I saw the Brazilian film Elite Squad last week after several strong recommendations, The COIN Graduate Seminar among them:
Brazil, a hotbed of corruption, crime, and vicious urban warfare between heavily armed special operations police and AK-toting gangsters, is a preview of a possible future for American urban centers. Tropa De Elite (The Elite Squad) is about BOPE, a Brazilian military police special operations unit confronting gangsters and their well-bred sympathizers. The film leaves no one in Brazilian society unscathed, attacking the corrupt municipal government, the fashionably left-leaning university students whose addictions finance the gangs; the horrific gangs themselves, and BOPE itself—depicted as a brutal instrument of repression against the residents of the favelas.
It is an excellent film. If the film is an accurate depiction then, and it is congruent with what I've read and been told by people who have been, then Gringo Malandro's above post sounds accurate.


Letter from São Paulo: City of Fear, by William Langewiesche. Vanity Fair, April 2007.

Operating by cell phone, a highly organized prison gang launched an attack that shut down Brazil’s largest city last May, with the authorities powerless to stop it. For many in São Paulo, this vast, amorphous criminal network is the only government they have.