In search of the shadow fleet: Paraguay’s mau cars and the politics of bottlenecks across the triple-frontier

Within the tri-border area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, the city of Ciudad del Este is infamous for stolen cars. Since Ciudad del Este is a crucial bottleneck for contraband in the continent, the saturated car market throws up a series of questions about legitimacy and commercial capitalism across the triple-frontier. Rather than a set of economic reforms aimed at unweaving a national social welfare safety net and privatizing state-supported industry, the anti-regulatory impulse in Paraguay has long been predicated on local histories and political claims around the role of commercial markets as engines of development. From the vantage of the driver seat of my 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, I take an ethnographic approach to the triple-frontier’s regulatory landscape. I show how the region takes shape through a series of bottlenecks, from traffic snarls on the international bridge, to the work of insurance actuaries who seize stolen vehicle, to an elite Customs task force charged with surveillance of Paraguay’s contraband cars, to the pleasures of cruising on suburban streets. By refocusing attention on region formation through a transborder vehicle fleet (and its shadows), I track efforts by actors within Paraguay and Brazil to individualize particular cars within the aggregate. I argue that the crowd and the bottleneck serves as powerful metaphors for explaining the distributional politics of freewheeling frontier capitalism, and especially the unequal forms of access that generate wealth for some more readily than others. Speaker: Caroline Schuster is a Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology. She completed her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay. Her forthcoming book, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy will be published with University of California Press this year. The seminar will be followed by light refreshments. No RSVP required.