Rio de Janeiro’s reputation as a center for crime has long threatened to overshadow its glamour. But with the 2016 Olympics on the horizon and Brazil’s economy booming, there’s a new push to clean up the favelas, or slums, where violent drug bosses reign unchallenged. As Mac Margolis writes in this week’s edition of NEWSWEEK, Rio public safety director Jose Mariano Beltrame’s forces have made huge strides, “pacifying” 14 slums, firing almost 1,000 corrupt cops, and killing or arresting three major dons. But even with this progress, huge swaths of the city remain lawless and perilous. Photographer Balazs Gardi founded www.facingwatercrisis.org, a photography project devoted to documenting marginalized communities in extreme poverty. In 2008, he ventured into Rio’s favelas—both those under government control and those still in the throes of drug-lord control—to show what life is like for their inhabitants.