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 lethality 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 illegality,9 is functional for urban durable inequalities (Tilly 1998). We will empirically describe scenes of violent robbery, nonviolent theft, and the destinations 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 contraband 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:
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, fluctuating 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 histories. […] 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 administrative 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 modeling that marks some of the author’s works does not prevent us from verifying the analytical potential that can result from his reflections on what we call here normative regimes, with a particular emphasis on the forms of governance 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 recognizable (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.
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 theoretical 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 categorical 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 organizational 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 normativities, 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 reproduction 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 different 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.
