At her inauguration as Brazil’s new minister of racial equality, Anielle Franco described the country she wanted to work for. “One where a Black woman can access decision-making spaces without having her life taken by five shots in the head,” she says, interrupted by the audience shouting the name of her dead sister “Marielle”.
It’s doubtful whether Franco, a Black woman taking an office traditionally occupied by white men, would have been involved in politics had it not been for the tragedy on 14 March 2018. Marielle Franco, a socialist city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, and Anderson Gomes, her driver, were murdered by unknown assailants who opened fire on their car as they returned from a political event. Marielle was 38, the same age as Franco is now, and had been an outspoken critic of Brazil’s extrajudicial killings and police brutality.
Five years on, Franco says the authorities have made little progress on the case. Two suspects were arrested in 2019 – former police officers allegedly with links to the family of former president Jair Bolsonaro – but there have been no convictions to date. To this day, the nature of the connection, if any, between the two suspects and the Bolsonaro family remains unclear. But Franco channelled grief into advocacy, becoming a prominent voice for racial justice in Brazil.
“Ever since they killed Mari, fear has been present in my life,” Franco says. To cope with a pain she describes as “unmeasurable”, she has relied on her family and faith, as well as writing and publishing two books honouring the memory of Marielle.
“But fear can’t paralyse us,” she says. She believes her sister, known for denouncing human rights violations perpetrated by the police and paramilitary groups in Rio, was a victim of “an unfortunately very well-planned crime of political femicide”.
In 2019, along with her parents and Marielle’s daughter Luyara (who was 19 when her mother was murdered), she founded the Marielle Franco Institute to promote her sister’s political legacy and advocate for social justice, raising awareness of race and gender inequalities in Brazil.
In 2021, 62% of femicide victims in Brazil were Black. Black women represented 70.7% of all intentional violent killings.
“She was just doing her job,” says Franco.
While she recognises there are many reasons behind her sister’s assassination, Franco believes systemic racism played a major role.
“We live in a country used to seeing Black bodies as disposable. We, Black people, represent just another body that fell on the ground.”
The Franco sisters were born in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a city where a Black person is killed by police every nine hours.
“A dark-skinned person from the favela knows that he can’t forget his ID at home,” says Franco, who grew up witnessing frequent violent confrontations between the police and criminal gangs in the Complexo da Maré favela.
“If this person is stopped by the police, he knows he can’t raise his voice or go against the officers.” She adds that “there is no way this person will not develop racial literacy”.
Originally coined by US anthropologist and civil rights activist France Winddance Twine, racial literacy refers to the ability to identify, understand, and act toward the different forms that racism operates against oneself or a group.
Franco has been influenced by the 12 years she spent in the US, where she studied for her master’s degree after winning a volleyball scholarship.
She says Black Americans have more access to education and information than Black Brazilians, but realised while in the US that racism speaks the same language everywhere.
“What is the difference between George Floyd and Genivaldo?” she asks, referencing Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, a Black man who was killed in Brazil exactly two years after the death of Floyd in the US.
Santos, stopped for riding a motorcycle without a helmet, died in a police car, suffocated by teargas.
“Brazilian Black movements raise the same flags as Black Lives Matter,” says Franco. In February she visited Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, with the aim of creating a similar institution in her country.
While the far right is still strong in Brazil, Franco acknowledges that the end of Bolsonaro’s polarising regime represents the breathing space longed for by many Brazilians.
A concrete change happened already in her inauguration, when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, sanctioned a law making racial slurs an offence punishable with a jail sentence.
“This brings a sense of historical reparation,” says Franco, who is already discussing anti-racism policies with other government departments, including health and education.
The new government has told the Franco family that the Ministry of Justice will instruct federal police to help Rio’s civil police investigate the case. “It is a relief to live with a government that affirms that solving this crime is important to democracy,” says Franco.
Until the crime is solved, Franco’s family are left without answers.
For the new minister, however, justice will mean a day soon when “Black people will no longer be afraid”.
