Since last November, however, the shantytown has been under 24-hour police occupation as part of a state government initiative to make Dona Marta a "model favela".
In Baltimore on Tuesday night, as the city reeled from how the death of Freddie Gray exposed the violence of a decades-long police occupation of the black population, I didn't experience many moments of sweetness.
Moving swiftly to blunt protests against the police occupation of the national university, Mexican justice authorities announced today that they have freed 654 of the 745 people arrested in the raid on Sunday that ended a nine-month student strike.
One of the men, Carl Jason Mitchelll), furious at the police occupation of the streets, decides to taunt them and fires a starter pistol (i.e., one that makes noise but doesn't shoot bullets) out the window.
It wasn't just the militarised police occupation of the coalfields; the 11,000 arrests, deaths, police assaults, mass jailings and sackings; the roadblocks, fitups and false prosecutions – most infamously at the Orgreave coking plant where an orgy of police violence in June 1984 was followed by a failed attempt to prosecute 95 miners for riot on the basis of false evidence.
To achieve its goal, the government unleashed the full force of the state: a militarised police occupation of the coalfields, a commandeered and manipulated criminal justice system, mass sackings and jailings – and the use of MI5, GCHQ, the NSA and special branch to bug, infiltrate, smear, manipulate the media, and stage dirty tricks against the union and its leaders.
In Rio de Janeiro, a policy of police occupation of the city's slums, or favelas, aimed at expelling the heavily armed drug traffickers who previously dominated them, is changing the face of the city.
We have not yet seen a situation like [the British police occupation of] Belfast.
No major police occupation, no feeling of tension, no fearful looks between strangers.
Today, Polonsky's island empire is under military and police occupation.
