More than five years after the murder of the councilor and popular leader of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro Marielle Franco, the intellectual authorship of the crime has not yet been clarified.
But a new testimony, offered last week by ex-military policeman Élcio Queiroz, confirms something that was already suspected: far-right paramilitary groups – with historical ties to the Bolsonaro family – were the direct assassins of Franco, the car who was shot dead in the neighborhood of Lapa on the night of March 14, 2018. Queiroz was driving the killers’ car and Ronnie Lessa, a paramilitary with an ultra ideology, pulled the trigger.
The accomplices betrayed by Queiroz are robot portraits of the typical militiamen – ex-policemen, firefighters and corrupt local politicians – who already control a large part through an extortion network, the management of transport and service companies, and the purchase of political power.
“It is indisputable that there is a strong link between the homicide and […] organized crime militias in Rio,” said Brazilian Justice Minister Flavio Dino last week.
For all this, the new Spanish edition of the book Republic of militias. De los escuadrones de la muerte a la era Bolsonaro, by Brazilian investigative journalist Bruno Paes Manso, is essential reading to understand the historical context of the assassination.
Paes Manso, sociologist at the University of São Paulo and contributor to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, 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 current paramilitary groups, as well as their links with Bolsonaroism.
In a long interview held in the courtyard of his guarded condominium, in the Vila Madalena district of São Paulo, the author acknowledges 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 Rio de Janeiro’s assembly ordered the execution in revenge for a 2008 parliamentary inquiry into the militias, pushed by Franco and his Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) colleague Marcelo Freixo .
Then, for the first time, paramilitary criminality 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 to maintain order – explained Paes-. 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 after the 2008 investigation for his relationship with the paramilitaries, may have ordered 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 reason, related to the precise moment of the murder, six months before the unexpected victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential elections of October 2018. “I think it was a symbolic murder, in order to create the perception of disorder so that Bolsonaroism could grow”, he says. It would not be the first time – as Paes explains in his book – that the far right used acts of violent provocation to try to change the political atmosphere. The military Freddie Perdigão Pereira, a torturer during the dictatorship, was the mastermind of the failed attack during a rock concert in Rio in 1981, which aimed to “slow down the transition to democracy”, says Paes. Pereira would join the mafias that managed illegal gambling in Rio (slot machines and the so-called “jogodo bicho”), the first business of the paramilitaries.
When news of Franco’s murder broke, Bolsonaro’s networks were 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 related to Carlos Bolsonaro,” says Paes. “Lessa was already considering murdering Marielle in December 2017 and was discussing her plans with third parties, such as Queiroz. Carlos Bolsonaro could have found out before; the fact that they were neighbors and ideologically close would enable this communication”.
It is not the only link between the Marielle case and the Bolsonaro family. Flavio, the eldest son, hired militiamen and their relatives when he was a member of the Rio parliament, to pocket part of his wages in a corruption scheme known as the “rachadinha”. Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, the head of the so-called crime office, a powerful militia group based in Rio das Pedras, collaborated in the plot. “Ronnie Lessa was a good friend of Da Nóbrega”, recalls Paes.
Whoever is the mastermind behind the murder, the coincidence of the objectives of the paramilitaries and Bolsonaroism is indisputable, says Paes: “The paramilitaries and Bolsonaro are the product of the same police culture, which mixes a discourse about the war on crime with corruption and extermination”.
