This paper outlines how Brazil's latest public security initiative-its highly controversial Police Pacification Campaign (UPP)-is an integral component of a neoliberal political framework that is enacting rapid urbanization projects in and around strategically located favelas (informal settlements or slums) of Rio de Janeiro. Specifically, it evaluates what kinds of economic development initiatives are moving forward, how they are facilitated by the UPP, how they connect to the city's mega-events, and who is profiting from them. The article also examines how the pacification has affected residents in three favelas over a seven-year period from the inauguration of the UPP in 2008 through to mid-2015.

As Rio de Janeiro struggles to hold itself together through the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, its much lauded public security Games plan, including its highly controversial police pacification program-long promoted as one of the cornerstones of Rio's Olympic legacy-descends into a state of near total collapse. This paper takes an intimate look at what is likely the last days of this contentious pacification policy, the part it plays in the wider 'Games Security Plan', and how and why it has been implemented in the lead up to the 2016 Summer Olympics.

This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken in conjunction with Green My Favela, a land use restoration project that works with informal and vulnerable income sector residents to reclaim chronically degraded public areas by creating gardens inside the urban favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The paper reveals how government intervention policies employed in the lead up to the 2016 Olympics are destabilizing the fragile social fabric of the city's largest favela, Rocinha, through military occupation and urbanization activities that threaten an already low and unstable human security threshold.