Over the hills is a sprawl of slums and working-class neighborhoods housing the people who clean the rooms, serve the food and drive the taxis.
Instead, it caused the sprawl of slums and suburban commuters to live farther away, resulting in today's uncomfortably long, hot, and sweaty train journeys.
In Mumbai, itself a neat nutshell of India's extremes, this image is served on a platter: the shiny towers that rise from a sprawl of squalid slums, the two inevitably "jostling for space" in globalising India.
The city's new mayor, Aníbal Gaviria, spent an hour describing to me his dreams for burying a congested highway that runs through the middle of town, building an electric tram along the hillsides to stem the sprawl of the slums, adding a green belt of public buildings along the tram, rehabilitating the Medellín River and densifying the city center — smart, public-spirited, improvements.
The resettlement community itself was built along a regular grid, with blocks of small concrete houses laid out in meticulously straight lines, in marked contrast to the organic sprawl of urban slums.
The authorities are hoping a campaign of arrests will avert in Rocinha the type of bloody incursion that occurred last year when 2,600 personnel from the security forces took control of Complexo do Alemão, another sprawling patchwork of slums.
Still, a stroll one afternoon last month through a sprawling patchwork of slums, Nordeste de Amaralina, where, Mr. Almeida said, officials had increased the police presence, the tenuous nature of crime-fighting policies was apparent.
"The opposition doesn't care for the poor," said Neiva Montezuma, 50, a housewife in Petare, a sprawling patchwork of slums on Caracas's western flank, who said she voted for the president's slate of candidates.
"I am tired of Chávez treating the entire country as if it were his military barracks," said Heriberto González, 65, a carpenter, after he voted in Petare, a sprawling patchwork of slums here.
Mr. Chávez's announcement came at a crucial time for his government, with challengers winning ground last week in areas like Petare, a sprawling patchwork of slums here in Caracas.
Rapid population growth in turn led to the rise of sprawling slums that the municipal government was unable to regulate or police.
