top.
It is worth remembering that Cape Town’s taxis have become safer and
more modern for local customers and tourists. At the same time, taxi drivers
pay out a significant portion of their earnings in debt repayments, taxes, and
bribes. Thus, together with the attempt to curb illegal practices, formaliza-
tion has transformed the “taxi world” into a profitable market for credit insti-
tutions, insurance companies, and the automotive industry. This dynamic of
accumulation and (re)production of durable inequalities takes a concrete
form in urban territories. Life is produced both in the ruins (Tsing 2015) and
enclaves of concentrated urban wealth.
Alphaville currently consists of 81.8 percent class A or B households (offi-
cial IBGE data) with average incomes far above even the wealthiest neighbor-
hoods in the state capital of São Paulo.9 Meanwhile, the neighborhood where
the young men who stole the Ford Ka from an Uber driver live – the same
neighborhoods where Evangelical churches and mutual protection associa-
tions for Vehicle Protection are concentrated – has a population that is more
than 80 percent made up of classes D and E. Antônio Paulo lives in Alphaville
and democracy looks very good for him, a businessman with the profile that
Charles Lindblom described in his seminal text. Nevertheless, something is
amiss in the discomfort that Antônio Paulo feels towards the mutual protec-
tion associations of Vehicle Protection fame and their Congressmen. Those
who can afford to commute home by helicopter after a day’s work in the
financial sector now have to fight for market share with Vehicle Protection
associations that are based in the urban peripheries, often run by low-level
cops, if not by militias.
184  Stolen Cars

With his Catholic education, Antônio Paulo is horrified by the growth of

Evangelical churches and their fondness for European Romantic art. On the
other hand, the Vehicle Protection associations that currently compete with
him are part of the associative universe forged in the peripheries by Pentecostal
churches. Little used to high art, its members prefer popular romantic music.
The conflict between these two very different social groups has gained signifi-
cant political and economic traction. Both groups have made the National
Congress the battlefield for their arguments about defining the lines between
legal and illegal, marginal and official, democratic and undemocratic, con-
ventional and innovative, legitimate and illegitimate, fair and unfair. Moral,
legal, and economic principles are muddled together, and in the conflict
between them a synthesis is strengthened in the National Congress itself and
also in the broader public debate: liberal democracy as the basis for the opera-
tion of markets is clearly no longer enough.
At the beginning of the chapter, we saw that Antônio Paulo, along with
insurance and financial groups, supported Geraldo Alckmin for the Presidency
of the Republic in 2018. The PSDB is a party historically linked to civil liber-
ties and the financial industry, it falls on the center-right of the spectrum and
has had a monopoly on the state government of São Paulo for more than two
decades. Antônio Paulo believed that traditional media and democratic poli-
tics controlled by his class would again be sufficient to win the 2018 presiden-
tial elections. He was wrong. Police officers, Evangelicals, and militia-members
linked to Vehicle Protection and other low-income markets supported the
extreme right in the 2018 elections and elected Jair Bolsonaro president,
alongside many members of Congress who are openly opposed to civil liber-
ties and institutional democracy.
From his luxury office in Alphaville, Antônio Paulo may not have noticed
that the rise of his low-cost competitors does not resemble a conventional class
struggle in Marxist terms, in which the virtuous lower and working classes free
the population from the oppressive capitalism of their bosses. From what we
can empirically perceive of these conflicts, low-income communities within
the same capitalist market have become more explicitly capitalist, which
explains their contempt for public regulation and their attachment to the
weapons – police, militias, and criminals – that they can put into action to
achieve what they want. Affordable Car Insurance has not yet caught on and
Vehicle Protection continues to grow despite the criminalizing impulses of
insurance companies. After all, in terms of criminalization, the police and mili-
tia already know all about it. Geraldo Alckmin won 5 percent of the votes cast
in the 2018 presidential election and didn’t make it to the second round; the
Vehicle Protection candidate did. In the second round it was Antônio Paulo of
the large traditional insurance companies who was forced to vote for the
 Not Criminals, Legislators  185

“renewed” Vehicle Protection candidate and not the other way around. Perhaps
liberal democracy is no longer sufficient to secure the privileges of big business-
men. Maybe that’s why it should be reconsidered.

Notes

  1. For a historiography of the company and its importance in Paulistano and Brazilian
property development, see Candido da Silva (2016).
  2. For more information on helicopters, see https://lab.org.uk/sao-paulo-the-worlds-
biggest-helicopter-fleet. In regard to methodology in this chapter, we wish to point
out that Antônio Paulo (a pseudonym) was just one of the insurance industry
executives we interviewed (always in luxurious buildings in São Paulo). In addition
to the various face-to-face interviews, we also make use of videos of lectures and
interviews as well as footage of industry conferences, all widely available on the
internet. The construction of this chapter’s arguments is based on intensive analysis
of the abundant ethnographic and documentary material that was also set out in
Fromm (2019).
  3. According to the Commercial Director of a large insurance company, the expecta-
tion of the sector is that Affordable Car Insurance will increase the national fleet of
insured vehicles: “A policy that can cost around USD 400.00 per year (1.6 MW) is
not accessible for the new class C, which means that most cars in circulation are not
insured. If you change that to something like USD 250.00 (1 MW), the scenario is
different. […] Currently, this large insurance company alone sells more than 4,000
auto insurance policies per month on average. With Affordable Insurance, our
expectation is that this will rise to more than 7,000. […] Of the total number of
vehicles in circulation, 80 percent have been in use for up to five years. These will
be the priority focuses for the new type of insurance and our expectation is that the
[insured] fleet will reach 40 percent” (Commercial Director, Insurance Sector
Magazine, April 2013).
  4. “Founded by Muhammad Yunus in 1983, the Grameen Bank pioneered a simple
model of credit whereby small groups of poor women were able to secure small
loans at reasonable rates of interest. The model [known as Grameen model of
microfinance] is meant to serve as an alternative to both formal systems of banking,
which demand collateral and exclude the poor, and informal systems of finance that
prey them. Premised on the idea that the poor are inherently entrepreneurial, the
Grameen Bank places its bets on the generation of income and the smooth
repayment of loans. After all, as one treatise on the Grameen Bank puts it, ‘the poor
always pay back’” (Roy 2010: 3). This model, created in Bangladesh, has become
central and globalized, mainly through World Bank policies.
  5. “Fortune tellers’ advertisements promising ‘to bring you your beloved in three days’
are now available in an organized crime version – in this case, ‘beloved’ is replaced
186  Stolen Cars

by ‘car,’ and the guarantee is given by the militias who have found a new way to
make money – by rescuing stolen cars. They have entered into a hustle initially
exploited by drug gangs who charge ‘commissions’ for returning motorcycles and
cars taken into the communities they control. The militias have gone further,
assuming the role of negotiators with so-called vehicle and property protection
associations. These are cooperatives unregulated by municipalities that offer policies
with prices well below those of insurance companies. The militia activity has been
the subject of complaints by the […] president of the [Mutual Property Protection
Union]. He claims that paramilitaries (and drug dealers) in Rio de Janeiro have
signed agreements with cooperatives that prefer to pay commissions for recovering
stolen cars rather than compensating their customers. “There is a peculiar situation
in Rio, something we call carjacking. Thieves steal a car and receive a payment of
between BRL 200.00 and BRL 300.00. The intermediaries of the charlatan
associations appear on the scene and promise to meet you within a few hours or a
few days. As the vehicle insured by a cooperative always has a tracker, they can go to
a community and negotiate its release with the local gang.’” (Report taken from a
major Brazilian newspaper).
  6. Wilson Pereira is a deputy from Rio de Janeiro and founder of an Evangelical
church with 80 branches around the world. Known for being in favor of the
“traditional Brazilian family” and defender of “gay conversion therapy,” he has
occupied the posts of Secretary of Human Rights and Secretary of Public Security.
His stance is very emphatic and he defends police violence: “I am in favor of human
rights for the right humans,” he says.
  7. With a quick consultation of the website of the official schedules of the President
and Vice President of the Republic, it is possible to see scheduled meetings with
representatives of associations from the traditional insurance sector and several
others from the private sectors.
  8. “Because public functions in the market system rest in the hands of businessmen, it
follows those jobs, prices, production, growth, the standard of living, and the
economic security of everyone all rest in their hands. Consequently, government
officials cannot be indifferent to how well business performs its functions.
Depression, inflation, or other economic distress bring down a government. A
major function of government, therefore, is to see to it that businessmen perform
their tasks” (Lindblom 1977: 172).
  9. A higher percentage than in the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city of São Paulo:
Moema (79.8%), Jardins (74.9%), Alto de Pinheiros (71.1%), and Itaim Bibi
(71.6%).
CHAPTER 8

Globalization and Its Backroads

André de Pieri Pimentel, Gabriel Feltran, and Lucas
Alves Fernandes Silva

Let us now return to a phone call mentioned in the Introduction to this book.
From his home in the East Zone of São Paulo, Aron makes a phone call to
Rosildo in Campos Verdes, Mato Grosso state. From a distance of 1,700 km,
Aron orders a Hilux pickup truck. He commits to paying the costs associated
with the robbery and delivery of the pickup to Bolivia, where it will be
exchanged for cocaine base paste. Aron is also responsible for paying the truck
driver, a friend of Rosildo’s, who will take care of transporting the paste to São
Paulo. Only 20 percent of these costs are paid up front. The rest will be paid
when the cocaine arrives in São Paulo. These arrangements don’t always work
out right. Debts often turn into deaths in the Brazilian world of crime. This
time everything worked out and Rosildo was paid for his services.
The Toyota Hilux stolen in Campos Verdes the day after the phone call
appeared several months later on the screen of one of the many computers at
the Alvorada Seguros Monitoring Center (see Chapter 4). With its tracking
device still turned on, the vehicle was circulating around San Esteban, Bolivia,
80 km from Campos Verdes. We were conducting fieldwork at Alvorada’s
main office in downtown São Paulo. We observed the movements of the
Hilux on the screen. We decided to reconstruct its journey in this chapter. We
also decided to follow one of the 7 kg of cocaine base paste that were used to
pay for the stolen pickup. We start from a cattle ranch in Mato Grosso and
travel by the Bolivian and Brazilian backroads along which exports of stolen
cars and imports of cocaine make their journeys.
Europe exports stolen cars to Africa and Africa exports drugs to Europe.
Europe exports luxury cars to Brazil and Brazil exports cocaine back. Our
Toyota Hilux is converted into cocaine at the Brazil–Bolivia border. The

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
188  Stolen Cars

extent to which value is added in international trade is intrinsically related to

the levels of inequality in the countries involved. This chapter demonstrates
how this happens as the cocaine base paste makes it way to the periphery of
São Paulo and then onward to its final point of sale. We follow it as it travels
by way of Santos, the largest port in South America, where part of it is
exported. It is sold by illegal immigrants in Görlitzer Park and finally con-
sumed in a Berlin nightclub.1
Along these journeys we assess the mechanisms of unequal distribution of
wealth by looking at the numbers. Different operators within these global
circuits extract different amounts of money from the chain. Evidence suggests
that the unequal circulation of money within these circuits is connected to
the territoriality of the associated violence. A gram of cocaine costs USD 3.00
in San Esteban. That same gram of cocaine can be sold for USD 115.00 in
Berlin. A high level of armed violence is associated with illegal car and drug
markets in São Paulo’s favelas and in kidnappings in Campos Verdes. There is
almost no violence associated with the retail cocaine market in Berlin.

***

We had heard of vast quantities of cocaine in Campos Verdes and had conse-
quently imagined border posts with police, customs and migration control
officers, sniffer dogs, and scanners. In fact, the border and inspection posts are
run by different State agencies and are more rudimentary than we had expected.
Nonetheless, we found that they did possess a truck scanner worth millions of
dollars that could be used to detect illegal goods hidden in cargo. They also had
electronic police highway warning systems capable of detecting stolen license
plates on the road. We also learned that there is a border force that brings
together the army and police and conducts sophisticated intelligence activities.
Given the existence of these systems, how is it possible that so much cocaine
and so many stolen cars and weapons manage to cross the border?

***

As soon as his phone call with Aron had ended, Rosildo knew exactly what he
had to do and who he had to call. Rosildo had been based in Campos Verdes
for several years. He was active in the local world of crime and, since he had
spent time in prison in São Paulo, had extensive contacts within the PCC. He
called Julinho at the Esperança ranch and asked him to round up a team of
four men. He would pay them USD 250.00 (1 MW) each for their services.
Julinho, 26, was a farmhand. He had grown up in a poor village in the
region and had always worked on the farm. He’d never had any run-ins with
the law, unlike his brother, Guga, who had just got out of jail. While inside,
 Globalization and Its Backroads  189

Guga had made some contacts with people linked to the Comando Vermelho
(Red Command, CV), a criminal organization based in Rio de Janeiro but
also active in the prisons of Mato Grosso. Julinho met Rosildo through Guga
(who is unemployed). Rosildo decided to include Julinho in his team. The
two other places would be filled by two other farmhands from Esperança
Ranch. The farmhands work 44 hours a week for 1 MW per month. The
farm owner lives in the interior of São Paulo and visits Esperança twice a year.
He inherited the farm. This inheritance helps maintain his already extremely
high income. He employed Joel, another Campos Verdes local, to manage the
farm for 4 MW a month – a high salary in those parts. He supervises the
employees and mediates between the day-to-day reality and the image of the
farm presented to the owner during his biannual visits.
A 36 km stretch of the land border with Bolivia falls within the boundaries
of the farm. Fifteen backroads that cross the border run through those bound-
aries. In some cases there isn’t even a fence to separate Bolivia from Brazil.
Julinho, Guga, Joel, and the other farmhands know these backroads well. The
owner of the farm does not. The police are familiar with two of them.
However, the police rarely visit the property. They appear when they receive
an anonymous tip off. Needless to say, the farmhands give them a wide berth.
As a dealer from São Paulo, Rosildo relies on Julinho and Guga’s knowledge
of the region. The backroads are central to his business. Young working-class
men from Campos Verdes are a particular interest of Rosildo’s. He has hired
Esperança’s workers in the past to bring cocaine into Brazil on foot.2
This time the mission would be of another order. Julinho was aware of
that. They would have to commit a robbery. The remuneration would be
somewhat lower than last time. But it would still be a lot of money for a few
hours’ work. Rosildo had explained everything to Julinho. It would go like
clockwork. The four young men, two of them armed, broke into the Costa
Prado family home a little before 7 a.m., shortly after the father had left for
work. Two of them established a watch post on the rooftop terrace while the
other two took possession of the family members’ cellphones, ordered them
to remain completely silent and locked them in the bathroom.
Julinho drove the Hilux to the farm. They took care to arrive before Joel,
the farm manager. Julinho then drove the Hilux along the one of the back-
roads that crossed the farm into Bolivia, accompanied by another of the farm-
hands on a motorcycle. Meanwhile Guga, experienced in the procedures of
robbery, stayed at the Costa Prado home and periodically reiterated his warn-
ing to Mrs. Costa Prado and her teenage children that they should be quiet.
They would be released unharmed before long. The mother calmed the chil-
dren down and the three of them sat silently on the bathroom floor.
One hour and 10 minutes passed and the family was told that they would
soon be able to leave. Guga and his partner escaped in the same car they had
190  Stolen Cars

arrived in. They each returned home and then arrived separately at the farm.
When they got there they saw Julinho and his partner arriving on the motor-
cycle. It was just another ordinary day at work.
The following evening, Rosildo met Julinho at a bar on the outskirts of
Campos Verdes. Rosildo left the meeting on a motorcycle, carrying a back-
pack containing 7 kg of cocaine base paste. He went straight to the garage
from where the paste would transported to São Paulo by truck. The rest of the
consignment in the truck would consist of 26 metric tons of soybeans des-
tined for São Paulo with all the necessary paperwork. Twenty-six metric tons
of legitimate cargo and a mere 7 kg of contraband. A mere 7 kg that would
earn the truck driver four times more than the rest of the load combined.3
Rosildo, Julinho, Guga, and the truck transporting the cocaine base paste to
São Paulo remained at all times within Brazilian territory.
Following the theft, Julinho, Guga, and assistants decided to keep a low
profile. The kidnapping was reported in the local newspaper. They were
afraid of their families joining up the dots between the story in the headlines
and their newfound wealth. As it happens, no-one connected them to the
crime – although Guga went back to jail a year later, this time for a crime he
hadn’t committed. He was a marked man. The police arrested him for
“alleged” involvement in another robbery.
The truck scanner at the border post on the main road connecting Brazil
and Bolivia is not often used. In any case, the truck with the load of soybeans
and cocaine base paste would have easily got past it: the soybeans were accom-
panied by an invoice, the freight was within applicable weight limits and 7 kg
here or there would not go noticed. Indeed, the cocaine remained unnoticed
by anyone until Aron, the football coach whom we had met at a samba gig in
Vila Cisper in 2015, took possession of it. This was same Aron who earned
1,500 MW per month.

A Global Market and Its Margins

In 2017, 1,159 insured Toyota Hilux pickups were stolen in Brazil (SUSEP
2019). A Toyota Hilux costs around 200 MW. Thus, insurers have paid out
claims worth almost 231,800 MW (USD 58,000,000.00). The vast majority
of these payouts, including the one paid to the Costa Prado family, are used
to buy new cars. This has boosted sales in the automobile industry by 1 per-
cent, as we saw in Chapter 3.
During an interview, the director of vehicles at Alvorada Seguros provided
us with important data regarding the insurance sector. He informed us that 1
percent of all insured vehicles are stolen every year. An average annual insur-
ance policy for a Toyota Hilux costs 4.5 MW per annum. There were 89,790
 Globalization and Its Backroads  191

insured Toyota Hiluxes in circulation in Brazil in 2017. That means that

insurers earned approximately 404,055 MW (i.e., more than USD
100,000,000.00) from Toyota Hilux insurance premiums that year. Insurers
earn 1.7 times the value of each claim paid out for a stolen Toyota Hilux. Half
of the vehicles that give rise to paid out claims are recovered by hunters and
rapid response units and then, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, sold at auc-
tions. Through these auctions, insurers, which tend to be multinational
finance companies, recover some 80 percent of the cost of each claim.
Therefore, for each Toyota Hilux stolen in 2017 in Brazil, an insurer earned
an average in excess of three times the amount of the claim it gave rise to.
Unlike São Paulo, Campos Verdes is a small municipality with a mainly
rural economy in the hinterland of Mato Grosso. The region has potential for
tourism thanks to its proximity to the biodiverse Pantanal and the Paraguay
River. It is characterized by a concentration of large landed estates specializing
in the production of livestock and agribusiness commodities and has close
social links with Bolivia. Most of the manual workers in Campos Verdes are
Bolivians from San Esteban.
Pickups are highly valued by the local population, especially farmers, due
to their ability to handle the dirt roads that crisscross the immense territory
of Mato Grosso. The presence of Toyota Hiluxes and the Brazil–Bolivia bor-
der boost the profile of Campos Verdes. Locals like Julinho are frequently
enlisted to take stolen vehicles or counterfeit goods across the border or to act
as scouts. Scouts travel ahead of the cargo carried by border-crossers like
Julinho to guarantee their safe return to Brazil with the goods resulting from
the trade. The amounts charged to carry out this work vary according to dis-
tance traveled, quantity transported, and type of vehicle stolen.
Based on information gathered from our interlocutors in the region, scouts
and border-crossers earn anything from 0.5 to 7.5 MW, depending on the
type of service performed and how experienced they are. If the vehicle is com-
ing from a distant part of the country or the cargo transported is very valu-
able, the payment might rise to 15 MW. Young manual laborers are easy to
recruit to perform illegal services. Unemployment and low wages in the legal
job market – Julinho earns 1 MW per month as a farmhand – provide incen-
tives to take on risky but better-paid work in the illegal market.
Home invasions and express kidnappings are common in the region, espe-
cially in rural areas. They usually follow a pattern whereby the victims are
released after a few hours and they call the police. Sometimes they are released
in a remote place and sometimes they are tied up – they are always very fright-
ened. Crimes involving armed violence and kidnapping that produce physical
and psychological harm are seen by market operators as necessary to buy
enough time to drive a stolen vehicle to the border without attracting police
attention.
192  Stolen Cars

The Costa Prado family’s Hilux was driven to San Esteban by Julinho and
exchanged for a 7 kg consignment of cocaine base paste that was then deliv-
ered to Rosildo. We traveled between Campos Verdes and San Esteban twice
during our fieldwork. The journey on the main road takes 1 hour and 40
minutes, but via local backroads it takes less than an hour. The backroads are
popular with drivers of stolen cars. A pickup can be exchanged for between
five and 7 kg of cocaine base paste. Cheaper cars are worth 1 or 2 kg; a new
motorcycle will fetch no more than 1 kg. The trade is booming and transac-
tions occur every day. The city of San Esteban shows clear signs of this com-
mercial activity. Shiny new cars park in front of run-down houses worth
one-tenth of their value (Figure 8.1). The cars are inevitably missing license
plates or else they have counterfeit ones that were produced by hand or pro-
vided by the city government (and not recognized by the Bolivian State).
With a population of less than 15,000, the dust-filled town of San Esteban
is just one in the region that is associated with illegal trading. Political, legal,

FIGURE 8.1  Stolen Brazilian pick-up truck in San Esteban, 2019.

Source: The authors.
 Globalization and Its Backroads  193

and economic factors drive the formation of marginal connections between

Brazil and Bolivia. One such is the absence in Bolivian law of any legal status
attributed to the receivers of illegal goods. Another is the fact that Bolivia
doesn’t have significant industrial sector and does not produce its own cars.
On the other hand, it does produce the coca leaves that are used for the
manufacture of cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine base paste. The Bolivian
border neighbors Brazil’s Center-West and north macroregions, home to large
numbers of pickups and SUVs. San Esteban’s population is generally very
poor and only has access to menial jobs.
Conveniently, no regulations govern the receiving of stolen cars. The
Bolivian consul in Cuiabá told us that he felt ashamed of all the stolen
Brazilian cars in San Esteban but that the local population would need to
have other economic opportunities before a government clamp down could
take place. The illegal drug and stolen car markets have become central to
the reproduction of local inequalities. Social and legal conditions have been
molded around the potential gains to be made from them. From time to
time, the Bolivian government introduces national vehicle regulation poli-
cies, as in the case of Law No. 133 of June 8, 2011. Law No. 133 allows
undocumented vehicles to be regularized by those in possession of them
upon payment of a fee. This is a direct incentive to steal Brazilian vehicles
and allows the State to appropriate part of the economic gains generated by
the stolen car market. The law effectively imposes a tax on the import of
stolen cars, which in turn encourages the export of the Bolivian product
with the greatest added value: cocaine. It is, in effect, a foreign trade
policy.
Law No. 133 has received heavy criticism from Brazilian politicians and
moral entrepreneurs in the public security sphere. According to them, then-
president of Bolivia Evo Morales had “legalized crime,” which would have
negative impacts on Brazilian states bordering Bolivia like Mato Grosso. The
law remained in force until 2013 and led to around 100,000 vehicles being
legalized. While the law was in force, Brazilian insurance companies were able
to verify by means of tracking devices that 5,188 vehicles stolen in Brazil were
circulating in Bolivian territory. At the end of 2013, after diplomatic negotia-
tions between the two countries, Bolivia returned a batch of 397 vehicles to
Brazil, 55 (13%) from the state of Mato Grosso and 85 (21%) from the state
of São Paulo.4 The return of the vehicles was the occasion for speeches from
local politicians, none of whom commented on the huge discrepancy between
the 100,000 vehicles that had been legalized in Bolivia and the 397 that had
been returned to Brazil.
194  Stolen Cars

Connecting Markets

Rosildo was arrested in 2016 after being caught driving a Fiat Palio with 27
kg of cocaine hidden in the fuel tank. The arrest was reported in the local
newspaper of Riacho Largo municipality in the Metropolitan Region of
Cuiabá. In reconstructing this scene, we will conduct some calculations that
will indicate why stealing a vehicle in Brazil exchanging it at the border for
cocaine is more appealing than simply buying the cocaine.5 According to a
report in the local newspaper, published the day after the arrest:

Brazil’s Special Border Force (GEFRON) arrested a 44-year-old man

carrying 27 kilos of cocaine base paste. The paste was concealed in the
fuel tank of a Fiat Palio. The arrest took place on a Sunday afternoon, on
a side road near Fazenda Maravilha, a region near the Bolivian border.
According to GEFRON, the man had bought the paste in San Esteban.
He planned to resell the 27 packages in Riacho Largo for USD 3,000.00
(12 MW) apiece. (Local Newspaper)

The 27 kg of cocaine base paste Rosildo transported would have earned

him – as an actor in the local world of crime well connected to the PCC –
around USD 81,000.00 (324 MW). In Mato Grosso, PCC traffickers have
long had local alliances with traffickers from the Comando Vermelho. Even
though the two organizations have been at war since mid-2016 (Feltran
2018), they had previously cooperated peacefully for 23 years and Rosildo
still maintained friendly ties with some Comando Vermelho suppliers.
But how much did he invest in acquiring the cocaine base paste and what
net profit would he make from a shipment? Let us consider that a Toyota
Hilux was included the transaction and that 7 kg of cocaine base paste would
offset Rosildo’s expenses. He had spent USD 3,750.00 (15 MW) for the
Hilux to be stolen in Cuiabá and taken across the border. But he had to pay
for the remaining 20 kg in cash. If we consider that he paid USD 2,800.00
per kg, another USD 56,000.00 (224 MW) would be needed to complete the
shipment he had with him when he was arrested. Along with labor costs,
Rosildo must have spent no less than 239 MW to obtain his 27 kg of cocaine
base paste. If he sold it in Cuiabá he would keep a third of his takings, thus
making a 35 percent profit.
Now let us exclude the Hilux from the transaction and suppose that he
paid for everything in cash. In that case, he would have spent USD 75,600.00
to buy the cocaine base paste and another US 1,250.00 on freight costs. He
would have spent 307 MW and his profit margin from selling it in Riacho
 Globalization and Its Backroads  195

Largo would be something like 5 percent. The profit margins from drug traf-
ficking are far higher when stolen vehicles are included in the transactions. If
the cocaine base paste were paid for entirely with stolen cars, Rosildo would
make a profit of 460 percent by selling it in Riacho Largo (see Table 8.1).
Before he was arrested, Rosildo loaded 7 kg of cocaine base paste into the
truck carrying soybeans and the driver delivered the paste to Aron in Vila
Cisper. Aron runs 16 drug sale points in the area, mostly located in favelas. In
São Paulo’s favelas, the retail price for a kilo of cocaine base paste that has
been cut with other ingredients and transformed into powder is up to USD
15,000.00 (60 MW) gross. It may be cut with flour, baking soda, powdered
medicines, or other substances. It is sold in quantities of 1 or 2 g for an aver-
age price of USD 2.50 or USD 5.00 respectively. At the samba party where
we met Aron, many people were buying cocaine for immediate consumption.
Depending on the situation, dealers earn a commission of 20 to 40 percent of
total sales. This is a very high commission compared to what is paid in the
legal commercial sector in São Paulo (between 2% and 5%). Many favela

TABLE 8.1  Percentage increase of Bolivian cocaine base paste price

when sold in Brazilian territory (kg).

USD MW
San Esteban (wholesale) 2,800 11.2
Riacho Largo (wholesale) 3,000 12
São Paulo (retail) 15,000 60
Percentage increase along 435.7
supply chain
Source: The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018).

TABLE 8.2  Percent increase of Bolivian cocaine hydrochloride price

when exported to Europe (kg).

USD MW
San Esteban (wholesale) 3,500 14
Port of Santos (wholesale) 28,750 115
Görlitzer Park (retail) 115,000 460
Percentage increase along 3,186
supply chain

Source: The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018).

196  Stolen Cars

teenagers are attracted by drug trafficking and see Aron as an example of the
success this line of work can lead to (Feltran 2019, 2020a).
Aron is a “brother” who has been baptized into the PCC. The PCC does
not function like a company, nor as a military-style hierarchy, as Mexican and
Colombian cartels do. The PCC is a secret society along the lines of the
Freemasons (Feltran 2018, 2020a). Different entrepreneurs from different
illegal markets (robbery, theft, smuggling, drug and arms trafficking, money
laundering, etc.) join the brotherhood, usually after going through shared
experiences in prison and the peripheries. However, they do not mix their
private incomes with those of the PCC. Like a businessman who is also a
Freemason, his work in the company is kept separate from his work in the
fraternity. Equality is one of the most cherished values among the brothers of
the PCC (Biondi 2016), as it is among the Freemasons. Administrative roles
within the PCC, as with other secret fraternities, are considered responsibili-
ties and there is no personalization of power. Secret fraternities greatly assist
their members in pursuing their private business interests, by providing
mutual support, networks of market contacts, and sharing know-how, tech-
nology, and helpful tools at lower-than-market rates.
Aron has his networks within the PCC and had recently met cocaine
exporters. This is a market in which he had previously had no contacts. He
realized that exporting cocaine was even more profitable than selling it in the
retail market. His contacts informed him that they formed export consortia.
If he wanted to export 6 kg, another brother wanted to export 20 kg, and
another 10 brothers wanted to export a combined total of 400 kg, a single
“boat” of 12 brothers would be created to export 426 kg. Each one would
receive his share and pay his share of the operation’s logistical costs (i.e., the
amounts spent on bribes to police and tax officials and on payments to
employees of international cargo ships).
According to our informants in Santos, Aron would earn between USD
14,950.00 and USD 17,250.00 (59–69 MW) per kilo of cocaine he shipped.
Furthermore, this would eliminate the cost of the commissions paid to his
retail dealers. Once in Europe, this cocaine sold wholesale would be worth
almost twice as much, approximately USD 28,750.00 (115 MW) or up to
four times as much if sold retail, about USD 115,000.00 (460 MW; see Table
8.2). The main changes in price occur at state, national, and continental bor-
ders, i.e., when the merchandise crosses from one consumer market to another
with higher levels of consumption and a favorable exchange rate.
Aron paid USD 3,750.00 (15 MW) to have the Costa Prados’ Hilux stolen.
If he managed to export the 7 kg of base paste that he gained in exchange for
the pickup he would make 378 MW. This is a return of 2600 percent. It is no
surprise that he can earn 1,500 MW per month. Aron has never been to Europe,
although he tried to when he was still pursuing a football career. If he had gone
 Globalization and Its Backroads  197

as a trafficker and sold his 7 kg of cocaine on the European retail market, he

could earn eight times his original investment – a profit of 3,206 MW or USD
801,500.00. There is no more profitable product in the world today (Wainwright
2017). For more detailed breakdowns see Tables 8.3– 8.5.

TABLE 8.3  Percentage increase of Rosildo and Aron’s cocaine operation

when they only use cash (1 Hilux = 7 kg cocaine base paste for retail
sale in São Paulo).

Expenses Income Percentage

increase
USD MW USD MW
Rosildo (Riacho 19,600 78.4 21,000 84 7.14
Largo)
Aron (São 27,350 109.4 105,000 420 283.9
Paulo)

Source: The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018).

TABLE 8.4  Percentage increase of Aron’s cocaine operation when he

uses the Hilux as currency and sells it in São Paulo (1 Hilux = 7 kg co-
caine base paste for retail sale).

Expenses Income Percentage

increase
USD MW USD MW
São Paulo 3,750 15 105,000 420 2,700
(Aron)

Source: The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018).

TABLE 8.5  Percentage increase of Aron’s cocaine operation when he

only uses cash and when he uses the Hilux as currency (1 Hilux = 5 kg
cocaine hydrochloride exported to Europe).

Expenses Income Percentage

increase
USD MW USD MW
Cash only 23,500 94 143,750 575 512
Using the 9,500 38 143,750 575 1,413
stolen Hilux
used as
currency

Source: The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018).

198  Stolen Cars

When Aron called Rosildo and placed the order for the Toyota Hilux, he
set in motion a supply chain between different markets that moves money
across global territories and mobilizes transnational marginal economic con-
nections. The existence of these illicit economic circuits earns a lot of money
for local criminal entrepreneurs in São Paulo, Campos Verdes, Riacho Largo,
and San Esteban, but it earns a fortune for the operators of transnational
cocaine trafficking circuits, like the entrepreneurs baptized into the PCC
who operate in the Port of Santos. Once again, those who occupy more
central positions in these vast market networks extract greater returns with
less risk of punishment. Aron is much less likely to be arrested for the Hilux
robbery than Rosildo, who in turn faces less risk than Julinho and Guga. At
the same time, the use of stolen cars to enhance profitability is very revealing
for thinking about the connections between two criminal markets: car theft
and the international cocaine trade. So far, we have been talking about ille-
gal markets. But money from illegal markets also moves quickly into legal
ones.

Urban Reconfigurations

Samuel,6 a black 15-year-old male, was also at the samba party in Vila Cisper
on the day we met Aron. Well dressed in designer clothes, he was smiling and
talking to friends with a glass of beer in his hand, an iPhone in his pocket, and
a pouch hanging around his neck. Samuel works for Aron in one of the fave-
la’s drug dens and was at the samba party to work. He worked a 12-hour shift,
selling cocaine from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. He hung around near one of the bath-
rooms with three other dealers, also employed by Aron, each selling a differ-
ent product: marijuana, cocaine, crack, and “loló,” a chloroform-based
inhalant.
Samuel had already carried out carjackings but found drug dealing easier.
He is one of millions of young dark-skinned people from poor families who
work at the margins of these markets, just like Julinho or his Bolivian coun-
terpart. Samuel was born and raised in a São Paulo favela. He has been close
to the “world of crime” since he was 12 years old, when he wrote the letters
“P.C.C.” on a desk at his school. For boys like Samuel, illegal economic cir-
cuits like car theft and drug dealing present the possibility of income and
important symbolic benefits. Activities considered risky are rewarded with
much higher incomes than those available in legal markets, while the possibil-
ity of acquiring branded clothing and accessories, attractive to teenagers inte-
grated into global symbolic economies, offers enhanced status.
 Globalization and Its Backroads  199

At the samba party alone, Samuel would earn a third of a monthly mini-
mum wage through his commissions for selling cocaine. It wasn’t a big event
but it paid well. By contrast, his grandmother, who he lived with, earned only
a monthly pension equivalent to 1 MW after working her whole life and tak-
ing care of eight children – two of whom were murdered at the ages of 17 and
19. The day after the samba party Samuel went to a shopping center. We
accompanied him. Samuel spent all of the USD 75.00 (0.3 MW) he had
earned the night before. He bought a pair of Oakley sunglasses. They were on
sale for USD 69.00 (normally they would have cost USD 113.00 (0.45 MW)).
With the change, Samuel bought a sandwich at Subway and an ice cream at
McDonald’s for USD 6.00 in total. He paid for everything in cash. As we
accompanied Samuel on his shopping trip, we were struck by something
obvious. Money that had been “dirty” the day before had become everyday
money for paying consumption taxes and stimulating the global brands
desired by Samuel and millions of his peers in the peripheries of São Paulo,
Oakley, Subway, McDonald’s, and many others.
Two years later, in 2017, Samuel was shot in the back by a policeman
while trying to flee from a routine roadblock on a main road near his home.
He was already known to the police as a drug dealer and a motorcycle thief.
He spent several days in hospital but survived. His mother, a former partici-
pant in our ethnographic research in the East Zone, who had never accepted
the dirty money her son earned as a drug dealer, had thrown him out of the
house a year before. She was well aware of the likely destination for a favela
resident in these illegal markets, even in the event of achieving economic suc-
cess – it was the same destination reached by Samuel’s uncles and father: jail
or death. The dirty money that Samuel’s mother rejected in spite of her pov-
erty now supports the house where he lives with his girlfriend and daughter
(whom she was pregnant with when he was shot). He is still wanted by the
police and the courts and could be arrested or killed at any time. But he is still
alive and involved in illegal activities.

***

The money that millions of young people like Samuel, Guga, or Julinho earn
every day by acting as low operators in illicit economies circulates freely into
the so-called formal economy via consumption. At the same time, the daily
trajectories of these young people are marked by numerous processes of crim-
inal subjectification (Misse 2010). They are not seen as victims, exploited by
unequal and violent transnational markets. In Brazil, these young men
embody the figure of the “public enemy” that is be fought against. They
inspire social demands for repression, not protection. It is no coincidence that
200  Stolen Cars

it is young people with exactly this profile who make up most of the prison
population – Guga was arrested the following year – and of the homicide
victims in Brazil – Samuel was almost killed two years later.
Both mechanisms – mass incarceration and lethal violence – are also cru-
cial to economic expansion and labor dynamization in these illegal markets.
Prison institutions are strategic spaces where criminal gangs recruit their
members. Meanwhile, when these young people are arrested or killed, their
jobs are quickly filled by other young people, also mostly black and from
peripheral areas, thus increasing the number of criminals. Mass incarceration,
then, entails the expansion of a “reserve army” of low-level operators in illegal
markets, which, of course, exercises further downward pressure on what these
operators can earn. Commissions paid for drug trafficking in São Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro are falling every year as the turnover of low-level operators
increases.
Samuel’s story problematizes normative understanding of how illicit econ-
omies function. This understanding is commonly found in both in the public
policy community and in academic studies. These illegal markets are treated
as constituting a separate reality from the formal economy and even as a force
that works against economic development (FIESP 2016, 2017). Furthermore,
such normative analyses tend to associate the presence of illegal markets with
the “absence of the State” that is presumed to characterize urban peripheries
or, at a global scale, the everyday life of countries in the Global South. As we
can see, it is not necessary to presume any absence to recognize the logic
inherent in the normative regimes that at the boundary between the legal and
the illegal are also the margins at which the modern State is constructed (Das
2007a; Das and Poole 2008; Herzfeld 1997).
The formation, operation, territorialization, and regulation of these mar-
kets produce cities empirically and produces internally unequal cities, from
the rich financial centers to the poor peripheries. But they also produce dif-
ferent cities at the global scale – São Paulo, in this way, can be read as the
periphery of New York, London, or Berlin, connected to them via their finan-
cial centers but also through their marginal economies. These markets pro-
duce personal networks, territorial regulations, and protection markets,
among many other elements. Both the formal economy and the State are
crucial references for the way these illicit markets are produced, just as illicit
markets are key references for the formal economy and for the tense boundar-
ies inscribed in urban inequalities (Feltran 2011).
On the one hand, “effects of place” (Bourdieu 1997) are produced through
these relationships that tend towards internal coherence and classify cities and
their internal spaces differently (what is central is official, what is marginal is
informal, illegal and illicit). On the other hand, the land market internalizes
 Globalization and Its Backroads  201

this hierarchy of values, producing economic validation of the managerial,

State-centered gaze that sees illegalities as emerging exclusively in the periph-
eries. The criminal subjectification of small operators like Samuel is a direct
consequence of this interpretive framework. Far from producing a split
between irreconcilable parts, however, these boundaries produce regulated
interfaces, in which protection markets flourish – whether operated by police,
militias, or criminal organizations like the PCC or the CV.
These boundaries can only be properly understood empirically, by taking
into account the kinds of relationships that are established through them. If
in Brazil’s social imaginary “crime” and “illegal markets” are strongly associ-
ated with the everyday life of urban peripheries, the chapters of this book
have revealed that in fact they have far greater territorial, social, economic,
and political reach and are far more plural than this. Let us go back to that
Monday, when Samuel went to the mall. That afternoon he only bought
products from global companies: Oakley, McDonalds, Subway. Urban
peripheries, territories that are often represented as “territories of crime,” are
not the final destination of the money that this crime makes circulate.
Samuel’s money, earned in the periphery of São Paulo, flows to owners of
franchises in Brazil’s middle and upper classes, and also to the international
headquarters of these large companies.
These marginal global markets are invariably formed thorough personal
networks that are heterogeneous and territorially distributed. Aron met
Rosildo and kept in touch with him; Rosildo met Julinho through his brother
Guga, and with each new criminal act, the bonds of trust are strengthened (or
not). These are the bonds that structure all commercial transactions, regard-
less of whether the market is legal or illegal. However, today, these private,
personal ties structure networks with transnational reach. The Toyota Hilux
stolen in Campos Verdes is connected to the purchase of cocaine base paste in
San Esteban, Bolivia, which in turn is connected to the sale of cocaine at a
drug den on the outskirts of São Paulo.
These networks coproduce distant territories and bring together very dif-
ferent actors to drive uneven and combined development. This seeks out the
reduction of prices that marginal informalities can offer for appropriation by
the center – large global companies – on an unprecedented scale. Producers
of cocaine base paste, car thieves, border-crossers, scouts, truck drivers, small-
and large-scale local drug dealers and even large farmers, large business own-
ers in the “formal economy,” and State agents operating protection markets,
among many others, are connected in these supply chains. If drug trafficking
is central to the construction of symbolic representations of Brazil’s urban
peripheries, associating them with crime and violence, these connections
202  Stolen Cars

invite us to reflect on the relational dimension inscribed in the production of

the urban.
The way in which the commercial networks connecting Campos Verdes to
the drug dens of São Paulo operate leads us to the problematic of what prop-
erly constitutes the distinction between the “rural” and the “urban,” a theme
much discussed in contemporary urban studies (Harvey 1992; Lefebvre
1991; Soja 1993). This example suggests the formation of multiple urbani-
ties, produced in relation to one another. Furthermore, State agents that
operate on the margins of the State (Das and Poole 2008), mainly in protec-
tion markets, are central to the territorialization of these networks. There is
no State absence but rather the production of different normative regimes,
coexisting with the State, that are constitutive part of the way it is relationally
produced. Samuel, Julinho, and Guga demonstrate that if the urban bound-
aries coproduced between the legal and illegal, centers and margins, Global
North and Global South are porous, they also produce radical cleavages.
Although the operation of these illegal markets establishes connections
between different agents, some of these are far more exposed to risk as a result
of participation in these markets than others. From a theoretical and method-
ological point of view, it is necessary to problematize a certain State-centric
narrative that analyzes illegal markets using the State order as its sole refer-
ence. From a practical point of view, however, this narrative has concrete
effects: millions of black youths from the peripheries of São Paulo and in
many other cities within and beyond the so-called Global South are very
familiar with these effects.

North–South Urban Inequalities

We are now many thousands of kilometers from São Paulo, in Görlitzer Park,
located in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, Germany. The park is large,
wooded, and frequented by different groups, from young people to families.
Görlitzer Park is recognized as a public problem. Immigrants congregate in
the park, in broad daylight, offering marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and syn-
thetic drugs to potential customers passing by. We spoke at length with some
of these dealers in 2017, in most cases young, tall, black illegal immigrants or
asylum seekers from different African countries.
The cocaine sold in Görlitzer Park comes from African, Colombian, or
Brazilian suppliers. In all of these cases, it is South American cocaine, most
often transported via Brazil to Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and even
North America. In 2020, Brazilian and Colombian cocaine traffickers are
arrested in diverse parts of the world. Clearly, the diverse routes that take
 Globalization and Its Backroads  203

cocaine from the Brazil’s borders to Berlin are dependent upon very diverse
personal networks (Cohen 2017; Fleetwood 2014; Padovani 2018). These
trafficking operations do not involve young people like Samuel, or even
agents like Aron, but rather major criminal actors who are usually more expe-
rienced and better connected, mobilize transnational protection markets and
move much larger volumes of money with every shipment.
When Aron’s cocaine arrives at Görlitzer Park, via his contacts in the PCC
there are similarities and differences in the mechanisms through which urban
inequalities and violence are reproduced. On the one hand, it is common for
the drugs to be sold by nonwhite ethnic groups, typically black and brown
men from different regions of the African continent. If these retail dealers are
seen as outcasts in the city, and sometimes criminalized for their small-scale
dealing (which is generally tolerated by the police, with legal guarantees),
they do not fight the police, are not armed, and are not exposed to violence
like Samuel, Julinho, or Guga are.
The participation of these immigrants in illegal circuits does not carry a
high risk of prison – they carry small quantities of drugs that by law are con-
sidered to be for personal consumption – nor lethal violence – there is a very
low homicide rate in Germany. In Latin America, necropolitics (Mbembe
2003) seems to be a dominant grammar through which states construct their
War on Drugs, with repression directed specifically and exclusively at the low-
level operators of these circuits. In Germany, as in other European countries,
repressing the small operator is seen as an inefficient strategy – it only produces
a revolving door of these retail vendors, increasing the prison population and
incentivizing those who suffer repression to arm themselves. These are radi-
cally different ways of addressing the same urban issue that produce different
scenarios of public action, even if they are clearly connected to each other.
Table 8.6 shows the distribution of gains along the stolen car-drugs chain.
In the São Paulo and Brazilian contexts, both the expansion of criminal
markets and the growth of armed violence is closely associated with the con-
text of the economic opening during the transition from the 1980s to the
1990s (Feltran 2012, 2014; Hirata 2018; Telles 2010a; Telles and Cabanes
2006). They are linked to the insertion of the Brazilian economy into global
economic circuits. Just as violence and crime are associated with the daily
lives of peripheral territories at the scale of the city, they are often associated
with megacities in the Global South like São Paulo (Roy 2017).
In both cases, representations tend to ignore the relational aspect of urban
marginalities. Discussing illegal economic circuits in São Paulo, such as
vehicle theft and illicit drug trafficking, takes us far away from the Global
South. Global cities (Sassen 2007) in so-called developed countries are
directly involved in this coproduction of urban asymmetries. Not only does
204  Stolen Cars

TABLE 8.6  Distribution of gains per agent/city along the stolen Toyota
Hilux/cocaine chain (1 Toyota Hilux = 5 kg of cocaine hydrochloride
exported to Europe = USD 575,000 in Berlin retail market).

Agent/City USD MW Percent par- Risk of exposure

ticipation to violence
Thief [Julinho/ 250 1 0.04 Very high
Riacho Largo]
Thief manag- 2,500 10 0.44 High
er [Rosildo/
Riacho Largo]
Truck 2,500 10 0.44 Low
driver [Riacho
Largo/São
Paulo]
Protection 2,500 10 0.44 Low
Market
[Bribed state
agent/Santos
Port]
International 135,250 541 23.55 High
wholesale
dealers (total)
[Santos Port/
Brazil]
International 431,250 1725 75.09 Low
retail dealers
(total)
[Berlin/
Germany]

Source. The authors, based on ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018).

the so-called formal economy reinforce the economic centrality of devel-

oped countries and their global cities, as we have seen in this book, illicit
economies are also important bridges for the production of economic cen-
tralities, observed here from their global margins. Illicit economies are not a
counterpoint to globalization but a constitutive dimension of it.
Globalization is a widely addressed topic in contemporary urban studies.
Even today it tends to be understood as the global expansion of the so-called
superior circuits of the economy (Santos 2017 [1975]) or the production of
 Globalization and Its Backroads  205

a “network society” (Castells 1999) with dematerialized flows of social life

connecting everything and everyone.7 However, elsewhere “globalization
seen from below” has also been discussed (Knowles 2014; Portes 1997;
Tarrius 2002; Tsing 2005), conceiving the secondary circuits and backroads
of globalization as crucial for understanding contemporary inequalities8 and
the search for alternatives in the ruins of capitalism. For our part, we are
concerned with understanding globalization from the margins based on the
premise that marginal economic circuits, especially illegal ones, are not a
counterpoint to the expansion of the global economy but rather a specific
mechanism of this expansion. There are important conceptual differences
between poverty and economic under-development, as the Afterword to this
book outlines. Poverty is not produced globally by a lack of economic inte-
gration but rather by powerful and highly unequal subaltern engagement in
economic circuits. Nor is poverty restricted to a lack of income but is a
multidimensional phenomenon that is produced and reproduced at the
same time that it generates wealth and therefore durable inequalities at a
global scale.
Brazil, for example, is the main producer and exporter of cars in South
America, according to data on the formal industrial sector. The Toyota Hilux
illegally exported to Bolivia suggests that, in fact, exports are even higher than
is commonly thought. There is no competition, on this measure, between
formal and informal economic development, as there is not on any other.
Contrary to what common sense would lead us to believe – based on value-
based representations of good and bad – that the expansion of the formalized
economy would represent a decline in the illegal economy, what we have seen
in Latin America over the past 30 years is exactly the opposite. With more
money to consume, teenagers like Samuel and older individuals like Aron
buy more global products in shopping centers but also more drugs and weap-
ons to resell or use in their businesses.
The uneven territorialization of lethal violence also shapes strategies for
the global circulation of cocaine. When the “big flows” are observed up close,
it is impossible to ignore the fact that the markets are socially produced by
plural rationalities (Callon 1998; Garcia-Parpet 2003; Miller 1998).
Nonetheless, at a macroeconomic scale, the money produced by these circuits
becomes alienated from the social processes in which it was produced and
becomes “pure quantity” (Simmel 2009). Empirically, we can see that this
money also becomes socially marked by the territories and socially differenti-
ated actors through which it flows (Guyer 2004; Zelizer 1994). Money is also
a producer of these social differences and inequalities. It produces contempo-
rary cities, both in the Global South and the Global North. It produces and
reproduces relationships, distinctions, and economic centralities between
206  Stolen Cars

these cities. Police lethality and mass incarceration directed at small drug
dealers in the favelas of São Paulo are related to the sale of cocaine for EUR
100.00 (USD 115.00) a gram in a nightclub in Berlin. On the one hand, fun
and freedom, on the other, repression and violence. The uneven distribution
of gains and losses in global economies.

Notes

  1. Through exploratory research in local newspapers and also via academic contacts in
Mato Grosso, we were able to arrange a series of interviews in both Campos Verdes
and San Esteban. Thanks to our interlocutors’ networks, we were able to undertake
interviews on both sides of the border with local journalists, civil, military and
transport police, and taxi and truck drivers, as well as with the Bolivian consulate in
Brazil. In Mato Grosso state capital Cuiabá, we were able to speak to the Civil
Police and collect data on thefts and armed robberies in the state. We saw dozens of
pickup trucks that had been stolen on the Brazilian side of the border and were now
circulating without license plates on the Bolivian side. This phenomenon is not
restricted to pickup trucks. There were also motorcycles, cars, large trucks, and
buses without plates or with plates that were not legally valid. There was even an
ambulance of illegal origin used by the San Esteban city government. Our field
notes were particularly useful in reconstructing the routes by which cars stolen in
Brazil arrive in Bolivia. In 2017 we undertook field visits to Görlitzer Park in Berlin
thanks to the precious help of Talja Blokland. Between 2018 and 2019 we mapped
the car theft markets in the UK, France, and Germany with the help of FAPESP
funding.
  2. On that assignment the workers crossed the border to meet up with a truck carrying
a ton of animal feed and 100 kg of cocaine base paste. They were wearing special
vests that facilitated the carriage of as much as 25 kg of cocaine each. They met the
truck, received the consignment and walked back into Brazil. They also took
possession of two 7.62 rifles for delivery to Rosildo and, if necessary, use against any
rival actors they might meet in the course of their assignment. The operation took
three hours. They were each paid USD 500.00 (2 MW). They were pleased to earn
so much in so little time. Due to the success of the operation guaranteed by the
silence surrounding it, Julinho won Rosildo’s trust.
  3. The average price paid to transport soybeans between Cuiabá and São Paulo is USD
50.00 per metric ton, i.e., USD 1,300.00 (a little more than 5 MW) for each stage
of the journey (Source: www.fretebras.com.br). Aron paid USD 2,500.00 (10 MW)
to the truck driver for transporting the cocaine base paste.
  4. For more information, see these reports from Isto é magazine (https://istoe.com.
br/142716_ROUBO±LEGALIZADO; last accessed: April 20, 2020) and G1
 Globalization and Its Backroads  207

(http://g1.globo.com/mato-grosso/noticia/2013/11/cinquenta-e-cinco-veiculos-
roubados-em-mt-sao-recuperados-na-bolivia.html; last accessed: April 20, 2020).
  5. As we verified in our field research, a kilo of cocaine base paste in San Esteban costs
USD 2,800.00. The purest form of cocaine, cocaine hydrochloride, costs USD
3,500.00 per kilo. These prices are not universal, but local criminal organizations
that have operated in the market since the 1990s have sought to stabilize them as
much as possible. Argemiro Procópio Filho and Alcides Costa Vaz (1997) found
similar prices when they analyzed surveys carried out by the Federal Police in 1996.
They argued that prices in different territories may have varied according to the
level of police activity (which influences the supply and demand of products
through seizures and extortion) and the distance between production and process-
ing sites. Procópio Filho and Vaz (who made no distinction between cocaine base
paste and cocaine hydrochloride) claimed that prices could vary by over 100 percent
depending on where on the border the purchase is made: in Mato Grosso prices
ranged from USD 2,500.00 to USD 3,500.00 but in Santa Catarina they could
reach USD 6,000.00 per kilo.
  6. Samuel’s profile is a kind of “ideal type” based on the millions of young people in
Brazil who act as low-level operators in these illegal markets. He was used for
similar analytical purposes in an article published by Gabriel Feltran in 2018
(2019). We will now reproduce some excerpts from the article, adapted to the
analytical narrative of this book.
  7. It should be noted that we are not arguing that there are no qualitative or quantita-
tive differences between these two circuits or that this form of division should
ignore the interfaces and the relationships between both. As Silveira (2009) points
out, the upper circuits feed on the lower circuits. By transposing these cleavages
through the terms “center” and “margins,” we are seeking precisely to establish a
dialog between this more contemporary approach to globalization and more
consolidated ones in the field of urban studies. To some extent, this maintains the
image of hierarchical distinctions between the two circuits but draws attention to
the fact that these hierarchies are not strictly economic as they also involve legal,
moral, political, and judicial aspects, among others.
  8. In the Brazilian context, there are studies that address this question using the
concept of “informal commerce” (Pinheiro-Machado 2008; Rabossi 2015).
Conclusions
Gabriel Feltran

The Tietê River runs from east to west through the city and across the entire
state of São Paulo. Unlike the vast majority of Brazilian rivers, the Tietê does not
flow into the Atlantic Ocean but rather in reverse – inland. This unique charac-
teristic made it an important instrument in the occupation of what would come
to be called Brazil. Used for millennia by indigenous peoples and later by colo-
nizers, its name is Tupi in origin and means “true water.” The demographic and
industrial explosion in the city of São Paulo between the 1940s and the 1970s
killed the aquatic life in the metropolitan section of the river. The river was the
end point for the disposal of raw sewage and industrial pollutants. It turned
murky and began to emit a wretched odor. Each incoming mayor announced
promising clean-up projects, none of which worked.
Rainy summers and dry winters are characteristic of the humid subtropical
climate of the state of São Paulo. The dry season usually lasts six months, from
mid-April to mid-October. During the dry season, in the section that cuts
through Greater São Paulo, the water level of the Tietê drops a few meters.
Thousands of vehicle bodies, stripped bare and unceremoniously piled on top
of one another, emerge from the river. After being illegally dismantled and
stripped of their most valuable parts the carcasses are often then burned and
dumped in the river. Car thieves know that this will make it difficult to iden-
tify a vehicle and eliminate any connection between themselves and a theft.
On a morning in September 2019 where the river cuts through the eastern
part of the city, the urban landscape is marked by carcasses of stolen cars piled
on the exposed banks or partially submerged in the shallow waters of the Tietê.
On that day the so-called “Carcass Hunting Operation” is to begin, carried out
jointly by police officers, agents of the municipal government, and environ-
mental NGOs. The operation takes place almost every year and there are always
thousands of vehicles to be pulled from the river. That year several media out-
lets cover the event. In a single day, city-owned cranes remove 200 carcasses
from the Tietê in a stretch of just 500 meters that is known by the media as the
“submerged vehicle cemetery.” It is a legally protected Environmental Protection

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Conclusions  209

Area close to Jardim Noêmia, land occupied by about 20,000 families living in
extreme poverty and without a proper sanitation system.
The operation pulled an assortment of vehicles from the waters next to the
slum – trucks and vans but mostly affordable cars. One of them was the Fiat
Palio 2011 stolen from Sérgio by Israel and Índio in the schoolyard and dis-
mantled not far from there in front of Cohab Tiradentes. After a year with it
taking up space in his garage, Sérgio paid for a tow truck to take the vehicle
away; he could not have predicted his car’s final destination.

***

The full complexity of urban representations polarized between legal and illegal
can be found in the “Carcass Hunting Operation.” These are representations that
synthesize mechanisms fundamental to the reproduction of urban inequalities in
contemporary São Paulo. On the one hand, there is the slum with its poverty,
crime, pollution, illegal markets, and environmental degradation. On the other,
horrified by such degrading realities and committed to cleaning the city, are State
agents, the police, and environmentalists, the latter volunteers in corporate social
responsibility programs. On the one hand backwardness and on the other the
vanguard (Oliveira 1997). The similarities with the picture of the reproduction
of inequalities on a transnational scale, which imagine worlds polarized between
Global North and Global South, are not a mere coincidence.
From a sociologist’s point of view the connection between the periphery,
poverty, violent crime, environmental degradation, and backwardness repro-
duces all the central elements of the official normative representation of the
city. By contrast, this connection reproduces the set of normative assump-
tions of what daily life should be in the modern city: the center of a civilized,
prosperous, legal, and sustainable world. In this book, marginal situations are
not our object but our perspective for understanding contemporary norma-
tive regimes. Jardins and Alphaville residents see their neighborhoods as per-
fect examples of what a city should be. To the elites of Alphaville (Atkinson
2017), the grinding poverty in Sapopemba or Jardim Noêmia or in the slums
and poor neighborhoods of any global city, exists precisely because poor peo-
ple have yet to learn that they need to act differently. We say yet because for
them this “modern” project is universally suitable and history is marked by
ceaseless human evolution (Durkheim 1999). Poor people are a bit behind
but they could be just as rich as the rich themselves are. It depends on them.
For an average Brazilian economist, the formal structure of the rationality
underlying this concept sets two poles in opposition, even though there is no
lack of empirical examples to contradict him. For the economist, illegal mar-
kets, crime, and violence exist in direct opposition to the legal markets that
210  Stolen Cars

function in a civilized order. For this reason, reports by major Brazilian business
associations make estimates of the size of illegal markets in the country and how
much they “steal” from legal ones (FIESP 2017). While the methodological
flaws in such studies are so egregious that it is not worth citing their figures
here,1 it is important to note the rationale underlying their conclusions: these
corporate reports state that the billions of dollars handled annually in illicit
Brazilian economies are subtracted from the national GDP, year after year. They
believe illegal markets steal wealth from legal markets. The Brazilian GDP is
therefore a victim of predation by illegal markets (for a critic of these reports see
Rabossi 2018).
As if the money Samuel earned from robberies and trafficking – Chapter 8 –
did not return almost immediately to the formal market via consumption. As if
the dynamism of the Brazilian auto-parts sector – Chapter 5 – did not come from
the illegal “sheds” that dismantle stolen cars. As if the capital accumulated illegally
by Aron – Chapter 1 – does not seed formal enterprises, does not leverage the
career of young soccer players, and does not move the real estate and financial
markets in which he invests the fortunes he earns monthly. As if the fact that
Fernando Wagner – Chapter 3 – does not have to worry about spare parts for the
HB20 since the illegal market takes care of it for him and gifts him a massive
competitive advantage (partly responsible for making the HB20 the best-selling
car in the country). As if for each insurance payout made by Alvorada Seguros
in the case of a theft of a new vehicle the automobile industry does not pay
for sales of more new cars – Chapter 7. As if the formal arts market does not
heat up with the funds that Carlos Augusto – Chapter 4 – extracts from the
stolen vehicles he auctions. As if the money that Car Auction Corp makes
with stolen vehicles does not generate taxes for the Brazilian State as well as
foreign governments and does not impact the economic development of
more than one country. We could go on.
The stories of each of our five stolen cars and the associated companies
and characters are an attempt to demonstrate that the idea of polarity between
legal and illegal, mediated by State law, may have once been useful to describe
urban society, but is now an outdated and inaccurate framework to describe
contemporary urban conflict. The image of a porous frontier between legal
and illegal near which very profitable companies abound is a more accurate
portrayal. Also included in this portrayal would be an image of how these
companies manipulate the law and the use of force. After concluding this
investigation, the idea of legal and illegal opposing poles seems to us more
like an empty ideological smokescreen than a reflection of contemporary real-
ity. Obstructing the consideration of the real-world interplay between the
legal and the illegal condemns urban daily life to inaccurate categorical paring
linked to the reproduction of such persistent inequalities (Tilly 1998) as
underdeveloped/developed; poor/rich; black/white; man/woman.
 Conclusions  211

Conceived of in this way, the legal–illegal polarity is not merely deconstructed,

as if it did not produce concrete unequal effects that really exist in the social
world. Wellington was really killed; the values that central and marginal actors
extract from stolen cars are very unequal and create very unequal bank balances
for people along their journeys. As Pierre Bourdieu noted in an essay towards the
end of his career, the objectification of unequal places in social space is also objec-
tive in physical space (Bourdieu 2013). In wealthy neighborhoods with their
brutalist modern architecture, reinforced concrete, hardwood floors, and tem-
pered glass; in poor neighborhoods with their Bahian brick, raw wood floors, and
corrugated cement tile.
Escaping this polarity, from an analytical point of view, our more relational
perspective suggests that the frontier between legal and illegal should be
understood as a space for political regulation of capital accumulation, defended
with violence whenever necessary. It is also along this frontier that we see the
functioning of the mechanisms of production and reproduction of urban
inequalities. If it is a frontier, the interventions and meanings characteristic of
this regulation are the fundamental analytical dimension. It is a regulation
carried out daily and in contrasting dimensions: state bureaucracy, moral-
religious, the economy, and violent conflicts. It is a regulation carried out with
differing intensities and rhythms and by different actors – State agents acting
legally, State agents negotiating protection markets, as well as the criminal,
religious agents, and the liberal and moral entrepreneurs of each society.
In São Paulo, competition for the resources that circulate in the vehicle
markets, both legal and illegal, generates wealth for many people. Consumers
of cocaine in London, insurance policy holders in Brazil, and buyers of vehi-
cles and auto parts inject money into an economy in which profits are divided
very unevenly by all those involved in its operations, from the most central to
the most marginal. In this economy, entrepreneurs in the slums like Israel and
Índio, Grandão and Wellington and the super-rich like Carlos Augusto and
Fernando Wagner make money from stolen cars. Very rarely will they come
into direct conflict – but that does not make São Paulo any less violent. Legal
State violence directed at thieves, brutal violence as we have seen, is empiri-
cally linked to the desires of the dominant local, central, or subordinate
groups. The police act for Carlos Augusto, for Fernando Wagner, and for
those who accept their own domination, like Seo Cláudio.
It is the most subaltern actors who always carry out this violence. Vehicle
thieves linked to the PCC or police officers acting of their own accord outside
the legal framework. The more central the actor in these markets “the less he gets
his hands dirty with blood,” as the Brazilian saying goes. It is assumed that some-
one else will get their hands dirty for him. The more marginal he is the more risk
he takes and the less benefit he receives. In any case, the potential for economic
212  Stolen Cars

gain in illegal markets as compared to legal markets is the main reason why
young people in the slums get involved in illegal enterprises. A change in this
differential would certainly make cities like São Paulo much less violent.

***

The analytical narrative of this book began with vehicles stolen in the peripher-
ies of the city of São Paulo, distant from the economic heart of Brazil. In the
first chapter, we learn in detail the territorial, technical, and social distinction
between the armed robbery circuit and the car theft circuit, the latter being
much more specialized, less risky, less violent, and more clearly directed at the
auto-parts market. From this distinction there emerged the distinct profiles of
car owners and car thieves and of the neighborhoods where they live.
Multidimensional inequalities of class, age, race, gender, professional experi-
ence, generation, place of residence, and education materialized in the flesh and
blood characters with whom we lived during our field research.
Based strictly on ethnographic research, Chapter 1 demonstrated that vio-
lent urban conflict is concentrated on the margins. These marginal spaces are
heterogeneous internally and are not necessarily in direct opposition to the
wealthiest areas of the city. The fundamental conflict incited by stolen cars
opposes different unequal types of peripheral residents and is not simply rich
versus poor. Among the poor the conflict is violent and produces classifica-
tions that are applied in other social contexts, such as the essentialist polarity
that differentiates “workers” from “bandits.”
Chapter 2 tested these ethnographic findings on a quantitative basis,
focusing not on the violence practiced by thieves but by the São Paulo police
against those thieves. We see how radically uneven this police violence is in
rich and poor territories. The very differentiation, also mercantile, between
theft and robbery, is based on State use of legal force. In wealthy neighbor-
hoods far more thieves are killed in relative numbers, though not in absolute
numbers. As the wealthy neighborhoods have the newest and most expensive
cars, the gangs that operate there must avoid the use of violence and specialize
in nonviolent tactics.
The transformation of violence into technical specializations that are
appropriated by individuals and groups who outsource work to poor young
people demonstrates how the mechanisms that criminalize poor young people
(such as Wellington) provide those who outsource to them (such as Grandão)
with the possibility of becoming “entrepreneurs” in illegal markets. Your ille-
gal business will be well received by markets as long as it does not threaten the
established (local and central, power-broking) elites and makes money for
them. When we last interviewed him, Grandão was setting up a despachante
 Conclusions  213

service – a traditional and perfectly legal business in Brazil. Despachantes help

customers with the complicated bureaucratic and legal red tape connected to
buying and registering vehicles. Furthermore, as Chapter 2 demonstrates,
thefts, unlike armed robberies, are not lethally repressed by the police. Thefts
are linked to the market, not to violence. Illegal dismantlers and buyers prefer
cars stolen without violence. The parts do not come “with blood on them”
and they do not attract unwanted police attention.
Legal entrepreneurship within illegal markets remained our focus in
Chapter 3. While the rationality of State intervention is punitive and aimed at
thieves, the rationality of the insurance sector is restorative and aimed at
money. We demonstrated how the regulation of protection markets, which are
traditionally coupled with illegal markets (Misse 2018), is no longer a job done
by gangsters but by executives. The conversion of illegality into a political
commodity, which has already been theorized about in the case of criminals’
payouts to police (Misse 2006), is now becoming a business activity for large
insurance companies, small brokers, and businesses owned by former police
officers. Each group has strong links to political institutions. The relationship
between insurance and security is an important dynamic to study, and the
restorative rationality of insurance, which makes it possible to convert vehicle
thefts into profits – and we are talking about a lot of money here – has become
our investigative focal point.
The reproduction of multidimensional inequalities brought about by this
rationality is seen through the prism of auctions in Chapter 4. On a single day
of auctioning, the most central actor in this market – a white executive from
an insurance company – invoices 928.7 MW for his company and the auc-
tioneer – another white executive – earns 46 MW. This is small change for
insurers, who encourage their employees to make more profits and develop
more aggressive strategies for taking over new markets. The same is true of the
auctioneers who open new establishments across the country and around the
world in search of more money. At the other end, there are the countless mar-
ginal players in the business who buy at auctions or transport stolen vehicles
and who earn a maximum of 0.5 MW on the day of an auction. For these
marginal players it feels like good money because their peers in formal econo-
mies earn even less.
These workers are mostly black and do not live in the central areas of the
city but rather in the slums and peripheries. São Paulo is the nodal center of
this economy. Of course, insurance and auctioneer executives are legal, for-
mal, official business elites who also happen to make money from stolen cars.
They go to church, consult with other businessmen, and visit men’s clubs,
and they sleep with a clear conscience. The mechanism that lustrates the
illegality and violence embedded in markets and products is one of the main
214  Stolen Cars

reproducers of contemporary inequalities. At the other end are the criminals.

The most marginal players in this business live and die like Michael, Israel,
or Wellington, and move between slums, prisons, and hospitals. Wellington
did not earn a penny from the HB20 that he stole with Grandão and that
was recovered by Alvorada Seguros. Perhaps that is why he decided to do the
robberies himself – which led to his being killed in the affluent neighbor-
hood of Lapa.
Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrated how the wealth from stolen cars is com-
peted for at each point along the legal/illegal arc. Each specific moment of
this dispute, which mixes bureaucratic, market, moral, and violent dynamics,
is presented with its respective empirical details. The world of crime, state
governments, market actors, and moral entrepreneurs in these markets do not
appear separately but rather in the relationships that socially coproduce them.
While criminal entrepreneurs organize themselves in a kind of “crime
masonry” (Feltran 2018), a secret fraternity in the form of a criminal organi-
zation like the PCC, and manage to maintain the economic dynamism of
their business, the economic, social and political elites use State institutions
to create the Dismantling Law. The Dismantling Law makes it possible for
them – in alliance with financial groups and insurance companies – to colo-
nize the auto-parts market that was once the exclusive preserve of small chop-
shops. They succeeded through a criminalization process – another of the
central mechanisms studied in this book. The auto-parts market generates
USD 2 billion a year in Brazil; it cannot therefore remain in the hands of a
myriad array of poor black slum dwellers.
When the insurers decided to enter the market they forced two other inter-
ested intermediary groups (not to be confused with the bandits themselves) to
react. Owners of legal dismantlers, like Maurício, reacted by competing in the
gray area between the legal/illegal poles and extracting their fair share from
both markets. Police officers who extort from these businesses also reacted to
prevent further losses. The police officers started to organize themselves in
churches and through the discretionary powers that allow them to run their
extortion rackets. The legal dismantlers formed a union and developed new
business from their ambiguous position between legal and illegal. The air of
legality of dismantlers like those on Avenida Vitrine that traffic in illegal, sto-
len parts, allows them to survive socially and economically. Not all power rests
in State offices or on the boards of central market operators. On the margins,
in clandestine warehouses and small chop-shops, a response is prepared. Those
on the margins find their political representatives in the institutions.
In Chapter 7, our scale and perspective broaden and local conflicts come
to be seen in the midst of the transformations of contemporary global capital-
ism. We explored the expansion of big capital into the popular economies
 Conclusions  215

that live on the margins of the global economic system. The small empirical
clashes in the daily lives of people like Maurício and Guto and the small
potential conflicts between Maurício and the Civil Police, narrated in the
previous chapters, are now contextualized in the contemporary, transnational
economic dimension. Giving empirical consistency to the segmental mic-
ropolitics proposed in abstract terms by Deleuzian plateau, our specific
sequence of chapters is intended to communicate intelligibility and offer an
example of the ways in which the desirable way of doing economics, politics,
or morals reproduces the mechanisms of inequalities and violence – surely the
cruelest side-effect of contemporary life.
In Chapter 8, when we use the journey of the Toyota Hilux stolen at the border
to look again at the connections between illegal markets for vehicles, drugs and
weapons on a transnational scale, our ethnography changed from face-to-face
interaction between thieves to unequal interactions between central and periph-
eral urban worlds. The problem of multidimensional inequalities refers to social
and urban coproduction carried out at different scales. We argue that the contrast-
ing positions of countries and cities in this global, unequal, and violent system are
coproduced. Their margins and centers are separated but connected. In the wake
of the criticism of dualistic reason (Oliveira 1997), we suggest that the pluraliza-
tion of government directives in the contemporary urban world, which go far
beyond traditional modern, State-centered projects, seem to have become hege-
monic in their 30 glorious years. With the rise of contemporary forms of racism,
fascism, and totalitarianism – urban Brazil is a sad example – the political conse-
quences of this plurality reflect a loss of hegemony of that order, of the attempt to
civilize and modernize the peripheries. The decline of the colonial world itself
seemed to herald this transition and is now consolidated in many marginalized
cities, such as São Paulo.
The sequence of this book’s chapters show us that the market competition
at the frontier of the (il)legal, as well as at the border between the global cen-
ter and the global margins, is in fact the daily, violent struggle for the funda-
mental resources necessary for social reproduction and is the basis of any
power regime, including that of nation-states. It is a conclusion that goes far
beyond the economic arena and is in line with what Charles Tilly (1982)
proposed in Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime. In the absence
of clear hegemony, a combination of economic, social, and political privileges
as well as ideologies and moral principles are embedded in plural urban gov-
ernment regimes and are always underpinned by the use of force. From this
perspective, the so-called “urban violence” of cities like São Paulo could be
better identified as “political violence” that simultaneously shapes multiple
but coexisting urban and global orders.

***
216  Stolen Cars

João’s stolen HB20 ended its journey in the garage of an 84-year-old woman
on Ilha do Governador, Rio de Janeiro. She hardly leaves the house and did
not notice the lack of a fire extinguisher, which was removed from the vehicle
in the Auction Corp auction yard, to be resold under the table at a gas station
in the west of São Paulo. The parts of the Fiat Strada illegally dismantled and
sent to Belém do Pará and the Ford Ka on which Diego worked under the
table and was disassembled in the Stratus are scattered through auto-parts
stores all over Brazil and installed in a diverse group of cars. Seo Cláudio
bought a VW Gol 2000 to work on and since it is an old car it requires a lot
of maintenance. He visits the dismantlers on Avenida Riacho whenever he
needs a spare part.
The Toyota Hilux stolen in Campos Verdes was seen in 2020 driving
around La Paz. It had already been legally registered. Upon payment of a fee
to the State, the Bolivian government registers vehicles from Brazil, even those
without papers. The Bolivian vehicle fleet has become much younger at a very
low price thanks to the decades of illegal imports from Brazil. Taxes are col-
lected on these cars while also ensuring the export of the country’s most profit-
able domestic product, cocaine. The money paid for one gram of it at the door
of a nightclub in Berlin pays for months of work by a Bolivian coca grower.
The Silva Costa family, having called Alvorada Seguros, now has a black
GM Silverado in the garage. Julinho, one of the thieves, is now thinking of
“doing good” – a big robbery – and stopping working as a farm laborer. He has
discussed this with his colleagues who are just out of prison. Safely in a forti-
fied enclave in Alphaville, Fernando Wagner is having other conversations. He
talks to big businessmen from the legal and illegal market, generals, and judges
and they discuss who should run for President of the Republic in 2022. The
businessman does not believe that people like the pastor at the church that
Grandão goes to, low-level soldiers, and low-ranking police officers, disman-
tlers like Maurício and illegal businessmen in the field of drugs and weapons
should be able to compete with him in the management of his businesses. He’s
not even all that worried about who will be the next President of the Republic.
Politics, the moral-religious sphere, and the market for weapons no longer
travel in one direction. Each of these governmental devices, embedding their
relatively autonomous principles into the social fabric, today constitutes a rep-
ertoire of normative regimes that inform, signify, and guide daily actions.
Different positions of privilege in this new reality, even that of actors previ-
ously considered irrelevant, can legitimize new forms of government that were
previously considered outdated. The most marginal actors formulate and
manifest their vision of how the world should be. This is constituted in differ-
ent social, normative, and institutional systems implemented at the local level.
 Conclusions  217

Actors located in coexisting normative regimes appropriate segments of

the forces of order, or segments of criminal forces, because it is necessary to
have weapons to produce order and defend against other undesirable orders.
These same actors take ownership of segments of the State, because it is nec-
essary to have social legitimacy and legality whenever possible. They also
compete for the share of the market available to them as we saw in Chapter 7,
in order to guarantee the material reproduction of their activities, communi-
ties, and families. They also compete for parts of the religious universe,
because communities and families need discipline and a sense of their place
in the world.
This is the contemporary urban conflict, seen here from São Paulo, more
specifically from cars stolen in São Paulo. This is a living and breathing con-
flict insofar as it still constitutes the remarkable hegemony of one regime over
another. Markets, moral-religious order, the institutional political sphere, and
raw violence have become the currency of a daily competition to create a bet-
ter place for one’s self and one’s own. Elementary forms of politics, such as
male fraternities and secret brotherhoods, return to the center of the public
scene, increasingly tainted by the attributes of war. Hence those in favor of
privatization and against public initiatives, the monetarist, Old Testament
Evangelicals, and militarists, are all actors in the same war against crime that
marks the contemporary urban conflict in Brazil. This is the mechanism par
excellence for the reproduction of the unequal and violent urban order that,
long established in cities on the margins of contemporary capitalism, now
haunts the center.

***

Illegal car and cocaine markets are tangled up with the legal global economy.
They compose what we call contemporary capitalism. Following not stolen
cars, but mushrooms throughout the world, Anna Tsing once asked: “how
might capitalism look without assuming progress?” Her answer is: “it might look
patchy: the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned
patches is appropriated for capital” (Tsing 2015, p. 5). We partially agree, it
might look patchy; nevertheless, Tsing’s answer is perhaps too general. This
book argued that capitalism is made by (very often violent) conflicts within
unpredictable chains of patches. For instance, capitalists might have carefully
planned to use smartphones for their global businesses and they are happily
using them for that purpose. But they could not ever have imagined the unex-
pected social and political effects of the massive use of smartphones in multiple
and different but connected (il)legal patches.
218  Stolen Cars

The problem of the unpredictable “side-effects” (i.e., the bases) of contem-

porary capitalism concern not only “terrorists” using smartphones to plan
attacks, but also the unplanned massive entrance of people into political are-
nas, the spread of big data, and the expansion of smartphones into intimate
and public life. Brazil’s recent history is a caricature of this. One thing has at
any rate not changed: contemporary global capitalism produces and rein-
forces actually existing inequalities. Drawing on Tsing’s reasonings we ask –
from our point of view in the hugely unequal world populated by criminal
actors of São Paulo – who is supposed to live and who is supposed to die in
the ruins produced by capitalism? Living inside each of the linked patches or
normative local power regimes, most people do not notice that they have a
place in a situational chain of value. Most part of world’s population live in a
single (and local) capitalist patch – but now they carry smartphones. The
money they spend necessarily crosses different local and transnational patches
before acquiring the form of capital. This “crossing” is never general, but
specific. Its effects are hardly general or universal. Socially embedded money
circulation orders different patches by positioning them in a situational and
unequal material chain that is only visible when we combine relational analy-
sis with local fieldwork. What appear to be common on these different paths,
journeys, or chains patched by contemporary capitalism is reproduction of
inequalities, guaranteed by an increasingly hegemonic understanding of the
correct use of violent means.
Money does not flow freely from one patch to another (Knowles 2015).
There is a huge and concrete conflict and often lethal wars that determine the
circulation of money and the appropriation of capital. This book has demon-
strated how value produced by car workers in a Brazilian Toyota factory,
partly appropriated by Japanese Toyota, also feeds street drug commerce in
Berlin. No-one who steals a Toyota Hilux in the East Zone of São Paulo imag-
ines that it will be swapped for cocaine at the Bolivian border. The people
doing the swap have no idea that the same cocaine will be sold in Görlitzer
Park a month later. Nevertheless, the transnational cocaine supply chain
exists in lived experience. It stands because most of its workers and dealers live
their entire lives in a single patch and possess deep knowledge about the loca-
tion they inhabit. It also stands because Toyota executives and international
dealers fly around the world using technology produced by global scientists
and dining in expensive hotel restaurants.
The unexpected chains of patches that mold contemporary capitalism are
not abstract or fluid floating assemblages. No one could plan them and there
is no one who controls the entire chain, as they take advantage of very local
traditions and very inaccessible global technology. There is no invisible hand
controlling the stolen cars economy. Money turns into capital when myriads
 Conclusions  219

of people buy and sell, but also when they steal and pillage. There are a lot of
illegal products and illegal activities pursued within the global economy –
from smuggled plastic holders for cell phones in São Paulo’s streets to European
tax havens in which huge gambling turns into global wealth. Ethnography can
do more than present us the universal world once dreamed of and now
destroyed: ethnographers are able to describe how each and every small patch
of capitalism works and how it is perceived to be linked to other patches.

Note

  1. These reports are commonly produced by former police officers now working as
market consultants. They normally compile newspaper reports, in some cases
aggregating quantities, rates, and values presented in them. The quantity of drugs
seized by the police is almost always taken as the quantity of drugs in circulation.
Drug prices are considered to be fixed throughout the country and over time. In all
cases, legal and illegal markets are seen as two independent sets that do not feed
into each other.
Afterword
Following Cars in a Latin American Metropolis:
Inequality, Illegalisms, and Formalization
Daniel Veloso Hirata

If you consider Stolen Cars against the backdrop of seminal studies in the field
of Latin American sociology, you see areas of commonality as well as some
significant original contributions. From the middle of the twentieth century
on, Latin American urban sociology has tried to get to grips with the urban-
ization and industrialization processes in the region, and despite clear steps in
that direction since the 1980s, socio-spatial inequalities remain.1 The 1960s
and 1970s saw the emergence of a debate that looked at two enduring rela-
tionships: poverty versus wealth and legality versus illegality. These are with
us still, in this complex and changing world, and they frame the context of
Stolen Cars and its contribution to that debate.
The fundamentals of Latin American urban theory of the 1960s and
1970s were as follows:
The authors who gave birth to Latin American urban sociology2 observed
rural migrations fueling accelerated urban growth, as well as changes in the
labor market that seemed to resemble the European experience. They found
certain specificities, nonetheless, in respect of socio-spatial inequalities. On
the one hand, these authors described the dynamics of center versus periph-
eral urbanization and segregation in the provision of urban services and facili-
ties; on the other, they outlined an employment structure in which the service
sector was “bloated” and jobs were unstable, with workers oscillating between
employment, unemployment, and informal work.
The initial debate in this literature was dualistic, opposing informal “poles”
or “sectors” that constructed a gradient of “incorporation” or “integration” of
rural migrant populations – “archaic” or “pre-modern” holdouts to be assimi-
lated by processes of “modernization.” However, very quickly, this dualism
(Lambert 1953; Hirschman 1958) became cast as relational (Oliveira 1972),
and it was realized that Latin American singularity was not merely an historical,

Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Afterword  221

cultural, or geographic “deformation,” “anomaly,” or “dysfunction.” In this

sense, the duplicity that would characterize Latin American residential and
occupational inequalities became a set of specific relationships between wealth/
poverty and informality/formality.
The nature of these relationships was measured against different analytical
scales with varying levels of connection to processes of great historical and
geographical amplitude as well as the life trajectories of the inhabitants of
Latin American cities. At a macrosociological level, these relations would be
the expression of under-development or a “dependent capitalism” (Cardoso
and Faletto 1970), terms that guided the debate that occupied the so-called
theory of marginality from the 1960s and 1970s onward (Kowarick 1979;
Pearlman 1981). In line with this macrosociological discussion and, in order
to get closer to the experiences of the inhabitants of Latin American metropo-
lises, some authors sought to demonstrate the nature of the relationship
between poverty and wealth on the human scale of life in cities (Camargo
et al. 1976; Lomnitz 1975; Machado da Silva 1971).
The consensual starting point was that poverty is not a product of scarcity,
but the opposite: poverty is the driving force behind the production and cir-
culation of wealth. Companies employ temporary contractors according to
demand and use employee turnover as a way to control labor costs in respect
of low-skilled and unstable jobs. Unemployed and informal workers, hired
intermittently, boost the production of wealth in moments of expansion, pro-
viding cheap labor and also indirectly depressing wages when outside the
formal job market (Nun 1969; Oliveira 1972; Quijano 1970).
This is replicated in the production of the center/periphery pattern and
the DIY method of home-building of the periphery, where no wages are paid,
and the work is frequently performed by the residents themselves or their
neighbors; and where it is paid for this is done “under the table.” An infor-
malization of life in this way is a necessary precondition for survival in an
industrialized but under-developed metropolis and permits the payment of
extremely low remuneration to workers. The corresponding increase in com-
pany profits is in keeping with the concept of “urban plunder” (Kowarick
1979) mentioned in the Introduction to this book.
The monetization that accompanies the growth of the urban way of life has
not been adapted, in Latin America, to urban workers’ consumption patterns.
A series of informal activities emerge to meet this demand. Informality has
come to be seen as a way to maintain suppressed living conditions, allowing
what was once called the “dynamic core of the economy” to keep growing.
Informality is, therefore, a condition for industrialization and urbanization –
not the other way around.
222  Stolen Cars

The permanently or temporarily unemployed find themselves engaged in

informal occupations aimed at providing formally employed but underpaid
workers with products and services at the lowest possible price. These com-
prise various food products, popular clothing or domestic items, transporta-
tion services, and informal housing.
Such were the theoretical references that produced some of the best Latin
American ethnographies, including the classic works of Larissa Lomnitz (1975)
and Luis Antônio Machado da Silva (1971) – neither of which present a radically
different picture from the one described by Keith Hart (1973) in Accra, Ghana
in his book that would go on to enjoy a seminal reputation in the institutional
debate on informality and work in the Global South within the framework of the
ILO3 and ECLAC.4
In each of these ethnographies, close inspection and empirical description
of real situations has underscored the diversity of forms of insertion into this
structure of poverty/wealth and informality/formality. The figure of the
grifter who goes back and forth between legality and illegality in terms of
both paid labor and accommodation has become an avatar of most of the
population insofar as life strategies are concerned. Likewise, the back and
forth of the grifter life has acted like a lighthouse for analysts tracking the dif-
ficult daily lives of the poorest, characterized as they are by the complete
absence of any kind of social security. Social security never came into exis-
tence precisely because the precariousness of the worker’s life served as the
lever for empirically visible transformations in the production, concentration,
and circulation of wealth.
An incomplete understanding of the wages paid to workers and a view that
social housing was the social security solution for the construction of citizen-
ship guided research undertaken according to a range of sociological scales as
late as the 1980s. This is not the place to discuss the changes that took place
in the following decades and that were intensified in the late 1990s, when
debates about so-called “globalization from below” began to view informality
not as something transitory, to be “overcome,” but as a permanent feature of
the Global North and Global South (Oliveira 2003; Portes 1997; Tarrius
2002). Furthermore, late-twentieth-century capitalism imposed a break with
the great narrative of progress (Tsing 2015), modernization (Ferguson 1999),
and the relationship established between a certain space of experience and a
certain horizon of expectations (Koselleck 2004) that configured both a polit-
ical and an analytical space. These are the references that offered consistency
to the formative debate within Latin American urban sociology and which set
out from that point of departure. All of this produced the now well-known
multidimensional processes – not just income, but also race, gender, territory,
service provision, etc. – that gave Latin American social inequalities their
durability (Arretche 2015; Tilly 1998).
 Afterword  223

Stolen Cars and Urban Theory

In this renewed scenario, the methodological and analytical procedures used

in Stolen Cars have achieved advances anchored in the original studies of
Latin American urban sociology. As we will see, these advances reinvigorate
the issue of social inequalities and may even shine light beyond the horizons
of social security towards the possibilities of life in the ruins of capitalism
(Tsing 2015).
Firstly, by following cars the research team was able to “ethnograph” differ-
ent spaces in their connections, thus demonstrating in a very concrete way
how poverty and wealth are related in São Paulo, and also between São Paulo
and, say, London. The researchers remained faithful to the tradition of Latin
American urban sociology, which has identified these constitutive relation-
ships and, inspired by Simmel (George Simmel 2004 [1900]) and the anthro-
pology of objects (Appadurai 1986; Latour 2005; Mintz 1985), managed to
empirically demonstrate these relations in a very original way. Stolen Cars
follows not only life trajectories through its human interlocutors but also
trajectories of the car-object. With this theoretical-methodological resource,
it manages to shine its searchlights on the comings and goings, crossroads and
bifurcations of humans and nonhumans between the duly problematized
dimensions of legality and illegality, formality and informality.
Likewise, the book also shows how the connections between markets, com-
panies, technologies, laws, State and non-State institutions, political, social and
economic moralities and rationalities are connected in a coherent chain. Through
these human and nonhuman trajectories, we find the continuous production of
the connections between wealth and poverty, which makes those workers in the
criminal car theft market5 gain only a negligible fraction of the values that
encompass the different circuits associated with this market. At the same time,
Brazilian and international large companies share most of the lucre.
Connections to the global drug market, which follows a very similar logic,
also reinforce these asymmetries in illegal supply chains (Gereffi and Koreniewicz
1994). It is clear, furthermore, that the cleavages within the criminal labor
market are also present within the popular classes, hence the seduction that
fuels the vast availability of labor in illegal markets, reinforced by “excess” work-
ers available for “work.” The book presents the criminal labor market from the
inside out on a transnational scale, in which processes exist that are similar to
those described 40 years earlier by Latin American urban sociologists, when
describing the relations between the formal/informal labor market characteris-
tics of the Global South. The question remains: are we seeing a renewed
moment in capitalism and global cities?
224  Stolen Cars

Finally, the relationship between the production of criminal markets and

persistent forms of social inequality still ends with a central dimension: the
possibility of violent death, which distinguishes Stolen Cars from previous
seminal works of urban sociology. Among the multiple dimensions that
inequality presents (Arretche 2015) when it comes to criminal markets,
inequalities are also associated with the imminent possibility of death. In this
case, the statistical analysis (Chapter 2) demonstrates clearly not only that the
wealthier neighborhoods are more “protected,” but that encounters with the
police are more lethal for car thieves. This analysis, relating to the unequal
distribution of protection by the State, further demonstrates that workers
who occupy the lowest-income positions in the car-theft circuit are far more
likely to be killed by São Paulo police patrol units.
Secondly, the relationship between legality and illegality is also reclassified
in Stolen Cars, as the law is seen not only as a source of conflict over rights
guarantees but also as a power resource, to be strategically manipulated by
market production and expansion actors in the party-political field. In the
network exposed by the spoor of humans and nonhumans, some links in the
chain are involved in poorly visible the legalization processes (Chapter 6).
The conflicts and forms of coordination between markets for services and the
sale of goods are empirically demonstrated, as well as the markets for protec-
tion or extortion, which selectively filter movements and impediments within
the circuits associated with car theft. Clearly, the strategic production of laws
is done for the benefit of those best positioned in the multiple markets associ-
ated with cars; however, those who are dominated also make strategic use of
points of formalization and informalization, bypassing laws in such a way as
to force their entry, as well as that of the dominant actors, in another key – or
order – in this unequal game.
Socio-technical networks connect, create, and put into circulation differ-
ent models of cars that ran the gamut from popular to luxury, from the most
to least sold, and across national and foreign brands. Human and nonhuman
characters situationally change their roles as owners of insurance companies,
dealerships, and auction yards or as politicians, police officers, senators, and
also specialized and improvised thieves, fences, and dismantlers.
The dynamics of this network of humans and cars were in the process of
being reconfigured by the so-called “Dismantling Law” that had been drafted
with a view to changing the role of insurance companies from workplace acci-
dent insurance provision to property protection. Whereas previous legislation
had provided labor guarantees for car dismantling workers, the Dismantling
Law served as a vehicle for the expansion of cartelized and monopolistic insur-
ance companies (Chapter 6). Legislation that had sought to regularize the
situation of those in poorest and most precarious link in the stolen car parts
 Afterword  225

sales chain had been superseded by punitive guidelines aimed at the reduction
of car thefts and robberies, that favored large companies and had the potential
to criminalize the activities of small businesses and entrepreneurs.
As in other markets that I have been studying for years (Hirata 2011, 2014),
formalization as a socio-technical and legal device emerges through the com-
bined forces of technological implementation and political commitment, rein-
forces social divides and produces, regulates, and protects markets subject to
the centripetal tendencies of concentration and centralization. Formalization is
a vector for novel and pre-existing social inequalities. In my research on clan-
destine transport and street vending markets, when services are formalized, the
power games between the illegalisms of the powerful and their subalterns are
punctuated by the promised modernizations of unified registries, information,
and management systems, but also by differentiated management of illegal-
isms (Foucault 1976) among those poor people who are to be “economically
integrated” or else combated for being part of the phantom of “organized
crime.” Thus, formalization also triggers inequalities among the poor, espe-
cially within an increasingly militarized logic of control (Hirata 2014).
As a result, large monopolies expand their radius of social and urban action,
begin to dictate the rules by which such markets function, and defend their
interests and properties, in conjunction with the either subalternizing incor-
poration of small businesses – including real estate agencies – or the persecu-
tion thereof by the forces of order.
In the case of markets associated with car theft, clearly the centrality of pow-
erful insurance companies is reinforced by the “Dismantling Law.” They per-
form the transubstantiation from the illegality of stolen cars into the legality of
recovered vehicles for sale and in so doing power an extremely lucrative market
(Chapter 3). Auctions, closely linked to insurance companies and an actual
place where stolen cars are resold with legal documents, play an important role
as mediator. Auctioneers assume the role of the insurance companies’ fences,
both economically in terms of the conversion from legal to illegal, and legisla-
tively in terms of the occupation of lawmaking spaces and participation in
lobbying activities (Chapter 4). Finally, the link that is most dependent on
insurers and auctions is dismantling, where the gains are smaller and the shadow
zone makes it more difficult to delimit legal/illegal boundaries, even though its
actors try their best to “keep things clean” (Chapter 5). Thus, if it is true that all
links in this chain are on the threshold of illegalism, only the poor and precari-
ous end suffers from the effects of incrimination and imminent death.
This latter point is central because in this unequal chain of circulation of
humans and nonhumans, the moral and legal component (in variable rela-
tionships) drives the extent of dependence on protection markets and politi-
cal favors (Misse 2006). Although insurers have very questionable practices
226  Stolen Cars

regarding the use of stolen car “hunters,” thereby glibly crossing the threshold
between legality and illegality and public and private security, they are very
seldom subject to legal control and/or the extortion games played by those
agents who should in theory apply the law. In other words, insurance compa-
nies are not, as a rule, targeted by the police. On the other hand, the disman-
tlers, even when acting strictly within the boundaries of regularity and
formalization, are constantly extorted by the police, who demand that they
pay for the illegal authorization of their operations. In this sense, it is worth
noting that the extortion regimes of criminal agents (State or otherwise) also
reinforce the constitutive asymmetries of these markets.

***

It can then be understood that the city of São Paulo, since its demographic,
industrial, and urban explosion, has never been marked by worthlessness,
lack of wealth, or isolation. Urban theory needs to be very clear about this.
Throughout the twentieth century, São Paulo has consolidated itself one of
the main Latin American metropolises, a crossroads between different global
economic circuits and Brazilian cosmopolitanism.
The persistent poverty and inequality of part of the population, as seminal
studies on the city have pointed out, are related to a specific way of relating to
the immense wealth in circulation. With the breaking of the promises of mod-
ernization (the vaunted connection between city and citizenship) imposed by
the capitalism of the turn of the twenty-first century, any hope of social secu-
rity has been put on hold for the time being (Castel 1995; Telles and Cabanes
2006). The dismantling of the rarefied public system of social protection in
São Paulo, in Brazil, and in Latin America in general since the 1990s, com-
bined with the promises of economic integration via the market, destabilized
the promise that guided both social analysis and the political struggle in the
previous period (Rancière 1995). A detailed description of the urban mecha-
nisms of reproduction of inequalities and violence, in their connections with
our theoretical heritage, and also socio-historically, in terms of current life
possibilities, is more than necessary. Stolen Cars is faithful to this tradition.

Notes

  1. In Brazil, the understanding of socio-spatial transformations and continuities in the

period was made explicitly in two books: Nas Tramas da Cidade – trajetórias urbanas
e seus territórios (Telles and Cabanes 2006); São Paulo: segregação, pobreza e desigual-
dade. (Marques and Torres 2005).
 Afterword  227

  2. For some contributions to the debate, among many others, see: Berlink (1975).
Marginalidade social e relações de classes em São Paulo; Kowarick (1975) Capitalismo e
Marginalidade na América Latina Germani (1973). El Concepto de Marginalidad:
significado, raíces históricas y cuestiones teóricas, con particular referente a la marginali-
dad urbana; Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Machado Da Silva (1983) “Vida e Morte
da Teoria da Marginalidade”; Nun (2001) Marginalidad y Exclusión Social.
  3. See: ILO (1972) Employment, Incomes and Equity: A Strategy for Increasing
Productive Employment in Kenya. Also Rabossi (2007). Los Caminos de la
informalidad.
  4. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a
regional UN body based in Santiago, Chile, was a hub for the Latin American
debates at the time.
  5. Regarding the perspective of thinking about a criminal labor market, it is worth
highlighting the seminal text of Peter Letkemann (1973). Also updating this
discussion: Ruggiero (2000). Crime and Markets. Specifically for the Brazilian case,
see Telles and Hirata (2007) “Cidade e práticas urbanas: nas fronteiras incertas entre
o ilegal, informal e o ilícito”.
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Zelizer, V. (2017). Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the Unit-
ed States. New York, Columbia University Press.
Index
accumulation, 19, 75, 88,
94, 96, 106, 120, 121,
148, 151, 173, 174,
183, 211
action/social action/action
theory, 12, 17, 18, 38,
55, 72, 155, 163, 174–175,
181, 203
actuarial tables/actuarial
calculations, 94, 96
affordable car insurance,
168–171, 173, 175,
177, 184
agency, 43, 88, 174, 175,
178
asset protection, 120, 175,
176
auction/auctioneer/auction
companies/online auction/
virtual auction, 20, 28,
30–33, 57, 78, 93, 99,
104–125, 128, 135, 137,
145, 151–153, 157, 173,
177, 191, 210, 213, 216,
224, 225
automobile industry, 32, 95, 99,
100, 142, 143, 171, 190,
210
Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict, First Edition.
Edited by Gabriel Feltran.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
auto parts/spare parts/stolen
parts, 4, 10, 20, 30, 56, 102,
105, 119, 127–131, 136,
138–142, 152, 154, 156,
157, 170, 171, 173, 174,
210, 211, 212, 214, 216
Belém, 138–140, 216
Berlin, 6, 11, 20, 28, 31, 33,
188, 200, 202, 203, 206,
216, 218
black/Brazilian blacks/black
youth, 1, 13, 14, 16, 44, 54,
65, 68, 69, 73, 145, 202,
213, 214
Bolsonaro/Jair Bolsonaro, 53, 70,
81, 83, 84, 137, 166, 167,
184
borders/international borders, 9,
18, 27, 28, 31, 33, 188, 189,
191, 193, 203
bottom-up growth strategy, 117
Bourdieu, Pierre, 211
bribe, 33, 91, 101, 136, 137,
139, 140, 154, 159, 183,
196
brotherhood/fraternity, 97, 196,
214, 217
246 Index
business/business model, 9, 22,
32, 33, 40, 46, 48, 53, 54,
56, 64, 68, 87, 95–97,
99–102, 104, 105, 107,
116–118, 122, 128, 130,
131, 133, 134, 136,
138–143, 145, 148, 152,
155–157, 159, 163, 169,
173, 179, 182, 189, 201,
205, 210, 212, 213, 214,
217, 225
Campos Verdes, 8, 9, 28, 33, 37,
39, 165, 187–192, 198, 201,
202, 216
cargo, 49, 82, 96, 97, 139, 188,
190, 191
car recovery/recovered cars/
salvage cars, 81, 93, 105,
107, 111, 115–119, 124,
151, 152
chains/chain of unequal gains/
global chains/value chains/
supply chain, 27, 32, 34, 38,
58, 97, 106, 109, 119, 120,
140, 173, 174, 188, 198,
201, 217, 218, 223, 225
chop-shops/junkyards, 43, 57,
80, 93, 98, 116, 121, 127–
130, 136, 137, 140–143,
145, 148, 151, 152, 154,
156, 157, 160, 163, 171,
173, 174, 181, 214
church/Catholic/Evangelical, 4,
11, 33, 54, 56, 70, 83, 138,
139, 166, 176, 180, 183,
184, 213, 214, 216, 217
circuits/popular circuits/central
circuits/marginal circuits/
market circuit, 17, 28,
30–32, 38, 47, 51, 55, 56,
79, 88, 98, 104–106, 109–
121, 123, 124, 152, 188,
198, 203–205, 212, 223,
224, 226
class/social class, 13, 38, 39, 57,
79, 212, 223
cocaine/cocaine trafficking/crack
cocaine, 7, 9, 21, 33, 48–50,
78, 79, 187–190, 192–199,
201–203, 205, 211,
216–218
community, 8, 15, 32, 38, 47,
72, 74, 75, 78, 82, 84, 91,
92, 96, 163, 165, 177, 182,
200
competition/competitors, 94,
106, 110, 117, 118, 127,
130, 142, 143, 167, 168,
173, 175, 182, 184, 211,
215, 217
concentration/concentration of
gains/concentration of
resources, 68, 110, 113,
117, 121, 175, 191, 222,
225
consumption/customers, 9, 48,
53, 89, 97, 98, 117, 118,
122, 129, 135, 138, 154,
166, 168, 171, 173, 175–
177, 179, 180, 183, 195,
196, 199, 202, 203, 210,
213, 221
cops, 49, 95, 145

corruption/corrupted, 29, 77,
81, 95, 136, 137, 138, 142,
154, 181
criminal groups/criminal
subjection/criminal world,
11, 17, 23, 27, 33, 46, 50,
51, 57–59, 77, 82, 91, 92,
95, 96, 109, 120, 146, 180
criminalization, 20, 33, 58, 110,
120, 121, 128, 130, 137,
147, 167, 169, 173, 178,
180, 182, 183, 184, 203,
212, 214, 225
daily life/everyday life/ordinary
life, 1, 10, 11, 17, 19, 33,
39, 79, 109, 145, 158, 200,
201, 209, 210
Das, Veena, 17
delinquency, 17
difference/social difference,
14–17, 20, 39, 46, 84, 203,
205
dismantling, 28, 32, 33, 91, 106,
110, 111, 127–160, 162,
163, 167, 169–171, 173,
174, 214, 224–226
double, 76, 77, 119
drug/drug production/drug
trafficking/drug dealers, 7, 9,
10, 18, 21, 27, 33, 48, 49,
53, 65, 78, 79, 97, 98, 160,
161, 187, 188, 193, 195,
196, 198–200, 201–203,
205, 206, 215, 216, 218,
223
Index  247
economic gains/gains/earnings/
revenues, 9, 10, 17, 32, 81,
99, 100, 109–111, 113, 115,
117, 148, 151, 156, 173,
180, 183, 193, 203, 206,
223, 225
economics/economic
connections/
economic regulation, 2, 10,
18, 20, 31, 56, 75, 88, 100,
111, 115, 117–125, 128,
133, 134, 138, 140–143,
147–149, 151–153, 156,
162, 163, 166, 167, 169,
170, 172–174, 181–184,
193, 198–201, 203–205,
210, 211, 212, 214, 215,
223, 226
education/school, 20, 29, 40, 43,
44, 47–50, 55, 59, 151, 184,
198, 212
election/elections, 14, 33, 70,
137, 160, 161, 166, 167,
184
elite/elites/political elite/global
elite/Brazilian elites, 2, 6, 32,
33, 38, 68–70, 73, 107, 109,
115, 120–125, 137, 147,
165–167, 169, 175, 209,
212–214
entrepreneurship/entrepreneur,
2, 7, 16, 19, 32, 100, 101,
117, 121, 123, 139,
148, 172–174, 181,
193, 196, 198, 211–214,
225
248 Index
environment, 22, 72, 73, 127,
135, 141, 142, 153, 156,
208, 209
ethics/ethic procedures, 29, 50
ethnography/ethnographic.1, 11,
17, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29,
31–33, 37, 53, 65, 106, 116,
149, 155, 158, 163, 199,
212, 215, 219, 222, 223
exclusionary formalization, 174
expropriation, 96, 122, 148
favela, 1, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 21,
23, 27, 30–32, 37–39, 47,
51, 57, 59, 65, 68, 69,
71–77, 79, 81, 82, 90, 91,
97, 98, 117, 127, 188, 195,
198, 199, 206
Fiat Palio, 9, 28, 31, 47–52, 56,
79, 80, 145, 163, 194, 209
Fiat Strada, 9, 28, 31, 39–43,
56, 58, 59, 138, 140, 145,
216
fieldwork/fieldworking, 27, 29,
38, 66, 68, 80, 81, 95, 97,
156, 187, 192, 218
financial compensation, 94
financial crimes, 101
financial reparation, 94
FIPE table, 118
Ford Ka, 9, 28, 53–56, 74–78,
127–130, 132, 137, 141–
143, 145, 148, 152, 153,
154, 155, 165, 168, 183,
216
fortified enclaves, 165, 216
Foucault, Michel, 149, 225
funk/Brazilian funk, 47, 74, 75,
77
gated communities, 6, 15, 18,
38, 165
gender, 30, 39, 162, 212,
222
gentrification, 157
global, 4, 14, 22, 31–33, 107,
109, 128, 169, 172, 188,
198–201, 203–206, 209,
214, 215, 217–219, 223,
226
globalization, 2, 16, 37, 187–206,
222
global south/global north, 1,
10–13, 16, 18, 46, 95, 163,
166, 167, 200, 202, 203,
205, 209, 222, 223
governance/urban governance,
12, 17, 19, 29, 94, 96, 161,
162
government, 1, 16, 22, 27, 40, 75,
80, 90, 95, 120, 134, 137,
138, 142, 148, 153, 155,
165, 181–184, 192, 193,
208, 215, 216
governmentality/neoliberal
governmentality, 120
Hirata, D., 34, 124, 157
homicides/homicides reduction,
18, 28, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74,
82–84, 92, 200, 203
housing, 4, 48, 68, 128, 165,
222
Hyundai HB20, 9, 28, 31,
43–47, 89, 95, 99, 102
illegalisms/differential
management of illegalisms,
149, 158, 161, 220–226

illegality/irregularities, 18, 30,
84, 96, 97, 106, 110, 128,
130, 133, 137, 141, 142,
145, 148, 154, 155, 156,
158, 178, 213, 220,
222–226
illegal markets/illegal vehicle
market/illegal car market, 10,
11, 17, 22, 27, 30–33, 39,
43, 47, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57,
59, 65, 73, 82, 91, 92,
94–96, 98, 102, 105, 109,
120, 136, 139, 142, 143,
147–164, 169, 171–174,
191, 196, 198–202, 209,
210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 223
illicit markets, 200
immigration/immigrants, 1, 40,
188, 202, 203
income, 5, 8, 15, 22, 41, 54, 55,
69, 113, 115, 120, 121, 128,
140, 151, 157, 167, 168,
170, 172, 173, 177, 179–
181, 183, 184, 189, 196,
198, 205, 222, 224
incrimination, 167, 225
indemnity/indemnification, 87,
94, 176
inequality/inequalities/
multidimensional
inequalities, 2, 4, 11–13,
17–22, 28, 29, 32–34,
37–59, 73, 74, 82, 97, 106,
109, 114, 117, 119, 123,
149, 155, 156, 158, 161,
163, 167, 169, 183, 188,
193, 200, 202–206, 209–
215, 218, 220–226
Index  249
infrastructure, 2, 12, 13, 20, 69,
128, 156
insurance/auto insurance/
insurance companies/
insurer/insurers/parallel
insurance/pirate insurance/
popular insurance, 23, 27,
29, 31–33, 42, 43, 45, 56,
69, 72, 78, 81, 84, 87–90,
92–100, 106, 107, 109–115,
118–121, 123, 124, 127,
128, 137, 141, 143, 145,
151, 152, 162, 165–184,
190, 191, 193, 210–214,
224–226
journey, 4, 9, 11, 18, 20–31, 37,
44, 46, 47, 53, 95, 105, 109,
119, 148, 166, 183, 187,
188, 192, 211, 215, 216,
218
Latin America, 2, 6, 11, 16, 30,
38, 105, 110, 203, 205,
220–226
law/2014 Dismantling Act/
Dismantling Law, 17,
33, 37, 76, 96, 106,
110, 111, 124,
133–135, 137, 141, 142,
147–158, 160, 162, 163,
167–171, 173, 174,
181–185, 188, 193,
210, 214, 223–226
law enforcement, 128,
129
legal-illegal boundary, 119
lobby/illegal lobbying, 101,
181, 182
250 Index
low-income classes/low-income
customers, 167, 168, 173,
180
Machado da Silva, Luis Antonio,
21, 222
marginal circuits/marginality, 10,
32, 79, 105, 115–121, 221
margins/marginalized actors/
marginalized group, 11, 40,
83, 110, 113, 118, 120, 128,
162, 163, 173, 174, 179,
180, 190–193, 195, 198,
200, 202, 204, 205, 212,
214, 215, 217
marijuana/weed, 7, 49, 74, 161,
198, 202
market/market interest/market
competence/low-cost
market, 1, 4, 6, 9–11,
15–23, 27–33, 39, 42,
43, 46–48, 51, 54, 56–59,
65, 73, 81, 82, 87–102,
104–107, 109–111, 113–
125, 127–143, 145, 147–
185, 188, 190–203, 205,
209–217, 220, 221,
223–226
mechanisms, 2, 11, 13, 19, 20,
28, 29, 31–33, 56, 71, 73,
74, 78, 87, 97, 104–125,
128, 149, 160, 161, 166,
174, 182, 183, 188, 200,
203, 205, 209, 211–215,
217, 226
methods/mixed methods/
ethnography/urban
ethnography, 11, 21–30, 32,
155, 158, 215, 219
microinsurance, 172
migration/migrants, 1, 2, 6, 17,
34, 68, 188, 220
military/military police/army, 5,
14, 39, 40, 51, 63–65, 68,
69, 71, 77, 79, 80, 84, 100,
122, 136, 142, 152, 158,
159, 161, 163, 166, 174,
188
Misse, Michel, 96, 148
money/currency/money
laundering, 8, 10–12, 16,
18, 21, 28, 29, 32, 48,
55–58, 76, 78, 79, 81, 88,
93, 99, 101, 109, 111, 125,
135, 137–141, 145, 148,
149, 170, 188, 189, 196,
198, 199, 201, 203, 205,
210, 211–213, 216–218
monopoly/oligopoly, 72, 100,
115, 124, 151, 184
moral entrepreneurs, 193, 211,
214
mutual associations, 176, 180
National Congress, 165, 170, 184
necropolitics, 203
neighborhood/poor
neighborhood/
wealthy neighborhood/
peripheries/favela, 1, 5–9,
11, 12, 15–17, 21, 23, 27,
29, 30–32, 37–39, 41–44,
46–51, 53, 57, 59, 64, 65,
68–79, 81–84, 89–93, 97,
98, 101, 105, 107, 109,
115–117, 127, 128, 145,
158, 160, 165, 176, 177,
183, 184, 188, 195, 196,
199–202, 206, 209, 211–
215, 224

normative regimes, 11–21, 28,
32, 33, 37, 50, 73, 83, 91,
120, 121, 128, 145, 148,
149, 156, 157, 160, 169,
174, 200, 202, 209, 216,
217
ordinary life/everyday life, 1, 10,
17, 39, 200, 201
organized crime, 21, 163, 225
PCC/PCC members/brothers/
brotherhood, 4, 5, 9, 15, 16,
20, 32, 33, 48, 50, 51, 57,
58, 72, 78, 82, 91–93, 97,
143, 188, 194, 196, 198,
201, 203, 211, 214, 217
Pentecostalism, 53, 83, 138, 161,
184
periphery/urban peripheries, 2,
5, 6, 31, 32, 37, 42, 44,
48–50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 65,
69–74, 77, 78, 82, 83,
89–92, 107, 116, 117, 145,
160, 165, 169, 183, 184,
188, 196, 199–203, 209,
212, 213, 215, 220, 221
plausible/plausibility, 12–14,
16, 17, 22, 23, 38,
160, 163
police/police officers/policemen/
police violence/police use of
lethal force, 5, 8, 11, 13–15,
17, 18, 20, 21–23, 27–29,
32, 33, 40, 45, 51, 63–74,
70, 72, 73, 77–81, 83, 84,
90–92, 94–98, 109, 110,
128, 129, 133, 136, 137,
Index  251
139–141, 143, 145, 148,
152, 155, 156, 160–164,
166, 171, 174, 183, 184,
188, 189, 191, 196, 199,
203, 206, 208, 209,
211–215, 216, 224, 226
politics/political capital/political
crisis/political disputes/
political merchandise/
political power, 11–17, 19,
65, 80–84, 93, 95, 96, 98,
100, 101, 115, 120, 121–
125, 128, 130–143, 146–
149, 151–164, 169, 173,
174, 181, 182, 183, 192,
201, 211, 213–218, 222,
223, 225, 226
poor/poverty, 2, 10, 21, 30, 31,
34, 37–39, 65, 67, 69, 73,
74, 114, 160, 162, 168, 172,
175, 198, 199, 205, 209,
210, 212, 214, 220–223, 226
popular economic circuits/
popular economies, 33, 117,
125, 214
population, 1, 17, 69–73, 75, 82,
96, 168, 172, 183, 184,
191–193, 200, 203, 218,
220, 222, 226
ports/Santos port, 11, 188, 198
power, 5, 11, 13, 16, 18, 21, 33,
37, 72, 73, 95, 97, 98, 107,
115, 137, 143, 148, 149,
151, 152, 158, 163, 168,
183, 196, 214, 215, 218,
224, 225
predictability, 94, 170
252 Index
price/price increase, 5, 28, 30,
32, 43, 54, 56, 57, 80, 88,
94, 101, 105, 110, 111, 116,
117–119, 123, 128, 133,
137, 141, 143–146, 152,
156, 166, 168, 170, 171,
174, 175, 177, 195, 196,
201, 216, 222
prison/incarceration policy/mass
incarceration, 8, 50, 53, 59,
72, 76–79, 81, 84, 109, 188,
189, 196, 200, 203, 206,
214, 216
profit/profits/profitability, 9, 32,
56, 57, 59, 73, 74, 87, 88,
92, 94, 100, 107, 109, 110,
117, 118, 120, 123, 124,
139, 140, 141, 142, 151,
152, 155, 158, 162, 172,
173, 174, 176, 179, 183,
194–198, 210, 211, 213,
216, 221
property, 51, 71–73, 81, 88, 93,
101, 120, 165, 168, 175,
176–179, 189, 224
protectionism, 181
protection market, 94, 97, 120,
136, 148, 155, 157, 162,
175–181, 200–203, 211,
213, 225
public debate, 14, 65, 111, 137,
142, 161, 179, 184
public security, 38, 73, 120,
134, 152,
162, 193
punishment, 88, 93, 94,
137, 162,
167, 198
race/racial conflict, 39, 69, 212, 222
Racionais Mcs, 93
Rancière, Jacques, 13
rap/hip-hop, 47, 93, 94
rationality/rationality scheme,
12, 37, 88, 94, 120, 182,
209, 213
regime/regimes of action/
normative regimes, 11–21,
28, 32, 33, 37, 50, 73, 83,
91, 92, 94, 96, 106, 120,
121, 128, 143, 145, 148,
149, 151, 156, 157, 160,
162, 169, 174, 200, 202,
209, 215–218, 226
regulation/regulation model/
regulation of illegal markets/
regulatory regimes, 10, 13,
14, 30, 33, 56–59, 92, 120,
121, 124, 135, 145, 147–
149, 151, 156, 157, 161–
164, 166, 167, 169, 173,
180, 182–184, 193, 200,
211, 213
religion/catholic religion/
Pentecostal religion, 53, 184
reparation, 15, 94, 95
reproduction of urban
inequalities, 97, 209, 211
Rio de Janeiro, 10, 11, 18, 28,
96–98, 104, 143, 174, 176,
179, 189, 200, 216
risk/risk assessments/risk analysis,
5, 32, 38, 42, 49, 51, 56, 57,
71, 73–75, 88, 93, 94, 96,
109, 116, 139, 140, 157,
168, 176, 177, 191, 198,
202, 203, 211, 212

robbery/armed robberies, 5, 10,
17, 18, 20, 23, 28, 29, 31,
32, 37, 38, 40, 46, 47, 50,
51, 53–58, 64–67, 69,
71–73, 74, 76, 78, 82, 87,
88, 89, 93–95, 98–100, 109,
115, 137, 163, 170, 171,
176, 177, 187, 189, 190,
198, 210, 212–216, 225
routine, 10, 17, 21, 53, 79, 90,
157, 199
samba, 6, 7, 75, 190, 195, 198,
199
Sao Paulo, 1, 2, 4, 8–12, 15–21,
23, 28, 29, 31–33, 37–59,
63–70, 72, 79–84, 89–93,
95–102, 104–107, 109–111,
114–118, 120, 122, 123,
127, 128, 134, 135, 138–
140, 143, 146, 147, 149,
152, 155, 158, 160–167,
176, 183, 184, 187–191,
193, 195, 198–203, 206,
208, 209, 211, 212, 213,
215–219, 223, 224, 226
schools/public schools, 40, 43,
44, 47–50, 55, 59, 151, 198
security/public and private
security/public security/
private security/security
market, 5, 13–15, 20, 21, 29,
31, 33, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46,
64, 68, 71, 73, 84, 87, 88,
93, 95, 96, 120, 134, 137,
152, 160, 161, 162, 181,
193, 213, 222, 223, 226
Index  253
sex/sexuality, 5, 47
slums, 1, 37, 96, 209, 211
smuggling, 196
state/state actors/state and
market/state force, 11, 12,
14–16, 20, 21, 32, 33, 37,
38, 50, 55, 56, 58, 63–84,
88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 107,
120, 122, 124, 125, 128,
137, 143, 145, 148, 149,
151, 155, 156, 158, 161–
163, 165–169, 174, 176,
182–184, 188, 193, 196,
200–203, 209–214, 216,
217, 223, 224
strategy, 117, 134, 143, 169,
172, 174, 175, 203
structure/social structure, 14,
17, 22, 23, 43, 96, 106,
131, 149, 201, 209, 220,
222
tacking, 21–30
techniques, 14, 58, 59,
94, 96
technology, 96, 98, 152, 155,
196, 218
technopolitics, 152, 156
territory/territorial control/
territoriality/urban territory,
10, 16, 17, 18, 31–33,
48, 49, 50, 65, 70–74, 91,
97, 105, 106, 117, 118,
149, 162, 163, 167,
183, 188, 190, 191, 193,
198, 200–203, 205, 212,
222
254 Index
theft/robbery, 5, 10, 16, 18, 20,
23, 28, 31, 32, 37, 38,
40–42, 45–47, 50, 51,
53–59, 63–67, 69, 70–74,
76, 77–79, 82, 87–90,
92–95, 98–100, 102, 104,
109–111, 115, 120, 123,
128, 130, 137, 139–141,
145, 147, 151–153, 159,
163, 165, 167, 168, 170,
171, 173, 176, 177, 183,
187, 189, 190, 196, 198,
203, 208, 210, 212, 213,
216, 223–225
theory/social theory/action
theory, 11–13, 16, 21, 31,
106, 160, 220, 221,
223–226
Tilly, Charles, 18–20, 215
Toyota Hilux, 9, 20, 28, 37, 39,
59, 98, 187, 190, 191, 194,
198, 201, 205, 215, 216,
218
tracking/tracker, 42, 43, 89–91,
93, 95, 97, 98, 155, 177,
187, 193, 222
trade/traders, 6, 7, 10, 40, 48,
68, 78, 118, 121, 129,
131, 133, 147–149,
188, 191–193, 198
trajectory, 118, 122
uncertainty, 87, 94
urban/urban centers/urban
conflict/urban orders/urban
theory/urban violence/urban
war, 2, 4, 9–13, 16–22, 28,
31–33, 37, 38, 40, 55–59,
65, 69, 71–73, 75, 81, 82,
84, 88, 92, 94, 96, 97, 106,
107, 117, 118, 128, 145,
148, 149, 157, 158, 160–
163, 165–167, 169, 183,
198–206, 208–212, 215,
217, 220–226
use of force/legitimate use of
force, 16, 46, 93, 98, 148,
167, 210, 215
value/value chain, 12, 14, 32, 40,
42, 43, 46, 51, 53, 80, 88,
91, 93, 97, 110, 111, 113,
115, 118, 135, 136, 153,
174, 177, 179, 188, 191–
193, 201, 211, 218, 223
vehicle/vehicle protection, 1, 5,
9, 11, 23, 27–33, 37, 38,
41–47, 49, 50, 53, 55–57,
63–74, 76–82, 84, 87–101,
104–107, 109–111, 113,
115–125, 127, 129, 131,
132, 135–141, 148, 151–
154, 159, 160, 162, 165,
168–171, 173–180, 183–
185, 187, 190, 191, 193–
195, 203, 208–213, 215,
216, 224, 225
violence/use of violence/exposure
to violence/armed violence/
police violence/urban
violence, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11–13,
15, 16, 19–22, 28, 29, 31,
34, 37–59, 64, 67, 71–74,
81–84, 92, 93, 98, 106, 109,
123, 145, 149, 155, 159–
164, 166, 169, 170, 188,

191, 200, 201, 203, 205,
206, 209, 211–213, 215,
217, 226
violent conflict, 13, 38, 93, 211
war, 15, 17, 51, 81, 84, 160,
194, 203, 217, 218
wealth/wealthy neighborhood, 2,
5, 6, 18, 31, 44, 59, 63,
70–72, 79, 101, 110, 115,
122, 123, 156, 165, 167,
168, 174, 175, 183, 188,
190, 205, 210–212, 214,
219–223, 226
Wellington, 44–46, 59, 63–65,
69–71, 73, 81–84, 94, 211,
214
white/whiteness, 1, 7, 10, 13,
14–16, 32, 38, 43, 45, 50,
53, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 104,
127, 130, 135, 210
Index  255
worker/industrial worker/
informal worker, 1, 2, 5, 15,
19, 40, 47, 56, 59, 65, 69,
72, 78, 91, 136, 168, 173,
189, 191, 212, 213, 218,
220–224
work/labor, 2, 22, 40, 43, 46, 56,
72, 80, 92, 94–97, 99, 101,
128–130, 141, 152, 153,
163, 171, 176, 183, 189,
191, 194, 196, 198, 200,
212, 216, 220–224
world of crime, 4, 16, 18, 20, 33,
40, 44, 47–51, 53, 55, 71,
72, 76, 78, 84, 145, 187,
188, 194, 198, 214
youth/youth delinquency, 7, 21,
43, 50, 54, 73, 83,
109, 202