 Though a prominent journalist, Tim Lopes only became nationally known after his death in a crime that shocked the country.The television program "Jornal Nacional" pursued the story, which increased the pressure on the authorities to capture the criminals involved; and "O Globo" newspaper and TV began using the term "poder paralelo" (parallel power) to describe the paradigm of that time of criminal gangs controlling certain favelas within Rio with impunity.Rio journalist Jorge Antonio Barros, who has been writing about Rio's favelas and the crime beat since the 1980s and was a colleague of Lopes at Globo, wrote that Lopes's death served to snap him out of the dream state, to which people sometimes fall prey, of romanticizing "the malandro;" and that his death reminded people who don't have to live in favelas under the "law of the trafficker" of the terror that exists as a daily reality.