National Post (National Edition)
Gunned down in Rio
Before stepping into her Chevrolet Agile at 9:04 p.m. last Wednesday, Marielle Franco had just done what she did best: Fire up a room.
“Let’s do this,” the 38-yearold politician with the cascading Afro had said as she wrapped up a speech at Rio’s House of Black Women calling for black empowerment.
Brazil needed it, she said. Across this troubled metropolis, police brutality and extrajudicial killings were ravaging the slums. Elected last year as the only black woman on Rio’s 51-member city council, she had gone after those responsible while reframing the debate in an uncomfortable new way.
In a society that has long seen itself as post-racial, Franco argued, the slaughter was not just a war on the poor. It was also a war on blacks.
Thirty minutes after her meeting, two vehicles approached her white Chevy. “Huh?” she said, according to the testimony of an aide riding in her car, as gunfire crackled. Then nine policeissue bullets bored into her, including four shots to the head.
But if the point was to silence a fast-rising black politician who had taken on corrupt police officers, Franco’s apparent assassination has done the opposite. In the days since, Latin America’s largest nation has watched in awe as a figure once little known outside Rio has been transformed into a global symbol of racial oppression.
Franco has been honoured on the floor of the European Parliament. Crowds have protested her killing and celebrated her life on the streets of New York, London, Paris, Munich, Stockholm and Lisbon. A vigil was planned for her in Madrid on Tuesday.
“Marielle Presente” (Marielle Is Here) has garnered millions of mentions on Twitter and Facebook. From Berlin to Miami to Montreal, mourners who never heard of Franco before last week are borrowing a line from the Black Lives Matter movement: #SayHerName.
“COME ON BRAZIL STAND UP,” tweeted the British model Naomi Campbell.
But at home, her death is being viewed in divergent ways, underscoring the racial divisions that many Brazilians contend do not exist here.
Her killers have not been caught. But the federal prosecutors’ office in Rio says that the evidence, including the highly professional execution, points to a hit by corrupt police officers. The bullets, authorities say, also came from police ammunition stocks. A spokesperson for the civil police would only say the investigation is ongoing.
In some circles, particularly within Brazil’s white elite, the killing is being viewed as a heinous act driving home the problem of runaway graft and violence. But it is not being seen as an issue of race.
“Her bloodshed can’t be used as an opportune moment to talk about hate,” said Ana Amelia, a Rio state senator, who is white. “When you talk about a black-white divide, you are contributing to this division.”
But some black and leftwing activists here call that attitude part of the problem. They say it reflects a belief system that pretends race is unrelated to the disproportionate violence suffered by Brazilians of colour — especially at the hands of law enforcement.
Underpaid and under pressure, police here are also under threat: At least 120 officers were killed in 2017, including many in confrontations with drug traffickers, according to the Rio-based Igarapé Institute. But last year, 1,124 people died at the hands of police, the highest number in a decade, the institute reports. In recent years, nearly 80 per cent of those killed by police were black or mixed-race.
White male politicians here have also sought to bring corrupt police officers to justice. But Franco was targeted, her backers insist, because taking the life of a black woman is less risky in Brazil, especially in a state where only one in 10 homicide cases results in a conviction.
As a black, left-wing lesbian, Franco represented an intersection of movements that are coalescing as a result of her slaying. And tens of thousands of Brazilians of every colour have taken to the streets in the aftermath of her death.
Yet some hope that the killing will mark a turning point for black activism. The storm of outrage is also already carrying more overt racial overtones than Brazilians are used to, including a flurry of tweets under the hashtag #genocidionegro (#blackgenocide).
“A black woman was speaking out and calling for rights, and she was killed because she could be,” said Rubia Augusta Gomes, a 38-year-old Afro-Brazilian dancer who on Sunday joined thousands at a march in the violence-ridden Rio slum of Mare, where Franco was born and raised. Some wore stickers proclaiming “Militancy in the name of Mariella.”
“It is time to speak out,” Gomes said. “It is time to talk about race, because we are the ones suffering.”
Racism in Brazil has a complex history.
The country imported four million slaves, more than 10 times the number brought to the United States. In the United States, intermixing of races was discouraged. But in Brazil, where Portuguese settlers were outnumbered by their slaves, it had been endorsed as a way to “whiten” the population.
Critics say that the myth of a post-racial Brazil silences conversations about deeprooted discrimination and violence.
Miscegenation soon became a cornerstone of national identity, with 53 per cent of Brazilians now seeing themselves fluidly as black or mixed-race.
The numbers, they say, speak for themselves. Every day, 112 blacks or mixed-race Brazilians are killed, according to the Igarapé Institute. They make up 54 per cent of the national population, yet 71 per cent of all homicides.
Franco was a rarity in Brazilian politics: A powerful black woman.
The day before her death, she mourned the loss of Matheus Melo, a young black favela resident who was shot while coming out of a church with his girlfriend, just the latest victim of the multifront conflict among drug traffickers, militias and police in Rio state that has left casualties on all sides.