The life of Anielle Franco took a radical and unimaginable turn with the murder that took her only sister from her and shook Brazil exactly five years ago, on March 14, 2018. To Marielle Franco, a leftist councilor from Rio de Janeiro with charisma and a promising political career, they fired five shots at him.
A crime with the signature of professionals.
She was 38 years old, the age her little sister is now, who has been Minister of Racial Equality since January.
Anielle was a young mother who made a living as an English teacher in private schools.
Before she was a volleyball professional, she studied two careers and lived in the United States.
She soon leapt into the public sphere as guardian of her older sister's memory and political legacy.
"If I have come this far, it is because of Marielle and my mother," she says in her ministry office.
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Interview with Anielle Franco
Minister Anielle Franco poses with her mother, Marinete Silva, who was visiting, on March 8 in Brasilia.
Photo: Matheus Alves |
Video: Myke Sena
At the entrance to her office and on top of her work table, two yellow scarves with her face and the motto "Justice for Marielle".
She hopes the suspects in her killing, two military police officers jailed four years ago, will go to trial soon.
But above all, she and her parents want to know who ordered her killed.
The minister receives EL PAÍS for this interview, carried out for the Leaders of Latin America project, in her office in Brasilia on 8M, International Women's Day, a date that was always special in her home.
She has just attended the ceremony in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva decreed that March 14 is Marielle Franco Day against Political Violence by Race and Gender.
“It is a day that gives a bit of meaning to the effort (of these years) and makes the struggle, the hard work… worthwhile.
There are still too many women in politics.
Mari [as she refers to her sister] always used to say that she dreamed of 50/50 at least”.
This imposing woman with an easy smile that overflows with enthusiasm, she admits: "We are still a bit far from that."
This Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary — “half a decade,” he points out — of the journey that took her from mourning to fighting.
She is one of the protagonists of the transformation that democracy is undergoing in Latin America.
As black women raised in a Rio de Janeiro favela, the Francos embody an incipient and seemingly unstoppable change in power structures in Brazil.
People like them, excluded for centuries, are opening cracks in the domain of upper-middle-class white men.
The job at the head of the Marielle Franco Institute gave her a projection that her sister never had in life.
After turning down offers to run for Congress, she accepted the presidential invitation.
“In these five years I was convinced that I would only change my life and my opinion for something very big.
And I'm not talking about money.
The return of President Lula to the Government, after prison, and six years of misgovernment [los elapsed since the
impeachment
of Dilma Rousseff], meant a lot to me”.
The leader of the Brazilian left was persuasive: "I sat across from him, he looked at me and said 'You know you are obliged to accept my invitation.'
Protest for the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, on March 15, 2018. Fabio Vieira (Getty Images)
time
magazine
she was just named one of the 12 women of the year.
Five years ago she took over from her sister, she left teaching and dedicated herself to promoting the entry into politics of other black and mixed-race women.
“It is not enough to elect black women, to get them to be candidates.
We have to take care of them, protect them, because there is a question that still haunts me.
How come we didn't realize Marielle's enormous strength, that it was necessary to protect her?
She had no protection.
Nobody ever thought of that, I think not even herself (…) As Angela Davis says, 'When a woman moves, she removes the entire social structure' and Mari [as she affectionately calls her older sister] removed many important things ” .
Marielle responded without being intimidated to the machismo of other politicians, she criticized corruption and police violence, corrupt deputies,
the power of the mafias of former uniformed men in Rio... She was also bisexual, the mother of a teenager and married to another woman.
The minister also arouses fierce hatred and suffers frequent threats.
Like politicians in the rest of the world, Brazilian women suffer greater hostility than their male colleagues, be it in the chamber or on social networks.
A study by the Marielle Franco Institute, which the family created and she directed until she took office as minister, found that more than 98% of the candidates in the last municipal elections suffered some type of political violence, the vast majority, attacks on networks.
She recalls that the black and mixed-race politicians surveyed denounced up to "seven or eight types of political violence without the parties helping them."
Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo are an emblematic example of this strategy of misogynistic virulence.
Lula presides over the Cabinet with more women than Brazil has ever had, but they barely reach a third.
The situation in Congress is much worse.
They represent only 17%, well below the world average;
And only 2% of their lordships are black women, although they are 28% of the population in this country that established the female vote 90 years ago.
“White men don't want to give up those spaces of power, but we are going to take them because we are qualified.
How good that we have the example of Francia Márquez in Colombia!” She says before emphasizing that Lula has also appointed two women to head two public banks.
Minister Anielle Franco holds a cartoon in which she appears with her sister, Marielle, on March 8 in her office in Brasilia.
Matheus Alves
But, in terms of women's presence in the political arena, Brazil is very disadvantaged when compared to the main countries in the region.
Just look at Mexico, with 50% women parliamentarians, Colombia and Argentina (with each vice-president of the Government) or Chile (with a joint Cabinet and a feminist president).
He confesses that it is hard for him to assume that "Brazil is so retrograde."
The Franco sisters were studious girls, of Sunday mass and funk dancing.
They grew up in a politicized household in the Maré favela, one of the largest in Rio de Janeiro.
“I grew up being a lulista, dressing in red.
Once my sister and I got into a double fight because we lied to our mother and we went to the center (of Rio) to campaign."
After her anger had passed, Doña Marinete was more understanding.
Although Marielle always stood out as the combative activist while Anielle was focused on volleyball, the political streak runs in the family.
“My maternal grandmother and my aunts mobilized during the dictatorship to protect women,” she recalls.
She says that her mother, a lawyer who was visiting the ministry on the day of the interview, worked as a domestic worker to pay for her law degree.
Key in the life and career of the minister, the long decade she lived in the United States.
When she got a scholarship to play volleyball there at the age of 16, her family made every effort to raise money so she could move.
She studied journalism and ethnic-racial relations there and she received the best salary of her life, according to what she recounted in a recent interview.
She was paid $150 an hour to translate for irregular Brazilian immigrants in a Texas penitentiary.
It is also unforgettable how different the reception was in the United States when she returned in February as minister, together with Lula, to meet with Joe Biden.
“At that moment, a movie went through my head.
Entering the US is very different when you're not in a presidential delegation... So, the dog sniffed me, at immigration they asked about the visa, what was I going to do... And I explained sweetly that he was going to study.
They even mistook me for a prostitute!”, she explains.
Anielle Franco holds sunflowers during the funeral of her sister, Councilwoman Marielle Franco on Saturday, April 14, 2018.Leo Correa (AP)
He took the opportunity to tell the US president that both countries, marked by the legacy of slavery, have a wide field in which to collaborate.
“Because the problems they have there, we have them here.
It's George Floyd, it's Marielle Franco…”.
The challenge she faces as Minister of Racial Equality is enormous because Brazil's historical debt to the descendants of the five million Africans forcibly transferred over more than three centuries is immense, and of daily consequences for 56% of mestizo or black Brazilians.
Even more so from the most vulnerable half, women.
She will need to collaborate with other ministries.
As she considers it impossible to single out a single priority as minister, she points to five weighty issues that complement each other: violence, access to health, hunger (because 70% of those who suffer from hunger are black or mixed-race), access to education, university fees (“I am also the fruit of fees”, she is proud to say), and access to land, crucial to explain the historical origin of current inequality.
Among the most urgent, violence.
“The first issue we have to talk about is the genocide of the black population.
Every four hours a black person is murdered (…) we are in a necropolitics, they think we are disposable, ”she declares indignantly.
She knows violence well, including that exercised by the Brazilian State: she learned it on a day-to-day basis in her neighborhood.
“I got tired of jumping bodies, of being prevented from leaving my house to study or work many times due to state violence.”
Last week, Maré, where she grew up, had two days of intense police operations.
The official data is really shocking.
Last year the Brazilian police killed 6,000 people, the majority black;
there are 500 victims a month.
The American killed a hundred a month.
The fear of black mothers in Brazil that their children will not return home is daily.
“We have to think of a way to clean up the police so that they understand that when you enter a favela, there are good people, people who work.
We cannot be perceived only as a threat.
We need a more racialized, literate, more humanized police, not a war police”.
A large collage with the photo of Marielle Franco in the stairwell of Cristiano Viana street, in the Pinheiros neighborhood, west of the city of São Paulo.Fabio Vieira (Getty Images)
Franco is in favor of addressing two of the debates that have made their way in Latin America, but are still taboo in Brazil.
She is committed to addressing the decriminalization of drugs within the framework of the discussion on public safety.
And regarding the right to terminate a pregnancy, she is clear: "It is always time to debate abortion, first, the legal one."
He believes that the priority now should be to guarantee that all Brazilian women, including black and poorer women, who die more than white women in clandestine abortions, have access to interruption in the public health system in the three legal cases: rape, risk for women's health and when the fetus has no brain (anencephaly).
Later, I would like the debate to broaden to decriminalization because “the body belongs to the woman.
We are already tired of having a gang of men decide on our bodies.
Despite the advances in Latin America and the fact that every two days a Brazilian woman dies in a clandestine abortion, the political environment is extremely hostile due to the prevailing conservatism and the power of the evangelical Churches.
Last year, the last of the far-right Bolsonaro's term, the budget to combat violence against women was the smallest in a decade.
And that has consequences, specialists emphasize.
“Physical assaults, sexual offenses, psychological abuse have become even more frequent in the lives of Brazilian women.
Sexual harassment, at work, public transport, has reached unimaginable heights.
And we are facing a sharp increase in the most serious physical violence”, warns a recent report from the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety.
Among its most chilling data, these two: 1,410 Brazilians were murdered in 2022 for the mere fact of being women, almost four a day;
and one million suffered an attempted assault with a knife or firearm;
almost one in every hundred Brazilians.
Minister Franco points out that here, too, racial inequality is evident: “Violence against black women is growing and against white women is decreasing”.
And in recent years, public policies to combat this scourge have weakened, she points out.
During these years, much has been said about the setback promoted by the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, in environmental policy.
But less of the damage to policies on race and gender.
“There is the destruction of budget items.
We started 2023 with just four million ($770,000 for the Ministry of Racial Equality).
I hated women and black people.
He was unaware of the numbers that prove that black women are still at the bottom of the pyramid in professional matters, access to health, education, but they are at the top of the pyramid when we talk about violence ”.
Remember that this department that is now a ministry was a secretariat.
But that was not the only problem: “The people who ran it believed that the racial issue was not important.
So to resume the task from that point requires restructuring, rebuilding and restoring public policies.
His two daughters have already started school in Brasilia.
And Marielle's spirit accompanies him every day.
She often thinks that the one who should be there is her sister, like when she was interviewed on a mythical Brazilian television program with which they grew up, she entered the Government or the Time
list
.
"When I get to the ministry, I think about my sister's project."
Anielle Franco works in her office in Brasilia.
Matheus Alves
And where do you think Marielle would be if she hadn't been murdered five years ago?
"I am absolutely certain that she would have become a senator of the Republic, that was her great dream."
EL PAÍS offers the project Leaders of Latin America openly, in collaboration with the Luminate Foundation for its contribution to promoting democracy in the region and strengthening women's rights.
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