Brazilians Welcome Obama As Their Own : NPR: Hope For The Poorest Brazilians
...At the City of God, one of Rio's most notorious slums, or favelas, a group of residents pray after taking part in a neighborhood clean-up to better their community.
Father Jose Adilson Pontes says there's no hiding the fact that blacks are worse off than whites. It's in the city's periphery, in the biggest favelas, he says, where you find blacks. He ticks off how blacks have the highest rates of illiteracy and how they're most likely to die violently.
And yet, the new Brazil saw a former shoeshine boy and factory worker – Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – win the presidency in 2002. Now his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, herself a former political prisoner, is president.
