A chestnut horse is being led across a bridge that crosses a stream of sewage, a canal of waste.

The officer manning the police post on the perimeter of the City of God favela falls into conversation. Shakira came to visit recently, he says, adding the Latina pop singer was more accessible than U.S. President Barack Obama, who passed swiftly through the shanty on a tightly controlled tour last March.

This is the other Rio, the city of slum housing thrown against hillsides to which more than a million residents cleave, pivotal examination points to any understanding of Brazil’s transformation of the past decade.

Last Sunday, 3,000 troops secured Rocinha, a notorious favela infected with drug dons and gun runners. By mid-afternoon, Robert Muggah, a Canadian fellow at the International Relations Institute at Rio’s Pontifical Catholic University, had hopped a cab to the foot of the favela to watch the hoisting of the national flag. Tapping on his BlackBerry, Muggah called the taking of Rocinha a “major symbolic victory.”

I had met Muggah in October at a coffee shop in Cobal do Leblon, a bustling market that is to Rio what St. Lawrence Market is to Toronto. Muggah has been working in Rio on and off for 10 years. A decade ago, he says, “people were leaving in droves because it was a death trap. . . . When I went to parties with friends people would be literally flinching when we passed windows.” He elaborated: stray bullets, bala perdida. Friends exited for one reason and one reason alone: “Security, security, security.”

In 2008, the government launched a major initiative, establishing so-called Police Pacification Units, or UPPs, within favelas, designed not only to secure the peace but, as Muggah says, “bring governance to these areas.” That’s lasting governance, along with the introduction, or the reintroduction, of absent public services. No more fly-in, fly-out storm-trooper tactics aimed at stamping out inner-slum violence, as effective as stamping out one fire as the forest smoulders. “It’s part of the whole act of the state trying to initiate social contracts with areas outside the state,” he says. “The long-term objective is to formalize settlements, make them part of the city.” Or, as they put it in Rio, to integrate “the hills with the asphalt.”

Thus far, UPPs have been established in 19 favelas, and the pacification program has been a public relations win with a big push on to secure twice as many shanties by the time of the World Cup. “It looks a lot like counter-insurgency,” says Muggah of the program. “Clear, shape, hold, build, like what we have in Afghanistan.”

The short-term prognosis, in Muggah’s assessment, is “islands of safety.” The long-term effects are unclear. There are as many as 1,000 favelas in the city. (Viva Rio, an NGO established in the city in 1993, puts the number at 600, but many are shanty clusters.) The UPP focus has been largely in the city’s south, where most of the Olympic activities are scheduled. And as much as crime indexes have declined, there is a photo-op aspect to the exercise, especially in the run-up to the Olympics, with the country anxious to project an its-safe-to-come-here impression.

“I think this is a huge branding exercise,” says Muggah, acknowledging the cynicism that comes with the statement. “UPP has become a brand, a brand they’re selling at home and abroad.”

City of God, in this sense, has been branded. Famous as the backdrop for the 2002 movie of the same name, the favela has become a highly visible test case in the city’s attempts to sell a new, improved image.