The murder of Marielle Franco

On the evening of 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco was sitting in the back seat of a car in Rio de Janeiro. The city councillor was coming from an event about young Black women who want to change structures. On the way, another car drew up. Thirteen shots were fired from it. Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes died. Her assistant Fernanda Chaves survived.

Franco had grown up in the Maré favela and had worked her way up from there to the city council. Elected for the left-wing party PSOL, she was one of the loudest voices against police violence in the poor neighbourhoods. She campaigned for women, for queer people and for young people from the outskirts. In private, she lived openly with her partner, the architect Mônica Benício.

The murder sparked a wave of outrage. In Brazil and around the world, thousands took to the streets. T-shirts and banners soon bore a sentence that became a slogan: "Fight like Marielle Franco." Benício carried it for months, travelled to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and herself received threats that drove her out of their shared flat.

Almost exactly a year after the crime, two former military police officers were arrested. One allegedly fired the shots, the other drove the car. According to investigators, the attack had been planned for months. But who had ordered it remained unclear for a long time. Suspicion fell on militias, criminal groups with ties to the police and politics.

It took almost eight years. In February 2026, Brazil's Supreme Court convicted five defendants for the double murder, including the masterminds. For many, it was a rare break with the impunity of political crimes in the country. Franco herself was thirty-eight.