More than ever, memory, truth and justice
“When black women move, the entire structure of society moves with them.” After the historic phrase spoken by Angela Davis in Salvador, in 2017, we could not imagine burying Marielle Franco eight months later, three months after being elected councilor in Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps because there was so much joy, in the commitment to the democratic path as one that could be capable of reversing centuries of coloniality. 2202 days after his assassination, which occurred a week after the massive demonstrations on March 8 , we know: it was the State who killed Marielle Franco.
When a woman like Marielle is murdered – and I conjugate the verb in the present tense, as we are aware of the risk faced by all black women, and also indigenous women, who hold political positions in the country – as a directly proportional magnitude, we begin to recognize the obstacles structures of society constituted by the workforce of these women and their ancestors.
It is necessary to remember the defamatory campaign that followed her execution: in the wake of the fake news machines that boosted the election of the genocidal Bolsonaro, messages associated the crime with Marielle’s lying involvement with supposed drug traffickers, seeking to induce public opinion to the same justifications that civil police across the country use it to not investigate the deaths of black women. Not allowing institutional racism to determine the silencing of her murder has always been a matter of honor, especially for black and feminist movements.
More than ever, memory, truth and justice.
And because all contemporary signs are about to be duly filled with meaning, at the risk of being distorted, we learned the names of those who ordered the murder of Marielle Franco – federal deputy Chiquinho Brazão, her brother Domingos Brazão, counselor at the State Court of Auditors , and Rivaldo Barbosa, former director of the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro – on March 24, 2024, international day of the Right to the Truth about Human Rights violations. In the country next door, millions took to the streets on a historic holiday to reaffirm all the people killed, tortured and disappeared during the Argentine civic-military and ecclesiastical dictatorship, together with the women who claimed their sons, daughters and grandchildren five decades ago… In figure of Marielle, we updated the date and became brothers.
Now we know that the motivation for ordering his death is linked to one of the most dramatic issues faced today: the right to land and territories by communities, whether indigenous or peripheral, in Gaza or here. It is necessary to place the Brazilian context: after four centuries of colonial exploitation, between the 1960s and 1980s, Brazil suffered one of the largest rural exoduses in the history of humanity as a reflection of the policy instituted by the military dictatorship in the period. The formation of the great Brazilian metropolises in the form we see today is closely related to the persecution, torture and violence experienced in the countryside, the extinction of cities with the closure of railway lines and the grabbing of land by the oligarchies, who today occupy benches in the Parliament.
Once the logic of hereditary captaincies was reorganized by the institutionalization of latifundium property, part of the dispute over the right to land coalesced in urban areas, constituting, over the decades, the struggle for urban reform, housing policies and the right to the city. Marielle is the result of these displacements, these geographies, sociologies and political ontologies of the territory. Hence, I dare say, its tectonic strength – in these six years, how many times have we asked ourselves how many centuries it took for Marielle to exist?
It is necessary not to dissociate the discourse, treating the issue of militias separately from the responsibility of the State. It would even be counterintuitive, since militias emerge, strengthen and sustain themselves precisely because they rely on the entire State apparatus. The militarization of space is a trend that has emerged as a hegemonic way of occupying and managing territories in the current stage of capitalism, widespread in such a dimension that it can range from the apartheid state to private condominiums.
Rio de Janeiro is the materialization of this historically constructed hegemonic reality. And an important point to be highlighted: high-luxury real estate speculation – which the Bolsonaro, Brazão and many other clans benefit from – is the most effective way of both grabbing land and laundering money from drug trafficking that operates through militias. After all, family, tradition and property are institutions that are for the State as much as capitalism has been for patriarchy, and vice versa.
Another lesson to be learned from the unraveling of Marielle’s murder and her motivations is that there are no deaths of activists for urban reform without a real intention of execution. The struggle of the working class in the countryside and in the city, in the centers and on the outskirts, in the Arabian desert and the Amazon forest directly affects the order that is embedded in the far right of the world from all of our territories.
There are no mistakes, as we have been told about the death of Sara Domingues, in Porto Alegre. Just as the death of Margarida Alves – and Bertha Cáceres, the Mirabal sisters, Nega Pataxó and many others – was never a mystery: the murder of these women expresses and exposes crucial disputes over the conception of life, society and the State.
How many deaths can still be avoided through agrarian reform, urban reform, the demarcation of indigenous lands, the titling of quilombola territories, the ceasefire in Gaza? What is this thread that connects us in such a similar way, in such different territories?
Therefore, today and always, Marielle is present.
* Benke Yelene, human rights activist.
** This is an opinion article. The author’s vision does not necessarily express the newspaper’s editorial line Brazil in fact.
Editing: Katia Marko
