Since 2014, smuggling, taxes, and organized crime have been denounced as pressing problems for Brazil. The hypothesis of this article is that the diagnosis present in the media is the product of the active intervention of institutional actors linked to the tobacco industry. Presented as a problem of smuggling and taxes, cigarettes migrate from the health debate to the field of public security, where they are reinscribed as a crime problem; a problem that would legitimize tax reductions to end the differentials that encourage this practice. The article maps the actors who carry out this work of inscription in public space, the performances used to make this work visible, the instruments and variables selected to compose smuggling figures, analyzing the consequences that this intervention produces.
Keywords:
smuggling; cigarettes; organized crime; media; public numbers; performances.
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Fonte: Elaboração nossa a partir de dados da Receita Federal, 2015;