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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 company – 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 significant 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 connections, 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 analytical 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 construction, 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.

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 immediately 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 entrepreneurs 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, territory, 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 dismantling 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.

Chapter 5 is an ethnographic study of the internal inequalities within the São Paulo vehicle dismantling market. It strengthens the empirical foundation of our theoretical framework, which is centered on the notion of normative 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, auctioneers, 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 border, 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 are in the chain – measures material and symbolic inequalities that are coproduced 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.

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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 chapters 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, professional, and personal interaction with them.