Interview Analysis: Remembering Marielle Franco

Abstract

In the following pages, I will provide an analysis of the meaning of Marielle Franco’s trajectory in the context of Rio de Janeiro and how it was transformed through her assassination. The analysis is grounded in ten interviews done with some of Franco’s ex-staff members and people that accompanied her trajectory closely. The results will be interpreted in Chap. 4, which focuses on the aspect of memory. Interesting details in the data on Marielle Franco that are not central to the question of memory will be commented on in the footnotes of this chapter.

In the following pages, I will provide an analysis of the meaning of Marielle Franco’s trajectory in the context of Rio de Janeiro and how it was transformed through her assassination. The analysis is grounded in ten interviews done with some of Franco’s ex-staff members and people that accompanied her trajectory closely. The results will be interpreted in Chap. 4, which focuses on the aspect of memory. Interesting details in the data on Marielle Franco that are not central to the question of memory will be commented on in the footnotes of this chapter.

3.1 “Things That Society Considers Very Perverse”: Social Representations and Violence

Marielle Franco was a Black woman from a favela, a teenage mother, and a woman who loved another woman. As such, she was a representative of several social groups that encounter a lot of prejudice in Brazilian society. An interview partner expressed it as follows:

[I]t was a body that represents many things in our society. It is a female body, a woman’s body that represents what society brings in its prejudice, right? [unintelligible] Woman, Black, favelada, LGBT. Everything … who raised her daughter, right? Think of all that in one woman’s body. These are things that society considers very perverse.¹

The last phrase in this quote—“things that society considers very perverse”—refers to hegemonic social representations. In Sect. 1.7.3, I outlined how social representations are socially constructed ideas about things and people. They serve to constitute and orient individuals, groups, and institutions’ actions. Hegemonic representations confirm what is commonly considered “real” or “normal.” This consensus is produced through culture and media, among other things. Yet the act of representing also contains the possibility of negotiating meanings and opening different modes of understanding that might resist the hegemonic version.

As I will show in the following, hegemonic social representations of favelas, gender, race, and sexual orientation as well as the violence justified by them affected Franco’s life in negative ways. Stigmatizations and marginalization through social representations and different forms of violence—which Franco and other women with a similar background experience—cannot be rectified through the efforts of individuals alone but need to be confronted by collectives. The following serves to provide basic insights into the social background of women similar to Franco and to establish the backdrop against which Franco’s personal biography in Sect. 3.2 needs to be read.

3.1.1 Criminalization of Favelas and Police Violence

According to the traditional hegemonic social representation in Brazil, favelas are dangerous places of precariousness and crime that are occupied by criminals and have run out of the state’s control.² As a consequence, favela residents are frequently stigmatized. This was also the case with Franco. She realized that there was a stigma while studying at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in the wealthy Zona Sul (South Zone) of Rio de Janeiro.

Why do I arrive at PUC and everyone looks at me with that face, almost with pity, because I have a daughter and live in the favela? And [why] does nobody look with pity at the girl who lives in Petrópolis, for example, which is much farther away from the university?³

As this quote shows, Franco felt like she was met with pity because she was a teenage mother and lived in Maré, a favela complex in the Zona Norte (North Zone) of the city,⁴ which became known as one of the city’s most violent zones in the early 2000s.⁵ At the same time, the quote also reveals Franco’s irritation about these looks of pity. It is not explicitly stated in the quote but implied that Maré is only about 20 kilometers away from PUC, so it is close to important infrastructure and working opportunities in the Zona Sul. In short, Maré is not an unattractive place to live.⁶ Yet, in the evaluation of the people Franco met at university, it was worse to live in Maré than to live in Petrópolis, which lies more than 70 kilometers away from PUC.

In the case of the favelas, how they are represented as places of out-of-control crime and precariousness serves to legitimize violence and the use of heavy weaponry by police, military forces, and others.⁷ In Rio’s favelas, the presence of brutal state violence manifests itself in the so-called caveirão (big skull), which is the popular name of an armored black personnel carrier that has been used since 2002 by BOPE,⁸ an elite unit of the military police.⁹ BOPE, whose logo of a skull pierced by a dagger gave the caveirão its name, is generally known for its violent invasions into favelas. During these invasions there are frequent casualties, including among children and women.¹⁰

For many favela residents, brutal police violence is to a certain degree part of their normal daily lives. This was also the case with Franco. But as she studied at university and became more familiar with Rio’s different neighborhoods, the presence of the caveirão in the favelas increasingly lost its normality. The following quote expresses how Franco started to question the way the state acts in the favelas more fundamentally.

Why does the caveirão arrive here shooting? Why do they have a caveirão here and not in the street in Gávea where PUC is? […] Why does the state arrive in the favela like this and not at my friend’s house [who lives in the Zona Sul, KM]? Something is wrong.¹¹

In summary, the representation of the favela as a place of crime and hardship is not only associated with the social stigmatization of its inhabitants and exclusion from the city and its infrastructure and opportunities; it is also used to legitimize strong police presence and brutal policing methods.

3.1.2 Machismo and Gender Violence

In Brazil, there is a culture of machismo that considers “men” the norm and values an aggressive masculinity and virility. Women are expected to align themselves, to be self-sacrificial to their husbands and children. Often the mother is the family’s pillar; she usually has the responsibility to provide for both the financial and emotional basics for her family members to survive.¹² As a result, women’s possibilities for making personal decisions about their bodies and lives are often limited. This is reflected in the following quote that recalls Franco’s work with a group of women and mothers from favelas: “[W]e discussed a lot this female thing, you know, this place of the woman. It’s where she wants to be, right? But that is not the case in our patriarchal and machista society.”¹³ It is noteworthy that this quote not only expresses what machismo is about but also reflects a feminist contestation (“[a woman’s place] is where she wants to be, right?”). This will be further elaborated below.

Although women are limited in making individual decisions about their lives in a machismo culture, they are not seen as weak. On the contrary, women, and even more so women in favelas, are often perceived as very strong. This is implied in the following quote by an interview partner who lives in Maré:

Women are very strong in the favelas. Very, very strong. So I always say that it is easier for a criminal, a drug dealer, to respect a woman than a man. It is easier for the police to respect a woman than a man, even though they murder women [unintelligible]. But they still have a strong visibility. It’s just that she doesn't use it for herself; she usually uses it in defense of someone else.¹⁴

As this quote implies, women’s strength is often a strength in the service of others. In this cultural context, it is very challenging for women to use their strength for themselves and to pursue a personal project or dream.

This background information is important for understanding the challenges Franco faced as a young woman in the favela. At the age of 19, she became the mother of Luyara¹⁵ and had to abandon her studies and start to take care of her daughter. During this time, she experienced domestic violence.¹⁶

Two years after her daughter’s birth, Franco resumed her studies, which was only possible thanks to the support of family and friends.¹⁷ Among them, the helping hand of Franco’s mother, Dona Marinete da Silva Francisco, was fundamental as she took care of Luyara during the day.¹⁸ Franco suffered from being away from her daughter so much to work and study. At the same time, her daughter’s existence motivated her to go on so that she could improve Luyara’s living conditions.

[S]he was always very motivated by Luyara’s existence. So, she always tried … whenever she had some extra money, the reflex was on Luyara’s education. For example, “go to English, go to a good, private school.” So whenever she improved her life in financial terms, this was reflected in an improvement, a way to compensate this distance that life imposed on her: university, work, and her little daughter there with her mother.¹⁹

In summary, in a culture shaped by machismo, women have limited possibilities for making decisions about their own lives. They are expected to provide for their children. This was also the case with Franco. As reflected above, her situation was even more demanding, as she was also preparing for university at the same time when she was a young mother and working.

3.1.3 “Whitening” and Racism

According to my interview partners, Brazilian society is highly racist.²⁰ In other words, race is used as a marker to create and maintain social inequality. The origins of this social structuring go back to the time of slavery. As an economic system based on the exploitation of the labor of Black slaves, slavery was officially abolished in 1888. Yet there have been other means and mechanisms of economically exploiting, politically excluding, and socially and culturally marginalizing the descendants of slaves and people of color ever since. This perspective is reflected in the following quote:

Our society is very racist, isn't it? The abolition of slavery is very recent in human history. So if we don't pay attention to it, we will Whiten or try to Whiten because it’s a lie, there’s no possibility of Whitening. Because the only possibility of Whitening that you have is cultural Whitening.²¹

Whitening originally referred to an ideology advocated by Brazilian governments from the nineteenth century into the 1920s in order to make the country more European. The promotion of the immigration of European workers played an important role in this process and was intended to “Whiten” the population.²² Up until today, there are still ideological residues of Whitening in Brazilian culture and society, as the quote above emphasizes. This is reflected, for example, in Afro-Brazilian women’s use of elaborated, time-consuming, and expensive products and procedures to straighten their hair.²³ As will be seen below, this was also an aspect present in Franco’s life.

Since racism might be practiced in very subtle ways, it is often hard to identify and to fight. Different interview partners highlighted that it took Franco some time in her trajectory to consolidate her identity as a Black woman. This is reflected in the following quote by a White interview partner (P) who was recalling earlier years in Franco’s life:

She [Franco, KM] experienced racism because she was a Black woman and so on, but at some point, for some time, she put it in a little box [inside her?]. She knew that she suffered racism. She would even talk about it, because sometimes she would say, “It’s because I’m Black. [It would be easier if I was this color?].” [P points to her own skin]. She would only call me a White girl [branquela], because sometimes I would say, “Go and do this.” Then she would come and say, “[You say this] because you are White. Now, if I go there and do this, this and that is going to happen.” She had this notion, but she didn’t … little by little she was building the Black woman, her hair, you know, curly, verbalizing, externalizing her Blackness, you know.²⁴

In summary, racism is practiced in Brazil today in various ways. Some of them are very subtle. This is reflected, for example, in the expectation that Afro-Brazilian women make themselves “Whiter.” This expectation is not only directed at them from the outside; they also internalize it. As will be shown below, it is an important step of emancipation for Afro-Brazilian women to reappropriate their bodies and appearance and to no longer perceive themselves through a “foreign” (racist) gaze from the outside.

3.1.4 Lesbophobia, Corrective Rapes, and Social Rejection

In 2004, Marielle Franco fell in love with another woman from Maré, Monica Tereza Azevedo Benicio. As a consequence, they experienced the effects of the hegemonic social representation of lesbians as “perverted” women, with whom something is wrong that might still be “corrected” under certain circumstances. The following quote provides insights into the fear that Franco and Benicio experienced when they realized that they were not just friends but lovers:

[T]hey were very afraid to live it, because it is like this: a favela woman is very distant from this kind of experience. A homosexual relationship is very … inside a favela, it is very combatted. It is fought against strongly. It’s very common to hear in these spaces that “a woman is with a woman because a man didn’t take her the right way.” The so-called corrective rape is very common, which are women that are raped and suffer sexual violence for being homosexual. [P imitating a male voice:] “Ah, I’ll show you why you don’t like men.” This is very common in favelas. So, in an unconscious way … they didn’t have this awareness of what a corrective rape was, but they lived it in the flesh. They were afraid. So this was something that took a long time to surface.²⁵

In this quote, it is striking to see how the idea of a lesbian relationship as a deviant behavior intersects with machismo in the idea that a man’s masculinity and virility might be able to fix it. As the last sentence of the quote suggests, for a long period of time, Franco and Benicio struggled with the negative images, values, and emotions about same-sex love that they had internalized and that were projected onto them in their living context, until they were able to accept and integrate it as a part of their identity.

Yet when falling in love with each other, the fear of physical violence and corrective rape was not the only problem Franco and Benicio had to deal with. When they told their families, it turned out disastrously, as the following quote reflects:

When they understood that this was a homosexual relationship and tried to come out to their families, it was a shitty situation. They didn’t have the maturity to handle it; they didn’t have the money to handle it, because it’s like this, “in my house, it can’t be,” this in both houses. […] And they … and this directly affected their relationship. They were … the situation directly affected their relationship. Because it was very difficult to deal with society. You live with your mother, with your father, who raise your daughter, who support you financially, who say that you can’t stay in your house if you have a relationship with a woman. You don’t have a place to go to. You don’t have a neighborhood that welcomes you. Everybody condemns, stonewalls a homosexual relationship. […] And they didn’t manage. It directly affected their relationship. They didn’t manage to maintain it.²⁶

As this quote highlights, the families of Franco and Benicio did not accept their relationship as lovers. The social rejection by Franco’s family members had to do with their Catholic faith, which made it difficult for them to embrace sexual diversity.²⁷ Since Franco and Benicio lived in their families’ houses and were dependent on their support, it put a lot of pressure on their relationship, and they ultimately had to break up.

In summary, when Franco and Benicio discovered that they had fallen in love with each other, they found themselves in a very vulnerable situation—not only emotionally but also physically. For years, they struggled to accept their feelings and their relationship as different challenges intersected. They included a precarious financial situation and, connected with it, relationships of dependency, machismo in the favelas, and traditional religious beliefs.

3.1.5 Construção Coletiva (Collective Construction) to Fight Marginalization

As seen above, different challenges intersected in Franco’s life as a young woman. In this context, it is worth quoting the following passage from an interview:

[S]he is a favela, Black, and lesbian woman. The only thing missing was that she was physically handicapped, you know? She embodies in her everything that she defended. So no one had to tell her what it was like to suffer racism, violence, lesbophobia, homophobia, right? No one had to explain it to her. She knew exactly what it was like.²⁸

From her own experiences, Franco knew about the problems that arise when individuals like her stand alone, often making them give up and stop pursuing change. This comes to the fore in the following example that remembers how Franco participated in a discussion group with other young mothers:

[S]he was part of a group, a maternity group, that welcomed young mothers, teenage mothers, which is very common, because these mothers tend to abandon their children, distance themselves, or abandon school. Everything is always very radical in these moments of having a child in adolescence. And she did group discussion work precisely […] to promote debate among these young girls, very young girls, who were mothers in the maternity hospital in the sense of carrying on with the pregnancy but with a perspective of resuming their studies, of not stopping forever, and so on. She did this in the maternity ward on Praça XV.²⁹

To resist the tendency to stop progressing and resign from personal dreams and projects, as exemplarily illustrated in the quote above, it was of fundamental importance to connect with others in similar positions and to construct collectively.³⁰ Joining forces with family members, friends, neighbors, local support groups and movements made it possible to deal with daily life challenges.

Franco was well aware of the importance of the collectivity and also repeatedly emphasized it in public; the last time at a public event she attended on the evening of her murder on March 14, 2018. In this context, she affirmed:

Today, I am in this field, and I am very happy with the trajectory of my life’s construction, which cannot only be an individual construction, coming much before this year and a few months in office, because our steps come from a long way back.³¹

The convergence of the individual and collective construction reflected in this quote should not be seen as a phenomenon that was unique to Franco’s biography. Instead, it is also reflected in the trajectories of other women with similar characteristics like hers. This is expressed in the following quote that narrates Franco’s biography in ways that reveal how individual, social, and political dimensions are connected:

Giovana Xavier, woman of law, Black, teacher, intellectual, academic, says that “we are born having to fight all the fights.” And I say: Marielle was the convergence of all these struggles of the invisible people. […] [P slaps a hand on the table to emphasize each characteristic] She was a woman, she was Black, favelada, she was poor. She was someone who studied, who fought. That’s it. She is a woman who works and has children early, who is a teenage mother, who doesn’t have a school, doesn’t have a day-care center, who has to help her family, who has to support, who has to take care of her younger sister, who has to take care of her parents, who has to be responsible, who ends up joining the fight because a friend suffered from violence, and she realized: “Ah, no way! Besides being a mother, daughter, sister, I have to be a friend. I have to take up this fight, but I also live in a community. I live in a favela. I have to fight for where I live. I also have to fight for other women like me. I have to fight for other women who are not only from my favela but from the world. So I also have a political fight.” She was a politician; she was a socialist. So: “I have to fight for an ideology, for a way of living in the world with less inequality, with less oppression of the most vulnerable.” So: “I'm a socialist because I have to try to reconcile equality with freedom.” So she was the convergence of these struggles, because we end up having to fight all the struggles, because they are violations in all the … on all sides, you know.³²

This quote reflects how collective construction and building together ultimately also goes beyond the specific interests of a local community and involves the construction of a more comprehensive collective identity and the pursuit of political agendas.

The following pages aim to show in more detail the interrelatedness of the individual and the collective construction of Franco’s life without separating them too strictly or letting one merge into the other. Franco’s life was connected to specific groups and communities that made her trajectory possible, yet she also had to go her own way and make very individual decisions.

3.2 “A Being in Construction”: Marielle Franco’s Biography

This chapter considers different stages of Franco’s personal biography, starting with her family origins and ending with her murder during her term as a city councilor.

With regard to Franco’s personal development, it is important to note that she did not always understand and express her identity the way she did at the end of her life. As reflected in Sect. 3.1, Franco struggled with financial precariousness, machismo, racism, lesbophobia, and other problems in her daily life as a young woman and mother. She took on these problems and challenges through different forms of collective organizing and the construction of a collective identity. Over the years, she managed to transform these obstacles into driving forces for political and social resistance. In this process, Franco was able to consolidate her identity as a Black lesbian³³ favela woman.

According to an interview partner, the development of Franco’s identity felt like a process of “peeling off” that brought her closer and closer to her core and heart:

Marielle was peeling herself off. She was peeling herself off. That’s it; she emerges as a favela leader who begins to understand herself as a favelada woman—who is different from a favelado [man]—who then understands herself as a Black favelada woman, and then as a Black lesbian favelada woman. That is a process. That’s it, she matured a lot, and that’s why we always joked that she had everything to be a national leader because she was always going forward, you know, Marielle was always going forward, and she did it very fast.³⁴

As this quote reflects, Franco’s ability to move forward continuously and to act on top of things was very important in this process and turned her into a leader. Other interview partners confirmed that the disposition to move forward, to learn, and to grow was peculiar to Franco. She was, as another interview partner put it, “a being in construction.”³⁵ Her own attempts to construct her identity and life resonated with those of others.³⁶

3.2.1 Origins

From today’s perspective, it is not quite clear where Franco’s story actually begins. As will be seen next, the question of origin is not only about a place or familiar relations but also about the recognition of generations and communities that precede and embrace an individual’s life.

3.2.1.1 Family Origins

In a narrow sense, Franco’s origin can be traced back to the northeastern part of Brazil. Both her maternal and paternal families came from the state of Paraíba. Franco’s maternal grandmother, Filómena, was a formative figure in the family. She came from the city of Alagoa Grande, brought up 11 children, and was politically active in the Liga Camponesa.³⁷ Her example contributed to the creation of political consciousness in the family and helped to turn her daughters into strong women.³⁸ Among them was Franco’s mother, Marinete da Silva Francisco, who was born in João Pessoa in Paraíba. As an interview partner argued, it was her mother’s example that helped Franco become who and what she was:

I think that her strength also comes from Marinete’s strength as a lawyer too, right? If you think, right, that she is sixty years old, a lawyer, a Black woman too, raising her children, right? Working hard … I think Marielle was who she was also because of this mother, who today is carrying on an important fight. And she does it the way I think Marielle also used to: gathering, being affectionate with people.³⁹

A similar perspective was raised in the following quote:

Marielle’s way of life is practically forged by her mother. Even after Marielle graduated, everything she was going to do, she asked her mother’s opinion: “Mother, this is what I’m going to do. Is that ok? Do you agree?” So, her mother always gave approval, always, always, always gave approval. One of the few times she didn’t accept an opinion from her mother in an endeavor she was going to do was when she became a candidate [for the city council, KM].⁴⁰

As this quote affirms, Franco’s mother was in fact a very important person in her life, and she held her mother’s opinion dear. There were not many disagreements.

Franco’s parents married in 1978.⁴¹ Originally, the family of Franco’s father, Antonio Francisco da Silva Neto, was also from Paraíba. But Franco’s father grew up in the favela complex of Maré, because his parents moved to Rio de Janeiro in search of work. Antonio Francisco da Silva Neto’s father became one of the pioneers in helping build Maré’s communities.⁴²

3.2.1.2 Upbringing in Maré

Marielle Franco was born on July 27, 1979, in Rio de Janeiro at the maternity hospital on Praça XV as Marielle Francisco da Silva.⁴³ She and her sister Anielle,⁴⁴ who was born on May 3, 1985, were brought up in different communities within the favela complex of Maré.⁴⁵

As a child and teenager, Franco frequented the municipal school SUAM/Luso Carioca in Bonsucesso.⁴⁶ She was a focused student who did well in school.⁴⁷ Despite the family’s precarious financial situation, it was always important to Franco’s parents to provide their daughters with decent nutrition and a good education, knowing that it was a fundamental condition for social advancement.⁴⁸ Franco was continuously encouraged to take her mother’s sister and her cousins as examples of good students who graduated.⁴⁹

At the age of 11, Franco started to take over more responsibilities at home and care for her sister, as both her parents had to work in order to sustain the family.⁵⁰ Franco’s mother, who had studied law while pregnant with her,⁵¹ often worked outside Rio de Janeiro in other Brazilian cities and sometimes had to stay away from home for several days.⁵² At the same time, Franco also started to support her family financially.⁵³ This shows that Franco “always was this person who always wanted to help,”⁵⁴ as an interview partner expressed it. Franco’s helping attitude also reflected the northeastern origins of her family:

[O]ne was always helping with everything. A person from the northeast is like this: You arrive. “Do you want something? […] Have you already eaten? If not, we will make something, we’ll see how.” So she brings … funny how she brings this into her life. This welcoming [acolhimento] of a family.⁵⁵

Franco’s efforts to help others manifested itself among her family and friends.⁵⁶ Beyond that, Franco also tried to help the community, for example by collaborating in community projects⁵⁷ or by trying to mediate in conflict situations.

To understand the latter, it is important to know that at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, a new phase of violence began in Maré and other favelas of Rio. Until then, Franco and her little sister had grown up in relative safety and could stay out in the streets until late at night. But from then on, heavily armed criminal factions involved in drug trafficking started to occupy the territory of the favela,⁵⁸ which heralded a new phase in Maré’s history. Thinking about crime and violence in Maré before the 1990s, an interview partner said:

It was a different kind of concern. In fact, the girls went out; the girls had a lot of freedom, do you understand? Very early, to stay up until late playing. We didn’t have … we didn’t have … thirty-something years ago, almost forty years ago … [it was] the first time we saw a dead person. The girls saw it, there at the … it was a … it shocked me, I’ll never forget that scene. It was a Sunday, right? A Sunday morning, two people were found dead in the field, in [Conjunto, KM] Esperança.⁵⁹ It started another phase in the history of Maré and of the whole complex […]. So, it was another life story. The biggest concern was of someone approaching; it was the dark, of crossing the footbridge, that was it, but it didn’t have … for example, I never thought about a stray bullet, never thought about a faction attack, for example. We didn’t think about that.⁶⁰

Starting in the early 2000s, the police began to fight the factions and drugs with warlike means, such as the caveirão.⁶¹ Often they did not take the local population into account. As the following quote reflects, Franco knew from firsthand experiences about the difficulties that police incursions caused for local residents:

She knows all the difficulties that were there: of sometimes not having the means to leave and not having the means, you know, to wait to go out. Our mother in heaven! And in front of those guys, [who are with?] a caveirão, how many times Marielle went there. She arrived there to take up the front. My God, I was desperate. She went in front of them. [Also?] very often here in Maré. During school, she would go up there.⁶²

As this quote shows, Franco used to place herself between the fronts when tensions arose between the police and the community members. In such situations, she used her body to defend others, just as other women from the favela do as well.⁶³

3.2.2 Teenage Motherhood and Critical Education

The following pages are about the formative times in Marielle Franco’s life that shaped her understanding and identity as a favelada (a woman from the favela).

3.2.2.1 Access to University and Constructing a Favelado Identity

In 1998, in the midst of the rising violent tensions in Maré, Franco started to frequent the first class of a newly established course for preparing students for the university admission exam. In Brazil, students who want to study at university are obliged to pass an entrance exam (the “vestibular”). To date, students like Franco who receive their basic education at public schools have poor chances of passing this test. Students from families with low incomes cannot afford to attend private schools or take extra classes. As a result, they tend to be excluded from university. Yet since the 1990s, various popular initiatives have emerged to help working-class students prepare for the entrance exam.⁶⁴

In Maré, the preparatory course Franco attended was organized by the local NGO Centro de Estudos e Ações Solidárias da Maré (Center for Studies and Solidary Actions of Maré; CEASM). Since its beginnings, CEASM’s work has been intended to change the life prospects of the local youth and to provide alternatives beyond the daily struggle to secure a livelihood. In the words of an interview partner:

[We] have always worked so that the people here can have a project that goes beyond working to just eat, to have a medium- or long-term project. And we have succeeded. For example, CEASM today has about two thousand people that have been admitted to a university.⁶⁵

CEASM’s origins go back to the initiative of a group of young people in Maré that shared specific characteristics. They all had met in church, which was strongly influenced by liberation theology at the time; they were some of Maré’s very few university graduates;⁶⁶ and they were all left-wing activists of PT,⁶⁷ the Worker Party. Concerned about the poor level of education among the local population and its tendency to vote for right-wing parties, this group of young people came up with the idea to found a local PT offshoot to mobilize the population more strongly for left-wing political causes.⁶⁸ After these efforts failed, a new vision emerged: “They began to imagine that the ideal was that people could vote for themselves, with knowledge, such as that. So they thought that if people had more access to more qualified education, they could do this.”⁶⁹

From this vision, the idea of an educational project and community preparatory course for the university admission exam was born. In 1997, CEASM was officially founded.⁷⁰ Up to this day, the NGO and the courses it offers are strongly inspired by the critical and liberative pedagogy of Paulo Freire.⁷¹ It also borrows from Marxist theory, especially from Antonio Gramsci and his critical reflection on superstructures from a local perspective.⁷² Against this background, community preparatory courses for the university admission exam like the one organized by CEASM not only provide the knowledge necessary for passing the university entrance test but also contribute to the creation of students’ political consciousness. This is reflected in the following quote: “The preparatory courses serve an important role in terms of politicization because they not only provide access to university but also problematize the difficulties of accessing university. They almost naturally create a political consciousness.”⁷³

Over the years, CEASM has not only worked in the field of education but has also pursued other strategies to benefit the population of Maré.⁷⁴ In 1999, it founded a community newspaper—O Cidadão (The Citizen)—meant “to counteract the mainstream media.”⁷⁵ Furthermore, it also invested in the collection and reappraisal of the memories of residents of the favela,⁷⁶ which led to the foundation of the Museu da Maré in 2006.⁷⁷

In summary, the work and achievements of CEASM have led to a positive reassessment of the local identity. This is reflected in the following quote:

We began to oppose a hegemonic vision of the favela as a negative option. We started to value the people who formed this space. Our parents became references, and we started to often use an expression: “I’m a favelado,” which was a new thing at the time. For many, it was a question of something negative. We started to make this word positive. Her [Franco’s, KM] first campaign, for example, when we did it, she said that “I am a Black and favelada woman.”⁷⁸

As alluded to in this quote and illustrated in Sect. 3.2.6, the positive reaffirmation of favela identity became a central pillar of Franco’s electoral campaign for city council in 2016.

3.2.2.2 Teenage Motherhood and Marriage

At the age of 18, Franco became pregnant. Years later, she commented on this in the following words: “I did not escape the statistics,”⁷⁹ referring to the high number of teenage pregnancies in favelas.⁸⁰

Franco married the father of her daughter Luyara (born in 1998) and interrupted her preparatory course to take care of her family. Yet, as stated earlier, Franco was a person that continuously moved forward. According to an interview partner, this is why she would not let herself stop:

That marriage didn’t last long. Nothing could stop Marielle, you know. It wasn’t a marriage with a teenage pregnancy that, 95 percent of the time, will make a woman stop her life to work inside the house, take care of her family in the favela, or stop her studies and at most work in another family’s house as a maid. Marielle did it, she saved some money; she always worked, she always worked [in some institution?], as a waitress, she sold things, she took things to sell at school. She was always very active, always wanted to get some money, to have some money to help at home, always with the purpose, you know, to improve life there.⁸¹

To illustrate Franco’s forward compulsion, the same interview partner told me a story Franco had told her:

There is an episode that is very funny because her husband … she said, “Uff, the guy doesn’t care about anything, so I went and bought it.” She managed to buy a van, a van car, so that he could do those services of … because there are no buses in the favela, right? It is very big. Sometimes you need a car to get from the favela to Avenida Brasil, where you can catch a bus. So she arranged for them to buy a car like that. She was like the person that changed the money, he would drive, and she would be in the car: “Come on, Avenida Brasil, 3 Reais,” and she would collect the money, and that’s how she did it. And there came a time when she got tired of her husband, because he didn’t have any prospects in life, and she was dying to go back to school.⁸²

In the time that followed, Franco separated from her husband and moved back to her mother’s house. Her mother started to look after her daughter. Franco retook the university preparatory course that was held during night hours and finally passed the entrance exam.

3.2.2.3 Increasing Politicization as a Human-Rights Activist and Favelada

In 2002, Franco entered the prestigious Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Rio de Janeiro. She was granted a full stipend and started to study sociology. Franco’s entrance into university, the daily necessity of crossing the city to take her courses, and experiencing different neighborhoods of Rio stimulated her questioning of why things were the way they were. One of my interview partners who did not know Franco at the time of her university studies recalled what she must have experienced at the time:

So, imagine a woman, a young girl, a mother. At college, nobody is a mother, even more at a PUC, which is the most elitist university in Rio de Janeiro, the most expensive, in the Zona Sul, hyper Sul, in the middle of the richest part of Rio de Janeiro, where women … she said, “It looked like a fashion show.” So she had to leave Maré, cross the whole city, leave her daughter with her mother, cross the whole city, take two buses to get to the place that was completely surreal. […] [Imagine?] the most beautiful women, the most expensive clothes, and imagine facing four years of this, because this is very oppressive.⁸³

The oppressive character of Franco’s university experience became apparent in a letter of hers from 2017 that she sent to the collective Bastardos da PUC.⁸⁴ In this letter, Franco encouraged other poor Black students and scholarship holders—so-called bastards among the mostly White and economically privileged student body—to continue to pursue their studies at PUC despite all the adversities they encounter. She wrote:

To the Bastards of PUC-Rio, with love:

Entering PUC-Rio may feel somewhat nerve-wracking: the natural insecurity in occupying a new space; people and norms as yet unknown … It is impossible not to feel a knot of fear in your belly! Especially when we hear stories of professors who assign texts and films in English without translations, when we don’t see any black students or professors in the classroom, when the [typical] students’ main demand is for cheaper parking, when we find out that PUC’s Pilotis student common area is a catwalk … and on it goes.

There’s no handbook that can address all the questions and worries that we may have, but some tips are important to help make sense of this new academic way of life, while taking into account our economic, political, and social reality.

The first tip is not to let everything that is said about PUC affect you. Although important shared similarities exist, experiences are individual, and everything will depend very much on how you view the world and the challenges that you face. I, for example, opted for a frank and regular dialogue with my professors in the face of the difficulties I experienced, whether as a young mother, a worker, or a favela resident. From the very concrete barrier of traveling from Maré to Gávea to arrive in time for my first class at 7am, to the extracurricular activities I couldn’t attend because of my work commitments or even because I didn’t have the money to pay for them.

Sharing our concrete reality with others does not make us victims, especially not when we do so with the intention of seeking possible alternative paths to the barriers we encounter. […]

Moreover, seeking to understand PUC-Rio in its complexity, as a high-quality private university with academic prestige, is also to understand that in an unequal, racist, and sexist society, rare opportunities should not be underutilized. From this perspective, being a “bastard” of PUC cannot be seen as anything bad. We need to claim a new political meaning: the “bastard” is someone who resists inequalities. In this sense, it’s important that our personal story become the motor that drives our academic life.

Without losing sight of the identity, place, and family that make us who we are, studying at PUC-Rio is almost a political and social mission, since the learning process is a two-way street: when we transform, we also change everything and everyone around us. Our presence at PUC-Rio is, by its very nature, an act of resistance!⁸⁵

As this letter shows, while studying at PUC, Franco struggled with problems that were quite different from those of students from a more privileged background. She had to coordinate her life as a mother with her student commitments; she continuously had to work and still did not always have enough money for extracurricular activities; she could only travel to the university with the help of precarious public transport, which took a lot of time; she had difficulties in preparing for the lessons when the reading material was only provided in English, as she had not learned English at public school, and so on. With regard to the latter, it is interesting to see that Franco opted for dialoguing with her professors to seek other solutions, which is quite similar to what she also did in later years as a professional while working in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ).⁸⁶

During her studies at PUC, Franco started to reflect more deeply on the differences between different parts of the city.⁸⁷ According to an interview partner, the problem of territory (or socially produced space) and the question of whether the favela is recognized as a part of the city or not,⁸⁸ was the first subject she began consider from a political standpoint:

The territorial issue is the first one that comes to her as a woman from the favela, because that’s it: she leaves the favela to go across the city to a mega elitist university and comes back every day. So I think that the territory issue, the favela as a territory, you know, that seems like it’s another place, not a neighborhood, but something apart from the city … For her, this is what comes first, her notion of belonging to this space […]. “The favela is city [an affirmation meaning that the favela is part of the city, KM]. […] Why does the caveirão arrive here shooting? Why do they have a caveirão here and not in the street in Gávea where PUC is? […] Why does the state arrive in the favela like this and not at my friend’s house [who lives in the Zona Sul, KM]? Something is wrong.” So the first thing that moves her […] as a political subject is the question of territory, favela.⁸⁹

Meanwhile, the topic of human rights also started to impose itself on Franco. Alongside her studies at PUC, she was working for Redes da Maré, a well-known NGO in Maré that works on questions of violence and human rights.⁹⁰ While studying sociology, working for Redes, and experiencing different forms of violence in Maré that were absent in other neighborhoods, Franco seems to have slowly become aware of a certain picture:

She began to realize that her rights were somehow violated, especially by the state, due to the fact that she was from a favela, right? So, first of all, she has a personal, flesh-and-blood experience of violation. She understands that her rights are violated, not only because of her work […] but also because of the major she was studying at university, which was sociology. So she understood herself as a victim of a violation of rights. Sometimes she couldn’t leave; sometimes she couldn’t return. She saw many boys and girls that she knew from the favela get into the drug trafficking business or the police, and all of them died. She had a friend who died. This is very significant in her life. She had a friend who died from a stray bullet … very young. I think she was fifteen years old. This also moves her. This also turns her gaze toward human rights. “How can a person die because of a police incursion?” So her experience, first of all, is this. Her embodied experience of what violations are like. Of course, she has an academic background, because she was studying sociology, but somehow this was pushing her, and she was doing this internship in the human-rights NGO. So this was pushing her to kind of specialize. She began to understand that what she lived, where she worked, and what she studied made a triangle and this converged into acting in the area of human rights.⁹¹

During her university studies and her work in Maré, Franco also began to understand herself as a favelada (a woman from the favela), which is different from a favelado (a man from the favela). In this process, she started to explicitly engage with feminism. Her attraction to feminism was fueled primarily by her early motherhood and the challenges it presented.⁹² Yet in a latent form, feminism seems to have been inherent in her for a long time. As already implied above, Franco’s family has always had a close relationship with the Catholic Church. Like her parents and throughout her life, Franco was a practicing Catholic.⁹³ As a teenager, she worked as a catechist.⁹⁴ Regarding her religious practice, Franco had a preference for Maria, the mother of Jesus Christ, churches under her patronage, and her apparitions (nossas Senhoras). According to an interview partner, this reflected some sort of latent and subtle feminist option in Franco’s life, even before she explicitly named it such: “[S]he had this thing for nossas Senhoras. And I would always tease her about: ‘You were always kind of feminist; it was always a woman’s thing, and so on.’”⁹⁵

In retrospect, it also appears likely⁹⁶ that another experience contributed to Franco’s greater awareness of the difference between favelados and faveladas, especially if the latter deviate from the norm. While studying at PUC, as already seen in Sect. 3.1.4, Franco fell in love with Monica Benicio. In a context that was strongly shaped by a culture of machismo, their love put them into a vulnerable situation. It exposed them to social rejection and the risk of experiencing forms of violence specific to women. Due to complex social challenges, the pressures of their environment, and their own prejudices, they could not sustain their relationship and they broke up several times.

In summary, the period of Franco’s university studies shows how her self-understanding as a political subject grew. She increasingly understood herself as a favelada and, based on her own everyday life, gained a critical understanding of the connection between (police) violence and human-rights violations.

3.2.3 Working with Marcelo Freixo and PSOL

The following pages show how Franco joined Marcelo Freixo’s campaign, how she became a formative figure on his team, and how this work also shaped her personal life.

3.2.3.1 Joining Freixo’s First Campaign for State Deputy

In 2006, around the time of Franco’s graduation, the rising politician, human-rights defender, and history teacher Marcelo Freixo ran his first campaign for state deputy of Rio de Janeiro. Freixo was affiliated with the socialist party PSOL, which had been created through a split from PT in 2004. He had been a staff member of the state deputy Chico Alencar, who presided over the Comissão de Defesa dos Direitos Humanos e Cidadania (Commission for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizenship) of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ). Up until 2006, Freixo had coordinated this commission.⁹⁷ One of my interviewees had helped to organize that campaign and told me the following about it:

[W]e ran a very hard campaign, without money. Marcelo sold a car he had, an old one, to allocate it to make pamphlets. It was a campaign that brought together a lot of young people, something that Rio hadn’t done in a long time. Rio de Janeiro had its peak of youth involvement in politics at the time of the PT campaigns. PT had finally assumed the presidency with Lula in 2003. And then these movements kind of cooled down, the youth had already aged, and you didn’t see participation by the youth in the political processes in Rio. Me, at least, I didn’t see much. I was very involved because I worked inside the parliamentary office. And then I saw something: in Marcelo Freixo’s campaign, there was a very large number of young people that came together. It was a campaign that was different, as hard as it was in terms of money, it was a very cheerful campaign, you know.⁹⁸

As this quote shows, Freixo’s campaign was difficult with regard to financial and material resources. Yet it was also a campaign that mobilized many young people. One of them was Marielle Franco.

Franco’s sister Anielle had been one of Freixo’s students, so it was Anielle who first established a contact between Franco and his team. Franco met one of Freixo’s staff members during a gathering of different feminist organizations that wanted to support candidates who would advocate for women’s causes.⁹⁹ After this initial contact, Franco started to contribute to Freixo’s campaign. She organized, for example, a visit by Freixo to Maré to meet important local NGOs like Redes da Maré and Laboratório de Favelas.¹⁰⁰

3.2.3.2 “A Soul of That Office”

When Freixo was elected, he asked the local activist of PSOL Maré¹⁰¹ to choose two people to become part of his team.¹⁰² One of them was Franco. The other was Renata Souza, another Black woman from Maré who is a human-rights activist, a graduate from PUC, and a friend of Franco’s.¹⁰³

Building on her experiences with Redes da Maré, Franco was assigned the task of integrating the perspective of favela communities into the political work of the deputy’s office. In the words of an interview partner: “[S]he was there to do politics, to think favela politics, right, as a woman from the favela, to direct the office to the favela, to think politics, to help Marcelo Freixo to think favela policies.”¹⁰⁴ In this context, integrating the perspective of favelas meant working together and integrating the perspectives of local social movements and associations.¹⁰⁵ The other staff member from Maré, Renata Souza, became part of Freixo’s communications team, building on her experiences as a journalist for O Cidadão.¹⁰⁶

In the following years, while working together, Freixo and Franco became close friends who shared mutual respect. According to an interview partner, Franco was one of the few people that had the courage to criticize and stand up to Freixo, who continued to become a more and more famous and influential politician: “She was one of the few people if someone had to say something to Marcelo Freixo: ‘Look, it’s wrong, man. You can’t do this,’ she would say it. And he would listen.”¹⁰⁷ The same interview partner also emphasized Franco’s importance to Freixo’s office as a whole:

[M]y recollection of her was always … she was an extremely active person, and how able she was to do a lot of different things without stopping. Today, thinking about her own importance to Marcelo Freixo’s office, I think she was a soul of that [office] … She had absolute control over it and pushed the office a lot. An indispensable advisor for him. I imagine that … I’m not there every day, but it must have made a huge difference, you know, when she left to become a city councilor. And participating, you know, she was always organizing and articulating, and very, very, she was always very concerned about people. She was a person who was extremely … I think the word lovely defines it, because she was extremely cheerful, extremely caring with people, very attentive to people.¹⁰⁸

As this quote reflects, Franco was perceived as a person that strongly cared for others. This topic will be further elaborated in Sect. 3.3.2. Other interview partners confirmed that over the years, Franco became a very active, well-known, and dear person not only on Freixo’s team but to the party in general.¹⁰⁹

3.2.3.3 New Relationship and Master’s in Public Administration

While working for Freixo, Franco and Monica Benicio separated for good after several attempts at being in a relationship, and they even stopped talking to each other. In the time after, Franco got to know Freixo’s political coordinator and chief of staff, Eduardo Alves de Carvalho. They fell in love with each other and became a couple.¹¹⁰

At the same time, it appears as if Benicio never completely disappeared from Franco’s life and mind. This is reflected in the following quote from a close friend of Franco’s:

I remember that once on New Year’s Eve, we spent New Year’s Eve together, in Leblon, at some friends’ house. Me, Marielle, Edu, me with my spouse, I was already married and so on. We went to Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas to watch the fireworks. She saw Monica at a private party that was going on in the lagoon with another person like that. She was like … [P imitates how Marielle’s face hardened at that moment] it was over. I said, “Man” [a long silence follows].¹¹¹

Another interview partner confirmed that Benicio continued to reappear in Franco’s life. In his evaluation, a relationship with Benicio “was a dream she [Franco, KM] would not think of realizing.”¹¹²

After a few years, the relationship between Franco and Eduardo Alves was no longer working. However, since they continued to face private and work-related challenges together, they remained friends and were even strengthened as such.¹¹³

Encouraged by Alves, among other people, Franco continued her academic studies and frequented a master’s program in public administration at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). In 2014, she defended her master’s thesis, in which she analyzed the implementation of Rio de Janeiro’s Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (Pacifying police unit; UPP) program.¹¹⁴ The UPP program was initiated in 2008 to regain state control over favelas, break the monopoly of violence held by criminal factions, and “pacify” the territories.¹¹⁵ The topic of Franco’s thesis was closely related to her human-rights work, which will be presented next.

3.2.4 Commission for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizenship

In 2009, Marcelo Freixo took over the presidency of the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizenship (in the following abbreviated as Human Rights Commission) of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ). In 2012, Franco became its coordinator.¹¹⁶ During the years that followed, the commission sought, among other things, to link the protection of human rights with the debate on public security and to counter the widespread idea that these were irreconcilably opposed.¹¹⁷

3.2.4.1 Moving and Mediating at the Margins

In order to understand better the Human Rights Commission’s work, it is crucial to consider its purpose. The Human Rights Commission is one of many organs of the state of Rio de Janeiro that defend human rights, yet the only one within the ALERJ. The commission was created to realize different propositions, policies, and actions related to human rights. Its aim is to ensure the minimal conditions necessary for dignified survival, as well as the full ability to exercise individual and collective rights.¹¹⁸ In concrete terms, the commission critically discusses bills and public-policy propositions from the perspective of defending human rights before they are voted on. It assists and supports people who have become victims of human-rights violations. It also organizes public events to promote ample discussions and solutions to problems related to human rights.¹¹⁹ In summary, the Human Rights Commission is supposed to check and advise the executive power of the state of Rio de Janeiro, which is under the leadership of the governor.¹²⁰

Since Franco’s time in the Human Rights Commission,¹²¹ there has been a peculiar spirit among its staff members, as was pointed out by several interview partners. This is expressed in the following quote: “There is a phenomenon here in the commission, which is that we take this work for real, you know. You can’t fool around when you work in this place.”¹²² As this quote expresses, staff members felt it was necessary to fulfill their tasks in a way that would make a real difference. As a consequence, the commission’s work could not be limited to the office and work hours; instead, the staff felt the demand to deal with human-rights violations wherever and whenever they happened. This is demonstrated in the following quote:

[I]t was about movement. It was something that Mari did, that we did together. It is a matter of “let’s call, let’s talk to the mother; if necessary, we even go into the territory.” And she went into the territory. Sometimes people are in a demonstration, and then it is that thing, they are going to throw stones or whatever. She would hold them and say: “You are going to disturb; we are making a protest here.” That way, that great woman helped sometimes in this thing of dialogue within the territory itself. There was also this capacity, because we speak the same language inside the favela territory […]. There is a video of her saying: “You can’t do this!” People were going up the viaduct and there’s something about our public security that creates too much tension, that is, it creates tensions to justify the violent response that it will make. And so, one thing that Mari used to do often was to say: “No, we are not going to give them what they want.”¹²³

As this quote demonstrates, Franco and other staff members of the Human Rights Commission started going to places where human-rights violations were happening. These places included the favelas and peripheries. They participated in acts that commemorated victims of human-rights violations and protested police violence,¹²⁴ and they mediated when tensions arose. They were able to do so because they were familiar with the contexts and knew the challenges.

Through her capability to mediate, Franco became an important figure and contact for human rights in the favelas and among social movements. This is reflected in the following quote from an interview partner who comes from Maré and experienced the effects of the military occupation of Maré from April 2014 to June 2015:

Mari did CEASM, which is a preparatory course for the university admission exam in Maré, which I also did, but years later. […] When I was in CEASM, [she became?] a very big reference for human-rights advice because we were going through a time of occupation by the military in Maré. […] We were living in a moment of occupation in Maré. The military went to Maré. And in the area where I live, the army was acting very oppressively, you know, very oppressively. In the areas where Vila do João, Conjunto Esperança, Pinheiro, Baixa de Sapateiro, and Morro are, they acted in a very aggressive way. Not that they weren’t aggressive in other areas, but in these areas, they were particularly aggressive. And because of this there was a very large reference to the Human Rights Commission. And then, knowing that the advisory on human rights was coordinated by Marielle, […] there was a group that made denunciations, right, so the army would act in a different way.¹²⁵

For contextualization, it is essential to know that the military occupation of Maré started two months before the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. It was meant to last four months and to prepare the installation of a UPP. From the perspective of the population, the occupation could hardly be considered a success. There were indeed areas within Maré where the occupation brought temporary positive changes for the population because it interrupted some forms of inter-gang conflicts, among other aspects.¹²⁶ However, as described in the quote above, numerous incidents between the police and the population further strained the already tense relationship. Young darker-skinned men were most often negatively affected by these incidents.¹²⁷ In the end, the positive changes brought about by the occupation, which lasted 15 months, were not sustainable. No UPP was installed. Within hours of the end of the occupation, the gangs reestablished their territorial control and resumed selling drugs, which were common before the occupation.¹²⁸

As the quote above reflects, Franco’s mediation between groups and movements in favelas and the Human Rights Commission was crucial in the process of denunciating violence perpetrated by the military. Beyond this, two other topics must be illuminated that defined her activities for the commission: supporting women and the inclusion of the police’s perspective.

3.2.4.2 Supporting Women

In Franco’s work for the Human Rights Commission, meeting and embracing women’s demands was most important to her and her team. This is reflected as follows:

It is something that was very important to her in that process there. It was the embracing of women’s demands. Because women were the ones that were or are the ones that suffer most from the violations that exist from the state. She is the one who can’t go to work because the daycare stopped, and she can’t [go to?] the daycare. So she will miss work. Because not all jobs accept that one must [stay with one’s?] child. It is her who goes, who loses her partner in a conflict situation within the community […]. She is the one who has her son murdered, who mourns the death of her son, of her daughter. So, it is her that is violated. It’s her that is arrested, [accused?] in association with drug trafficking, for having drugs hidden in her house because she doesn’t have the means to say no. So when women were victims of violence, both domestic and state violence, she [Franco, KM] was the one who took them in. Of course, we all took them in there, but she and the women of the team, they […] had this practical responsibility. They assumed this responsibility [for themselves?]. And she, with that personality that stood out in whatever space she was in, was the person who also had this capacity to take others in.¹²⁹

This quote reflects the ways in which the Human Rights Commission adopted an intersectional perspective to support victims of violence. As stated in the quote, women were not the only ones affected by violence. However, due to the social circumstances in which the acts of violence occurred, they were often in particularly vulnerable situations. As seen in Sect. 3.1, Franco and some of her colleagues who also came from favelas and were Black knew this from firsthand experience.

In her work with victimized women, Franco was particularly close to mothers whose children had been killed through acts of violence. Franco not only received these women in the premises of the Human Rights Commission but also made an effort to meet them in person. This is expressed in the following quote from an ex-colleague of Franco at the Human Rights Commission: “We attend to everyone today, but it was this eye-to-eye contact, the moving around, you know. She moved around and sometimes went I don’t know where. And she would go, you know! And she went to attend them.”¹³⁰ According to the testimonials of some of the mothers Franco had attended to, her closeness made a fundamental difference in the fight for justice for their dead children.¹³¹

Ultimately, being close to the victims helped the commission map and contextualize the cases and acquire a bigger picture of human-rights violations. According to an interview partner, Franco and her team were convinced that:

When you work with human rights, you have to accompany people. These people have to be, for the rest of their lives, at least, mapped. You have to understand the context, where these people go, quantify this, be able to report this. She could do this. She could take a look, start to amplify, put all this into a single universe, somehow quantify it, make an extract of it, you know, how many Black women, how many single women … She could see these women, all single, without husbands, 90 percent single, who support their families with their own money; the great majority living in peripheral areas; almost all of them had experienced sexual violence. She was able to look at it from the outside, to understand that after this, the victimization, [follows] the revictimization of the person who suffers violence.¹³²

In this quote, victimization means the act of becoming a victim through an act of violence. Revictimization refers to an aggravation of the victimization through inadequate reactions by the social and institutional environment that deals with the victims.¹³³

Franco and her team did not collect information on victims and their contexts to have it gather dust in files. On the contrary, they took it and brought it back into debates and round tables about public security. According to an interview partner, “the work was eye to eye; the description, mapping based on the numbers of cases. And going to these meetings, armed with information, you know, like: ‘Hey, we have x number of people murdered by the police. How can we come into dialogue? How can we solve this with the state?’”¹³⁴

3.2.4.3 Including the Perspective of the Police

Working in the Human Rights Commission, Franco made strong efforts to include the perspective of the police (and their family members). This was a difficult task since many of the human-rights violations were caused by police violence. This is reflected in the following quote:

Marielle is the person who brought to the Human Rights Commission the importance of also including the perspective of police officers in its discussions. This was a difficult context, because a large part of the demands of the Human Rights Commission has to do with police violence. So it’s not something that you can put on the same level, but it’s something where she managed to awaken the interest in it, you know? So there was a hallmark of the Human Rights Commission that is its position in relation to the victims of police violence, including how racism cuts across this violence, how the racial issue and the criminalization of poverty cut across this structure of violence. And there was a special second layer of the Human Rights Commission that knew that it was impossible to think about violence and racism as if the police were not also inserted into this structure, you know? The same structure of power, of the state, of violence. And then, almost as a parallel work, she helped to build a line of work, a work methodology that dealt with the police officers, with the victimized police officers, and especially with the mothers of victimized police officers.¹³⁵

As already said above, the Human Rights Commission applied an intersectional perspective in their work. This is also reflected in this quote that approaches challenges and acts of violence in police units through the lens of class, race, and gender.¹³⁶ In this context, among other aspects, Franco became a spokeswoman for female police officers who had anonymously filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission about their working conditions, which included bullying in the military units.¹³⁷

As the quote above also shows, both dimensions—personally attending to victims, especially mothers, and including the police’s perspective—were integrated into a specific methodology that included actively seeking those who have been affected by violence for hearings and reunions.¹³⁸ In the words of an interview partner:

She related to everyone. She related in the sense of attending to the cases personally. She didn’t know only on paper. She coordinated, but in every case, she had a contact. All the cases that were closed, independent of the context in which they were closed, she kept a … she would call, I don’t know, three months later, to know how that mother was doing who had lost a son: a military man, a military policeman … Which was different, right? Because that’s it, she put an end to this thing that “human rights is something for criminals.” Because when she went to gather mothers of people who were victims of confrontations in favelas, she also went to get mothers of policemen. […] “Bandits die and police die.”¹³⁹

As this quote reflects, Franco’s activities proved that it was possible to support victims of police violence in favelas and the work of police officers at the same time by defending human rights.¹⁴⁰ When people say that “bandits die and police die,” they are usually referring to the idea that violence and crime need to be fought with more violence. Franco’s work was more about demonstrating that “bandits die and police die” because they are part of the same problematic structures. The importance of this work began to slowly enter the public consciousness only after Franco’s assassination. When clichéd accusations were made after her murder that she did not stand up for police officers because she was a human-rights activist, some police members came forward to defend her.¹⁴¹

Finally, closely attending to the victims of human-rights violations went along with a remarkable observation and learning experience for those who worked together with Franco in the Human Rights Commission:

Marielle had something that was fundamental for her in the Human Rights Commission. All the meetings were discussed. Every Friday we had a meeting, [each one starting?] with breakfast. Each person brought something to prepare for the breakfast. So we had that … as if it was a fraternization. And then we discussed the cases. Also, because we didn’t have answers or solutions for all the cases. In fact, most of the cases were unsolvable. They had no solution, because people had already died, people had already been murdered, people had already had their rights violated. But what was very important—and I consider that work space to have been a very important school for my life, not only as a professional, but also as a human being—[what was very important] is that some people who arrived with problems to [put?] in the Human Rights Commission, they themselves ended up giving answers to them, through their engagement, their movement, their participation, or by engaging in movements that already existed, right? Or by helping to build movements that did not exist yet.¹⁴²

As this quote shows, in many cases, the commission could not come up with any solutions to a specific case as it was often already too late. Yet in some cases, discussions in the commission helped create a space in which people whose rights had been violated could start to think about ways out. As a consequence, the commission turned into a site for political mobilization and the development of public policies that were based on the perspectives of people affected by human-rights violations, people who often came from the peripheries.¹⁴³

3.2.4.4 Amplifying Experiences through the City Council

Beginning in 2014, a small group of people working in the Human Rights Commission started talking to Franco about a possible candidacy for the Rio de Janeiro City Council. As colleagues, they had observed how Franco’s abilities had matured over the years she was working with Freixo. They were convinced that she could make a difference by bringing her experience in connecting and working together with women, Black people, and people in favelas to the city parliament. This is reflected in the following quote from a black staff member of the Human Rights Commission, who was also a favela resident (P):

P: […] We were there all the time with Marielle, saying “we need to take this, our experience, to the City Council.” [Because?] all the political spaces here in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, are important, as this city was once the capital of Brazil, right? Rio de Janeiro was once the capital; it was once the federal district, right? What is now Brasilia was once here in Rio de Janeiro. [Because?] most of the public buildings here continue, there is a structure, a state infrastructure that still remains. Everything that happens here in Rio de Janeiro is very important for the country. And this dispute of the political spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro is very important for us. Especially for us, the Black and favela population, the political dispute of this space is very important. […] And Marcelo Freixo is … one could see him as a representative of the minorities in the legislative assembly. Yet he was not a person who was a reference in the favelas, in the community. So …

KM [interrupts P]: It needed one.

P: It needed one. And then the majority of the economically active population in the favela and who, in truth, those who bear all the difficulties, all the [evils?] of the favela, are the women, you know? The majority of the families are supported by women. And then you could see from Marielle’s history of being a young woman, a young mother, who had to go through all these difficulties to survive in this [moment?]. […] Unfortunately, she didn’t arrive where she could have arrived due to this barbaric crime that was committed against her. But it would be a possibility to say to other women and to the young Black favela, peripheral and also non-Black population, that it was possible, that it was possible to occupy this space.¹⁴⁴

As this quote shows, it was important for the Black population and the favelas to gain a political voice and power on the city council. According to my interview partner, this would have had repercussions for the whole country because of Rio’s past as Brazil’s former capital city. Marcelo Freixo, while considered a representative of minorities in many ways, was not a reference in the favelas. But Franco had become one through her work in the Human Rights Commission. Because of her own background, people thought that she also had a special legitimacy to represent Black women from favelas.

3.2.5 Turning into a Feminist Reference

At the same time, while Franco was working for the Human Rights Commission, she continued her activism in different feminist movements. Since 2011, Rio de Janeiro has seen several increasingly larger feminist mobilizations. Famous examples are the Marchas das Vadias (Slut Walks)¹⁴⁵ and the 2013 June Days protests.¹⁴⁶ In 2015, Franco became an important reference point during the so-called primavera feminista (feminist spring), which arose in protest against a bill that sought to deprive women of the right to abortion, which is anchored in Brazilian law.¹⁴⁷ This is reflected in the following quote:

Then [after 2013, KM], Marielle had already become a kind of leader in Rio, because she was coordinating the Human Rights Commission, which was presided over by Marcelo Freixo. Rio was experiencing an explosion of demands, and the feminist movement, which was very dispersed in Rio, was unified around the issue of the president [Eduardo Cunha, KM] of the Chamber [of Deputies, KM], who wanted to roll back several … he wanted to end the law that allows abortion in cases of rape and brain disease. [KM sighs with discomfort] He wanted to put it on the agenda [unintelligible], and he had the majority to vote for it. Crazy. And Rio de Janeiro, the women of Rio de Janeiro were stirred up and managed to make a demonstration take over Brazil. This came up because he is […] from Rio de Janeiro. So I think that this made the city the first to mobilize, because it knew the figure. And she [Franco, KM] in this thing of the 2013 demonstrations, she became a reference, because she had already been coordinating the Human Rights Commission for about two years, one year. She was already militating within the women’s sector, the women’s collective within the party, she was already inside the party, active, she was becoming a pole of unification.¹⁴⁸

This quote is not easy to read due to various interrelated references. It mentions not only the 2015 feminist protests against Cunha and his anti-abortion bill but also the 2013 demonstrations and Franco’s work as a coordinator for the Human Rights Commission since 2012. The blurring between these references is probably due to the fact that the different spheres of Franco’s work and activism cannot be strictly separated. As shown above, there were numerous connections between her work in the Human Rights Commission and women’s concerns and movements.

In the time since 2013, and especially in 2015, Franco was able to gather together different feminist movements because she showed the importance of understanding White and Black feminist movements as complimentary. This is reflected in the following extract from an interview with one of Franco’s former staff members (P):

P: Marielle was never “ghettoized,” you know? She never was; she never stayed within a group. She never accomplished that. So she was very skilled in articulation, because in Rio de Janeiro there is a very strong dispute between the feminist groups, the older ones and the newer ones. This is crazy, this is very crazy.

KM: Yeah [affirming]

P: Nowadays, much less, much because of Marielle

KM: Ah, yes?

P: Who did a lot, yes.

KM: That’s interesting.

P: Yes, yes. Who all along stressed the importance of complementing each other. Of one another, that’s it. […] There is an article of hers […] that went to Le Monde, which is “the new always comes,”¹⁴⁹ but it’s of no use being new, you know, if you don’t look back. Because it’s like this, the old feminist movement was a movement that didn’t have Black women. It was a movement that didn’t see … women went out to fight but left their children at home with the Black nanny. They were not part of the movement. So there is a lot of resentment, especially by Black women from the Black movement toward the older feminist movement. And she, Marielle, was able to articulate herself in all of them. Because that’s what it is, she was a born leader. Very few are like that. That is very much a characteristic of a leader. She attracted, she attracted everybody, she didn’t “ghettoize” anywhere; she thought that everything could be connected, for everything a connection was possible, you know, because in the end everybody is fighting for something. What is good for one is good for the other. And that made her a reference, you know?¹⁵⁰

As will be seen later, Franco’s election as a city councilor was ultimately related to her feminist activism and the waves of women’s insurgences mentioned above.

3.2.6 Electoral Campaign and Election

This chapter elaborates Franco’s decision to run for office and how her campaign was organized in collective ways.

3.2.6.1 Franco’s Decision to Become a Candidate

At the end of 2015, Franco was well-known, especially as representative of women, in her party, PSOL. In this context, an interview partner remembered a conversation he had with Franco after she had appeared on a TV show:

[I]n 2015, Marielle was the representative of a women’s segment within PSOL. It was a year when PSOL had many problems because there was little female representation, and one of the few there was had been expelled due to an internal problem. And then, at the end of the year, they made a TV program to talk about the party, and it wasn’t an election year. And Marielle appeared on it. I called her and said: “Hey, Marielle, are you going to be a candidate next year?” And she said: “No. Why are you asking me that?” [P smiling and KM laughing] I said: “Ah, your party is a small party, but it has important people, and many people were left out so that you could appear on television. So I think your party must be thinking about investing in you to give you this space.” She said: “No, that has nothing to do with it. I was talking about the whole party and so on.” I said: “No, Marielle. Your party needs women. I think that if you go to find out, then you have a chance.” And then she kept stubbornly saying: “No, but I don’t have money. We need money to campaign, ok?” I said: “Marielle, you don’t need money. You have a young party, a party of activists. It’s not that expensive to campaign in a party like PSOL.” She said: “I’ll see what I can tell you.” Then, two weeks later she called: “Ah, negão [referring to a Black man in an endearing way, KM], well, I will come [as a candidate, KM].” I said: “Let’s go. Then I’ll get the PT people here, and we’ll run your campaign.” And that’s how it was.¹⁵¹

As this quote shows, the interview partner, who was a friend living in Maré, and other people connected to PT helped Franco build her campaign.

For some people close to Franco, her decision came as a surprise, but they also supported it. This can be seen in the following quote by a friend who had rather thought that Franco wanted to pursue an academic career:

I remember her calling me and saying, “I’m thinking about becoming a candidate [unintelligible]. I’m going to run for city councilor.” I said [in a surprised voice], “You are going to run for city councilor?” Because she never had the ambition to be a politician, right? She went through university, then she got a master’s degree at UFF [Fluminense Federal University] in public administration when she was in Freixo’s team. She wrote her thesis about UPPs [Pacifying Police Units], which was her experience […]. She had perhaps more academic ambitions, of being a Black favelada woman but who did her master’s degree, who was articulate, but it never crossed her mind to be … And then one day she turned [unintelligible]. I said: “You’re crazy.” And she said: “Yeah, I think I’m crazy, but here I go. There is nowhere else to go. Rio de Janeiro is exploding. The movements want me. I feel … not obligated, but I feel responsible to carry this forward. I am, you know, I have the new women’s movement, the old women’s movement who want me. I have the Black movement […] wanting me. All the fronts of the party are betting on me […] and I feel this responsibility because I am getting all these people together. I am unifying all these people. I am with all these people. All these people were expecting this from me. I will go. I want to go.” I said: “Ok then.”¹⁵²

There was also at least one person close to Franco who disagreed with her decision. As mentioned in Sect. 3.2.1.1, Franco’s mother, whose opinion was always very important to her, expressed great resistance to this decision. Ultimately, however, she accepted it, and even participated in the street campaigning.¹⁵³

As the two quotes above reflect, Franco experienced a moment of strong personal empowerment at the time of her decision to run for city councilor. This is also contained in another quote highlighting Franco’s political instinct, honed over many years, that it was the right time to take the next step: “When she decides to run, I think she said: ‘It’s my moment. I’m going. And it will work out this way.’ She had an awareness. She had been working in politics for some time.”¹⁵⁴

Through her experience working in Freixo’s team, as the coordinator of the Human Rights Commission, and as an activist in different social movements, Franco seems to have developed an ever-greater awareness of the role she was about to play in politics, which was to make a difference by bringing the voices of people on the margins to the city council. This is demonstrated in the following quote by the interview partner from Maré who helped organize Franco’s campaign:

[T]hen, in the campaign, we thought about this structure that was already our characteristic, which is this posture of positivity of the favelado, right? To mark this point, the women’s issue, the Black issue. This was the campaign’s agenda, right? This was the structure.¹⁵⁵

This quote reflects the way Franco presented herself publicly in the electoral campaign—as a Black woman, a mother, and a person from a favela.¹⁵⁶ With regard to the subsequent developments, it is important to note that LGBTQ+ issues were not a central campaign element. These surfaced with much more emphasis and visibility when Franco was serving as a city councilor.¹⁵⁷

3.2.6.2 “I Am Because We Are”: Collective Construction

In the first half of 2016, a lot of people joined and started to participate in Franco’s campaign for city council. It seems that one of the things that attracted people was her authenticity. This is reflected in the following quote:

[T]oday, Marielle is unanimous, but inside the party, not everyone was in her campaign. The party has many disputes, and she was also fully aware of her role, a role to represent women, to make a difference in the party, on the issue of machismo. It would be the first elected term for a woman in the Rio de Janeiro City Council. And it was politics always made by men. And when she arrived, she was not just any woman. She was a Black bisexual favela woman. She had a female partner. She had a daughter. And, in fact, she brought not only energy and a very well-constructed campaign, but I think that the most beautiful thing about her campaign was the affirmation of her roots and the affirmation of her personality. She was all that.¹⁵⁸

Franco’s campaign was shaped by a strong sense of collective empowerment of young Black women from favelas. This is reflected in the following quote by one of my interview partners, who is a Black woman from Maré:

I went to campaign for Tarcísio [Motta, KM] when I graduated, and she [became?] a candidate. And then the section [PSOL Maré, KM] decided to have a meeting with her and so on, to see how we were going to act, because we are a group of people directed by other campaigns. And during this meeting, Renata Souza, who is now a state deputy and the president of the Human Rights Commission,¹⁵⁹ introduced Marielle to us. We already knew Marielle, but she makes a political presentation. And in the political presentation, Renata says that it is difficult for a Black woman to recognize herself in another [Black woman, KM], because we are raised within such a strong structural machismo that we have always had political representations of White men, of middle-class White men. And how difficult it is to recognize yourself in the other. And after this sentence, my life story changes completely, like this, not that I abandon Tarcísio’s campaign, but I join Marielle’s campaign.¹⁶⁰

As this quote demonstrates, my interview partner recognized herself in Franco’s (and Renata Souza’s) trajectory and campaign and experienced a turning point in her personal history.

The campaign also included a group of young and agile social-media communicators. This is reflected by the following quote:

P: […] And there was a collective that ran her campaign, young people who wanted to run the campaign, so a lot of communicators, this new generation of communicators.

KM: Online.

P: Yeah, which is Mídia Ninja; people who saw her offered to help and make the materials, make the visual identity. Everybody did it by participating in the process, you know? Truly. Nothing was commissioned, you know. We didn’t go to an advertising company and order a slogan. No, things came about. They came about because they didn’t need to, because that’s it, she was very authentic. So, you don’t need to create much, you just need to realize and have a little technique to take what she does and turn it into this “I am because we are” [Eu sou porque nós somos] and make a slogan out of it.¹⁶¹

Mídia Ninja is a network of media activist that seeks to diversify and democratize communication and the Brazilian media landscape through the means of digital technology and a collaborative approach.¹⁶² It is responsible for an online platform called Vereadores que queremos (City councilors we want) that presents socially progressive candidates. On this page, Franco and her Black feminist favelada agenda were introduced to a wider public as well.¹⁶³

As the quote above reflects, Franco’s campaign slogan emerged almost by itself during the development of the campaign. “Eu sou porque nós somos” is an ubuntu proverb and means “I am because we are.”¹⁶⁴ It embraced and summarized various dimensions of what Franco had done and represented. First, it expressed the collective organization of her campaign (and later also of her office), as captured in the following quote:

[W]hen she defended her term, she defended a collegiate body, a collective with those who were willing to do it for an even bigger collective, you know? Something with a truly collective participation.¹⁶⁵

Second, Franco’s campaign slogan embraced the recognition of a history of resistance strongly present in favelas and Black communities. This is mirrored in the following quote:

I think there was a consciousness of the periphery, but that is also very much of Black people. “I am because we are” brings a lot of the perspective of ubuntu, right? That is, how Black people value the perspective of the ancestor, of the past, how nothing that is done is limited to who did it, but a whole history, right?¹⁶⁶

Third, it was close to (Black) feminist concerns about collective organization to strengthen women as a social group, which is also expressed in the saying “uma sobe e puxa a outra” (one woman goes up and pulls the other along). In the words of an interview partner:

I think she took that idea of “one woman goes up and pulls the other along” or “I am because we are” to heart. This phrase, “I am because we are,” gives this idea of belonging of ubuntu, of the Black woman she is very firmly, right? “I am because we are” is the sense of collectivity, including the African one, right? Of you, of the village, of the collective, of the family, of an organization that is collective. At the same time, this “one woman goes up, pulls the other along” also understood very well this dimension of the collective organization of a feminism, but above all it was not just any feminism, it was a feminism of the Black woman, of the leftist woman. She had this dimension that is not the question of the favelado as an identity, but at the same time what it meant to be a favelada and to have been a woman who overcame so many barriers.¹⁶⁷

Last but not least, there was also a dimension of care in the way Franco used and lived the slogan. This is expressed in the following quote:

I think that there is another element, not only of the political struggle being collective, but something that the left has to learn a lot, in my opinion, which is the dimension of affection and solidarity among us. So “I am because we are” is more than “we fight collectively.” I think it is “we need each other.” We need to care. Maybe this even goes a little bit into the pastoral, theological, mystical field. Because people get very tired in activism, very worn out. It is not easy; sometimes it is a very hard environment. So “I am because we are” is also, in my opinion, an element of “we need to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally; we need to look to the side and see if the fellow is well, if there are problems at home, if they have an anxiety crisis, if he/she is depressed.” I think that we need to take more care of each other. This is missing a lot.¹⁶⁸

Franco’s caring attitude toward others and its effects will be further elaborated in Sect. 3.3.2.

3.2.6.3 Electoral Period and Election

Marielle Franco and her campaign “enchanted” and mobilized people. With the start of the electoral period in June 2016, Franco became more and more known. During this time, one of my interview partners (P), who lived outside Rio de Janeiro at that time, made the following observation:

In June, the campaign really started, because the electoral period began. And then I went once, twice, three times, I couldn’t go very often […], but I went once in a while, and then I saw it, and said: “Guys, there is really something there.” […] When Marielle arrived, she would cause a stir, you know? She had a presence, a very strong energetic thing. She would arrive, and people would stop to look at her, you know? [P imitates the way people look at Marielle, jokingly] She would arrive, and people would look at her, and this was getting stronger and stronger.¹⁶⁹

Later, in August 2016, the same interview partner was amazed at the crowds that had gathered on the occasion of Franco’s birthday party:

And then in August, I went to Rio again for her birthday in July, but that’s because the party was in August. And then when I entered the party, I said: “Man …” She threw a party … I remember it was a leonine¹⁷⁰ ball. [P with affection, KM laughing]. Because she was a Leo. The party was packed, and Marielle was surrounded by hundreds of people. I said: “Man, this … [KM laughing] it’s coming true, it’s not possible, it’s not possible.”¹⁷¹

Just before the elections, Franco won the support of famous Brazilian musicians and artists, such as Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso. Once again, in the words of the same interview partner:

P: […] Then I came back for the election […] in October to vote. I arrived a few days before the election, so, a lot of meetings, final stretch, debates, I don’t know what. We were very focused on Freixo’s campaign because he was running for mayor. He came in second place and so on, it was very important. And then we went to do his last popular event, in the street, in a place in the Zona Sul, and there were lots of artists. And then, that day, at night, I started to see several artists talking about Marielle.

KM: [recognizing] Mh.

P: And I couldn’t believe it. She kept telling me: “Have you seen this here? Did you see this here? It’s Chico Buarque. I can’t believe it.” Because they had been participating in the activities that Marcelo went to with Marielle, and they left convinced that they needed not only to vote but to call for votes for her. They called for votes, they took pictures of Marielle, they took selfies with Marielle. Chico, Caetano, you know, it started, and it was real like that. Chico asking her for a hug, you know, something that … people were happy to [know about the?] “woman, favelada, Black” [campaign slogan of Franco, KM].¹⁷²

On October 2, 2016, Franco was elected a city councilor of Rio de Janeiro with 46,502 votes. This made her the fifth-most voted of 51 city councilors, the second-most voted woman, and the only woman identifying as Black.¹⁷³ When Franco was elected, people close to her could not believe it, as testified in the following quote:

And then she was elected. We couldn’t believe it. I was already in Lapa, waiting, the results were coming out little by little. When she arrived in Lapa, she already had the result. We already knew that she had been elected, and we kept looking at ourselves: “How is it possible? What now? What now?”¹⁷⁴

As seen above in Sect. 3.2.6.2, one of my interview partners from Maré had participated in Franco’s electoral campaign. As the following quote demonstrates, her election was something that she had never experienced before:

I didn’t go to Lapa. I stayed home that election day. Her number was on TV. And I remember when we reached ten thousand, which is a guarantee. Ten thousand is a guarantee that she was in. There were ten thousand. And my family that almost didn’t vote and that I sent for the first time had voted and kept singing a song that was by Luan Santana. “Eu, você, o mar e ela” is the song they were singing. [P emotional and happy] Now: “Eu, você e Marielle. Eu, você e Marielle.” So that’s how remarkable that was for us. And then Mari was the fifth-most voted in the municipality and the second-most voted woman, right?¹⁷⁵

As this quote shows, Franco’s election was striking for the interview partner and the people in her surroundings. This is reflected through the rephrasing of the song “Eu, você, o mar e ela” (I, you, the sea, and she) to “eu, você e Marielle” (I, you, and Marielle), which sounds similar in Portuguese.¹⁷⁶

The same interview partner, who later also joined Franco’s staff, told me another episode that reflects the significance of her election:

P: And before we started working, in fact, inside that house, we had a party on Renata [Souza]’s laje [flat concrete roof that is typical for favelas, KM], which was where many of our political meetings took place. And my son, who is now eleven years old, at the time he was eight, he sat on Marielle’s lap, and I remember the scene, and he said: “You are going to change our lives.”

KM: He said? [amazed]

P: [fondly] Yeah. He did. But we didn’t imagine that it would change so much, right? Because the work with a more dignified salary […], there was a whole change, right?¹⁷⁷

As my own comment in the passage reflects, this story amazed and touched me. For me, it expressed a collective hope and trust in Franco and the project she represented. This project was expected to have long-term impacts that would also benefit the coming generations (personified by my interviewee’s eight-year-old son on Franco’s lap).

This hope was not only fulfilled on the governmental and political level, as will be discussed below. It was also fulfilled in terms of more personal levels. As a member of Franco’s staff with a suitable salary, my interview partner was able to pay for high-quality primary and secondary education for her children.¹⁷⁸ Working for Franco not only changed her life but also that of her children: “So in that way, it’s about other opportunities, as Angela Davis says: ‘When a Black woman moves, the whole structure moves along with her.’”¹⁷⁹

3.2.7 City Council of Rio de Janeiro

In February 2017, Franco and her team started their work on the City Council of Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, Franco was also elected president of the Commissão da Defesa da Mulher (Commission for the Defense of Women; in the following abbreviated as Women’s Commission). The following chapters highlight different dimensions and aspects of her activities.

3.2.7.1 “Access the Real Needs”: Working with Social Movements and Collectives

Franco’s activities as a city councilor were characterized by a close relationship to those she politically represented, an accurate perception of their needs, and the ability to transform these needs into action.¹⁸⁰ As one interview partner stated, Franco elaborated her projects “with” and not “for” the groups she represented:

It was a very important thing. It’s not doing for, it’s doing with. So, I can’t do it for you, but I can do it with you. I can even do it for you, but I am doing it my way. Maybe I don’t have access to your real needs, so do it with. And that was it: she welcomed, gathered, held meetings to make proposals, and dialogued, stated the limits […]. Because sometimes people don’t understand these political procedures: “Ah, the governor is going to give orders to the city council.” He won’t, you know? […] Sometimes people don’t understand this, but the meetings to make decisions and to make law proposals […] are meant to help society effectively in a concrete way. And for this you need to talk to civil society, you need to talk to residents, you need to listen to the people who are going to receive this benefit.¹⁸¹

As this quote reveals, Franco’s office put a strong emphasis on dialogue and collaboration with civil society, which also had an educational purpose in informing people about political procedures and responsibilities and stating the limits. Beyond this, Franco’s office was also distinguished by its simultaneous work on different fronts and issues. It encompassed topics of intersectional feminism, the needs of the LGBTQ+ community, solidary economy, the criminalization and incarceration of Black youth, and the struggles of favelas. Franco’s political project was not monothematic, because her life was not either, as an interview partner stated:

I think it’s very representative not only of what she represented, but how she insisted on representing, you know? Without bargaining, without self-promotion, without turning it into a … banner maybe, but banner maybe is not the right word, but … without turning it into a single agenda. Marielle was not monothematic, of only one agenda on which she wanted to build her story, to project herself, maybe that … No, because that was in fact dear to her. It had to do with her life, with her history, with her daughter, with her trajectory, right? Her own historical family relationship, right? She comes from a Catholic, conventional family, and then all these transgressions on the issue of sexuality. All these stories, how important they are, and how she accepts the challenge of embodying and incorporating this in a very strong, fearless way. But I think this was fundamental for people to identify with her.¹⁸²

Ultimately, the office’s work on several fronts, and its close cooperation with those affected by the topics discussed, was also reflected in the composition of the team. Asked about the office’s specific characteristics, an interview partner answered:

So the actual diversity within her office. The favela representation [people in the background are making a lot of noise] … The favela representation, the women representation, the LGBT representation. It was the first mandata [artificial word used to refer to Franco’s office that was composed by a majority of women, KM], the first elected official to name a trans woman to her office […]. On the badge of this advisor was her social name, not her official name, but her social name. So it was a question not only of speech, right, but of practice.¹⁸³

As this quote notes, the majority of her employees actually came from the social groups that were politically represented. This also included a trans woman whose social name was registered. According to my interview partner, this demonstrated that the office represented the concerns of women, Black people, and people from favelas not only in discourse but also in practice.¹⁸⁴

All Franco’s staff members were encouraged to continue their histories of activism in their personal environments and to include the respective perspectives, networks, and contacts in the office’s activities. This led to mutual empowerment, as an interview partner affirmed:

P: [Marielle] became a person with visibility from her parliamentary work, but she also gave visibility to the struggles that the other people who are, who were part of her office, were already doing before joining that office.

KM: Mhm. So it was a gain of strength, a lot of strength.

P: Wasn’t it? And that was not something that was just her responsibility. It was everyone’s responsibility, and she invited them not only to be part of her office but also to continue their struggles out here. Because people continued here. People who were in education, health, transportation, solidarity economy, all these processes, you know?¹⁸⁵

The office’s prolific collaboration with social movements was reflected in the number of proposals. Evaluating the projects and initiatives promoted between the beginning of 2017 and March 14, 2018, Franco’s office was very active. It presented 16 bills, mostly related to the perspective of intersectional feminism, asserting (Black) women’s access to rights to physical and psychological integrity and dignity.¹⁸⁶ After Franco’s death, five of these bills were approved on May 2, 2018.¹⁸⁷

One of the approved bills was Espaço Coruja (Owl space). It foresaw the opening of childcare facilities at night where (single) parents could bring their children when they had to work or to study during the nighttime and had no one to take care of them.¹⁸⁸ This project was met with a lot of sympathy from my interview partners, since it reflected their own trajectories and needs as mothers or fathers from working-class backgrounds.¹⁸⁹

3.2.7.2 Strengthening the Presence of “the Black Woman” in Parliamentary Space

According to my interview partners, one of the greatest achievements of Franco’s term in office was to strengthen the presence of Black women in politics. In fact, Franco was not the first Black women to be elected a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro. There had already been Benedita da Silva¹⁹⁰ (and Jurema Batista¹⁹¹) from PT. Yet according to my interview partners, Franco differed from da Silva, as she sought to empower other women systematically. This is reflected in the following quote:

[W]e’ve had other Black women in elected office, but who never had much power of leadership within the parties, you know? And one of them had a lot of power within the party, but at the same time she didn’t have the same vision [sacada] that Marielle had, of bringing other women to strengthen herself. It was Benedita. Benedita already had a lot of power inside PT, but she never strengthened other women’s groups to join. And this ended up weakening her issue too, even though she is still a very strong person, right?¹⁹²

Another interview partner also compared Franco’s actuation with da Silva’s and emphasized the strength of her voice and how she vindicated her right to be there:

[A] mark that she [Franco, KM] created strongly is the presence of Black women in parliament. For a long time, the parliament in Rio de Janeiro had a strong Black presence, which was Benedita’s, but it was always a very discreet presence. I think that Marielle is a mark in the sense that she presents this presence of the Black woman, the Black woman from the periphery … I won’t even go into the issue of sexuality at this moment … but a peripheral presence of a Black woman, progressive, you know, of the left. I think that a strong mark of Marielle’s trajectory is how she positions the place and the voice of the Black woman inside the parliament. A voice that stands out, a voice that affronts, a voice that confronts, a voice that denounces, a voice that claims its place, you know, its place of recognition. I think this was a strong mark that caused a lot of uneasiness, I think right from the start, you know? You see the composition of the parliament, of the city council. […] The profiles of men and women are similar. And suddenly you have Marielle. I think this was a significant mark.¹⁹³

One famous example of Franco raising her voice and defending her right and place to speak occurred on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2018. That day, Franco gave a speech in the city council and presented statistics on violence against women. She was interrupted by a man who heckled the name of an officer of the military dictatorship. Franco responded with the following words:

Is there a gentleman who is defending the dictatorship and saying something against [my speech]? Is that so? I ask that the presidency of the house, in case of further demonstrations that come to hinder my speech, to proceed as we do when the gallery interrupts any councilor. I will not be interrupted [eu não serei interrompida]. I will not put up with interruptions by the councilors of this house. I will not put up with a citizen who comes here and does not know how to listen to the position of a woman elected president of the Women’s Commission in this house.¹⁹⁴

As this quote shows, the right and place to speak is not only about an individual but also about social position and context. In other words, Franco asks that the other councilors respect not only her but also the position of a woman elected president of the Women’s Commission.¹⁹⁵ The video of Franco’s speech became widely known after her assassination and her assertion “I will not be interrupted” (eu não serei interrompida) has been frequently quoted since.¹⁹⁶

During her term in office, Franco’s team organized several events. One of them was to honor the Black writer Conceição Evaristo on August 1, 2017.¹⁹⁷ On the occasion of the International Day of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean Women (July 25), and in connection with the plenary discussion “Eu mulher negra, resisto” (I, a Black woman, resist) organized by Franco’s office, Evaristo was offered the Pedro Ernesto medal by the City Council of Rio de Janeiro. This medal is the body’s main award for those who stand out in Brazilian or international society. During the event, the chamber of the city council was crowded with Black people, as an interview partner recalled:

That day was very beautiful. But how Black the chamber became. Black in a good sense, because they always used “a coisa ficou preta” [something went wrong; literally: “something turned black,” KM] in a pejorative sense, you know? Always in a pejorative sense, you know? But how Black the Chamber became, you know? And then we had to use our space, use the chamber itself, where the plenary took place, and the room next door, which had a TV showing what was happening there, and everything was packed. Magnificent. And Black people, people who had never entered that house, felt at home in that place.¹⁹⁸

As this quote shows, this event affirmed Black people’s identity and presence in a place that traditionally negates it—that day, Black people “felt at home in that place.” Another project called Rolezinho also contributed to people “feeling at home” in parliamentary space. It will be presented below in Sect. 3.3.1.2.

3.2.7.3 Controversy I: The Favela Agenda and Police Violence

The concerns of people living in the favela had been an integral part of Franco’s electoral campaign and continued to be a main axis of her term in office. However, the question of which issues should be given priority was not without controversy.

In the first months of Franco’s term as a city councilor, her team organized a workshop called Direito à Favela (Right to the favela). It was held on June 23 and 24, 2017, at the Museu da Maré with around 300 participants from different favelas in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁹⁹ Its objective was to strengthen the network of favela activists and to collect ideas “from the favela for the favela” on different public policies, like housing, sanitation, health, education, culture, the decriminalization of drugs, and public security.²⁰⁰

As the workshop’s title hints, it was inspired by the discussion about the “right to the city.”²⁰¹ Originally, the phrase “right to the city” was coined by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre. In the middle of the 1968 student revolts, he pointed out that urbanization was a crucial aspect of political and class struggles. In 2008, and in the face of the ongoing global financial crisis, David Harvey made a new reference to Lefebvre’s “right to the city.”²⁰² His work departs from the Marxist insight that capitalism requires capital to flow freely, which makes it necessary to constantly create new opportunities for the production and absorption of surplus value. In this process, capitalist urbanization plays an active role. “Creative destruction”²⁰³ allows new urban infrastructure and housing projects to emerge and capital to flow. Yet such “creative destruction” has a problematic aspect, as it usually affects the lower classes. According to Harvey, social movements could unite by jointly demanding a “right to the city,” meaning “greater control over the production and use of the surplus,”²⁰⁴ so that all residents of the city have opportunities to participate in shaping urban life and its possibilities.

According to my interview partners, the workshop Direito à favela was an important event, as it actually addressed the concerns of local residents and activists.²⁰⁵ Franco was not the only politician to organize an event in the Museu da Maré. But according to an interview partner:

She was the only one we participated in and did it jointly. As we are not a partisan institution, and we can’t be either, to open it [this space, KM] for some, we have to do it for others, too, you know. So other politicians, I believe, asked for space here to hold meetings, gatherings … but never with this theme that is very much ours, you know, nor with the possibility that we influence it, as we did in this case.²⁰⁶

However, there was also a limit to the discussions held in this workshop, since public security was not the responsibility of the municipality (and the city council) but of the state. This limit was pointed out by an interview partner:

We held a meeting in Maré called Direito à Favela, a two-day meeting with youth, […]. It [public security, KM] wasn’t the municipality’s prerogative, but the figure of Marielle as a woman from the favela, a human-rights defender, having this axis in her office, led to this discussion. She was a reference.²⁰⁷

Being a reference for human rights in favelas, local activists expected Franco to work on the issue of public security and police violence in the communities with elevated priority. This is reflected in the following quote from a person from Maré:

[T]he first and only time I went to her office, I went to her cabinet, was to make a complaint. It was the Thursday before her death. People here think that since I am older, they think I have the authority to speak. [P smiling, KM laughing] The people here were complaining a lot, because there were a lot of [police] operations, and she hardly ever touched this subject in the city council, which is a … which is crazy, because she dies of violence and everyone was saying: “She was talking too much.” Me: “No, on the contrary. I was there at the… [P emotional, with tears] less than a week before her death, I was there complaining that she wasn’t saying anything.” And I went to make this complaint, you know, that people were annoyed, and that she moved, she left from here and went to live outside, and people were also complaining.²⁰⁸

This quote is noteworthy because it contests any hypothesis that linked Franco’s assassination to her denunciations of violence in the favelas (“she said too much”). My interview partner’s evaluation that Franco “wasn’t saying anything” was also shared to a certain degree by another interview partner who worked on Franco’s team in the city council and highlighted that the issue of police violence was not the highest priority:

Marielle wanted to run a little from the public-security agenda, for example. She was elected in the wake of the rise of women’s struggle for rights, the primavera feminista [feminist spring], here in Brazil during the Fora Cunha [translated: “Cunha out”; slogan of the protests demanding that Eduardo Cunha resign from office, KM]. He was a federal deputy involved in a series of … well, political crimes but who was also a staunch defender of dismantling women’s rights, opposed to gender agendas. And he begins to suffer a series of accusations, and women unite to demand “Cunha out.” And Marielle is elected in the wake of this insurgency of women, this organization of the feminist movement in Brazil and the feminist movement in Latin America. Marielle was elected in a movement of rising Black women, and she brings this to her term in office. She has as the axis of her term the favela agenda, but she implements more and more a gender perspective as a very strong agenda in the performance of the office. But this agenda [of public security, KM] pursued Marielle, right? So the favela agenda was much more articulated from a gender perspective. Work with mothers, with women but never very strongly on the issue of public security as a whole, you know?²⁰⁹

As this quote shows, Franco’s term in office focused strongly on gender issues and did not address the issue of violence and public security as directly as some favela movements expected her to. Yet the increasing militarization of Brazilian public security²¹⁰ and the military intervention in Rio in early 2018²¹¹ imposed the issue on her. Even though public security belonged to the responsibility of the state and not the municipality, the issue resurfaced in her office:

It was impossible to escape with the intervention and with the events that took place. So there was this recurrent discussion within the office that the public-security agenda is not a prerogative of the municipality. But we have to discuss it, for example, when they bring up the issue of arming the municipal guard, which is not an armed guard. But the ascendant process of militarization of the daily life of Brazilian society has been pushing this agenda. And this was an agenda that we discussed a lot, linked to favelas and peripheries, to what we had in the context of the city. For example, [we had] both the municipal guard and the military police, which polices by the show of force, by patrolling, [we had] a very strong action of repression against Black youth from the favelas, for example, when moving in the city, especially when these young people go to the Zona Sul of the city, to the beaches, for example. We had the closing of a bus line because this bus line came directly from a favela to the Zona Sul. Favela Jacarezinho. So this agenda was always on the heels of Marielle’s office, and it couldn’t be any different, she herself being a woman from the favela. She tried to give it a stronger gender outline, but the public-security agenda kept coming after us, at the municipal level.²¹²

3.2.7.4 Controversy II: Lesbian Visibility

Another topic that was also controversially discussed was the office’s struggle for LGBTQ+ issues, especially lesbian visibility. As stated earlier, sexual orientation was not a central topic of Franco’s electoral campaign.²¹³ However, this changed with her election as a city councilor. At this point, the developments in Franco’s private life increasingly overlapped with her agenda to strengthen the causes of LGBTQ+ communities.

As indicated in Sect. 3.1.4, Franco and Monica Benicio had struggled to be a couple since they had met in 2004. As it was difficult for both them and for their environment to acknowledge and support the relationship, they broke up again and again. Throughout the years, as an interview partner observed, Franco’s “relationship with Monica was always a hidden relationship, it was always a thing of … it was always a thing of … it was a dream that she didn’t think of realizing, which is to take on the relationship with Monica.”²¹⁴

Yet in 2016, different factors interacted in a way that finally allowed Franco and Benicio to enter into a stable long-term relationship for good. This is reflected in the following quote:

P: There is also a question that I think is personal for her. […] For the first time in her life, she feels autonomous financially, professionally, to the point of making her own choices, because since Luyara was born, Luyara was the priority. So like any woman from a favela, having a male partner that could help her raise her daughter, I think that for her, it was always a priority. And because of her Catholic upbringing, for everything that involved her life, the presence of a man was also important for these issues. Because in this man–woman relationship, you know, the financial issue has an impact, the social issue has an impact. And when you have a daughter, you know, raised in a hetero family, you know, from this relationship, then I think that for her the idea of family, as her family understood it, it was important to offer this to Luyara. Because when she starts the relationship with Monica, effectively, you know, Luyara is almost eighteen years old.

KM: Ah, yes, almost an adult.

P: Yes, so it was a moment when she felt free. So, “my daughter is no longer, in quotes, a burden for me, so now I can also take on a … I can be, right?”²¹⁵

This quote illustrates once again the complex relationship between individual and social requirements that Franco had to meet at the same time.²¹⁶ In the end, when Franco arrived in office, she was not only reunited with Benicio. She also started showing her relationship in public and affirmed its legitimacy by posting photos on social media.²¹⁷

At the same time, LGBTQ+ issues were also more strongly emphasized during Franco’s term in office. In this regard, the most famous example was the bill to introduce the “day of lesbian visibility” to Rio de Janeiro’s official calendar,²¹⁸ which became the subject of various controversies.

To understand the idea of the project, it is important to know that days of commemoration in Rio de Janeiro’s official city calendar have an educational purpose in public schools. An interview partner explained it in the following way, notably with an ironic undertone:

In Rio de Janeiro there is a French-bread day, a day of … they approve this in the plenary. They approve it in the house. […] October 25 is a day for whatever, and what does it serve for? It serves to enter the official calendar, so that schools and public spaces can work on that date to bring that theme into discussion. So there is Alzheimer’s day, I don’t know what day, nanana day. All these days pass; it is customary, it is kind of a gentleman’s rule. Nobody vetoes, […] everybody approves the day of something, because some deputy asks for it, because this one is asking for it, because it is important. There is a day for everything. There was a baker’s day, a day for I don’t know, for more things … that’s it. That’s it, there is the French-bread day if you look it up, there are crazy days, because on French-bread day the schools will talk about French bread, how it was created, I don’t know when, nanana, that nonsense. There are more interesting days and so on.²¹⁹

As the same interview partner recalled, the bill written by Franco’s team and lesbian movements was intended to raise awareness of lesbian lives, especially lesbian health:

She created the lesbian visibility day, which was exactly to bring the lesbian women issue into a space of debate, mainly in the area of health. Because there is a whole discussion about lesbian women’s health, for example, cervical screening, which the SUS [Unified Health System] recommends, “you have to do your treatment once a year to avoid cervical cancer” and so on. Lesbian women, when they arrive at the … many of them never have sex with men, so the doctors think that “they don’t need to do prevention because they don’t have sex.”²²⁰

Yet, when it came to voting in the city chamber, the proposal was rejected by two conservative, evangelical votes.²²¹ This came as a surprise to Franco and her team:

So she was very sure that they were going to approve this … It was very well grounded, that is, to discuss the health of lesbian women, the careful look at issues of violence, because lesbian women have to suffer domestic sexual violence, because there is a whole structure of machismo that says that lesbian women deserve rape to “learn to become women,” in short, to bring up these issues. It had already passed in a first vote without any problems. When it passed the second vote, the councilmen of the more conservative evangelical wing noticed it, called it out, and blocked it with hate speeches. And Marielle, who was that lion, who [unintelligible] arrived and called for attention, wasn’t afraid of what was different. So she was always very secure and so on. That day, she went, she made her speech, she refuted absolutely all the opposing speeches, but then she left the chamber, she left the plenary, we were going up, and she was mute. I knew how angry she was because she … [unintelligible]. I knew she was very upset with that story, but I thought it was anger, and then she pulled me into the bathroom and inside she cried like this, you know, with rage, mixed with, you know, with … Because, you know, it was something like that … It was hate. It was prejudice. It was everything that happened that afternoon. It was very bad. But she pulled herself together and got up there to the team that was shaken, that was watching from above on TV. She was upset, because she was sure it was going to be approved. It had already been approved in the first instance. It was just about, you know, finalizing. She embraced the wave of the girls who created the project, who developed the justifications. She took care of everyone. The girls were devastated, you know, who wrote the bill, the defense of the project. She took care of everyone. She was very much like that, very human, melted butter. They say: “Ah, Marielle, she was a strong woman.” She was strong, but also melted butter.²²²

In relation to this episode, it is worth noting how Franco looked after the people around her in a moment of fragility. As will be seen in Sect. 3.3.2, caring for others was one of her most striking characteristics. It helped empower and strengthen individuals and groups.

The same episode described above was also witnessed by another interview partner. According to her, this episode perfectly demonstrated Franco’s strength and how empowered she was:

I saw Mari very sad once when the lesbian visibility bill failed to pass by two votes, and super prejudiced votes, and she was very sad, like that. For her, it was very important. It just proved that really, how much visibility there is, how much [they want?] visibility, you know? The visibility of a woman’s body, the visibility of a specific gender. She was very downcast, sad. Then she took a breath. Then she went back to that house and said: “Oh, you know. Ah, my vote there.” […] Most empowered. She leaves a lot of this to the women today, you know, who are there in this role.²²³

In the speech mentioned in this quote, which was understood as an expression of her empowerment, Franco did not give too much space to the lost vote but suggested a different reading of the situation as an act of resistance by the lesbian and feminist movements. The presence of lesbian and feminist movements in the city council during the voting was an act of standing up for their lives as lesbian women. Through the bill, she said, the conservative city council had been taken out of its comfort zone. She affirmed that she and fellow activists would continue to fight for representation and occupy all places of power to make lesbian women more visible.²²⁴

The quote above also reflects that seeking collective empowerment is one of Franco’s most important legacies. After her assassination, for example, different leaders of lesbian movements testified to the importance of Franco’s parliamentary activities. They emphasized the difference she had made not only for the cause but for many individuals, too.²²⁵ Monica Benicio, Franco’s partner, also continued her efforts to empower lesbian women. After Franco’s murder, Benicio entered politics and was elected a city councilor of Rio de Janeiro in 2020. In 2021, she again proposed the bill to introduce a “day of lesbian visibility,”²²⁶ which was once again rejected.²²⁷ But Benicio kept at it and tried again in 2022. Finally, the bill passed on September 13, 2022.²²⁸ Other examples that testify to the ongoing legacy of Franco’s effort for collective empowerment will be treated in the Sects. 3.3 and 3.4. Before that, I want to return to the controversies that arose because of Franco’s efforts to strengthen lesbian women.

The previous paragraphs showed that the collective empowerment of lesbian women was a demanding parliamentary task. Beyond this, it was also a challenge among Franco’s supporters and not self-evident. As stated earlier, the concerns of the LGBTQ+ community (and lesbian women in particular) had not been part of Franco’s election campaign. So when she started taking up these issues more strongly, it led to conflicts with some of her supporters. This is reflected in the following quote by a friend who had helped organize Franco’s campaign in Maré:

I confess that right from the start I was a little upset because as we did a campaign … I mean, I already knew about her bisexuality, they lived together. Monica, too. We were all in the same group of friends, right? But since we ran a campaign for Black favelada women, I was afraid … and then, after she won, she took on a strong LGBT movement. I was afraid that she would forget this debate that we had during the campaign and that people who voted would feel a little betrayed, right: “Pô [a filling word expressing discontent, KM], she never said she was LGBT, she said leader of women.”²²⁹

This quote shows that people suspected that Franco was about to become alienated from her original campaign agenda when LGBTQ+ topics began to take on greater prominence in her office. For this reason, it became necessary for Franco to seek a conversation with some of her allies and to balance different interests. This is reflected in the following quote:

So we even talked about it, and we had evaluated that it wasn’t that she had become a LGBT leader, but that the LGBT movement had more needs and demanded more from her. And so she kept this characteristic, you know? But I think that her role there is working with these groups: Black, women, LGBT, that she ended up embracing, and that got stronger because she publicly acknowledged homosexuality.²³⁰

As this quote reflects, raising awareness about the needs of LGBTQ+ movements, and lesbian movements in particular, was an important step to smooth the waters. As a result, there was an agreement according to which Franco took up the lesbian movement because it lacked political representation and visibility.

3.2.7.5 Reactions to Franco’s Activities

In the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, Franco personified difference in many ways. For many city councilors, the presence of a Black woman from a favela, a human-rights activist, a mother, a feminist, and a person living in a lesbian relationship was challenging. In the words of an interview partner:

Marielle was a lot of information. Let’s put it this way, right? At the same time woman, at the same time mother, at the same time, at the same time, at the same time … […]. So, I think she was a lot of information for a very well formatted and boxed in parliament. So she only had two options with all these belongings: either she would come and be silent and then she would go unnoticed, doing what was possible, or if she dared to open her mouth, it would always be this discomfort. And I think that was the option she took, right?²³¹

Beyond what was said in this quote, Franco’s presence was even more challenging for the city council because she did not stand there alone but brought a lot of people with similar backgrounds with her, as already seen above. This created a specific dynamic that was either perceived as a threat to the status quo or as something profoundly hopeful. Both are illustrated in the following quote:

P: We can’t put Marielle in a bubble. We have to bring Marielle … I am also a practicing Catholic. So what I like most, you as a theologian, what I like most to practice in the Catholic Church, is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and especially in Ordinary Time, when he is together with the population, doing, dialoguing with the people. It is this dialogue with the people that the politicians have lost, or maybe they had it once? I don’t know. But in a certain way, Marielle introduced the new, a new way for politics, a new way for life, a new way for relationships, a new for everything, because Marielle is bisexual and she was there, right, shaking this structure of a hypocritical society. Marielle was against reducing the age of criminal responsibility because she was convinced that it was not by imprisoning, by incarcerating, that we could address the issue of security. It is by taking care of people that we make people feel safer. And care even for those that have transgressed [me?] one day. So this process involved the [unintelligible] that Renata Souza is experiencing here in the legislative assembly. It was something that Marielle faced inside the city council.

KM: Threats.

P: Yes, threatening acts, attempts to silence within that legislative process, right? And Marielle was, her office, she took all the possibilities to include people who until then had no visibility within that legislative space. So she paid tribute to: [unintelligible], Black writers, trans women, LGBT movements. So everything that was within her proposal, her campaign platform, she supported. What she had time to do, as a parliamentarian, she did. So it is like observing the gospel, it is the new, right? It is a new one that arrives. So it is the new that shakes structures, and the new that has to be silenced, shut up. But just as Jesus was never shut up, they couldn’t shut up Marielle.²³²

In this quote, the “new” embodied by Franco has a prophetic, even slightly messianic dimension, as it marks the beginning of a new, more “salvific” way of doing politics. But it is important to point out that this “new” is not exclusively tied to Franco’s person (even though she had an important role); instead, it is tied to the collective construction she pursued. For this reason, attempts at intimidation affected not only her but also her coworkers and other Black women pursuing projects of collective construction.²³³

The hope that Franco embodied can be further clarified by drawing attention to the overlapping of the individual and collective dimensions. For Franco, being elected and working as a city councilor was an important step in her personal trajectory, as it allowed her to develop her full potential in a way that was visible to everyone and step out of Marcelo Freixo’s shadow. At the same time, this also encouraged other Black women to take their places. This is illustrated in the following quote:

She blossomed. She blossomed because when you are an advisor or when you are at work doing a very important job, those who were nearby knew she was doing it, but the visibility was always Freixo’s, right? I think that she, as a city councilor, having already had this experience of an office, of building the office [of an elected official, KM], she knew, like no one else, how to touch that, carry those kids, those Black girls. I think that her office also had this construction of saying: “Look, this is also ours. If I am here, I am because we are. If I am here, you can also be here.”²³⁴

As another interview partner confirmed, Franco, her work, and how she related to others did in fact have an effect on other women. In this context, the interviewee told me about an episode involving a young woman from a favela who felt encouraged to study law after meeting Franco. According to my interview partner, this encouragement came through stories of realized possibilities in the lives of Franco and other Black women:

[S]he [Franco, KM] was talking about the things that were already there, a group of people who had already gone beyond, penetrated the bubble in a way, of the place that society says that Black people [should occupy?], especially Black women, which is not necessarily […] at the stove in [someone’s?] house, which is no problem at all. My paternal grandmother was a domestic worker. And thanks to everything she did, I am here today.²³⁵

As this quote shows, Franco (and other Black women like her) helped other young Black women to break with the idea that their place in life was the place of a domestic servant, which has typically been Black women’s work. The point here was not to speak poorly of domestic servants—on the contrary, as the example above shows—but to open up new possibilities in the imagination of young Black women.

Despite such cases, Franco’s example did not automatically translate into mobilization. Tragically, it was only her assassination that made people move more strongly. This is expressed in the following quote by one of Franco’s ex-staff members:

We kept fighting. Communications fought to increase the number of followers on Marielle’s page, to give visibility to the things we did in office. It was a daily fight. And Marielle today, on her page, on her site, [unintelligible] her family, her partner, you know, her widow, Marielle has thousands of [followers, KM] … thousands.²³⁶

It was not only difficult to mobilize people to follow and participate in the work of the office. Franco also had difficulties encouraging other women to candidate for political offices in order to advance the collective political agenda. This is reflected in the following quote:

[S]he was kind of like a soccer coach looking for this player, you know? She was plotting, and I think it’s a shame that with her death she managed to encourage and in life, I think, she would have more difficulties to encourage.²³⁷

The reasonableness of this evaluation becomes evident in the case of Mônica Francisco, for example. Francisco is a Black woman from the favela of Borel, a social scientist, and a feminist evangelical pastor. She was one of Franco’s staff members and only decided to run for office after Franco’s assassination when she realized that Black women and human-rights defenders needed to continue occupying political spaces despite the fear and risk it posed to their lives. She was elected a state deputy in 2018.²³⁸

3.2.7.6 Traces of a Future That Did Not Materialize

It is not easy to imagine how Franco’s personal trajectory and career would have proceeded had they not been brutally interrupted. Nevertheless, there are a few hints about what could have happened.

Franco seems to have been greatly concerned for the causes she represented and fought for. But she did not want to pursue a personal political career at any cost. This can be illustrated by how Franco thought about the situation of Jean Wyllys, a famous, openly gay ex-politician of PSOL, who received numerous death threats.²³⁹ In the words of an interview partner:

[She wasn’t doing the office for herself?], not at all, not at all, and she even sometimes said that “I don’t know if I’m going to continue this,” because people put her on that pedestal of hero and so on, right, because she relativized things a lot. Jean Wyllys, a deputy of PSOL, who had to leave Brazil, lived through a very violent situation, he had many threats and then what happened? Jean started to walk around with only security. Freixo himself lived this life, but Freixo still had another way of facing things. But the case in Brasília with Jean … They even arrested some guys at their house with a plan to kill […]. Then I remember Marielle saying: “Man, I’m worried about Jean. He can’t leave the house anymore.” Because in Rio the deputies would always go to concerts, they would meet for a march on the beach … Rio is like this, it’s very much in the street, people meet a lot in the street … Carnival … And Jean wouldn’t go to anything. Then there was a concert and I said: “Did Jean go?” And she said: “No, Jean is not even able to leave his house.” And she said: “Man, I am not up to it, if one day I got to that point … if one day I got to that point,” because she had not received [a threat, KM] [at the time?], “if one day I got to that point and received a threat and I could no longer go to my beach, not be able to get my car, to go there … I would not agree to a role like that. Office for what? I will do what I want by doing it in other ways.” So that was not a project that ended there, you know? She didn’t have a personal political project for herself. She had a project of being integrated in a collective that had her and she was with the collective, managing to change things. Because if it was for this, if it was for being threatened, if it was for living under escort: “I won’t do it.”²⁴⁰

Apart from this, there are indications of how Franco’s career could have continued after 2018. According to my interview partners, Franco would have been interested in running for the Federal Senate of Brazil. In the end, however, her party, PSOL, nominated Chico Alencar to run for senator. After that, a few days before her murder, Franco was nominated as a candidate for vice governor alongside Tarcísio Motta.²⁴¹

In any case, my interview partners agreed that Franco would have had a long and very successful political career ahead of her had she lived on.²⁴² This is exemplarily reflected in the following quote:

I think that if she were still alive, she would be a … she wouldn’t sort out problems, but I think she would mess with the party structure, which as I said is like the leftist parties, right? It has a very White and masculine structure. At the same time, she had this possibility of being able to talk to the favela, something that the favela could understand, something that our left has a lot of difficulty doing.²⁴³

Beyond this, other interviewees saw in her the potential to change politics in Rio de Janeiro and possibly in Brazil by expanding the collective construction that had begun. This is illustrated by the following quote from an older interview partner:

She had an enormous potential. She would have turned 40 on Saturday, right? We thought that when she would be 60 at the most, she would be president of the republic. That was our perspective. Maybe I wouldn’t be there because I would be too old by then. Maybe I wouldn’t participate so actively in this construction, but we were already building a youth that was going to start this process. And for her to get there, she would have to increase her base more and more. The base would have to be so big that, perhaps, to reach it, it would have to have many, many, many people supporting it.²⁴⁴

Because of Franco’s assassination on March 14, 2018, all ideas about her possible future will always remain speculation. However, as the previous quote highlights, collective construction was fundamental to her life and trajectory and would have continued to be so in her (interrupted) future. It will therefore be explored in more detail in the next chapter; especially in Sect. 3.3.3.

3.3 Strategies of Individual and Collective (Self-)Empowerment

Throughout her trajectory as an activist and professional, Franco helped strengthen social movements and causes in Rio de Janeiro’s civil society. In the following, I will provide an overview of different strategies of individual and collective (self-)empowerment. These include education, cuidado (care), construção coletiva²⁴⁵ (collective construction) in words and practice, incarnation, and creating visibility. These strategies were identified on the basis of the interviews about Franco’s life. However, they go beyond her individual life and are still used today in her social context.

3.3.1 Education

In Franco’s trajectory, education played a crucial role in her own development and also in her political work. Here, education not only refers to formal school education but also to critical knowledge about one’s everyday life.

3.3.1.1 Education to Act in a Qualified Way

In Franco’s personal development, the experience of the course to prepare for the university admission exam organized by CEASM and its understanding of education was particularly formative. Here, she experienced firsthand that education is a fundamental condition for changing lives.²⁴⁶ This is also demonstrated by the further progression of Franco’s life. After studying sociology at PUC, she completed a master’s degree in public administration at Fluminense Federal University (UFF).²⁴⁷ This helped to qualify her for her work in the Human Right Defense and Citizenship Commission and to prepare intellectually for the city council.²⁴⁸ Convinced of the importance of education for the improvement of one’s life conditions, Franco also tried to encourage others to pursue an education as well.²⁴⁹ This is reflected in the following quote:

For whatever difficulty she was going through, regardless of her situation, she made herself available to others, because that’s it: because she would go to have conversations with girls who had children, who were pregnant during adolescence. She would go there and do it, because she thought that everybody could be like her: wanting to move, wanting to graduate, wanting to … ²⁵⁰

In the preparatory course for the university admission exam held by CEASM, Franco learned that education and action must correlate to arrive at informed and qualified actions. This attitude was also evident in her work in the city council:

P: So in a short time she had several projects in mind […]. There is another characteristic of many leftist parliamentarians, which is to be driven by provocation from the right. So it [the left, KM] becomes just a defender, but ends up not being proactive. Marielle was very proactive, right? So, even if she fought the absurdities that were being talked about there, she had proposals. I think that would be her great differential, an activist, you know, that she could … which is very much from the formation of CEASM, right, which […] is the Center for Studies and Solidary Actions, right, which was the name created as a sort of criticism of people who are only activists, who don’t think about the action and other people, who only think and don’t do any action. So, studies and actions, the idea of …

KM: Putting it together.

P: And Marielle was very much this. At the same time, she learned a lot … It is impressive how she learned a lot about the feminist issue in office, for example, but at the same time she thought: “I learned this. Now how do I turn that into action?” So she had this thing, you know, that she did very skillfully.²⁵¹

The way how Franco concretely related education and action in her work as a city councilor becomes evident in the following quote from a former staff member:

We worked very hard, like this. And how active she was, you know? Very active. Very active. Starting at 10 o’clock in the morning and finishing at 10 o’clock at night, right? Very, very active. And how well she prepared herself. All Marielle’s advisors knew how to write her speech for the roundtable, you know. We had real training. “We’re going to do a table on women and technology [from PSOL?],” which was divided into teams. “There is a gender team, a favela team, a Blackness team, a service team.” It was divided into teams. […] And: “You always have to learn. There is no way.” And she had a lot of discipline to read the texts, to study the texts, to know the speech, to know the people. You had to, if you accompanied her to a roundtable, you had to make a summary of everyone who was there. You had to know the name of each person that was there for her to know that. So it really was advisory. Real work, like this. And she liked that, to see her people developing, you know? Because it was a lot like this. When she wasn’t there, the advisor would be there to present, and you would only say her words. Because it was a very united team. It was a very, very united team. And she was always on this training thing: “It is no use just having an education. You have to master what you are talking about. You have to know what you’re talking about.”²⁵²

As this quote demonstrates, Franco encouraged and wanted her team to contact and meet with people for real. This provided the basis for proposing and inciting actions that were able to meet the actual demands of those affected instead of those imagined by someone who just looks and observes from the outside.

3.3.1.2 Political Education to Help Occupy Political Spaces

During Franco’s term as a city councilor and in her role as the president of the Women’s Commission, education was also meant to move people and to show them how things work. For this reason, Franco’s staff introduced a project called Rolezinho (Short spin). This project aimed to acquaint and familiarize people with the parliamentary process who are traditionally excluded from it (including Black people, favelados, women, etc.). This is expressed in the following quote:

It seems that the state is all the time hindering these people from winning the city of Rio de Janeiro, right? Always hindering, right? And the idea of Mari’s office was to move people around, right? […] We have wonderful stories of women who had never entered city hall. And then we had a project called Rolezinho, right? It’s a group of people to get to know the chamber. And then, there is not only the guy who introduces [his work portfolio?] presenting, but also two people from the team, from our office, presenting, who go there with another view, not only the technical view, but with another view. […] And that’s it, when you have someone like you there, someone equal doing that work, you think that anything is possible. You think that you can also be in that place one day, but that you can ask for what you are entitled to from that person in an affectionate way, you know? Ask for things from that person, right?²⁵³

Political education, as exemplified in this quote, was one way of helping and empowering people to access and occupy political spaces. Others will follow in the next chapters.

3.3.2 Cuidado (Care)

All my interview partners remembered Franco as a person who deeply cared for others. She cared not only for her friends and family but also for activists and people at work. This is reflected in the following quote by a former staff member from Maré:

[The] wonder, you know, it was like this: Friday, Mari would take classes in English in the morning and come straight to the office to do another agenda. She usually woke up very early, you know, but English was at seven in the morning, so she had to wake up absurdly early, right? Very early indeed. And that’s when we were most alone in the office, because on Fridays there was less movement. Fewer advisors, fewer people. It was a more permanent team, right? And Mari was there by 11 o’clock. And we managed to talk, right? It was time to talk about how are the children doing, right? And about how are the actions going inside Maré, right? I have participated in a movement against violence within Maré since the beginning. […] Today, I’m still in the forum not only as a resident but as an advisor. And we were the only party that was there, that is present within the movement. So she had all these questions. She would talk like this: “Today is the day of the interview!” Then she would ask: “How is your son?”²⁵⁴

This way of asking others about what was going on in their lives and in their homes was an act of care meant to strengthen individuals and collective causes. This becomes most evident in the next chapter.

3.3.2.1 Cuidado as a Means to Individual Empowerment

My interview partner emphasized the ways Franco cared for women and mothers who had become victims of violence and consulted the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights and Citizenship (in the following abbreviated as Human Rights Commission).²⁵⁵ This is reflected in the following quote:

[S]he had this thing of caring about people, right? She had this characteristic. I think that’s also why everybody liked her so much. So this very affectionate figure, at the same time very firm, with a high personal energy, speaking, big, but at the same time she had this closeness to people, this affection, especially very solidary with struggles, with mothers.²⁵⁶

One of these mothers whose case became known to a wider public was Rozemar Vieira. Her son Eduardo Oliveira was a civil police officer and had been murdered during work. At first, criminals were blamed for the murder. Later, video images from surveillance cameras provided clues that Oliveira had been killed by one of his colleagues.²⁵⁷ Seeking justice for her son, Vieira was supported by Franco and the Human Rights Commission. In an interview, she told a journalist what Franco had done for her:

She solved my case. Not solved it, because it is the Justice Department that solves it. But she helped me. She registered the whole case, got the number of the inquiry that became a lawsuit. She helped with a hug, a friendly word, the welcome, the concern for the family. […] Just to give you an idea, Marielle didn’t have a car at that time. She wasn’t even a city councilor. She arrived by train. I can’t say today that this person didn’t help me. Who would take a train to Duque de Caxias, another city, just to help? Only Marielle.²⁵⁸

After Franco’s assassination, as seen in Sect. 1.3, false accusations were made against her, claiming, for example, that Franco (as a human-rights activist) did not help victimized police officers. In this context, Vieira stood up to defend the memory of Franco in public.²⁵⁹

In the evaluation of an interview partner, Franco’s caring attitude toward mothers like Vieira did not make her a special person. To care for others was what “ordinary people” do and what politicians should do. This is reflected in the following quote:

You tell that person [a mother Franco accompanied, KM] that Marielle was a special person, she would say: “No, Marielle was not a special person, Marielle was one of us.” She was an ordinary person who did the things that ordinary people have to do, right? What the deputies, the city councilors, the parliamentarians should do, but they have stopped doing it and ensconced themselves. They are in a bubble, which also becomes inaccessible, and they can talk inside that bubble, and they can articulate whatever they want, and then they tell another story, lying to the people. That wasn’t her. Her story was authentic. She was transparent. She was direct.²⁶⁰

A similar perspective is raised in the following quote by another interview partner who used to work with Franco on the Human Rights Commission:

I remember that one of the mothers had her son murdered. And I talked to her at 10 o’clock at night that day, right? And the mother … it is a very difficult part, you know, talking to someone who had just had a loved one murdered … and it was a son. The next day, Mari went to the territory, “Tomorrow I’ll go there, I’ll talk to her,” and she went to Manguinhos to talk, right? Then the mother came here, and we still talk to each other. Every time there is a hearing, the mother informs us, and we go there […]. Every time there is someone from the team that goes there, and so several times I went, several times Mari went, you know? This eye-to-eye interaction, an exchange, a hug, you know? Bringing it onto yourself. And after she became a city councilor, she would go, too. “Ah, there’s going to be a hearing for Jonathan … Ah, I’m going to stop by.” And we would get together and go by and talk to the mother.²⁶¹

Slightly different from the quote further above, this one not only reflects the values of my interview partner but also reveals the effects of Franco’s caring attitude, which sometimes provided a foundation for establishing long-term relationships and strengthening networks of support that also might exert political pressure.²⁶²

Being close and caring for the mothers and other victims of violence was not only important for their individual and collective empowerment in situations of high vulnerability. It also opened access to important information about the contexts of suffered violence that Franco and her team would not have received if they had not been in close contact with victims. As already seen in Sect. 3.2.4.2, such information was important to promoting public debate and to thinking about possible interventions to hinder people’s (re-)victimization through violence.

The same attitude—being close to and caring for people and their needs, observing the concrete context that creates suffering, and reflecting on the circumstances—ultimately became the basis of Franco’s way of practicing politics as a city councilor. This is reflected in what follows:

Her projects didn’t have much to do with structural needs, which is something that the left has a lot of difficulty with. The left thinks a lot about the issue of structure, right? I think this issue of superstructure is very Marxist but [it has a lot of difficulty to think, KM] about your need, I don’t know, to send a child to school, your need to have specific access to health care. She thought a lot about these day-to-day, everyday things […]. I think it was characteristic of her, this person that had lived the favela a lot and the needs of the favela, and she was able to transform this into action, you know? It wasn’t just a speech. But she … that’s typical of a councilor, right? A councilor has a lot of this. A good councilor at least wants to be close to the population, right? So he manages to think about everyday things that sometimes save lives, right? It makes an impact in a very effective way.²⁶³

As this quote argues, closeness to everyday needs might even “save lives.” This formulation is not exaggerated. In Franco’s work, for example, it is reflected in the development of different initiatives to fight the numbers of maternal deaths in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro²⁶⁴ or to fight violence against women.²⁶⁵

3.3.2.2 Self-Care

Caring and being close to people and their experiences in violent and precarious contexts was challenging and demanding for Franco and her team. This is reflected in the following quote:

At some moments in the Human Rights Commission, we also cried, you know. We cried with the anguish of our colleagues. Because we are human, and even though we work in the Human Rights Commission, our problems, our anguish, would surface at certain moments. And then the capacity that the team had to welcome, to embrace each other, was very great. Marielle cried several times in the Human Rights Commission. It could be for her problems and for the problems that we embraced. And that was how it was. … She didn’t lose the capacity to be sensitive to suffering.²⁶⁶

In a context where there is a lot of violence, it is sometimes normalized or even trivialized.²⁶⁷ In contrast, this quote highlights that Franco did not lose her sensitivity toward pain and suffering and her capacity for compassion. To keep this sensitivity, self-care and caring for those who care was most important to Franco. This is reflected in a quote by an interview partner working in the Human Rights Commission:

P: […] Sometimes business here is on fire, and after it’s over, you drink some water … You have a psychologist. There are two psychologists, an intern in the psychologist’s office, and there is another psychologist, [because?], sometimes, you need to talk to get some relief.

KM: Is this possible?

P: To get some relief. It’s about taking care of those who take care of you, right? It’s essential, right? It’s essential. It’s the beginning of the practice that came with Marielle’s experience here.²⁶⁸

Self-care was not only important in the context of the Human Rights Commission in dealing with painful and traumatic human-rights violations. It was also important in the city council, where Franco and her team continued to help people with their daily- life situations and problems and tried to find solutions together with them.

Beyond what has been said above, living a spiritual life was another way to keep energies high. This is contained in the following quote about Franco’s work on the city council:

I think it [spirituality, KM] was fundamental for her. To maintain herself, right, starting with the incense she used to light in her office […]. The symbols that she received, the flowers from the church, the axé. This was also present in the activities that we did. I think that faith was fundamental for maintaining the struggle and the conquests that Marielle made. It was fundamental.²⁶⁹

As this quote reveals, Franco practiced not only Catholic faith but also an Afro-Brazilian religion, signaled by the word axé.²⁷⁰ It will be treated in more detail below.

3.3.2.3 Care as a Means of Collective Empowerment

Franco’s caring attitude toward others not only strengthened individuals, as seen above. It also changed the institutional context in which she was working. This is reflected in the following quote:

Marielle brought a dynamic of humanity to the Human Rights Commission. She took the Human Rights Commission away from the technical, technocratic, heavy condition of conflict resolution to an accessible, welcoming place, where human rights were not only about violence but also about public transport, health, housing, and diverse contexts, right? So, the great void that Marielle leaves behind, I think, is how she filled the places with a lot of joy and with a lot of lightness, right? With a lot of generosity.²⁷¹

Franco’s way of relating with people created a feeling of trust among those who had to consult the Human Rights Commission. Even after Franco’s departure from the Human Rights Commission and her election as a city councilor and the president of the Women’s Commission, she continued to help ensure that the Human Rights Commission remained an accessible and welcoming place. This can be seen in the following quote from a former staff member:

We […] did many activities together. The city hall with the Human Rights Commission, right? The Women’s Defense and the Human Rights Commission, we did many activities together. Because there were many people that were afraid to be here [in the Human Rights Commission, KM], to come here, but felt comfortable there. And then we did it as a team. You make the person feel comfortable to be here. And today, we have many people … we have anonymous denunciations here in the commission, it happens … But people [say]: “Ah, but I went there with Mari, when she was in the chamber, and I am coming here,” you know? It’s the ownership when people spoke about that office.²⁷²

This quote stems from an interview that took place on the premises of the Human Rights Commission. The quote shows that Franco was a bridge figure. Treating people with care helped lower the threshold to enter an institution like the Human Rights Commission.²⁷³ This is especially important for people from the favelas and the peripheries, for whom access to public institutions is traditionally hindered.

Franco’s way of caring for people in combination with her own origins made people feel safe and represented. This is reflected in the change in the Human Rights Commission over the years:

I’ve known the Human Rights Commission for a long time. […] I keep hearing a lot from older people, people from the beginning, about this change in profile, about people that … There’s been an increase in the number of people that have sought help, are present, go, get to know, visit, call the Human Rights Commission, because Marielle’s story has reverberated. It seems that people see that there is someone from the favela there, who understands this daily life. It’s not someone … it’s not the European of Doctors without Borders, do you understand? [unintelligible] It is someone who came from the same place and understands that this connection is important, that this bridge is important. And this gives safety, gives representativeness. So this politics physically incarnated made all the difference, I think, for Marielle to have left a mark the way she did.²⁷⁴

The expression “politics physically incarnated” refers to how Franco’s own story, her attitude of care toward others, and her willingness to make other people’s problems and sufferings her own shaped her activities on the city council.²⁷⁵

Ultimately, feeling welcomed and represented by Franco and her caring attitude made people gather around her. This is reflected in the following quote:

Marielle was a welcoming place [um lugar de acolhimento]. She was a person in all spheres of life and relationships, be it work, be it friends, be it all together, she was, first of all, a welcoming person. Before anything else she was a welcoming person. And I think that makes a lot of difference. So I think that was what made her a leader. Nobody was behind her because she knew what to do. People were there with her because they were on her side, they felt on her side, building together with her. Because she transmitted this, like, “I’m not doing this alone, I’m doing this with you.”²⁷⁶

As this quote suggests, this gathering occurred not because Franco knew the solutions to the problems but because she was working on them together with the people around her. In other words, she turned into a leader not because she was a “strong man” standing above other people but because she embraced them as equals. In this way, she empowered and strengthened collective causes. A similar perspective is raised in the following quote:

I think that if she got this far, it is because she had something that was very peculiar … I don’t know if it is possible to do this. I do this by keeping the proper proportions, because it is a comparison, I don’t think you can make. But it is what I can do … It is the strength that Martin Luther King had, you know? Which is … The response is not aggressive, but it is absolutely unifying, right? Marielle had a very strong unifying force, a unifying force with a lot of simplicity. I think that everything was done with a lot, with a lot of love, I think.²⁷⁷

In summary, Franco’s closeness to people and her caring attitude toward them and their needs helped build trust, lowered thresholds to accessing institutions and claiming rights, and strengthened collective causes.

3.3.3 Construção coletiva (Collective Construction) in Words and Practice

In Franco’s trajectory, collective construction had different dimensions. Franco’s work was not meant to promote herself as an individual. Instead, as to be seen next, she sought ways to stimulate others to make their efforts count and to experience collective empowerment. To Franco and her staff, collective construction was not about working for but with the groups affected by a problem. In doing so, Franco’s office was able to unlock their potential, ideas, and everyday expertise to deal with problems.

3.3.3.1 A “Stimulus” to Make Efforts Count

Franco had several qualities that turned her into a reference point for others. In addition to her caring attitude described above, Franco was very skilled in dialogue and had the ability to serve as a mediator. This is expressed, for example, in the following quote, which refers to the time when Franco was part of Marcelo Freixo’s team:

Marielle had this capacity for dialogue. To give you an idea, she even had here, in the assembly, and even though she was Marcelo’s advisor, she was a hub; she had a capacity for dialogue with the other parliamentarians. There was a key position, a person who was head of security, and that person adored Marielle. Because when there was a very tense issue, a very tense vote, [when] there was some movement, [when] there was a possibility of some conflict, some confrontation, Marielle also worked as a mediator of the movements and with the security of the building, through the security coordination. So it was this capacity that she had to dialogue with the various sectors within parliament and within society.²⁷⁸

As this quote expresses, Franco did not shy away from conflict but made herself available to dialogue, mediate, and have a real impact on the context. Against this background, an interviewee also recalled the meeting Mulheres na Política (Women in Politics) on November 30, 2017.²⁷⁹ During this event, Franco motivated other women to make their efforts count:

[T]hen there was an event. Again, it was not something that she created by herself. She cocalled all the women there to talk for almost two months inside the office. And then: “What do you think?” and so on. I remember her being very pedagogical, which is difficult, pedagogical in politics. “It is not about giving for nothing. We can’t work with the question of giving for nothing […]. You talk about education, you are going to talk about human rights, right, and take it forward. And take it forward, right?"²⁸⁰

All these abilities—to care, engage in dialogue, mediate, and assert one’s work—made Franco a central point of reference for others. This can be seen in the following example, which refers to her last public event on March 14, 2018, right before she was murdered. In the evaluation of an interview partner:

[H]er last political meeting was … the theme was Black Women Moving Structures. That is, it was not about Marielle moving structures. It was: “Let us empower each other, each one in her area, in the neighborhood association, in the Black movement, in the media, in the cultural agenda, in institutional politics; let’s go.” So, I think she was the stimulus, the reference of strength and impulse for many, many, many, countless other Black women in their spaces of struggle and daily life.²⁸¹

As this quote emphasizes, it was not Franco alone who was meant to change structures but a collective effort of Black women that sought to empower each other in their respective areas.

In Franco’s and other Black women’s understanding, they were part of a continuing history of collective construction that had begun long before.²⁸² Yet with Franco’s electoral campaign and term in office, collective construction gained another significance. It was no longer only related to the challenges of daily life, the organization of social movements, and community resistance. Instead, it was extended into the realm of formal politics in the form of asserting the concerns of (Black) feminist movements, the LGBTQ+ community, and favelas in the parliamentarian space.

Franco’s office was characterized by a correspondence of the discourse and practice of collective organizing and representation. This can be seen in the following passage:

P: […] She didn’t want to be a pop star of politics. […] Sometimes when you stand out too much, individually, it’s bad even for your own cause, because you become so much of an exception that people don’t see that there is a fight behind it, that there is a fight beside it. I think that Marielle also escaped from this place of “I am Marielle Franco.” No, “I am one more Black woman today occupying an institutional position. But the work is collective and our steps come from far away.”

KM: And how did this influence her action, her way of dealing and connecting with other people?

P: I think that this is reflected, for example, in the very organization of her office team, that you will notice there a majority presence of Black women, people from the favela, from the periphery. I think that she gave signs in the practice that she believed in this: … when she builds an office with this cross-section of class, race, and gender; … the priority agendas she chose: denouncing state violence, harassment, sexual violence against women … I think she was giving signs that the political organization of the office was coherent with what she said and believed in. I remember that there was a political council, a more collective direction. It didn’t have the direction of the chief of staff. So I think she made an effort to have a very horizontal and democratic office, taking these agendas with her.²⁸³

As this quote highlights, the collective construction of Franco’s office was reflected not only outwardly but also inwardly. Office staff were encouraged to bring their own contacts and efforts as social activists to bear on their work, thus promoting the exchange of information and joint efforts.²⁸⁴

To summarize, Franco wanted neither to be put on a hero’s pedestal nor to relativize her own importance and make herself small. She wanted to excel together with others. This is reflected in the following quote:

[S]he used to say: “Here we work. You don’t have to complain. You don’t have to victimize yourself. It is hard, yes. Let’s go, sweetheart … Hey, negona,” she called everyone negona [referring to a Black woman in an endearing way, KM], “negona, let’s go.” You will hear many people saying this, because she talked like that. And that’s it. Somehow, I think, she transmits this energy. As if she were a beacon that mobilized people, but she was not a beacon to shine alone, you know? She wanted to have a lot of people around her and for everybody to always shine.²⁸⁵

3.3.3.2 Unlocking “the Potential of These Places”

Through Franco’s collectively organized office, bridges could be built between civil society and the city council. Concerns from civil society entered into institutionalized politics. This led to a lot of positive resonance, as the following quote shows:

How impactful it was. The emails we received … I had a function of doing email screening. Most of the emails were compliments. I never received an email with negative criticism. There were many invitations, many, many, many invitations. I remember the invitation … I received the invitation in October for Marielle to be at Harvard in April, right? She was then executed. But I received the invitation in October. I remember us having a party, you know?²⁸⁶

This quote demonstrates that the collective construction of Franco’s office and the response it created was not limited to the regional or national context. Instead, it encompassed the international level and transnational networks.²⁸⁷

As reflected above, the way Franco’s office practiced politics was seen as different from that of other politicians because the discourse of her office corresponded to its practice. Franco not only spoke about representing but actually worked together with the people she stood up for. In the words of an interview partner:

I think that the best thing about her conduct was the capacity she had to dialogue with those who were different. So I believe that this capacity that she had is what, in a certain way, unfortunately, made the people who saw her as a threat to what was already in place plan her assassination. Because she brought something different. Even within politics, you know? Because she went way beyond that political game that is the hypocrisy of having a political discourse and having a practice different from that discourse. So what Marielle proposed to do and built together with the collectives that supported her in the campaign, she put into practice in her term in office. And that was something new in politics. And it is the new that scares. The new is what scares those who are used to living with that [unintelligible], you know, that was traditional in politics. Both on the left and on the right.²⁸⁸

To understand the pitfall of the “old” or “traditional way” of politics described in the previous quote, it is worth pointing to another passage from an interview partner who also comes from a favela.

P: She [Franco, KM] is a … you know, “people of the people”? She is someone you can talk to. A person from inside the territory. Sometimes there is even someone else who can discuss this. But we will discuss basic sanitation; we will talk about the needs, sometimes about the structure of the house in the territory, all these things … It is there, the person understands what you are talking about.

KM: You don’t need to explain

P: You don’t … It is more than explaining. It doesn’t even enter into a clientelist logic, right? Because every two years … it is difficult for those who don’t understand and observe politics … every two years some candidates appear offering asphalt, and the asphalt is public, right? They come offering roofs, those roofs that close so that people can have parties there. They come promising the world. […] So it’s a very perverse level, you know? It is a very perverse clientelist logic, which is: “If you vote for me, I will give you this.” That is why we created an organization to talk about politics and also to understand: “Look, there you have it, the guy offers you all this, but, in four of four years, he doesn’t care and legislates against you.” So when someone who comes from this territory has a different intention and perception of the world, they don’t get into this clientelist logic, right? Mari never brings a clientelist logic into the favela territory.²⁸⁹

As this quote shows, Franco’s collective construction broke with the logic of clientelism, as she did not legislate for but with people from favelas. Unlike other candidates, Franco did not only enter the favelas during the election campaign. And she did not promise favela residents the moon to secure their votes, only to never return. Instead, she worked with them and developed law proposals jointly with them.

In the end, the collective construction of Franco’s office not only helped to make the problems and challenges of the affected groups and movements visible; it also called on their potential and everyday expertise to bring their proposals in political spaces. This is reflected in the following quote: “[S]he gave visibility to this group, to these people, to these voices. She took them out of the place, out of the area that needs help. Marielle brought the potential that these places also have.”²⁹⁰ As this quote demonstrates, the way Franco’s office brought people together turned those groups who are typically considered part of “the problem” (that is, those who need help) into part of “the solution.” Constructing collectively in words and practice helped unlock their potential in formal politics.²⁹¹

3.3.4 Incarnation and Creating Visibility

As a Black woman from a favela who loved another woman, Franco represented different social groups that encounter a lot of prejudice in Brazilian society and are at risk of suffering different forms of violence, which can also overlap.²⁹² Yet over the course of her life, Franco managed to turn her body and identity into a “an engine for struggle,” as reflected in the following quote:

[I]t was a body that represents many things in our society. It is a female body, a woman’s body that represents what society brings in its prejudice, right? [unintelligible] Woman, Black, favelada, LGBT. Everything … who raised her daughter, right? Think of all that in one woman’s body. These are things that society considers very perverse. But it was also a fuel, an engine of struggle, because she actually incorporates that and transforms it into an activism that one can take action on, right? So she effectively took action on these topics by working around them. So in the same way that it is not light, it was also a motor. The engine that made her become the giant that she is today.²⁹³

This quote describes the process through which Franco embodied and affirmed her identity and reappropriated her body. On the following pages, this process will be further described as processes of incarnation and creating visibility that promote individual and collective (self-)empowerment.

3.3.4.1 Incarnation I: Community and Ancestry

Throughout her life, Franco incarnated²⁹⁴ a strong sense of collectivity and community that was reflected in her closeness to (Black) women and in her self-understanding as a person from the favela. The origins of this sense of collectivity and community go back to the favela and the Black communities in which she grew up where women played a major role in sustaining the community.²⁹⁵ This is reflected in the following quote:

I bring to our conversation Vilma Reis, a Black intellectual, from Bahia, northeastern Brazil, the first Black ombudswoman in the city of Salvador. She tells her students, the ones she advises, she says: “This degree is not yours. This degree belongs to your community. This degree belongs to that old woman that says, ‘Go with God, my child.’ This degree belongs to your mother. This degree belongs to your community. You are graduating, so you are a doctor now? No, this degree belongs to everybody.” Because this takes us back to the ancestral relationship, to our first, primitive relationship, in Africa, of the common, of the community. So when Marielle says that her figure, her construction—and construction, she is talking about construction as a person, as an intellectual, a politician, everything—is a collective construction, [it is] because people like Marielle, with her starting point, can only be consolidated in a collectivity. Outside the collectivity is impossible, because you are talking about an environment where a mother is not only the mother of her son, for example. She is the mother of her son, of her neighbor’s daughter. She is watching her own child, but she is watching the other one. She feeds her own child; she also feeds the other one. So that’s what she is saying. This is what she recurrently evoked: “I am because we are.” It is ubuntu. It is Africa.²⁹⁶

As alluded to in this quote, acknowledging that one is embedded in a larger community is a central moment in forming an individual sense of self as reflected in the phrase “I am because we are.” This was also reflected in Franco’s attitude toward her roots. In the words of an interview partner:

[T]his trajectory between the favela and the city council is … she always looked where she came from. […] It was not: “Now I’m here and I’m surrounded and I’m going to be surrounded by… ," no. It was the same people she listened to; she added other people, but it was the people who came along the way, because we constructed ourselves together, right?²⁹⁷

The recognition of one’s embeddedness referred not only to the present but also to the past. This can be seen in the following quote:

I think she had an awareness of ancestry. Maybe this even enters into the more religious dimension. This expression “our steps come from afar,” I think it is a reference to so many figures who fought, resisted in the past, in their historical contexts. So, Dandara, Maria Carolina de Jesus, and so many other women, Black women who, throughout history, with their own bodies, their own struggle for survival, were sometimes resisting. So I think Marielle had this awareness that in the present the work is collective and that this present only exists because of a past. I think she carried many women within her, both companions by her side and references from the past. I think she was very aware of this.²⁹⁸

Franco’s awareness of (female) ancestry also became evident during her last public event shortly before her murder. In her conclusion, Franco pointed to the examples of her parents, her grandmother, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde.²⁹⁹

3.3.4.2 Incarnation II: Public Identification as a Lesbian

Looking back on Franco’s trajectory, she understood herself as a favelada when she entered the institutionalized realm of politics at the end of her university studies in 2006.³⁰⁰ By contrast, her identity as a Black and lesbian woman was not yet as developed and needed further consolidation. This is reflected in the following quote:

KM: […] When you think about Marielle’s path, from Maré to the city council, what do you think strongly marked her trajectory?

P: The relationship with civil society and the dialogue with social movements. I think this is one of the greatest hallmarks of Marielle’s work: a very close work, of much dialogue with social movements, with the collectives, especially with the feminist movement, and with the LBT [sic!] movement.

KM: This, too.

P: Yes. So this marks this relationship of Marielle: Maré–city council. And how she is intensifying her relationship with her own Blackness. Consolidating herself as a Black woman.

KM: Could you speak

P: [interrupts KM] They were very close processes. She began to appropriate being a Black woman. Even more than a woman from the favela, because that was already very strong, very well established. But being a Black woman and being a lesbian … so this was established in her relationship with women, very strongly, and with the lesbian collective in Rio de Janeiro, with the lesbian movement and with the projects … So this mark became very strong, of a woman who in this period came to be consolidated as a Black woman and part of the LGBT population.³⁰¹

In this quote, Franco is referred to as a lesbian.³⁰² This contrasts with other interviews, where she is referred to as bisexual or where the topic of sexual orientation was omitted.³⁰³

The question of Franco’s sexual orientation and diverging remarks on her public identification are not only related to developments in her private life but must also be seen in a political context.³⁰⁴ This is expressed in the following quote:

P: […] Marielle was not a person who dated many people. On the contrary, she had a few long-lasting, deep relationships. […] She always said that Monica was the only one and so on; she was even ashamed to say that because she was going through a transition. She first understood this as being a bisexual relationship, because she had had relationships with men and so on. Then she starts to embrace LGBT activism and the LGBT cause because she actually acknowledges herself within that context. But she starts to understand that, within the LBGT struggle, she needed to firm up the struggle of lesbian women. Because inside the LGBT movement, there is a lack of attention. Because it is this, it is a woman, right? The woman, in all contexts, is more screwed […]. So within the LGBT universe, women are also more precarious, the most whipped. She suffers under machismo, even within this LGBT scope, because she is a woman. So she [Franco, KM] began to understand—her feminist fight led her to the question of the LGBT fight—that to affirm herself as a lesbian woman was much more important for the LGBT women’s movement than to continue to identify as bisexual.

KM: Which seems to be undecided, right? There are some people who think that bisexuality would be the [position?] of a person who cannot decide for one side.

P: For one or the other, yes. She [would not hesitate?] [to take a side, KM]. No, it is much better that the person is … well, that she can do whatever she wants with her life, but in a political context of struggle, in the LGBT movement that suffers so much, even more in Rio de Janeiro, which has a mayor who is a pastor of the evangelical church. There, politically, strengthening the fight of lesbian women was the way to go. And then she starts to see herself as a lesbian woman. Because that’s it, you are not born ready, you are not born and say “I am a lesbian,” no, especially for her, because there were many, many processes. There are many layers until you understand yourself. So she positioned herself as a lesbian woman, right? But of course, she had a relationship, several relationships. She married a man, had a daughter, later she was in a relationship with Edu, she dated another man … There came a moment when she decided to position herself as a lesbian woman, in a dispute, in a fight. This makes people feel uncomfortable.³⁰⁵

This quote argues why it was important for Franco to identify herself as a lesbian. In a conservative political environment, it was important to make the lives of lesbian women visible and to help empower them. Publicly positioning herself as a lesbian was a powerful political sign.³⁰⁶ At the same time, this quote also indicates that Franco’s self-understanding developed in and through her life, her relationships, the people she met, and so on. Against this background, Franco’s life in all its complexity cannot easily be pigeonholed³⁰⁷ and calls for a cautious use of labels.³⁰⁸

3.3.4.3 Incarnation III: Identification as a Black Woman

The development and consolidation of Franco’s identity as a Black woman not only occurred through her engagement in social movements, as suggested above. It also took place in the more private realm of family and friends. This is reflected in the following quote:

P: […] I think it was very much in her. In her friends, right? […] My sister and I also went through a process of naturalizing our hair, removing the products, and we, right … that thing, she starts wearing a turban. All that stuff, right? It’s taking hold of your Black womanhood. She starts to empower herself as the Black woman she was, right?

KM: I find this very impressive, the reappropriation of roots, isn’t it?

P: Yes, she was taking them back. “My hair is mine, it’s going to be the way I want it, the color I want. There won’t be any product.” And that was it. Mari was doing this. And she was getting Blacker in her hair, in her clothes. Our society is very racist, isn’t it? The abolition of slavery is very recent in human history. So if we don’t pay attention to it, we will Whiten or try to Whiten because it’s a lie: there’s no possibility of Whitening, because the only possibility of whitening that you have is cultural Whitening. Because if you took Mari and put her on your side even when she wasn’t wearing a turban, she is a Black woman. There is no way, so she was reappropriating herself at a time when people were already appropriating this place.³⁰⁹

This quote is interesting because it places Franco’s process within a larger development, namely, the increasing reappropriation of Afro-Brazilian identity and culture since the 2000s.³¹⁰ It is also interesting because it points to different dimensions of reappropriation. One dimension is how one identifies oneself based on the tone of one’s skin. As my interview partner mentioned, Franco had lighter skin compared to others. In other words, she would not necessarily have been identified as preta (Black; commonly connotated in mostly negative ways) but could have passed as parda (Brown; less negatively connotated) or maybe even morena (Brunette; considered beautiful). But Franco would never have passed as White (like me, as highlighted by my interview partner). By actively acknowledging their Blackness, Franco and her friends positioned themselves to contest the racism present in their context. Their harmful self-perception of their bodies as “perverted”³¹¹ was thereby transformed into a critical perception of how Brazilian society organizes social life based on racial markers, such as the Brazilian color categories that privilege some (self-)identifications over others.³¹²

Another dimension of reappropriation involves the realm of aesthetics, particularly hair and clothing. This topic will be further explored below under the heading of visibility.

A third dimension, which is not mentioned in the quote above but has been brought up in Sect. 3.3.2.2, involves Afro-Brazilian religions. Franco was a practicing Catholic. At the same time, she also practiced Umbanda.³¹³ This was fraught with some difficulties, since there are many prejudices against Afro-Brazilian religions, especially among Christians with a more traditional or conservative background.³¹⁴ But in the place where Franco practiced Umbanda, she and other Black women felt acolhidas³¹⁵ (welcome and accepted) just the way they were.

Some aspects of Afro-Brazilian religious practice, such as the white clothes worn on Fridays,³¹⁶ were also adopted in Franco’s office. This is reflected by the following quote from an interview partner who described herself as Catholic:

We have, I have a habit of wearing white every Friday. She always said to us, “Hey, don’t wear dark colors on Friday, wear white.” Even though she was Catholic, she had other habits in her spiritual life. We started having similar habits, because of the energy. She [gave?] an energy, a very, very strong energy. She is, she was a giant like that.³¹⁷

Practicing an Afro-Brazilian religion may have helped Franco come to terms with her own identity as a Black woman who loves other women. This is reflected in the following quote:

I think that she was getting to be a very common Brazilian woman, a man too, who is passing through several religions. She was getting to know Candomblé,³¹⁸ which I think Monica knew more than she did. Monica who was telling me this, Monica [Benicio] the wife, right? And she was beginning to understand a little bit her role in the world through Afro religions. It was something that she was starting to get into, and at the same time, also for the question, for her to enter a homosexual relationship. I think that these religions are more open and have more respect for this position, right? I think she felt more welcomed than in the Catholic Church.³¹⁹

As this quote suggests, Afro-Brazilian religions are more open to diversity than traditional Catholic settings,³²⁰ which helped Franco develop.

3.3.4.4 Creating Visibility to Assert One’s Legitimacy

The topic of visibility has already been addressed several times in the previous pages. This chapter will explore the topic more systematically.

In Franco’s process of identifying herself as a Black and lesbian woman, her identity (or better, identification) also became ever more visible to the outside. This externalization had already started before her electoral campaign. But it was further emphasized during the campaign:

P: […] Marielle in the campaign and Marielle in everyday life was a person … she dressed in any way. The colorful clothes. There were even some clothes of which I said: “Marielle, what are you wearing?” Something that did not combine. She always wore very colorful clothes, but sometimes she didn’t match; she put on some things … But I noticed her maturing in politics, too. Because back in her office—and the images that we have of her today somehow reinforce this—it is this political identity that she assumes, these marks that were also placed in the clothes she started to wear, in the way she dresses …

KM: The hair …

P: The hair, this African thing … she somehow took on that look, and I think that this was part of her maturation, of her growth. In some way, it is to assume that her presentation and what she was putting herself through there to potentiate the fights and to make resistance, was fully incorporated in her. Including this aesthetic part, which wasn't such a big thing, but I think that in the office she kicked up a gear. And she became even more beautiful, I think, more confident, more secure, more …³²¹

As this quote shows, Franco’s visual transformation was perceived as a maturation that brought what she said and did even more into line with each other. Connected with that, it is also interesting to note that Franco started to share pictures showing her relationship with Monica Benicio in public, after assuming office as a city councilor.³²² This also strengthened the authenticity of her political agenda.

In the city council, Franco’s attitude and style as a Black woman strongly distinguished her from other politicians. This is reflected in the following quote:

P: She arrived quietly but did not go unnoticed, never, never, never. That was obvious in the chamber. If you look … there are some pictures […] that have Marielle in front. She was very diligent, so that the plenary looked like the school of Professor Raimundo, a bizarre humor show that we have here. She would sit there in the first row because if she was there, she would pay attention to absolutely everything and wouldn’t talk to anyone … because the city councilors talk. It looks like a fifth-grade classroom … and she was very diligent. So there are some pictures of her in the plenary, everybody sitting there, and you only see men. There were even other women, but the women, they become … it is not that they become masculine, no, but they somehow … the woman who works, in general, a deputy, a city councilor, wears a suit.

KM: Ok.

P: She will wear something black. She will put her hair up. She will … it’s not that she is masculine, but she kind of imitates a gesture of … I don’t know, a visual to look more like those men … which is maybe a form of defense. And she [Franco, KM] wore purple and yellow with a green turban, whatever … She went the way she is. And she didn’t do it to provoke. She did it because she … well, it wouldn’t make sense to put a blazer on Marielle. It would look weird. It wasn’t her. And then there are some great pictures, from the very beginning, of that bunch of White men in dark suits, black, gray, navy blue, but it all looks black, all gray, those gray heads … and Marielle, and that half-orange thing, with the half-colorful hair—she bleached her hair for a while—that half-colorful outfit, like that. It’s a thing. We used this photo in some stuff because that was it, that was it. You could see it in the picture.³²³

As a Black woman that had assumed her identity, Franco was different, stood out, and generated a lot of visibility. This visibility was further emphasized through the way she spoke and asserted her place in the city council. This is expressed in the next quote:

[The] protagonism of women and black women in politics was an agenda that she carried systematically, not only with words but also with her attitude. A woman with a lot of attitude, a lot of presence, and with a lot of authority, because of her life, because of her history, because of her place to speak.³²⁴

Due to her own history and background, Franco’s supporters recognized her as having a special authority and legitimacy to speak about the issues she brought forward. But others did not view Franco as a legitimate elected official. As seen before, Franco worked in a parliamentary context in which Black women, people from favelas, and members of the LGBTQ+ community only appeared (if at all) as objects of politics, not as subjects.³²⁵ Therefore, Franco had to constantly assert the legitimacy of her voice and presence in this space. This is expressed in the following quote about Franco’s major challenges in the city council:

P: I think that was the challenge of imposing yourself in a place that was not made for you, you know. A place that structurally serves the interests of the elite, of the city’s privileges. A place centered on the figure of the man, the heterosexual man …

KM: White

P: White. So I think that was the challenge for her, and that she managed it brilliantly. I think the biggest challenge was to break through this deep-rooted institutional blockade telling her all the time that that place doesn’t belong to her. I think, all the time, from entering the elevator of the chamber, to making a speech in the plenary, she had to impose her presence as a legitimate, necessary, transforming presence in that space. I think that was the biggest challenge, to break through the institutional blockade generated by machismo, racism …³²⁶

The aim of Franco’s efforts to impose her presence was to assert her and other Black women’s legitimacy as autonomous political subjects in parliamentary space:

[T]his empowerment, this affirmation of her Black and favela identity was not to victimize herself or to want people to feel sorry for her or to … it was exactly to say: “Look, here I am. You’re going to have to swallow me,” right? Here, we have a Black woman, and this Black woman is going to say: “You are not going to shut me up.”³²⁷

This attitude was most evident in Franco’s plenary speech on March 8, 2018, when a man who was present in the chamber tried to interrupt her. As a reaction, Franco affirmed the democratically established legitimacy of her presence: “I will not be interrupted.”³²⁸ Another example of this attitude is the speech following the rejection of the day of lesbian visibility, in which Franco reaffirmed the legitimate presence of lesbian women in the city council.³²⁹

3.3.4.5 Effects of Incarnation and Visibility

Franco’s process of incarnating different social struggles and thereby constructing her identity made her very authentic. It gave her a lot of strength, as many interview partners emphasized. This might be illustrated by the following quote:

[She] is someone who speaks not only because she understands the importance of these agendas, which is already very important. But someone who speaks by feeling in the body, by literally incorporating these agendas. So this is very strong. This is very strong. Because it is the speech, it is the body, and the life story. So you put that together, it creates power, it creates a very strong force. The meaning is a rare political authority in that place.³³⁰

Despite some difficulties in mobilizing people to participate in the office’s work,³³¹ Franco’s presence as a Black woman in a mostly White parliament had concrete consequences in the context of the city council. This is illustrated by the following example:

[W]e work in that house. Right away, there was racism, because they weren’t used to having Black people working there. But when the girls who clean the rooms saw the color of the city councilor and saw the color of the team, which was mostly Black, they felt very comfortable. So I have a relationship of coming to city hall and having coffee with those girls. They kept waiting for me so we could have coffee together, like this, you know?³³²

The example illustrated in this quote might appear of minor importance. Yet it shows on an everyday level how little changes encourage Black women, like those who clean the Rio de Janeiro city hall, to appropriate spaces that were traditionally not meant for them. What is visible here on a small scale became much more comprehensive after Franco’s murder. As will be seen later, her process of incarnating the Black woman she was, of creating visibility by her presence, and of defending the legitimacy of that presence provided the foundation for the much broader recognition of Franco’s work and trajectory.

But before proceeding to this, it is worth summarizing the effects of the identified means of collective empowerment: education, care, collective construction in words and practice, incarnation, and visibility. As seen in this chapter, some people gained a new sense of possibility through their encounters with Franco and her fellow activists. Through collective self-empowerment, people became mobilized and began to appropriate political spaces that traditionally did not see their presence.

3.4 (Re-)continuations after Franco’s Assassination

On March 14, 2018, Marielle Franco and one of her close friends and advisors, Fernanda Chaves, took an Uber to drive home after the closure of the event Mulheres Negras Movendo Estruturas (Black Women Moving Structures) in Lapa. The car was driven by Anderson Gomes, a husband and father of a little son. Gomes was an airplane mechanic by profession but had to work temporarily as an Uber driver because he was unemployed. The ride for Franco was one of his last scheduled rides because he was leaving for a new job a few days later.³³³ In the Estácio region, Franco, Chaves, and Gomes were overtaken by another car that had followed them. Several bullets were fired from the moving car. These bullets killed Franco and Gomes. Chaves survived with deep shock and minor injuries. The next day, the streets of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília, and other cities in Brazil started to fill, and there were numerous mass demonstrations against Franco’s murder.

Franco’s assassination was absolutely unexpected. Franco had known that politics and the defense of human rights were not without dangers.³³⁴ But she did not seek to put her life at risk, as an interview partner stated: “Marielle never had any idea of being a martyr, nothing. She didn’t go there looking to risk her life. She was starting a personal and collective project of her dreams, right?”³³⁵ However, unlike other human-rights defenders and progressive politicians, such as Marcelo Freixo or Jean Wyllys,³³⁶ Franco had not been warned that her actions posed a threat to some people’s interests. This is reflected in the following quote:

In the beginning it was very difficult. People were … there was a general paranoia. Because there was no warning. This is also very difficult. There was no warning such as “you’re talking too much” or “you’re saying a lot” or “you’re stirring up a hornet’s nest.” There wasn’t. There was no warning. There was no message. There was the execution. And this greatly changed the lives of human-rights defenders, especially women. This was something that no one expected, no one imagined.³³⁷

Against this background, the significance of Franco’s assassination and the various consequences of it will be elaborated in more detail below.

3.4.1 Interruption of a Personal and Political Project

Franco’s murder not only interrupted her trajectory and those of her family members, friends, and coworkers. Due to the many causes Franco had incarnated, her murder also hit different political causes and projects, as expressed in the following quote:

I think that her death … I think that it had such an impact because she represented so many meanings, right? It seems that the shot was not fired by a murderer but by a social scientist. Because it managed to reach so many fronts, you know, with a single person that she … that her spectrum embraced, so that many people at the same time felt hit, were hit.³³⁸

The evaluation in this quote can be further illustrated with regard to two examples. One of Franco’s main concerns had been to strengthen (Black) women.³³⁹ For this reason, her assassination hit many women who were sharing the same concerns. This is demonstrated in the following quote:

When you see that a companion, a person so close to you, can be brutally murdered like that, when you see that a companion, a woman who was here one day and suddenly is no longer here and with so much violence … In some way all women […] started to feel weakened, threatened. So you lose your naiveté and you become much more hurt, much more pained also because of this. Because if they did this to her … and in some way, I think all the women candidates suffered this too … it’s a little bit like: “Caramba [informal word expressing surprise, KM], it could have been me, too.” And somehow that fear too, that feeling, even for those who didn’t know her or who weren’t even candidates, it’s like … especially the girls, the Black women … it’s like that idea that Black women could be targeted, too, so lots of fear.³⁴⁰

Another cause Franco had incarnated was strengthening the representation of favelas in the city council. The consequences of Franco’s assassination in this regard are expressed in the following quote by an interview partner from Maré:

For us here, right from the start, it represented … it was impactful. Because we always dreamed of having a representative of our ideas, right? Marielle carried a lot of this, but […] her death […] represented the option of a project that we had been working on for twenty years. So it was very impactful, right away, right? Because we didn’t … I mean, at that moment, we were thinking about someone else who could … We were very happy to have three more women, but, at that moment, it was as if a collective project was interrupted for us. It is as if several people got together to make a pyramid for someone to arrive and when that someone arrives that person is cut off in such a violent way, right? So violent indeed. So for us, it was an interrup-, an interruption of a very strong collective project.³⁴¹

Both quotes show how profound the effect of Franco’s murder was, wiping out the results of two decades of work of social movements, NGOs, and the political empowerment of Black women.

3.4.2 Changed Perception of the Present Context

Highly alerted by Franco’s assassination, some people committed to the same causes and agendas started to perceive their context differently. This is demonstrated by the following quote:

Marielle’s assassination gave us the dimension that we are in a different context, and that it is much more serious than it was before. The context that marked Freixo’s ten years in the Human Rights Commission was a different context from the one we have now in Rio de Janeiro. […] For a long time, we always thought, we always dealt as if there was some kind of parity between our way of acting and the way the violent forces of the state acted. And I think we took a long time to understand that the violent forces of the state … I’m not talking about the state of Rio, right? The violent forces in Rio, I don’t know, in the Zona Oeste [West Zone, KM] … and in the state, the state itself, they won’t debate, they won’t talk, they won’t protest, they won’t hold demonstrations. They are going to execute. So we started to pay attention that this was a serious thing. No … we were no longer in a condition in which we cited names, denounced openly, and we thought that everything was in the field of denouncing the confrontation. It seems that there is no more room for confrontation. We understood that these violent forces that today are increasingly taking over Rio and are increasingly crossing into politics, they have no moral compunction about elimination, execution, silencing, intimidation. So I think this is a very different context from the ones where we were most active, I don’t know, maybe think of 2013, 2014, the demonstrations during big events: World Cup, Olympics, Confederations Cup. We had confrontations but much more heated ones, a very busy city, many protests, many demonstrations, many meetings, many meetings, much strategy building. We had clashes, right? And it seems that we no longer have room for these clashes. I think that it has become clear that we are very vulnerable. We are more and more vulnerable. […] We are in a context that requires a little more prudence in relation to these things.³⁴²

As this quote shows, the changes noted related primarily to increased violence and the strengthened position of militias, which are closely intertwined with the state and undermine the principles of a liberal society.³⁴³

Furthermore, this quote also provides hints to possible motives for Franco’s assassination. Indirectly, my interview partner linked Franco’s assassination to her work with Marcelo Freixo and within the Human Rights Commission, where she dealt with the problem of urban violence and human-rights violations on a daily basis. This assumed link was also made explicit by another interview partner:

[S]he was there. She was at the front of everything. This was her theme: public security. She even had a master’s degree, right? She had a master’s degree; there is her book. And I know, I would say that somehow, for me, everything leads me to believe that the militias were involved in her death, but this was not due to any … This issue of housing that they mentioned in the Zona Oeste as the cause of her death … everyone in the office tells me that this had nothing to do with it. This was not one of her priorities, nor was she doing any kind of major activities in the Zona Oeste that could … This has to do with her essential role, the visibility that she had in the Human Rights Commission in the work that Marcelo Freixo did and in the important denunciation that he made.³⁴⁴

This quote argues that Franco’s assassination was motivated by her work in the Human Rights Commission alongside Marcelo Freixo and his critique of militias and their criminal activities.³⁴⁵ At the same time, it states that Franco’s work could not have been the only reason why she was killed without warning since there were other people who embraced the same causes. In the evaluation of my interview partners, there must have been another reason, which will be elaborated next.

3.4.3 Risk and Chances of Visibility as a Means of Empowerment

In Sect. 3.3, I showed that there had been different strategies of individual and collective empowerment in Franco’s trajectory, among them, incarnation and creating visibility. In this chapter, I will show that Franco’s visibility in public probably became one of the reasons why she was shot. But the attempt to silence her did not bring the expected results; instead, it contributed to a collective empowerment after her assassination, even if it did so in ambiguous ways.

3.4.3.1 Franco’s Visibility as a Risk of Exposure

As seen above, some interview partners expressed the idea that Franco’s assassination had been motivated by her work in the Human Rights Commission. But this would still not explain why she was shot without prior warning. Other interview partners argued that Franco had been killed because she was who and what she was: an empowered Black lesbian woman from the favela in politics. This is expressed in the following quote from an interview partner from Maré:

I still talk about her in the present, right? I have a lot of … [P cries quietly] a lot of difficulty dealing with her death. And at the same time, we sometimes feel guilty, you know, because we lived and sold this dream that we could do, that we could be. I hope this doesn’t happen again, right? Sometimes, I get worried with the way Renata [Souza, KM] exposes herself. Because Renata, yes, she is in a function of … There is much more [impact?] with her about violence, right? Not Marielle. Marielle … we thought that … but anyway, I think it was the interruption of a collective project, you know? Not only the life of a mother, of a woman, of a Black woman, of a person dear to her family, but of a person that represented a project in fact, an idea, which didn’t die, but that was taken away from us in a very violent, aggressive way. And by doing simple things, right? Nothing … I don’t know, I think […] what hit me right away was a little bit like that. This message: “Look, this is not for you, this is not your place. You have to stop there. We are watching. You are showing up and you shouldn’t go up.” Something like that. Because if you look at that chamber of city councilors, with so many people that could be murdered and you choose a Black woman, you can’t say it was a coincidence.³⁴⁶

This quote reveals that Franco’s assassination came as a surprise to Maré activists because she had done “simple things” in the city council. Unlike Renata Souza, she had not touched on the hot topics like police violence in the favelas.³⁴⁷ In the Human Rights Commission, Franco had built a reputation as a human-rights defender and critic of police violence.³⁴⁸ However, in her term as a city councilor, this was no longer the highest priority.³⁴⁹ In my interviewees’ evaluation, there must have been another reason why Franco had been murdered without warning. According to them, it was the fact that she was a Black woman from the favela who had dared to enter the political space of the city council, which traditionally was not intended for people like her. A similar evaluation might be found in the following quote stating that Franco was killed because she was who she was:

[S]he was interrupted because she was her. Not because she knew anything, no. It’s because she was her. “Ah, because she was against the militias.” No, because Marcelo [Freixo, KM] is or Tarcísio [Motta, KM] is. […] Of course, it’s a question of the struggles she fought, but there are many people who fight the same struggles, you know? But “who are we going to stop, who can we not see doing this? She is a Black woman, from the favela, a lesbian on top of it all.” This becomes very, very clear today when we see these investigations. The man accused of having murdered her, of having shot her, he did some research, he started doing some research on Marcelo Freixo, on PSOL. So, it’s a political thing that is bothering this particular group of gangsters. So they are trying to pick on someone to take revenge, who, in fact, acts against the structures of which he is a part, these militias and everything else. So he knows Marcelo. “Ah, Marcelo is difficult because he is full of security, but Marcelo’s son doesn’t have security.” So he goes, then he investigates other people, the politicians, Tarcísio, and he ends up with Marielle. But why? Why? Why such a woman? “Ah, she worked with Freixo. Ah, she’s a defender, she’s a lesbian. Ah, that’s it. So she’s going to die. That’s the one that’s going to die.” Because that’s always the case, Black women, you know, who end up dying.³⁵⁰

This quote includes information about Franco’s alleged assassin that came to light in 2019 in connection with the investigation of the case.³⁵¹ This information is interpreted from a intersectional point of view condensed in the statement that “it’s always the Black woman that ends up dying.”

Against this background, it is plausible that Franco’s emphasis on visibility as a Black lesbian woman from a favela not only strengthened the causes she incarnated but also exposed her to risk as she was the only one in parliamentary space with her background and the agenda she pursued. This turned her into a target that could be easily hit. This is reflected in the following quote that concerns the developments after Franco’s assassination:

I was happily surprised that three people were elected, women. Because [there was] one thing I kept saying at her death: “If we had two or three more, the killer would at least have had doubt about who to kill. Having only her as a reference, it was easy to choose.” So I think that’s it. We have to have more people with profiles similar to hers, so that people can know that it’s not so easy to exterminate a thought, an idea of a collective.³⁵²

This quote reflects that having more women like Franco in politics (as happened after her assassination) is fundamental to strengthening these women as individuals and the cause they represent. A similar perspective was also reflected in the following quote from another interview partner who is also a Black woman from a favela: “It is bad to say this, but there are no bullets for all of us. If you cut, if you drop one, three will come out.”³⁵³ This quote introduces the idea that Black women are like hydras. This idea refers to the water monster in Greek mythology that has multiple heads and the special characteristics that for every head that is cut off, two new ones grow back. Without wanting to be cynical, my interview partner used the picture of the hydras to highlight the necessity of collective construction as it will ultimately help save lives.

3.4.3.2 Visibility as Unintended Means of Identification and Mobilization

To this day, the exact motives for Franco’s assassination have not been elucidated. Yet assuming that it was the intention of the murderers to silence Franco and stop what she was doing, this shot backfired in a figurative sense.

As seen above, Franco’s visibility as a Black lesbian woman from a favela was probably one of the reasons she was chosen for homicide. But Franco’s assassination also catalyzed the self-empowerment of marginalized groups, especially for young Black women. This is reflected in the following quote:

On the day of the funeral, I saw many people on the street, right? And of course, we knew her, and there was a huge emotional impact, but I was surprised that people who had never met her or even voted for her, suddenly she made an impact. I remember a girl walking alone on the street in Cinelândia, with a face like that, and she looked like her, her hair was kind of black, so I said, looking at the girl, I said: “Guys, maybe she didn’t even know her, how could she have such an impact?” Because somehow there were many projections, and she managed to embody who she represented, those thousands of girls. So it was a collective empowerment. I don’t even like this word empowerment, but it was like this, right? It had a collective meaning, a collective dimension, even spiritual, touching people, amplifying, for so many like her.³⁵⁴

A similar perspective was invoked by another interview partner. Before Franco’s assassination, her visibility as a Black lesbian woman from a favela had high symbolic value to those with closer ties to the office. After the murder, what Franco represented with her body also started to touch people without a connection to the office and made them wish they had known her (better), as expressed in the following quote:

You are representing a part of the population, but you are also legislating for the entire population. So it was important to have this visibility in your immediate circle, amplifying a little bit, and unfortunately after her death, this possibility for people to [get closer?]. Of course, the imaginary also opens the way to many other things, but people wanted to have known Marielle. Maybe this is the wish of so many people: “I wish I could have met Marielle, my goodness.” Maybe also in the process of remission, right? “Look, poxa [slang word to express sadness and anger, KM], why didn’t I go to the …?” As I heard one young woman: “Poxa, she gave me her phone number and I never called.”³⁵⁵

As already stated above, Franco’s murder made many people feel vulnerable. Many of those who worked for the same causes like Franco felt they were exposed to greater dangers and risks than they had imagined.³⁵⁶ At the same time, however, Franco’s murder also woke up and mobilized people to take matters into their own hands. This can be seen in the following quote:

So I think that this murder awakened a great need for action, for understanding that you have to be the subject of action to … you know, “only the struggle changes” that reality. You can’t expect someone, the state … this thing, the state. Who is the state if not the people that are inside it? So: “I need to occupy this state in order to do something.” And I think that this assassination in fact generated a state of urgency and people set out to do this: “If she did it, I can do it, and if there are many of us, it’s harder to stop it.” I think that it generated the opposite effect of what was imagined by those who planned Marielle’s death, Marielle’s assassination. You see, instead of fear … there even was fear, there really was fear, you know … It wasn't a fear that immobilizes. It was a fear that makes you act.³⁵⁷

3.4.3.3 Practices Toward Resurrection

As seen on the last pages, Franco’s assassination caused a lot of fear. But instead of paralyzing people, it made them act and move. This is captured in the following story of a former staff member of Franco’s:

I think the break in the routine of all the advisors’ lives was very painful. But I … on Thursday morning, I would get up, go to my work, because I had to open the office. And so, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Really, I didn’t know, right? At first, the impulse was to go to the place where the execution had taken place. My husband wouldn’t let me, right? My husband wouldn’t let me. And on Monday, after the office meeting, we took the same route where she was executed. We left Lapa and went to UERJ. She had a table at UERJ where she was going to talk about the importance of the Espaço Coruja, the importance of this place, but she [speaks of the importance?] of this place for this mother, for this father that studies, to have his child taken care of, right? Taken care of. And then we took the same path.³⁵⁸

As this quote shows, despite the shock and feeling of powerlessness after Franco’s murder, people began to remember her and took up and followed Franco’s path.³⁵⁹

In the days after Franco’s murder, some people with a Christian background (including myself³⁶⁰) felt like they were witnessing a resurrection. This impression was created by Franco’s increased visibility and the reaffirmation of her presence and legacy on the streets and in traditional news outlets and on social media. This was also reflected in the following quote, which interprets Franco’s death as a martyr’s death:³⁶¹

First, we lost her. I say this because … how can I say this, you can’t diminish this pain. You can’t see … only the seed. I don’t know if this is a pessimistic statement. I hope not. But I would prefer that we had fewer martyrs throughout history. Do you understand what I mean? What changes is that … the first change is that I lose a friend. And that is very hard, even more so the way it happened. So the first change is Marielle’s absence. And that is a pain … that needs to be acknowledged and felt with all integrity. Now, as a Christian, especially as a Christian, this multiple sense of resurrection … what changes is that this death ends up giving much greater visibility to the causes that Marielle carried. So it changes the level of the debate on the issue of machismo, racism, and LGBTphobia in the sense of giving more visibility, of giving more strength, of saying: “We don’t want another Mari to be lost. We are here; let’s go together, let’s go together.” So, I think it’s a level shift of visibility on these issues, and the empowerment of many other people from Mari’s memory. Right there, very close to us, there is a wall with a drawing of her. She is in Rio, she is in São Paulo, she is outside Brazil. In other words, she becomes a symbol of a struggle. The fight gained strength. Other women ended up being pushed. But from a huge defeat. It was not supposed to be this way.³⁶²

After Franco’s assassination, people stood together to affirm Franco’s legacy and to keep alive her memory in a way that should make it impossible for “another Marielle to be lost.” By reasserting her story and presence, Franco continued to take part in life. In other words, people’s practices of remembering Franco “resurrected” her. Her renewed presence and visibility strengthened the causes she represented by elevating them to a new level of publicity.

However, the practices of remembering, reasserting, and resurrecting also led to changes in Franco’s image (a) and to a difficult situation for people in Franco’s close surroundings who needed to go through a process of mourning (b).

• (a) Different Images of Franco after Her Death

Although Franco collaborated strongly with other Black women and groups, it was not until after her assassination that they were mobilized on a large scale. This can be seen in the following quote:

[T]his mark of Blackness is very much expressed after Marielle’s death, by the mobilization of Black women around the figure of Marielle, even more than in her life, for example, because we also had many difficulties in mobilizing. And it is very interesting to see how much Black women are getting closer to this figure that today is symbolic. How much, the following day, I can say … because at that early hour, it was still very much the people who were more close, […] we were more ourselves. But the next day, the fifteenth, the funerals … we can see this range of Black women, and there [were] recurrently the collectives, the acts, the Black women, the axé women, the women that came after. So this movement of Black women appropriating this figure comes later.³⁶³

As this quote reflects, the widespread recognition of Franco as a Black woman by other Black women turned her even more Black. In this process, it appears as if there was also an almost religious moment of redemption. This is reflected in the following quote:

P: […] I see it as if the Black women were almost … redeeming themselves, right, for a process of change, for not having attended, right? I won’t call it remorse. Do you understand the meaning of remorse?

KM: No, but keep talking.

P: Remorse would be a … feeling similar to the one Judas felt afterward and that led him to suicide.

KM: Ah, ok. Yes. When I have done something bad, or I haven’t done something, and I feel it.

P: We use the word remorse.

KM: Ok. I think I understand.

P: Because it troubled Judas so much, you know, to have betrayed, to have received money. So this is for you to understand this disturbing feeling that is guilt … very strong, very deep. So I won’t use guilt, I will use this perhaps unconscious feeling of … “here we are redeeming ourselves, we are understanding what you are, what you [represented?]. Why didn’t we manage to stay closer?” A little bit like that. [A long moment of silence follows.] I think it is very interesting because the presence of Marielle, for example, as a politician in an event, in a Black women’s event like a march, for example, for being a politician, and today appropriated by this … look at the banners, the flags, and how difficult it was for us to bring these … so, I see it as a recognition, a feeling of “look, we are here, recognizing” and so on. [Another long moment of silence follows.] But I don’t think it’s bad. I think it’s important because this gives strength. This also consolidates the image of the Black woman in this place today, this symbol. I think it is good.³⁶⁴

This quote describes not only a moment of remorse but also some kind of conversion that led Black women to reappropriate Franco’s figure after her assassination.³⁶⁵

In the wake of this and other processes of appropriation, Franco was increasingly transformed into a symbol. This also led to an increased detachment of the symbol “Marielle” from Franco’s story and its context. One interview partner noted, for example, that Franco appears to be a martyr if she is remembered as an individual only. Yet, he emphasized, she was also a very typical woman from the favela.³⁶⁶ As such, she had to live through different challenges and experienced social struggles in her flesh.

To underscore Franco’s humanity in view of her heroization, another interview partner (P) told me how she and her family (with two little children) had celebrated Christmas in 2017 together with Franco and Benicio.

[We said,] “Let’s do the Santa Claus story. We knock at the door; we ring the bell. The children will think that Santa Claus left it there.” Said and done. Then the bell rang, and my daughter went: “Oh my God, it can only be Santa Claus, because [everyone has arrived?].” And then she and the other child went there and Marielle was crying. She started to cry. [And why?] “My goodness, this innocence of children …” Oh, man … you know, that was her … [P laughing] You know, we made fun of her because she was, she had … her ascendant was the fish. […] So she was melted butter with specific things. She cried, “No, but it’s so sweet that these children believe that Santa Claus has arrived.” I said: “Aren’t you laughing at that?” She, “No," crying. So she was like that: too human. She got annoyed, she got annoyed for goodness’ sake, with the things in life, I don’t know, anything that everybody gets annoyed about: traffic and stuff … And then, that’s it, sometimes I see […] this Marielle that knew everything about … this myth that is there that knew everything about feminism … she knew. She was learning, reading, we were reading with her, building and not knowing all the references. […] Angela Davis, for example, was a very recent thing for her, for me. She had already read one book by Angela Davis; she had just started to read the second one. She was not this … you know, it seems that she was a Wikipedia of the Black, feminist, and favela movement. No, she was a being, all the time, in construction, and learning. But that’s it, she didn’t stop. She was learning all the time. She was like a sponge. She picked up things very easily, you know? Very quickly. Very quickly.³⁶⁷

As this story reflects, Franco did not stand above things, as the symbol “Marielle” sometimes suggests. Instead, Franco let herself be irritated and delighted by daily life just like other people do. If anyone insists to ask what set her apart, my interview partners highlighted that it was her willingness to learn.³⁶⁸

• (b) Difficult Mourning

As seen above, Franco’s visibility and the practices toward resurrection helped strengthen the causes Franco represented. But they should not be romanticized because of that. These practices keep the memory of Franco alive but do not bring her back. For the people in Franco’s immediate environment, this represents a major challenge.

[S]ometimes, it is very difficult; it is difficult to mourn. Because it is a mourning with a lot of presence. Mourning is absence. Mourning, in fact, for you to do it, is missing, isn’t it? That figure, that person, is not present in your daily life. And then, with the phenomenon, the size of it, the size of Mari, the difficulty is to mourn, because you have to struggle, to go against the name, against the face all the time. This is very difficult.³⁶⁹

A similar perspective is also evoked in the following quote by another interview partner: “I can’t talk about her in the past tense because she is very present, like this. She is very present in my life, like this, my daily life. She is very present. I don’t cry every day anymore, but it’s hard not to cry, right? Not to cry … it’s hard not to cry.”³⁷⁰

Still another interview partner expressed appreciation for work on the memory of Franco. At the same time, he emphasized that this cannot outweigh her loss:

It is accumulating what we call today necropolitics, the politics of the extermination of those who are not part of the plan. They are inserted in the survival plan, of living within the national and even global conjuncture. But there is resistance. This is important. There is resistance. So when you propose to listen, to listen to the people who were with Marielle at some point in her life, that is already something very positive. It’s something very positive. When you give Marielle a street name in several places around the world, right? When … Of course, all of us who live together with her, who live with her, who loved Marielle, for us, this is totally unnecessary. We just would want her to be here with us. That is all. That she would continue her trajectory with all the contradictions, with all the defects and virtues that she had as a human being, but that she would be here.³⁷¹

Against the background of these interview passages, it is important to acknowledge that Franco’s assassination first and foremost meant the untimely interruption of her and other individuals’ trajectories, dreams, projects, and hopes, which cannot be replaced through any attempt to keep her memory alive.

3.4.4 (Re-)continuations and Amplified Resistance After Marielle Franco’s Assassination

In this chapter, I will discuss some changes in the context of party politics and social activism that followed Franco's assassination. Afterward, I will demonstrate how resistance multiplied in the aftermath of her murder.

3.4.4.1 Reevaluating Security and the Importance of Franco’s Agenda

Franco’s murder brought different changes to the environment in which she had worked. The first change that needs to be mentioned is security. As seen in Sect. 3.4.2, many people committed to human rights suddenly perceived with new clarity the danger to which they were exposing themselves. As a result, the issue of security took on a new importance. This is reflected in the following quote:

[A] significant part of the more progressive left understood that our security is important. […] A lot of the habits we had … people knew our whole life, right? You went on Facebook. They knew where we were going to speak, where we were going to give lectures, our panel discussions, our meetings, public assemblies that were held in the streets, public classes in the square, all the events. Everybody knew where we were, you know, all the time. People could film, right, whomever they wanted. I think we understood that this moment demands a little more prudence for some actions. So I think these two things have changed: one is that we have gained a little bit of the real gravity of the context we are facing, and the second is that we have started to take seriously the need for our own safety and how important it is to protect ourselves.³⁷²

After Franco’s murder, activists reevaluated their personal safety concerns. Beyond that, some people who had worked closely with Franco also had to be placed under protection.³⁷³

In addition to security, the importance of Franco’s political agenda was also reassessed by her party and placed on a broader basis. This is reflected in the following quote:

I don’t know, I think that if she were still alive, she would be a … she wouldn’t sort out the problems, but I think she would mess with the party’s structure, which […] is like the left-wing parties, right, it has a very White and masculine structure. And at the same time, she had this possibility of being able to talk to the favela. Something that the favela could understand, something that our left has a lot of difficulty with. So at the same time, I think she had other campaigns where she could use her name and get even more interesting votes. And I think, in a certain way, this would also wear down the party and the party could get better, right, but with these issues. It’s interesting that with her death this will end up happening because now it’s not just one Marielle. There are three of them, with very similar characteristics. So wanting it or not, the party will have to … I even think that Marcelo [Freixo]’s last campaign in this sense was very good. Although I belong to PT, I think Marcelo’s campaigns were always the best chance for us to win the city. And he repeated the same mistakes of the other leftist parties that were only talking to the middle class, only talking to the university. In the last campaign, they gave it a new twist and put a very strong focus on the issue of the Black [person], of the favela. It became a popular campaign, you know, and I think they had that in mind.³⁷⁴

3.4.4.2 “Seeds of Marielle”: Multiplied Resistance

In the aftermath of Franco’s murder, her memory was kept alive and became an important inspiration for individual and collective resistance. In this context, people often refer to “seeds of Marielle” or “Marielles,” who carry on her legacy in their specific life contexts. This seeds rhetoric embraces two dimensions, as the following quote highlights:

[I]t is a political construction, perhaps intentional, so that this political vacuum can be occupied. In politics, it is a tactic to do that, right? There is an empty space. You occupy it. Other people will occupy it. But at the same time, it is a message of hope, right? To think of seeds, roots, fruits, flowers, and the cycle of life … that is, how to be born and die and renew and perpetuate in absence, but also in presence and in transformation.³⁷⁵

As expressed in this quote, the seeds rhetoric is a political construction for creating continuity. Meanwhile, it also contains a message of hope. In this quote, the seeds rhetoric seems to be secular, pointing to the renewal of the cycle of life. But historically, the image of seeds has also been closely connected to martyrdom and the growth and strengthening of the church through the killing of witnesses of faith.³⁷⁶ In the following, there will be three examples of how the memory of Franco provides a message of hope in the most grave of circumstances and how it has been used for political organizing.

• (a) Franco as an Example for Young People in Favelas

As shown above, Franco’s murder was a great shock to the social movements and institutions in the favelas and revealed some deeper changes in the political landscape. According to one interviewee (P), the current political developments felt like a step backward to the insecurity of the 1990s:

[W]e are now going through a moment of absurd setbacks, right? […] We already had many projects, and we ended up with most of them during the Lula government because they were in some way supplied by public policies, right? […] We are in a favela today that doesn’t even have a social project from the government. One social project, one. There is nothing. Most of our projects here work with volunteers. We don’t have the financial resources we used to have in the past. And we get desperate sometimes, because you have to talk to a young person and have nothing to offer, it’s crazy. But that is the demand of the day, what we are proposing when we built the institution, what we proposed to do and then we are shaking off the dust, getting up and trying to look beyond the … this pollution, you know? So we feel kind of … as if we had gone back to the 90s. This is the feeling, a little bit. But we don’t see any other way but to make the population more and more aware, to be able to vote better and better, to follow their politicians and believe in this falsehood that is our democracy, even for the sake of sanity, right? [P laughs] To believe that nothing will go right … can you imagine getting out of bed knowing that nothing will go right? This feeling is complicated. But we don’t have any other way.³⁷⁷

The setback to the 1990s indicates the return not only to a politically uncertain conjuncture but also to position zero and the founding years of some NGOs and movements in the favelas.³⁷⁸ In such an environment, for some individuals like my interview partner, there is no option but to cling to the original ideas of their organizations and start over. As the quote above reveals, this perspective is frustrating because it is not clear whether it is possible to make progress and improve the living conditions in the favelas.

At the same time, however, there are small testimonies that things do not stay the same. In the aftermath of Franco’s murder, for example, young people of CEASM appropriated her campaign slogan, “I am because we are.” Being Black was not originally an issue for the institution, but now it is becoming more so.³⁷⁹ In summary, young Black people in the favelas are appropriating the memory and legacy of Franco in order to consolidate and affirm their identity and learn how to occupy spaces in society, culture, and politics and to take part in the process of shaping a more just society.³⁸⁰

• (b) Black Women in Politics

As mentioned earlier, after Franco’s murder, several Black women have carried on the work she started. The best-known three “seeds” are Mônica Francisco, Renata Souza, and Dani Monteiro,³⁸¹ who were elected as state deputies of Rio de Janeiro in the fall of 2018. Their elections were perceived as signs of hope that the murder could not defeat Franco and that her legacy would live on.³⁸²

Concerning their activities, it is important to emphasize that it is not Franco’s work and legacy alone that these women carry forward. They have rather tried to expand their joint collective construction. This can be seen in the following quote:

Everything she was going to build she was going to call on people to build it together. This construction was so collective, these processes were so collective, that three candidates emerged from her office and were also victorious. But why? Because each one, in her field of action, was strengthened through the strengthening of that office, right? There was not Marielle alone. She became a person with visibility because of her parliamentary performance, but she also gave visibility to the struggles that the other people who are, who were part of her office, were already doing before being part of that office.³⁸³

This quote emphasizes that all three women have their own expertise, stories, and characteristics. For this reason, they should not be reduced to their connection to Franco and their status as seeds.

Beyond this, it is also questionable to what extent they can provide continuity to the project they had begun jointly before Franco’s murder. Apparently, since their election, there were also tensions among the three elected women. This is reflected in the following quote:

P: […] She had this dimension of collective struggle. With her death, even the campaigns and even though Black women replaced her, I now see this very fragmented and I see the campaigns much more personalized than she was. She had a more collective construction, even in the relations with other women candidates, for example.

KM: And today it is different?

P: Very different. There is a lot of conflict among the women in politics, a lot of conflict between the candidates. The three Black women in ALERJ—this doesn’t come out to the public—but they don’t get along very well. They compete with each other. To me, this is completely different from what she did.³⁸⁴

The extent of tensions and possible disagreements could not be investigated in this project. For a future assessment, it would be important to take into account that Franco’s murder changed the context. The work of these women cannot be the same as it was before Franco’s murder. This is also reflected by the same interview partner:

[P]olitics has become tougher, very painful. This campaign in 2018 was extremely painful. It was a blow. It was a personal blow to everyone who was with her … her family, of course, but everyone who was with her, who worked with her. There are people who are still not well in their minds because of this, [people] from her office, who worked with her. A lot … and somehow the politics, as it was done with her death, also didn’t help people to overcome mourning. Every month there was something. Politics becomes at the same time an important tribute that you had to do, a fight for justice. In a way it inspires our fight, but politics became very hard. In a way it is also doing politics with a very big loss, with a very big absence.³⁸⁵

As this quote suggests, it was important to remember Franco in order to fight for justice. But at the same time, the continuous remembering also gave her loss and absence ever greater weight.³⁸⁶

In this context, all Black women who ran for office after Franco’s murder needed a lot of strength and great courage to pursue this path. This was emphasized by another interviewee:

I used a campaign phrase in the past that when Mari arrived, you know, there was Mari, there were two Black women. She arrived ten years after a Black woman, and Mari used to say that “it shouldn’t be one Black woman at a time,” you know? She used to say this sentence a lot. And then when these other women put themselves in the forefront, because it was like that, you have to have a lot of courage, a lot of courage, after the execution of an equal, to put yourself in that position. It is an immense courage.³⁸⁷

As hinted at in this quote, ten years after Benedita da Silva, Franco was the first Black female city councilor from a favela. Assuming this position required a lot of strength and courage. After Franco’s assassination, the women who followed her needed even more courage to assert their voices and places as elected officials.

• (c) Marielle’s Seeds in All Places

In addition to these three well-known examples, numerous other (Black) women and groups who have been inspired by Franco’s trajectory turned into “Marielles” or “seeds” in the process of appropriating her memory. This development and its enormous extent came as a big surprise to everyone, as expressed in the following quote:

P: […] You have an increasing number of women, especially young women, Black women, who have assumed this position, this position and this fight, you know, of Marielle. Getting interested in her, you know, who she was, what she did. Trying to understand what she did, what she left behind, what she left as a legacy, what she started to do and couldn’t finish … to be able to give continuity to this, you know? Man, this is very incredible. I don’t remember a person in Latin America, perhaps, with such a strong repercussion. Of course, within their respective countries you have someone who is emblematic in some way. But I think it’s like that, you know, in Latin America, if I arrive today, tomorrow, at the University of Colombia, and there’s, I don’t know, a room, a place called Marielle Franco, it’s …

KM: Impressive

P: I think this is impressive, in fact. I think that this is still going to be studied because this is very surprising. As long as Marielle is alive, you don’t have any clue that she is this. I don’t even think she had, I don’t know, just a slight notion. Black woman, lesbian, and so on, peripheral. Really, it’s surprising. She’s in parliament, etc. But I don’t think anybody had the notion that, man, if this woman is assassinated, there’s going to be an international commotion. I don't think anybody would have bet on that.³⁸⁸

However, remembering and being interested in Franco as a public figure does not automatically lead to the empowerment of women, Blacks, LGBTQ+, and people from favelas. For this to succeed, it is important not only to remember her last years and her work in the city council but to keep in mind her origins and the process that made her the person she was. This is called for in the following quote:

[A]t the same time, as a friend, we really want to see […] that her name is not forgotten as a person that we loved. At the same time, I think, it is much more important that her struggles are not forgotten, because her struggles bring about an idea of collective. But her specific memory can give an idea of a martyr, where people stand still, stop, and say: “I can’t get there.” But she is the very classic profile of a favela woman, who had a child in adolescence, who socially suffers all kinds of aggressions. Our macho world attacks and offends, but she overcame many things. She overcame many things. And I would really like women to see themselves in this trajectory. It is possible [to become] not only a city councilor, everything else, but possible, as I say, to change your reality, you know? Against all the other structures that impose themselves on you. A girl who has a child in her adolescence in the favela, she seems to be condemned to social death, and the way Marielle managed to overcome this, I think that for me […] her story in this sense is much more political for me than a year in office […]. So she had to be a mother, she had to be an activist, she had to be a worker, and, at the same time, the dream of going to university. Women already have this characteristic, but they don’t necessarily pursue a personal project [unintelligible] out of this characteristic. They manage to work, manage to be a mother, manage to take care of their husband, manage to … Marielle within all this still managed to build a personal dream. It’s not the ideal, right? A person has so many responsibilities and so many limits. But at the same time, showing that it is possible, I think it also helps.³⁸⁹

This quote shows the inspiration that can come from Franco’s story; especially for Black and favelada women. Taking inspiration from Franco does not mean that one needs to pursue a political career. But Franco’s trajectory from Maré to Rio’s city council might show them that it is possible to follow a personal dream and become something other than what society and culture prescribes.

Whenever the memory of Franco makes women realize that it is possible to pursue a personal dream, it also contains some concrete strategies on how to proceed to realize them.³⁹⁰ This is reflected in the following quote:

P: […] I think that the great contribution and legacy, the fruits of Marielle, will be in the identification of these various girls that are out on the streets … in fact, what they will be thinking: “If I want to be a city councilor, I will be, but if I want to be an engineer, if I want to be a teacher, if I want to, I will wear my hair like this, I will assert myself as Black, I will … ” And her last debate […] was also very much in that sense, Black Women Moving Structures. This vision was incredible. Because in a certain way, I think this is the mark of what she leaves behind. That last event at the Casa das Pretas, with young Black women, was not an event to think about the seeds of Marielles in politics, as it ended up becoming a little later, but … well, to transform there really has to be a lot of seed, right? Just one seed, two, or three will not transform. Many seeds of Marielle, in this sense of …

E: Seeds in every place.

P: In every place. “One goes up and pulls the other up,” and “I am because we are.” This reference that is collective, just how this construction has always been collective.³⁹¹

As this quote shows, Franco leaves behind the idea and a concrete example of collective construction. The strategies of collective construction in words and practice, education, care, incarnation, and creating visibility will help Black women to empower themselves and others and to resist structures and tendencies of exclusion and marginalization.