That's since changed, with the pacification of dozens of Rio's "favela" hillside slums, the discovery of offshore oil deposits that have flooded the city with petrodollars and Rio's role as host for the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Some are concerned about the legitimacy of the new pacification police, given the lengthy history of corruption within both the civil and military police.
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Allowing East Germans to watch American soap operas on West German television, for example, seems to have acted as a form of pacification that actually reduced people's interest in politics.
The policy of pacification has been praised for establishing state control in areas that were previously controlled by heavily armed drug traffickers, but in some areas people have complained of police violence and corruption.
However, Prof Neri says the biggest problem of the pacification scheme is how the wider Rio economy can offer jobs to the large number of youths in the favelas now getting a better education.
"The youth is the biggest challenges of the pacification, how you offer opportunities to these young people, I think it is a very hard challenge, " he says.
It is like a new city has been born within Rio de Janeiro as a result of the pacification initiatives and companies are figuring out how to best attract the opportunities there.
The next stage was to implant a UPP, or Police Pacification Unit, a team of police officers specially trained in community relations to establish state presence and allow the conditions to begin the legalization of the favela.
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This was a community that for decades was dominated by drug lords, before the government took over and implemented what is known as a "pacification" programme, involving the deployment of large numbers of police.
The raids are part of a policy known as "pacification" which was adopted in recent years to help the state establish a more permanent presence in shanty towns.
Prof Anthony Pereira, professor of Brazil Studies at Kings College London, says the pacification programme is "largely positive".
From north to south, east to west, large swathes of the continent are at war, but almost all efforts at pacification have come to naught.
"I express my firmest condemnation of this new act of violence that, added with other cruel gestures carried out in that tormented country, does not help pacification or renewal, " the pope said in a message to Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
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