The Life and Death of a Defiant Voice
03/15/2018 - 14H10
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JOSÉ ROBERTO DE TOLEDO
The bars across Rio's South Zone were packed with fans watching Flamengo defeat Ecuadorian team Emelec. The Rio football team was surging on social media as well, leading Brazil's trending topics on Twitter on Wednesday night. Amidst thousands of tweets about the players who turned the game around, a name which had nothing to do with the match began climbing the list of trends: Marielle Franco. Slowly, the drama on the field gave way to an emblematic tragedy.
A leader in one of Rio's largest impoverished communities - Maré, a group of 16 favelas cramped between two highways, home to 130,000 people - Franco received the fifth-most votes of the 51 candidates elected to City Council in 2016. She was elected with over 46,000 votes; it was her first time standing for office. She used her tenure to denounce police violence and to defend the interests and concerns of Black women like herself. A representative of the Socialism and Liberty Party, or PSOL, and a sociologist with a master's in public administration, she had just been asked to serve as rapporteur on the City Council commission formed to monitor the military intervention into Rio's security apparatus. She never got the chance to fulfill her mission.
At around 9:30 p.m., as Flamengo took to the field in Ecuador, the white Chevrolet Agile that carried Marielle Franco was overtaken by another vehicle at the corner of Rua Joaquim Palhares and Rua João Paulo I, not far from Rio's downtown. There were at least nine shots. Eight projectiles pierced the rear passenger window, just where Franco was sitting. The ninth went into the bodywork. Four hit the councilor in the head. Marielle Franco died at age 38. She would have turned 39 in July.
The bullets went through the Agile on a diagonal, and three wound up fatally hitting the driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes. Their trajectory suggests that the shooter was behind the Agile on the right. If we imagine a clock face with Franco at the center, her assassin was between four and five o'clock. That is not the position of a person announcing a robbery; it may be that of a person planning an execution. Nothing was stolen. The angle and precision of the shots spared the press officer traveling in the passenger seat, in front of Franco.
More:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2018/03/1960708-te-life-and-death-of-a-defiant-voice.shtml
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