Bom dia, galera!
Three weeks have passed since I arrived in Brazil, and I have been having the time of my life. This past week, I visited my family in São Paulo to watch the last Brazil games of the World Cup group stages (we are on to the “mata-mata” stage with our first game against Japan!). I have also been working with the ROW team to begin translating some articles to improve my Portuguese comprehension skills and also prepare myself for transcribing my upcoming interviews, which should happen in the next two weeks.
As has been reflected in my previous posts, I have been organizing weekly research by different themes: Week 1 focused on favela-specific case studies and Week 2 focused on favela history and how racism perpetuates segregation and discrimination within society and institutions. This week, after learning a bit more about the paramilitary last week, I decided to dive into the city’s (and to a degree, the rest of the country’s) politics a bit more. While doing my research, I was distracted from learning the nitty gritty of the system and instead was drawn to the story of Marielle Franco, a black, LGBTQ+ woman from the favela of Maré who was assassinated in March 2018 along with her driver, Anderson Gomes. Marielle, as she is famously known, was a passionate supporter of housing and land rights, racial and LGBTQ+ equality, and human rights, serving as a powerful representation for the country’s most marginalized.
Marielle was a force to be reckoned with. Growing up in Complexo do Maré, her passion for social justice and advocacy was forged through observing the injustice and inequality that existed in her very own community: policing by paramilitary groups, frequent shootings, one of the lowest human development indexes across the favelas. Despite this, Marielle graduated from college and in 2016, decided to run for City Councillor with the left-wing party, the Party for Socialism and Liberty (PSOL). In her first election, Marielle won, making her mark in the city government where she was the only black woman among Rio’s 51 city councillors.
Marielle continued supporting the causes I previously described, but also frequently used her new platform to condemn extrajudicial killings by militia groups; illegal, typically off-duty law enforcement who seek to “bring order” to favelas through extrajudicial killings and raids, operating as a paramilitary group. Importantly, some of these groups have ties to the military dictatorship of the 1960s-1980s, such as Scuderie Detetive Le Cocq (Shield of Detective le Cocq). The group emerged in the mid-1980s as a vigilante group that operated in the Baixada de Fluminense region, killing people deemed as criminals by local politicians. Even today, politicians still hold very public ties to such groups, as can be seen with former president Jair Bolsonaro, an ex-military official who built his successful campaign around “law and order”. Bolsonaro, along with other family members who are public officials, has been seen numerous times with known members of these organized crime groups.
With all that being said, what do these groups have to do with the story of Marielle? Well, Marielle’s death had always been shrouded in suspicion; who would kill a woman trying to make such a positive change? From the beginning, it was suspected that it was a hit-for-hire plot, with some political adversary targeting her for her beliefs. However, it took just over six years for her killers to be caught, leaving the motives unanswered with no suspects to provide any clues. Prior to her killing, Marielle had been advocating against Bill 174/2016, which relaxed land allotment requirements, making it easier for militias to purchase land in areas known to have a strong militia presence. This was proposed by former Councilmember Chiquinho Brazão, who posed it as a solution to the city’s housing crisis. Marielle stood in firm opposition to the bill, arguing it would only worsen the vulnerability of socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, pointing out the benefits it would create for militias. Many advocates sided with Marielle, pressuring the Mayor into vetoing the bill, only for it to be later overturned by the parliamentarians. Marielle continued to argue that the bill increased power for militias, failed to accommodate the needs of those in favelas, and was environmentally harmful, which eventually resulted in Rio’s Public Prosecutor’s Office declaring the law unconstitutional. Angered, Brazão and his brother, Domingos, along with the former Chief of Civil Police, Rivaldo Barbosa, decided to plan Marielle’s murder. In March of 2024, the Brazão brothers and Barbosa were arrested with Marielle’s assassination after the hitman, Ronnie Lessa, a former police officer, confessed to the crime and struck a plea deal that resulted in the reveal of the crime’s architects.
The story of Marielle ties together the themes of my research so far: cyclical, violent state oppression of communities that would be at the bottom of the traditional “slave-holding structure”. This desire to maintain this hierarchy is deeply embedded in Rio’s – and Brazil’s more broadly – history and structure, and without the open ears of public officials to listen to the demands of the oppressed, it persists. I intend to carry her story with me as I continue to learn about Rio, a reflection of the resilience, strength, and a hope for a more equitable future.