Читать книгу Stolen Cars - Группа авторов - Страница 13

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 centers, and large insurance companies. We conducted interviews in public agencies 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 secondary 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 transcribed 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.

The list of bibliographical references was also compiled collectively, organized by theme using organizational software. We also obtained many tables of primary quantitative data – especially regarding police auctions and homicides linked to vehicle theft – and many, many written and video press reports collected 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 investigation: “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 technical 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 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.