Wedged between the Olympic Park and the Athletes’ Village is a favela called Vila Autódromo, which was slated for demolition in 2010 to make way for access roads. Many of Vila Autódromo’s residents, like Márcio Moza, a cable-company employee who lived there for eight years, refused to leave. Though he lacked the legal title held by older residents, he told me, “I built that house with my own sweat.” He showed me a smartphone video he shot earlier this year, in which Rio police manhandled him when he tried to approach his home as bulldozers worked next door. His wife was nearly nine months pregnant at the time. He resisted as long as he could, but ultimately gave in and moved his family out after the birth of his youngest child, for fear of how the constant commotion might affect her.

Like many of his former neighbors, Moza now lives in a low-income housing project less than a mile from Vila Autódromo. Thanks in part to attention from the international press, others negotiated sizeable indemnities and bought homes elsewhere. Of the nearly 600 families who once lived there, Paes allowed some 20 of them to stay, even agreeing to build new houses for them. But such concessions are rare. In evictions across Rio, residents often received indemnities or rental assistance too meager to allow them to purchase housing anywhere near their communities. Others were transferred outright to projects 25 miles away. While some of the favelas were torn down for express bus corridors—an obvious public good—some were demolished to make room for stadium projects, whose benefit is decidedly hazier.

When it comes to Vila Autódromo, Moza believes that the Olympics were just a pretext for a real estate push. “Carvalho doesn’t want to live next to poor people,” he said. And Paes, meanwhile, “has wanted to get rid of Vila Autódromo for a long time.”

Paes himself once said in an interview that he has used the Olympics as an excuse to carry out unrelated projects. And he wants to turn Barra into a new center for international business, a legitimate goal. But it’s impossible to separate Paes’s plans for Barra from his ties to Barra’s developers. Carvalho was one of the top donors for Paes’s 2012 reelection campaign, officially contributing the equivalent of half a million dollars to him and his party’s local chapter. Renato Cosentino, a Ph.D. candidate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro researching the development of Barra, calls Paes “a political project of these local businessmen.”

Paes’s roots in Barra run deep. He got his start there in 1993, when he was named the area’s subprefeito, a position similar to that of borough president in New York City. Only 23 then, Paes dubbed himself the “sheriff of Barra” and announced a war on “invasions”—a derogatory term for favelas, and one that gives short shrift to the squatters’ rights enshrined in Brazil’s constitution. Paes first attempted to remove Vila Autódromo in those years. Amid tensions between residents and city officials, one community leader died after being shot in the face twice. Another favela leader accused Paes of complicity in the crime, an allegation he denied vehemently. The hit men were never identified.