Marielle Franco

Marielle Franco (1979-2018), Brazilian activist and politician. Marielle Francisco da Silva was born to poor parents in Maré, one of the largest favelas (“slums”) in Brazil. The favelas were originally created by former slaves and other poor Brazilians in the hills outside Rio de Janeiro, and their millions of residents (favelados) have long suffered from unemployment, lack of sanitation and medical care, high crime rates, police brutality, and other problems. Franco often walked past dead bodies on her way to school and on some occasions had to stay home because of shootings. She began working when she was eleven to pay for her education and won a scholarship to the Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), one of the top universities in Latin America. Although more than half of Brazil's population is of African ancestry. Franco was one of only two black students at her institution, and she completed her degree in social sciences while also raising a daughter without support from the father. During her college years, the death of a close friend from a stray bullet fired in a shootout between police and gang members caused her to become more interested in attacking the country’s social ills. Her ideology was also shaped by involvement in a Catholic church that espoused the doctrine of liberation theology, which uses Jesus’ teachings to fight for economic and political justice. She earned a master's degree in public administration from Universidade Federal Fluminense (Fluminense Federal University), researching the militarization of Rio's police forces and occupation of the favelas. While completing this degree she began working for a state legislator, co-creating a leading a committee that focused on human rights issues. She also worked for non-profit human rights groups such as the Brazil Foundation and the Maré Center for Solidarity Studies and Action. She connected this work to global efforts towards racial, gender, and LGBT justice by learning English so that she could read the works of scholars like Angela Davis and bell hooks. “Black people are useful to serve coffee or clean the floor,” she asserted on one occasion, “If they don’t do that, they’re criminals.”

In 2016 Franco was elected to a seat on the Rio city council as part of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (Socialism and Liberty Party), receiving the fifth-most votes of more than 1,500 candidates. Although Afro-Brazilians were nearly 50% of the city population, she was the only black woman on the council. During her time on the council she advocated for favelados and for the rights of Afro-Brazilians, LGBT people, women, and the poor throughout Rio. She helped pass bills that improved transportation in the favelas and that fought corruption in the handing out of government contracts to social health organizations. She also chaired the Women’s Defense Commission and supported other bills that would have: extended business hours for daycare centers so that mothers of small children could return to the workforce; improved maternity care; fought sexual harassment and sexual violence, increased low-income housing; increased pay for civil servants; fought the excessive incarceration of black youth; and created days of recognition in Rio for LGBT people, black women, and fugitive slave communities. She also gave a great deal of attention to the ways that militarized police forces, paramilitary groups, and the military itself were increasingly restricting people’s rights. For instance, in 2016 she led a committee that monitored the military’s efforts to keep the poor confined to their favelas during that year’s Summer Olympic Games. Many of these efforts became more difficult as Brazilian politics shifted in a far-right direction. Franco was quickly gaining in influence and notoriety, but she was greatly overshadowed by presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who said that non-Christian religions should be banned and that their practitioners were not “true citizens,” that black activists were “animals” who should “go back to the zoo,” that black and Middle Eastern immigrants were the “scum of humanity,” that one of his female political opponents was “too ugly to rape,” that the current president should be shot, and that he would rather see his sons die than be gay. This rhetoric helped cause increased violence against black, female, LGBT, poor, and politically liberal Brazilians. Nearly 200 politicians and activists were killed between 2013 and 2018, while the police killed more than 4,000 people in 2016 alone. When the military took control of policing in Rio in early 2018, Franco led a government commission to investigate. Shortly thereafter she filed a formal complaint when two young men were killed by the police. After another young man was shot by the police while leaving church, she tweeted “Quantos mais vão precisar morrer para que essa guerra acabe?” (“How many others will have to die for this war to end?”)

This proved to be her last social media statement. The next day she attended an event called Jovens Negras Movendo Estruturas (“Young Black Women Moving Power Structures””), telling the people in attendance “We have to occupy every space with our bodies.” While in her car several days later, another car approached and shot her four times in the head, also killing her driver and wounding another passenger. Because of her activism and because the car windows were tinted, people immediately speculated that she had been assassinated rather than the victim of random violence. Protests were held around the country, with one in Rio drawing 100,000 people. Her name appeared in three million tweets across the world in two days, often with the hastags #MariellePresente (“Marielle Is Here”) and #SayHerName. The question “Who killed Marielle Franco?” began appearing on banners and T-shirts and on graffiti in nearly every Rio neighborhood, as did murals bearing her face. One journalist wrote that “Her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to miltiary intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazil’s power structure, but to subvert it.” In Paris a public garden was named in her honor, while her political party changed its logo to include her sillhouette and the phrase “Marielle Presente!” The outrage over her death was also channeled into political action, and three other black women were elected to the state legislature; one of them, Franco’s former chief of staff, asserted that “Marielle still represents, if only in memory, a threat to the status quo,” while another said “She was an inspiration...Suddenly you’re no longer invisible in a space where we had always been invisible.” The demands for a proper investigation of her killing also led to the discovery that the bullets which killed her had been purchased by the police and then in March 2019 to the arrest on murder charges of two former police officers who had ties to the family of Bolsonaro, who was elected president that same year. Efforts to complete the work of Marielle Franco continue. In the words of one of her college classmates, “She died because she was a combative black woman...She was executed because she was a black favela dweller who fought against the murder of black favela dwellers. The genocide of the black population continues in this country.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.