Weekly editorial – Bolsonarist extreme right killed Marielle

We publish an unofficial translation of the weekly editorial of A Nova Democracia found here.

In a plea bargain, former military police officer Élcio Queiroz (see relationship with Bolsonaro) stated that Ronnie Lessa executed councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, on March 14th, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro. According to the informer, he was the leader of the operation that took the lives of both.

In his testimony, Élcio stated that Ronnie told him about the operation on New Year 2017. The attack, carried out in March 2018, had already been attempted at the end of 2017, but without success. Élcio revealed some operational details of the attack, and confirmed the participation of former military firefighter Maxwel Simões Corrêa and Edilson Barbosa dos Santos as (respectively) responsible for monitoring the routine of the former councilwoman and for the disappearance of the vehicle used in the attack. Former military police officer Edmilson Oliveira da Silva (“Macalé”), who mediated the relationship between the leader and the executor Ronnie Lessa, was executed in an ambush in 2021, in a “burning of archives”.

The new information about the Marielle Franco case only reinforce what all democrats already know: it was an ambitious political crime, carried out by an organized and experienced operative. Absurd are all the thesis that seek to provide circumstantial answers or centered on the figure of the councilwoman, such as the one theory that advocates that the death was ordered because Marielle would have been a “thorn in the side” of the paramilitaries. No, none of these thesis can be sustained.

The objective fact is that on that court, due to the 2018 presidential elections, Bolsonaro’s candidacy had gathered all the extreme right-wing junk to practice acts of provocation to make that election unfeasible by creating the maximum amount of chaos and justify military intervention, which would pave the way for the installation of a military regime. In this attempt, its articulations for completely controlling the Public Security apparatus of the state of Rio, including the penitentiary system, its bank of profitable businesses, were threatened by the federal intervention of general Braga. Hence, the cowardly execution of Marielle Franco was an act of “throwing a corpse” on the political table, in a demonstration of dissatisfaction by this far-right scoundrel to maintain its absolute control of that police-military apparatus and the territories controlled by its bloodthirsty mafias, poorly called “militias”. But why Marielle? To make it clear that the authorship of the extreme right was that shameless act, because she was a black woman from the favela, openly homosexual and a member of parliament for a “left” party, that is, someone who combined a set of abominable conditions and values for that party, unmentionable fascist aberration, then, on the march, Bolsonaro’s candidacy.

Looking back. Ronnie Lessa and Élcio are both linked to Rio de Janeiro’s far-right paramilitary forces (“militias”). Lessa, coincidence or not, lived in the same condominium as Jair Bolsonaro, in Barra da Tijuca, and there was already a degree of family relation between them: the daughter of Marielle’s killer dated Bolsonaro’s youngest son. Let us also remember that at the beginning of the investigations, Ronnie Lessa stated that the person who executed Marielle was Adriano da Nóbrega, then head of the paramilitary group “Office of Crime”, and that his mother and wife already worked in Flávio Bolsonaro’s office. Adriano was executed, in a coordinated operation between the MP of Rio and Bahia, in 2020, in what was denounced by his wife as “archive burning”. In wiretapping, it was discovered that after such an operation, members of the “Office of Crime” would have made contact with “Jair”, “president” or “man in the glass house”, according to their codes. The tapping could not be resumed, as it would possibly involve the president in that time, which would go beyond the competence of the Public Ministry.

Now, is there still any doubt that the execution of Marielle Franco has a direct connection with extreme right-wing forces and with those who have command power and political reasons? Such forces worked, since then, to precipitate the social chaos that would force and justify a “military intervention” (military coup d’état) by the High Command of the Armed Forces. Is this not exactly the historic modus operandi of the extreme right: carrying out attacks to create chaos and force and justify the closure of the regime? Even if there is punishment for someone who ordered the cruel murder of Marielle (who will, of course, be presented as the leader of the whole scheme), there will be nothing to celebrate. Furthermore, the principal who will certainly remain unrevealed. It is necessary to accuse the truly democratic public opinion that for decades gave birth to all these right-wing extremist forces: this same old corrupt and our-people-oppressing democracy. It did so by never punishing the crimes of the fascist military regime – whose anti-communist organizations at that time are the genesis of these current anomalies and their paramilitary groups, and which led to the January 8th Bolsonaro campaign. It was in this old democracy that the number of genocides exploded, mainly black and poor people in war operations against them in the slums and rural areas across Brazil, at the same time that so much has been said about “representation in the spaces of power” to divert the revolt of the masses to the institutional path that legitimizes the old State genocide and submit them. The parliamentary path proved to be complete electoral cretinism, its cynical agents selling illusions and juggling the mistakes and misfortunes of the peoples masses. It can be said that Marielle was a victim, simultaneously, of the armed extreme right and of the illusion with this genocidal old democracy.