"Welcome to Rocinha. Welcome to my house." With this phrase, Carlos invites us to visit the largest favela in Latin America, where some 100,000 people live (although they could be 70,000 or 160,000, the equivalent to the population of Copacabana). The gigantic community, surrounded by two of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro (Gavea and São Conrado), is a world icon of unequal societies on the continent. Carlos (54) has always lived in Rocinha and has been a tourist guide for 26 years. He speaks five languages that, he says, he learned alone, without resources or access to a university. The guide is glad that an Argentine family takes the walking tour of the favela, which tries to show the real life of the marginalized and to ruin the prejudices and stigmatization of poverty. “Some do the excursion by car, without setting foot on the ground. This is something else, ”says Carlos. It means that we will not do “tourism of misery”, like those who travel through the immense impoverished territory in a jeep with armored glass, as if it were a human safari. In 2008, a few years before the international sporting events that would put Rio on the screens of the world, the Brazilian government began a “pacification process”, which, among other things, involved the militarization of a territory beset by violence and violence. drug trafficking It was an attempt by the State to reconquer that space forgotten for decades and which, in its theoretical foundations, intended to strengthen public safety by the hand of social and cultural change. Thus, Rocinha appears to the visitor as a neighborhood full of contradictions, where motorists give way to the pedestrian while they are confused with motorcycles delivering illegal substances and inscriptions on the walls that recall violent deaths. In the mouths of smoke (points of sale of cocaine and other drugs) everything is achieved, both for the inhabitants and for those who live in São Conrado or in Barra de Tijuca. "In Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblón you see more drugs than here", says the guide. In the passageways no more than two people enter at a time and at times they become a kind of tunnels with tiny window dwellings embedded in the walls, which allow to imagine the daily life of people. Upwards you can see the colorful houses, one on top of the other. The constructions reach three or four floors on piles of wood, iron or cement. While we walk through those corridors of small and almost always wet stairs, the school appears. The guide ensures that education is poor, that illiteracy is high and that children go through “automatic promotion”: without basic knowledge. “So, we will never get ahead. Without education people don't ask themselves questions: neither why they live as they live or how they can get out of here”, he thinks. Two men sitting in a hallway observe our steps. "Maradona!", they shout at us, while they wait for an accomplice gesture. Further, a woman gives way to us and three children play hide and seek, while in a house a group of men dispute a space in front of the television, which broadcasts the carioca soccer championship sub 20. Outside the rhythm of samba sounds and, on the walls, the graffiti speak: in several corners two little angels of the hand are observed (children victims of violent deaths?), a bleeding heart with a crown of thorns or legends that say “Help Rocinha". Almost at the end of the tour, Carlos stops at the church with the imposing nose in the background and, next to it, an impressive mural interpreting “The Last Supper of the Poor”, with a black leader kneeling near a soccer ball, which Embrace the dispossessed who can hardly smile. In the middle of the chapel, the guide speaks of the poor and poverty, of the rich and their wealth, of the literacy rates, of the minimum wage and of the opportunities that escape from the hands of those who inhabit the favelas. Then, thanks for the visit. "I hope it was a social experience," he emphasizes, before indicating the way back to the other country, that of the postcards, which awaits us just around the corner.