Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

(Duke University Press) In the late 1970s, activists from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas helped build a movement that pushed the entire country toward re-democratization. Rio was besieged by natural disasters, hyperinflation, and drug wars, however, and the activists’ aspirations were never fully realized. By the early 1990s, drug traffickers and the violence that came with them had become the new lords of the favelas. In Hard Times in the Marvelous City, McCann offers a political history of Brazil through the lens of its second-largest city. He is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University.