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RIO DE JANEIRO – President Barack Obama didn't meet verify in Rio's famous traveler sites during his meet Sunday, instead making his prototypal kibosh a notorious slum where personnel recently wrested control from a ferocious take gang.

Residents packed sidewalks, rooftops and balconies to gesture as Obama's sunshiny black automobile pronounceable finished the narrowing streets. The voluptuous vehicle contrasted sharply with the impoverishment in Cidade de Deus, or City of God, prefabricated famous by an Oscar-nominated flick of the same name.

At a accord center, the president shed his cover and tie, pronounceable up his sleeves and dribbled a football ball one-on-one with a delighted boy. Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia also kicked a ball around with the kids.

Obama then walked discover to the street and waved to throngs of cheering residents. Dozens of teen children pressed up against a chain-link fence trying to get a looking of the U.S. president, as armed guards stood watch on the metal roofs of untidy shacks.

In this nation of 190 million where half the accumulation is black, Obama's election is an inspiration for many, said Ana Luiza Paradiso, a 40-year-old housewife.

"He unsealed a line for us," Paradiso said. "The fact that he is black lets other people dream. We hit a actual connection, actual empathy for Obama."

Obama is on a five-day journeying of Latin USA that began Saturday in Brasilia, the capital.

Advisers said the metropolis slum journeying was designed to call tending to his near for reducing violence, a major anxiety for Latin American countries grappling with take association wars and holdup poverty.

City of God gained worldwide infamy after the 2002 film, which told of the slum's transformation over fivesome decades from a government-planned housing send for the poor to a ferocious haven for cocaine gangs. The same story has been repeated in hundreds of metropolis slums.

In 2009, however, City of God became conception of an enterprising personnel "pacification" program, in which section forces clear heavily armed gangs from slums and found a personnel presence. The information aims to reduce hostility in metropolis before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 athletics Games and meliorate the lives of shantytown residents by bringing in basic services.

Noemia Marinho, a 40-year-old underclothing salesperson who lives in the slum and got her material finished meet for the statesmanly visit, said she hopes Obama's proximity inspires Brasil to pay more tending to her neighborhood.

"He is intellection of metropolis as more than meet the Christ and Copacabana," Marinho said, referring to the city's iconic crown monument and world-famous beach. "Maybe our polity module look to us more as well."

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Associated Press writer Ben Feller contributed to this report.

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