BRASIL: 3 Months After Army Invasion, Rio's Complexo do Alemão Slum Prepares Peacefully For Carnaval; Corruption Sweep Nets 32 Police.

GUARDIAN / T. Phillips /

    "With the streets no longer controlled by traffickers, television presenters are pouring into the sprawling Complexo do Alemão slum, until recently off-limits. Politicians have made regular visits, promising the region's 70,000-odd residents a "social occupation" alongside the military one. Cable salesmen and telephone companies are flocking to the area in search of new customers. A cinema has opened."
AND:
  "Things are changing," says one resident, sitting in the Dawn Paradise's costume-strewn HQ – an abandoned beer factory on the favela's outskirts. "The community has become more sociable. Today you see society here more – we have a cashpoint inside the community, a bank. The gossip is that we're going to have a McDonald's in each of the cable car stations. A big pharmacy chain has just opened up at the top. The community is being opened up to the rest of the city. People who were scared to come here before are now coming." It was, he said, "the community's new reality".

ALSO:  Hundreds of police in a 2009 operation called "Guillotine" sought to arrest 45 people, including 32 mostly Rio police officers.
   The police were suspected of running protection rackets for illegal gambling, leading militia groups and taking bribes from traffickers.
 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/11/us-brazil-police-idUSTRE71A6BF20110211

BRASIL: Police Try Peace In Rio's Slums.

NYTIMES/ By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO :
"For decades, the City of God (notorious Rio favela/slum) — whose brutal past was immortalized in a 2002 film — was one of the city’s most fearsome neighborhoods, so dangerous that even the police rarely dared to enter.
Those days seem long gone. Drug dealing remains, and in at least one area, outsiders can enter only with permission from local youths who patrol the streets.
Still, the men with the big guns are gone, or at least have been driven underground. And life is returning to the streets."
How is this done?
"The peace officers are central to that effort, flooding in after the military police clear the streets in gun battles that can last weeks. Their job is part traditional policing, part social work. They devote themselves to winning over residents scarred by decades of violence — some at the hands of the police."