Power Games

Favelas are very interesting to learn about because they are so different from the structured cities that are so prevalent in the United States. Favelas are considered almost separate from the rest of society. They nearly have an air of exoticness. However, these images of Favelas are interestingly enough inaccurate. Favelas are portrayed as communities of poor, unruly, groups of people yet these groups of "unruly" people have established their own "governments". The illegitimate governments of the favelas are the people that have power which tend to be gang leaders. They keep the peace in communities by working with community members such as Lil' Dice did with the store owners. The gang leaders want as little disruption to their community as possible, thus they give the police what they want in order to keep them at bay, just as the cultural reading exemplified, "On a... memorable occasion, my trafficker neighbors simply left two tons of marijuana behind for the police to find, stacked in neat piles in the middle of an alleyway leading to a drug boss's house, on the route police were sure to take the following morning".
The best way that the reading portrays the relationship between the police the gangs, and the other favela community members is the following quote from the reading, "The police periodically attempt to bring order and control the imagined chaos represented by the favela, while traffickers seek to minimize losses of life and property and use the farcical nature of police performance to solidify their role as the de facto government of the favela." Although the traffickers bring the drugs into the favelas and distribute it, thus hurting the community, they also have the power to keep the police in check and because of this they do their best to work with the police to keep the violence at bay. This was visible in the movie, City of God, when the police were being bought off by the traffickers so that the police wouldn't bother them and also so the police would keep the traffickers updated on their movements.
It's most fascinating to see how integral the traffickers are to the favela society both from our reading and from the movie we have watched.