Surge in armored car sales in Brazil

a atividade que se propõe”). A decade ago, there were just a handful of armoring companies in Brazil. Today there are about 120.

Barrionuevo writes that São Paulo leads the country — and the world — in making and selling armored cars. Rio de Janeiro, a city with legitimate concerns about stray bullets from gang warfare in the favelas, or shantytowns, overhanging the city, is Brazil’s second-largest market.

The government, inadvertently, has helped perpetuate the bulletproofing wave. With industrial production slowing last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration removed a tax on the car industry, saving buyers from 5 to 7.5 percent. The change was so popular that the government recently took similar action for electronics and appliances, hoping to stop the bleeding in those industries as well.

The global economic crisis have caused car sales to suffering other parts of the world, but Barrionuevo notes that they have surged in Brazil in the past four months, the longest streak of monthly sales increases since 2002, according to the National Association of Car Manufacturers. Industry officials say that when car sales are strong, bulletproofing invariably follows. With so many companies now in the field, the cost of armoring a car has fallen in Brazil in the past decade, to about $22,000 from $55,000, opening the business to a new category of consumer. A decade ago, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Jeep Cherokees were the models most sought after for armoring; today, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Chevrolet are in the top five.

At the end of the day, however, crime is the force behind it the surge in buying bulletproof cars. Economic contagion in the late 1990s spread from Asia to Brazil, sinking the Brazilian currency’s value and leading to record unemployment and high poverty. In 1999 the city of São Paulo recorded a murder rate of nearly 53 per 100,000 people, according to the state’s Department of Public Safety — much worse than New York City has ever recorded. As we noted above, in the late 1990s the United Nations ranked Jardim Ângela, in São Paulo, as the most violent neighborhood in the world.

Not all news is bade. Since the late 1990s the murder rate in São Paulo has fallen by 78 percent and vehicle thefts by 38 percent, though armed robberies