Favela food festival wins award as Latin America's best culinary event in 2026

When you drive along the highway heading toward Rio de Janeiro's airport in Brazil, you pass a huge neighborhood known as Mare. You wouldn't stop there, unless you had a good reason to. That's because it's a favela, or a poor community. Many favelas are on Rio's hillsides. This one is squeezed between a pair of highways and Guanabara Bay. Roughly 140,000 people live there. It's known for being a hotbed of dangerous drug gangs, violence and police operations. But residents are trying to change that image - with food. Reporter Michael Fox has the story.