Marielle, Presente!

Thank you so much for being here tonight to mourn and protest the brutal assassination of Marielle Franco.¹ A special thanks to our Smith student, Marcela Rodrigues Guimarães, who emailed some of us last weekend and infected us with her passion, mobilizing faculty and other students to gather here tonight. Marcela invited me to share a bit about how Marielle’s assassination fits into a much larger picture of transnational contexts of racism, state-sanctioned violence, and black women’s struggle for liberation.

I could not be talking about Marielle under the current circumstances in any other way but from a place of vulnerability, or, as a student of mine once said, my moment of strength. And that is one of the things that transpired in Marielle all the time—one of the reasons why people connected with her leadership: she spoke from those vulnerable places of herself, from which the only thing to do is to speak truth to power. Marielle lived and fought as a black lesbian woman, a favelada, an activist, an intellectual, a politician, a partner, a friend, a mother, and a daughter. She was at the intersections of many struggles and she was a warrior. Let’s not forget that.

Marielle knew in her very bones what it meant to be a black woman, born and raised in one of the most violent favelas in Rio (Maré favela); she knew what it meant to live under the control and threat of militarized forces of all sides from sundown to sundown. Her master’s thesis completed in 2014 looked closely into the processes of police militarization and its presence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro—a state policy of public safety implemented in the past few years through the creation of the so-called Pacifying Police Units (Unidades Policiais Pacificadoras—UPP). Her analysis concluded that the policy “strengthens the penal state in order to contain the dissatisfied or ‘excluded,’ a group formed mostly by the poor and the black, those who have been placed in the ghettos of the cities and their prisons.”²

Marielle knew that the militarization of the police and the current military intervention of the armed forces under the illegitimate government of Michel Temer are part of the entrenchment of a long legacy of authoritarianism in Brazil. More than that, she knew that the authoritarian groups that sustained the twenty-one years of military dictatorship in Brazil are the same ones now elaborating, sponsoring, and managing the forces that brutalize black and poor people in the favelas of Rio and other parts of Brazil.

Marielle’s sharp critique of the current military intervention in the city of Rio was intrinsically related to her understanding of how Brazil and other countries in Latin America engaged in a militarization of the state and its police since the turn of the twentieth century—its main purpose being that of controlling and repressing the mobilization led by those who were suffering the most, the “dissatisfied or excluded.” Marielle also knew well how international military potencies, such as the United States, provided financial support and training that sustained these military regimes all over Latin America—a political intervention that is now vastly documented.

Marielle had been elected councilwoman of the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 with a massive vote. This outcome stunned the city’s political elite: as a first-time candidate, a black lesbian woman from Maré favela became the fifth most-voted candidate in the city (out of more than 1,500 candidates, 51 of them were elected). In her campaign, she used as a motto the Ubuntu philosophical principle, “I am because we are” (“Eu sou porque nós somos”). As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in his article, “That success solidified Franco’s status not only as a new political force to be reckoned with, but a repository of hope for Brazil’s traditionally voiceless and excluded groups: its favela residents, its black and poor people, and women.”³

In the United States, nearly 1,200 people were killed by police in 2017.⁴ Black people again faced...