Stolen Cars. Группа авторов

Stolen Cars - Группа авторов


Скачать книгу
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.

      Ethical Issues, Diversity, and Typical Days

      None of the researchers in our team got into a stolen car to do fieldwork; no-one carried hidden cameras or recorders or sought any information without the research subject having been clearly informed about our role in the field. None of the researchers negotiated interviews or testimonies in exchange for money or any other consideration other than respect, transparency, listening, and guaranteed anonymity. Our field relations have always been based on the longest possible stay as a way of building mutual trust.

      When, for whatever reason, there was any sign that we were not welcome in any space – as happened in notoriously corrupt Police Stations and in situations where cars were being dismantled during our initial approach – we simply discontinued our visit and disregarded the relevant data. In the vast majority of cases, however, our ethnography work unfolded very calmly in conversations marked by mutual trust, built over time by repeated visits to each space.

      All of our interlocutors knew that they would not be identified in our book and consented to the information they shared with us being used in our research. This way of working is not new for our team, having been tested in previous projects that also dealt with the line between legal and illegal (Bertelli and Feltran 2017). Three particularities of the (il)legal vehicle market deserve to be highlighted as they relate to relevant methodological issues. The first is the enormous diversity – and capillarity – of this market. This diversity can be seen in prices. We found the same car part sold for BRL 15.00 (0.015 MW) or BRL 450.00 (0.45 MW), depending on its origin and the consumer’s profile. Identical parts can be sold at very different prices depending on the profile of the consumer who enters the store. Illegal car parts are bought by both auto-parts resale stores in favelas and luxury car dealerships in exclusive neighborhoods. The car market is virtual as well as physical, poor as well as rich, and “tacking” strategies are used across the board. There is no stable “price list,” “average price,” or “typical route” in illegal markets. Negotiations are frequent, the prices situational and the regulations subject to change. The prices that we present in the book, therefore, are those empirically observed during our research.

      The second central feature of the (il)legal vehicle market is the way in which it is integrated. Illegality makes prices more competitive. Legality lends legitimacy and trust. The strategies for “heating up” all kinds of illegality are varied but everything is done “as if” it were legal. Official stores can sell stolen parts and clandestine stores can sell legally purchased ones. No car or auto part circulates without a corresponding invoice, but many invoices are false, or contain false information. Chinese parts are known to be cheap and of poor quality and therefore compete with the prices of stolen parts (which may be high quality and original). A new-car dealership might own a used-car dealership in which it sells illegal cars so that it can sell new ones cheaper by pooling the take of the two outlets. Buying a beaten-up car at an auction is a great way to obtain documentation so that a similar, stolen car can be resold as if it were legal. These are just a few examples, among thousands of others, that showed how official circuits of cars and auto parts invariably mix on the legal–illegal frontier. Today that integration is transnational in scope.

      Chapter Structure

      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,


Скачать книгу