Surge in armored car sales in Brazil

criminal gangs.
Statisticians have noted. In the late 1990s the United Nations ranked Jardim Ângela, in São Paulo, as the most violent neighborhood in the world.
There is one undisputed beneficiary from this anarchic state of affairs: the private security industry. When crime reaches unbearable proportions, and government agencies, owing to incompetence or corruption or both, no longer offer security, those who can afford it turn to private providers of security.

New York Times’s Alexei Barrionuevo writes, for example, that after being robbed twice in traffic, once at gunpoint, João Neves bought himself an armored car two months ago. “Even though the [global financial] crisis does exist, I consider my well-being and my security a priority,” said Neves, the owner of a small marketing agency. “I am afraid of being shot dead.” Rather than buy a new car, though, Neves opted for a 2005 Volkswagen Passat capable of withstanding bullets fired from a .44 Magnum revolver or a 9-millimeter submachine gun.

Barrionuevo writes that Brazilians have already trimmed their appetites for appliances and electronics in the recession, but bulletproofing is one expense they are not giving up easily. Once the domain of the very rich, armored cars have become a middle- and upper-middle-class obsession, especially in the huge city of Sao Paulo, notorious for roadside assaults and kidnappings.

Officially, crime is on the wane, but as the economy slides and the country sheds jobs, there is a palpable dread that street crime will get worse as well, economists here say. Many Paulistanos, as São Paulo residents are called, say the interminable stop-and-go traffic and the wide gap between haves and have-nots are recipes for assaults and carjackings, especially now that Brazil’s boom times have come to a halt.

“It is not a question of if you are going to be assaulted, it is when it is going to happen,” said Craig Bavington, who runs a tourist agency based here. After being assaulted twice, he decided to buy a used armored car two years ago when his wife became pregnant with their first child.

More than 7,000 vehicles were armored for civilian use in Brazil in 2008, up from 1,782 a decade earlier, and the pace has continued in 2009 despite the economy’s dispiriting first quarter, according to the Abrablin, the Brazilian Association of Bulletproof Manufacturers (the group assures us that “Todos os associados são credenciados pelo Exército Brasileiro para desenvolverem