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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 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 plausible 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 concepts 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 conflicting 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 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 synthesis, 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 capital, 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 without 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 colonialism. 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 multicultural equation, in the republican or federalist equation, it doesn’t matter, subjects and communities can share the same public space. Norris sees many 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 organizations. Alvin wants more cameras, more surveillance, and more State control. 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 disrespecting 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 common understanding of security: they do not accept ordinary crime or terrorism. 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 spectrum, 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 possible without destroying the framework in which the previous debate was elaborated. 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 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 considers Norris’ concerns futile and Alvin’s inhuman. He only believes in self-protection 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 collection 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 perspective 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.

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 manifests 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 alternatives to equalize differences, but today these are clearly insufficient. The problem 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 changing scenario and in deep disagreement about who they are, thieves or entrepreneurs, 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 alternative “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, argumentative 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 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 country, 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 irreconcilable 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 governance. 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 circumvent 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 researching everyday routines and the meanings that actors give to their social interactions, giving inferential consequences to them. Without accounting for these plural urban orders, authors tend to read the social circuits around illegal markets in a deductive fashion and see them as resulting from delinquency, misbehavior, 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 having barely touched on the world of crime as a power regime. Nonetheless, the literature still lacks inductive empirical work that could enhance our understanding 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 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.