Car smuggling in Bolivia is booming

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Bolivia has a car smuggling problem so big that even President Luis Arce inadvertently donated a stolen car to an Indigenous community last May. Authorities estimate about 20% of the country’s total car fleet is smuggled, with the issue widely documented by both car thieves and their victims through their respective phones.

It’s a deeply tech-driven story on either side. Bolivia’s contraband cars, known as autos chutos, are usually stolen in Chile and driven through the desert border into the landlocked country. They are then sold in one of the 73 easy-to-find illegal markets — the Bolivian government is aware of all of them.

TikTok is full of videos of chuteros, or car thieves, venturing into the impressive Bolivian salt flats as they avoid police raid sites. They usually do stunts to show off the cars they’ve stolen, mostly high-end SUVs or expensive sports cars, attracting praise from wannabe chuteros who ask for information on how to become one. Those interested in buying stolen cars inquire about prices of specific models in the comments. It makes for a striking feed: hundreds of TikTok videos set to the beat of “Chutero Yo Soy,” a song about the chutero lifestyle.

On the Chilean side of the border, car theft victims are whipping out their phones to try and tackle the problem themselves. Hugo Bustio, a former policeman, founded a volunteer group called Vehicle Search Group (GBV) after realizing the local police were overwhelmed by reports of stolen cars. Its members are mostly car theft victims. They patrol the streets, taking photos and sharing them on GBV WhatsApp groups as they try to find stolen cars before they’re taken to Bolivia.

GBV has even partnered with a Chilean AI startup called SafeByWolf to identify cars faster. Felipe Lobos, SafeByWolf’s founder and CEO, told Rest of World his app is able to identify license plates on moving cars. Its algorithm is allegedly smart enough to identify if license plates have been swapped, and it then feeds the information into the police database to find a match in the stolen car reports. The company was specifically created to deal with this issue, as the Chilean car insurance industry — Lobos’ main customer — has been increasingly disheartened by the smuggling situation in recent years.

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Source link : https://restofworld.org/2023/newsletter-latin-america-bolivia-chile-car-theft/ Author : Publish date : 2023-08-30 03:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .