By Kiratiana Freelon, Contributing Writer
I will never forget the night. I was in Salvador, Brazil, for the World Social Forum Conference and I had just left a wonderful panel of Black Brazilian Youtubers in Salvador’s historic center, Pelourinho. The event, packed to the brim with young Afro-Brazilians who now looked toward the internet for race-affirming content, left me excited about the future of Brazil. Young Afro-Brazilians were creating a new black movement that touched upon music, social media, and even politics.
Within an hour after the event, all that hope had dissipated. I received a WhatsApp message telling me that Marielle Franco, a 38-year-old councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, had been assassinated coming from a black woman’s empowerment event in the center of Rio. Her driver, Anderson Gomes, was also killed. My heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach and I started to cry. I had only met Marielle twice but even as an African-American woman, I felt a kinship with the Brazilian woman. She spent her entire political career fighting for the rights of blacks, women, and the poor. I admired her tenacity in overcoming racism, sexism, and machismo in Brazil.
At the same time, I was reacting to the death of Franco in Salvador, Pastor Paulo Mudesto of the Rio de Janeiro AME Church, was having a flashback of his personal experience with the violence that seems to dominate Rio de Janeiro. “Franco’s murder hurt me a lot,” Mudesto said. “I saw my experience in her death. In 2008, this almost happened to me and my wife.”
Ten years ago, he was sent to pastor a community that was run by the militia. These people are usually police, military, and security people who take on a guardianship role over a community to “protect” it from drug traffickers. However, that usually means extorting the community for money, as it did Mudesto’s church. Communities across Rio de Janeiro suffer from the extortion of these militias. When Mudesto denounced the militia, his family experienced so many threats that they had to leave.
Franco grew up in the Maré, a poor and dangerous favela in Rio de Janeiro. Despite her humble beginnings, she achieved a scholarship to attend the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She studied there while working as a teacher to take care of her young daughter.
After graduating, she entered politics, helping to coordinate Rio’s human rights committee. She stayed there until 2016 when she decided to run for councilwoman. During those elections, she ran a purple-themed campaign that promised to uplift the lives of women, Afro-Brazilians, and the poor. She was elected with the fifth-most votes of any councilperson. Franco was part of a new generation of young black educated women who form Brazil’s new black middle class. They are conscious of their black identity and their academic education has helped them to understand how Brazil works.
“Just being a councilwoman was Marielle´s greatest victory,” said Jaqueline Gomes, a transgender woman who plans to run for Congress this year. “It´s a victory for all of us, all groups that have been historically excluded from spaces of power, to have a black woman represent us in the council chamber,” she added.
Franco didn’t disappoint those who elected her. She immediately set out with a political agenda that would help women, blacks, and the poor. She proposed laws that would help poor women have safer pregnancies, recognized the work of young men who transport people in favelas, and introduced a day to acknowledge lesbian women in Rio de Janeiro. At the very end of her life, she was named to lead a committee that would monitor the military intervention in Rio de Janeiro. Yet, people think it was the denouncement of Rio de Janeiro’s violent police that may have led to her death.
“She did her work in the perfect manner,” Mudesto said. “She wanted to take care of the neediest people,” he added.
In the few days preceding her death, she sent out two tweets that denounced police for the violence that black men disproportionally experience. In one tweet, she wondered when the “war” would end now that a young man leaving the church had been killed. In another, she denounced the 41st Battalion, a Rio de Janeiro police unit that is known for leaving a deathly trail in the community that it polices. She was fearless.
When Franco was assassinated, many felt like it was a directed threat at black women who dared to fight for human rights. In Rio, thousands of people gathered at city council to watch her body pass by on the way to its burial. At night, thousands more held a peaceful vigil. Diverse groups of people gathered throughout the city to pay homage to the councilwoman. They danced in her honor. They debated the future of Rio in her honor. They protested the genocide of black people in her name.
More so than any recent death, Franco’s reminded Afro-Brazilians of the longstanding genocide against black people. A genocide happens when there is the deliberate killing of a specific group of people, in this case, Afro-Brazilians. Afro-Brazilians only need to point to the statistics to prove it. Statistics from 2012 reveal that every 23 minutes, a young black Brazilian is murdered. In 2012, 56,000 people were murdered, of which 30,000 were 15-29 years of age. Seventy-seven percent of the young people murdered in Brazil are black. At most, only 10% of these murders are investigated, so there is a culture of impunity that allows for this genocide to persist.
These figures were so alarming that Amnesty International created a campaign in 2014 called Joven Negro Vivo to mobilize civil society for the end of the extermination of black people. Most of the murders are of young black men but Franco’s murder was another statistic in this genocide against black people in Brazil. The genocide didn’t stop after Franco’s death. On March 16, a two-year-old black baby was among four people killed by police in a shootout with drug traffickers. A week later, four young black men were killed by suspected paramilitary assassins.
Activists all over Brazil, many of them black, organized marches and protests against the genocide of Afro-Brazilians. This was especially pronounced in São Paulo, where there were at least four protests against the genocide. In São Paulo, some activists even shut down a major highway in the early morning. They hung up a sign that said, “The state kills, we lost a lot, including fear. Marielle lives. #BlackLivesMatter.”
Carla Souza, a resident of the Rocinha favela, recently wrote an opinion piece entitled, “Black Bodies are Still on Target.” She said, “Black bodies are the target! Even in silence, even in childhood, even in youth, even being female. Black bodies have no choice about exercising their sexuality (their sexuality is either denied or violated). We discredit the state force and cling to the ancestral force, which is also denied and demonized, one more right taken away from us: the right to worship.” When Souza talks about blacks being denied the right to worship, she is talking about Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé being persecuted in Brazil.
The response to Franco’s death was international. Protests and vigils were held across the world in New York, various cities in Europe, and even Australia. The Portuguese Parliament demanded the European Union suspend free trade negotiations with the South American trade bloc Mercosur until the violence ends against human rights defenders in Brazil.
One month after her death, investigators have yet to find her killer. People in Rio de Janeiro continue to protest and demand action. Experts suspect that it was the organized work of the militia, the people who had threatened Pastor Mudesto 10 years ago.
Kiratiana Freelon is an acclaimed freelance journalist currently based in Brazil. Her articles have appeared in various publications including The Washington Post and theroot.com. Check her out on Facebook @GlobalKiratiana.
