“The complementary has become a system”: the rise of vans and conflicts in the regulation of intercity transport in Alagoas”

Abstract

We analyze the development of conflicts between vans, taxis, buses, and shared transportation services that provide intercity transportation in Alagoas, and are interested in how they have produced regulations over the past 30 years. We begin in the small municipality of Santo Domingo, in the forested region of Alagoas, in a collective, mobile, and multi-sited ethnography that reconstructs the trajectories of people and objects. We focus on changes in the transportation needs of rural and urban populations and the emergence of marginal transportation markets, reconstructing the change in status of some clandestine services to that of complementary services provided by vans, which dominate the sector. How have these changes affected the ways in which the state government, the municipality, and the transportation companies themselves regulate these services? We argue that transportation between rural and urban areas, which was carried out by “peruas” in the 1980s, and later by “Kombis” and “Bestas,” underwent transformations in the 2000s. Transportation services are no longer directly dependent on the coronelismo that gravitated toward the local sugar mill owner. We connect changes in infrastructure and the status of transporters to the shift in the political regime towards the coronelato, which regulates the distribution of municipal positions, structured around competition and control of the votes of the poor, and controls lucrative urban markets. The management of these markets also encompasses armed groups allied with actors who act at the municipal level in favor of a local or regional leadership or political family in transport.