The New York Times: November, 2011
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:  About 3,000 police officers and soldiers moved into one of
the largest slums here on Sunday in a pivotal effort by the government to assert control
over lawless areas of the city ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.
In an operation that began before dawn, military helicopters buzzed the sky, and tanks
rolled through the narrow streets of the Rocinha slum. Elite police squads patrolled the
alleys, and snipers perched on rooftops. The authorities said the occupation was an effort
at the “pacification” of the sprawling slum, or favela, and it was carried out peacefully.
By early Sunday evening, the police, accompanied by contingents from the Brazilian Army
and Navy, had not fired a shot. Officials said the operation’s success was made possible
by months of intelligence gathering and by the arrest last week of Antônio Bonfim Lopes,
the drug lord known as Nem, who was said to have effectively ruled Rocinha and adjacent
Favela Vidigal on the Two Brothers Mountain and was known as one of Brazil’s most wanted
and dangerous drug lords.

2011

The gangs of Rocinha, Brazil controlled the hillside squatter enclave for 35 years between the late 1970s and late 2011. This book is
about the unusual street photography project that for three weeks in the Rio winter of 2011 boldly documented what that everyday place was like. 
Out in the wild of that extraordinary time; under the leery glare of violent, yet ultimately urbane Rio gangsters at the pinnacle of the Amigos dos
Amigos dangerous rein at the height of the favela gangs’ storied and fabled criminal epoch. The pages of this book document what it was like
at the end of that unique age of territorial toleration and just before the 85-year Rocinha squatter experiment became less and less community
inventive and more and more just like any place else. What this unlikely, peculiar and most surprisingly content of places was like just before
pacification took hold - - - just before the tanks moved in from the asphalt below and the criminal element went underground; just before the
criminal justice system and global TV cameras moved in; and just as Brazil was expressing its global leadership in the
Twenty First Century in so many different ways at once...