the common fear offavelas as lawless, violent places eternally on the verge of descending toupend the rest of the city, shutting down businesses and enforcing a reign ofterror through small armies of coked-up adolescents with machine guns. in this case, though, the hills camedown to the asphalt with giant banners and photos of some of the hundreds offavela residents killed or disappeared by rios police in recent years. (if you imagine that rios cops dontenforce their own reign of terror especially in the citys favelas youhavent lived here long enough to get questioned and searched at gunpoint by a coked-uppost-adolescent with an ar-15 and a uniform).the march, called a festa nos estadios nao vale as lagrimasna favela (the party in the stadium isnt worth the tears in the favela),was sponsored by a coalition of social movements from favelas throughout thecity. it began monday morning inchapeu mangueira with hip-hop, poetry, and capoeira presentations beforeheading down to copacabana, where tens of thousands of soccer fans in face paintand green-and-yellow shirts (both locals and tourists trying to soak upbrazils world cup vibe) were waiting for the start of brazils finalpreliminary game against cameroon, and where a massive, mostly foreign, presscorps was waiting to capture anything out of the ordinary.it wasnt anespecially big march, but there were more people there than at recent protests(around 300 when i reached it near the beginning of the beach, and over 500after another activist coalition joined us about halfway through), and the glutof tourists and photographers with press credentials helped keep the policefairly benign. we were surrounded by cordons of riot cops that grew as we madeour way down the beach, and an imposing line of them blocked our initial approachtoward the entrance of pavao/pavaozinho, but they didnt let off any tear gasor stun grenades, even when the march changed course to reach pavao/pavaozinhodown a series of side streets. theprotest finished without the ass kicking thats become customary, although copsdid rough up and arrest "spiderman", awell-known local activist, apparently for carrying an unfurled banner on apublic sidewalk after the protest ended. controlling andtaming favelas has long been the holy grail of governance in rio dejaneiro. in part, thats becauseof what a major force favelas are in the city: somewhere between 15 30% of thepopulation lives in them, depending in largely on what any given researcherconsiders to a favela to be. themost recent initiative to bring favelas in line has been pacification, whichis a pretty major misnomer for armed occupations by police and armyforces. im not much for statistics,but a local paper showed that thenumber of favela residents killed and disappeared by police which has alwaysbeen outrageously high has increased in pacified favelas. the cases of amarildo de souza and claudia ferreira silva,which ive mentioned before on this blog, are recent examples of police killings that havegotten the most media attention for their sheer heinousness. two weeks ago, cops kidnapped a teenager and killed him execution-styleafter picking him and a friend up for an alleged robbery (the friend, who theyshot in his legs and back, played dead and later managed to