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 policemen 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].
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 neighborhood 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 business 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, 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 routines (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 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.
Figure I.2 Graph of theft and armed robbery of vehicles. Rate per hundred 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.
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 methodological. Not least because our research has taught us that, notwithstanding the existence of classic itineraries followed by stolen vehicles, the distinguishing 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 plurality 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 violence 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 govern ordinary urban life (Machado da Silva 1993). During our years of ethnography, 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 plural 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 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