Narratives about infrastructure and security interventions in Rio de Janeiro favelas are often built around the arrival of the State in places where it was supposedly absent, aiming at resolving the favela problem, both in terms of their informality and precariousness, and in terms of the marginality and criminality, and at integrating them with the formal neighborhoods so as to overcome the divided city. The concrete reality of successive infrastructure and security interventions, however, allows us to question the myth of State absence in favelas, whereas the territorial proximity between favelas and the rest of the city, their residents labor and circulation across the city and their vibrant social and cultural production allow us to question the myth of the divided city. Therefore, the main question posed is how the Brazilian State acts upon these spaces and bodies where it is traditionally seen as fragile and absent. With this aim, the presente work mobilizes International Relations literature to understand the relation between failure, fragility, disorder and practices of intervention in the global realm (which involves concepts such as failed State, peacebuilding and security-development nexus), and also literatures which mobilize such concepts in order to understand the urban realm, to understand cities as problems and their solutions (in terms of urban peacebuilding, fragile cities, military urbanism). Then, departing from a favela-focused Brazilian literature, the work questions the myth of the favela problem and also the solutions which are articulated in terms of specific forms of state presence, so as to reframe the problem as a problem of selective and imperfect, often racist, state actions. Finally, building upon those literatures contributions and limitations, the work reflects upon how state interventions, especially insfrastructure and security interventions, materialize in Complexo da Maré, reproducing exclusion and inequality, and how residents and local organizations resist those interventions.