More than five years after the murder of the councilwoman and popular leader of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro Marielle Franco, the intellectual authorship of the crime has still not been clarified.
But a new testimony, given last week by the former military policeman Élcio Queiroz, confirms something that was already suspected: the far-right paramilitary groups – with historical ties to the Bolsonaro family – were the direct assassins of Franco, whose car was riddled with bullets in the Lapa neighborhood on the night of March 14, 2018. Queiroz was driving the murderers' car and Ronnie Lessa, a paramilitary with ultra ideology, pulled the trigger.
The accomplices exposed by Queiroz are robotic portraits of the typical militiamen – former police officers, firefighters and corrupt local politicians – who already control much of Rio through an extortion network, running transport and service companies, and buying political power.
"It is indisputable that there is a strong link between the homicide and (...) the militias of organized crime in Rio," Brazilian Justice Minister Flavio Dino said last week.
For all this, the new Spanish edition of the book Republic of the militias. From the death squads to the Bolsonaro era, by Brazilian investigative journalist Bruno Paes Manso, is essential reading to understand the historical context of the murder.
Paes Manso, a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo and a contributor to the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, held daring interviews with prominent paramilitaries to investigate the close relationship between the dirty war waged in the sewers of the military dictatorship (1964-1984) and the groups current paramilitaries, as well as their links with Bolsonarismo.
In a long interview held in the inner courtyard of his guarded condominium, in the Vila Madalena district of Sao Paulo, the author admits that it is still impossible to know who gave the orders to the four paramilitaries who murdered the Afro-Brazilian and lesbian councilwoman. But there are two likely explanations. One is that corrupt politicians in the Rio de Janeiro assembly commissioned the execution to exact revenge for a 2008 parliamentary inquiry into the militias, pushed by Franco and his Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) comrade Marcelo Freixo.
Then, for the first time, paramilitary crime was denounced, historically justified as the legitimate self-defense of citizens against drug traffickers. “In Rio, when poor immigrants from the Northeast arrived in the favelas in the 1970s, a war was waged against them, which was understood as a way of maintaining order,” Paes explained. It was an extermination carried out first by death squads and then by the militias”. Paes believes that Rio state councilor Domingos Brazão, who was jailed following the 2008 investigation into his ties to paramilitaries, may have commissioned Marielle's murder. “Under this hypothesis, it would be Brazão's revenge against Freixo; they would decide to kill Marielle because Freixo has more protection”.
But Paes raises another possible motive, related to the precise moment of the assassination, six months before the unexpected victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential elections of October 2018. "I think it was a symbolic assassination, in order to create the perception of disorder so that Bolsonarismo could grow”, he says. It would not be the first time – as Paes recounts in his book – that the ultra-right used acts of violent provocation to try to change the political environment. The soldier Freddie Perdigão Pereira, a torturer during the dictatorship, was the mastermind of the failed attack during a rock concert in Rio in 1981, whose objective was to "stop the transition to democracy," says Paes. Pereira would join the mafias that managed illegal gambling in Rio (slot machines and the so-called bug game), the first business of the paramilitaries.
When the news of Franco's assassination broke, the Bolsonaro networks immediately activated to accuse her of being a drug trafficker. The coordinator of the so-called hate cabinet was Bolsonaro's youngest son, Carlos, a neighbor of Ronnie Lessa, in a condominium in Rio's most ostentatious beach neighborhood, Barra de Tijuca, where the entire Bolsonaro family resides.
“It is impossible to know, but if I had to bet, I would bet on something linked to Carlos Bolsonaro,” says Paes. “Lessa was already planning to assassinate Marielle in December 2017 and commented on his plans to third parties, such as Queiroz. Carlos Bolsonaro may have found out before, the fact that they were neighbors and ideologically close would facilitate that communication.
It is not the only link between the Marielle case and the Bolsonaro family. Flavio, the eldest son, hired militiamen and his relatives when he was a councilor in the Rio parliament, to pocket part of his salaries in a corruption scheme known as the “rachadinha”. Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, the head of the so-called Crime Bureau, a powerful militia group based in Rio das Pedras, was collaborating in the plot. “Ronnie Lessa was very close to da Nóbrega,” recalls Paes.
Whatever the mastermind behind the assassination, the coincidence of the objectives of the paramilitaries and Bolsonaro is indisputable, says Paes: “The paramilitaries and Bolsonaro are the product of the same police culture, which mixes a discourse on the war against crime with corruption and extermination.
