The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier

Within the tri-border area where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este is infamous for stolen cars. Since Ciudad del Este is a crucial bottleneck for smuggling on the continent, the contraband—or mau—car market throws up a series of questions about legitimacy and commercial capitalism. I show how mau cars articulate across a series of bottlenecks, from traffic snarls on the international bridge, to the work of insurance adjustors who seize stolen vehicles, to an elite customs task force charged with surveillance of Paraguay's contraband cars. Mau is an idiom as well as a practical mechanism for regulating frontier capitalism, accumulation, and free trade. Thus, mau should be treated as a regulatory form of economic governance in dynamic tension with the public and official terminology of trade such as economic “integration” and “free circulation” that dominate the Mercosur common market. [Borderlands, bureaucracy, contraband, free trade zone, frontier capitalism, informal economy, Paraguay, Tri-Border Area].