City of God

Gilmar, a community artist, with his latest work which he hopes to present to President Obama on Sunday, 'The Eye of Corruption'.

THE GUARDIAN, March 19, 2011

When the world's most powerful man touches down in Rio this weekend he will receive a handwritten letter from a man called José.

"To his excellency, the president of the republic of the United States of America," it will read. "Felicitations for the happy idea of coming to see our great nation and above all the City of God. Signed, José Neves."

Neves is an 80-year-old community leader from the City of God, a shantytown in western Rio de Janeiro which gave its name to Fernando Meirelles's 2002 blockbuster movie.

And on Sunday he is expecting a visit from Barack Obama, who is tipped to visit the favela as part of a five-day bridge-building tour of Latin America intended to bolster the US's shrinking regional influence against an economic and diplomatic offensive from China.

After visiting the favela, Obama is scheduled to make a speech in central Rio, before continuing on to Chile and El Salvador.

Obama will call for a rapprochement between Brasilia and Washington, a partnership that soured because of ties between Brazil's former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

With Lula in power, western diplomats in Brasilia described an Obama visit as virtually inconceivable. Brazil's new president, Dilma Rousseff, who took power in January, appears open to reconciliation.

In a rare post-election interview with the Washington Post she vowed to "try to forge closer ties with the US" and spoke out against human rights abuses in Iran.

Neves, a retired policeman and proud Afro-Brazilian, will need little convincing. In his ground-floor office in Bible Square, rumoured to be on Obama's itinerary, he keeps a giant US flag. "I followed [Obama's] election on TV – for the first time a black man took a step up," he beamed. "We'll be glad to receive him. He is president of a great nation that is our friend."

The US is no longer the only great nation in town. Recent years have seen the Chinese make big strides into Latin America – China overtook the US as Brazil's top trade partner in 2009 and is pouring billions into oil, mining, infrastructure and agriculture to secure access to its natural resources. In Washington, alarm bells are ringing.

US officials deny the visit is directly intended to counter the Chinese advance but White House adviser Ben Rhodes admitted it was "imperative that the United States [did] not disengage from these regions". "There's a cost to disengagement," he said.

Daniel Restrepo, Obama's leading adviser on Latin America, said the trip would highlight "the importance of the region" and "the restoration of American influence and appeal in the Americas".

For Rio's governors the visit represents a marketing coup as they battle to revive the city's international reputation as a safe, business-friendly metropolis.

The City of God is one of more than 20 favelas that have been "pacified" in a security initiative aimed at driving heavily armed drug traffickers from the slums before the 2016 Rio Olympics.

"It was terrible before," Neves recalled. "The kids would come out of school and they would all be stood there with shotguns and revolvers. Obama wouldn't have even considered coming to the City of God back then."

Even now, he is taking no chances. Obama will reportedly travel to the favela in a missile and gas-proof Cadillac, flanked by special forces operatives. A no-fly zone will be imposed by the Brazilian air force.

Neves said he had even spotted "the FBI" inspecting his favela. "They are big," he whispered. "And very strong."