The Unmaking and Making of Marielle Franco
How social media helped save the assassinated politician from social media
This article is an edited version of a paper originally presented at Montgomery Fellows Program’s Intersectionality in the Age of Populism — A Symposium in Three Panels held at Dartmouth College on April 20, 2018.
Apparently, few things are as fluid as the concept of populism. Democracy and intersectionality are the other two on this list. Anthropologist Robert Samet once noted that defining populism has “become a rite of passage to point out the failures of previous generations en route to a new and improved definition.” And Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro wondered how intersectionality scholars could find “a middle ground between an impossible conceptualization of intersectionality as intellectual property, and a destructive conceptualization of intersectionality as meme”. All of this only goes to show how these are very urgent concepts, transforming and adapting as people get hold of them and try to apply them in their everyday lives. One might say that democracy, populism and intersectionality are alive and kicking.
I will leave it to you to take the defining quest further but it seems that no matter which concept — or which definition of a concept we elect to adhere to — they all have something in common at their core: otherness.
So, I would like to tell you a story that illustrates all these connections with otherness. It is located at the crossroads of negative and positive identification, multiple identities, the belligerent language of populism and the sense of belonging. It ends the day Marielle Franco dies. Then it begins.
Marielle, as Brazilians would come to refer to her, was a Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman from PSOL, a left-wing political party. She was also a black feminist, a fierce advocate of LGBTQ rights but also of all victims in the failed war on drugs that ravages her city. She was a mother, she was bissexual, she tried to help anyone in need who came to her at Maré, the poor district in which she was raised. She had become Councilwoman with around 46,000 votes, an extraordinary feat for a newcomer — especially a newcomer like her. She was the only black representative and just one of the seven among the 51 members of Rio City Council. In this condition, she helped to keep open a Special Committee investigating paramilitary militias, which terrorize Rio even more than drug organizations. Her relentless work was bearing fruits: the first members of militias, usually corrupt police officers, were being brought to justice. On the evening of March 14, 2018, she left a meeting at the House of Black Women, downtown Rio, in which she had talked about black empowerment, to go home. The city was under military intervention decreed by president Michel Temer in the beginning of March as a way to tackle the growing violence in the city — and incidentally to boost his one-digit ratings. A little after 9pm, a vehicle approached Marielle’s Chevy and fired nine times through the tinted windows. Four bullets hit her head and another one killed her driver.
The commotion that followed proved to be as extraordinary as Marielle’s rise in politics. Thousands took the streets of Rio and other major cities in Brazil, even abroad, to protest her death and to put pressure on the police to arrest her killers. The foreign press also took notice: Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Guardian, front page of The Washington Post… Now Marielle was an icon, as Le Monde called her. And icons are the main currency in political propaganda. That is why Marielle the brand should be either co-opted or destroyed.
On the other side of the political spectrum, disparaging messages, fake news started popping up in Brazilian social media: Marielle advocated for thugs and bandits, she had been engaged to one of them herself, she actually garnered more votes from the liberal middle class than from the Maré dwellers. The main aggregator behind most of these was Movimento Brasil Livre or MBL, a conservative group that started as free-market orthodoxy advocates in 2013, during the protests that culminated with the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. They were sponsored by the Atlas Network, a non-profit free-market promoting organization behind many such groups throughout Latin America and funded by the Koch Foundation among others. Increasingly, though, MBL has also adopted a more socially reactionary tone in their communications to appeal to a deeply conservative religious population. By then, they had elected a few representatives in larger cities like São Paulo. For the 2018 general elections, they partnered with Democratas, a right-wing party that supports Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s newly elected government.
According to data analysis by the University of Espirito Santo, a website linked to MBL spread decisively most of the fake news surrounding Marielle that night after re-packaging these rumors in appealing, shocking language. They had done this before successfully. In 2017, Santander Bank cancelled Queermuseum, an exhibit that spanned 60 years of queer art, in the city of Porto Alegre due to protests led by MBL. They posted on their Facebook page that “the left is trying to promote pedophilia and zoophilia to children”. This scaremongering persisted even after the DA released a statement which exonerated the bank and the exhibit of all these accusations. ‘The Left’ turned into a signifier of all things degenerate, like all kinds of non-normative sexuality — they are not us, they are a menace, a bad influence to our children, that is, to our survival as a community.
In the populist narrative, as Jan-Werner Müller explains, the “pure, innocent, always hardworking people” are pitted “against a corrupt elite who do not really work and, in right-wing populism, also against the very bottom of society.” The core audience for this message is usually the middle and upper middle classes, united, as it were, against those on the top (the rotten elite) and below (moochers, scroungers, all those lazy people living on the dole and lumped together with criminals). None of them belong to Brazil proper as much as these hardworking citizens. What we have here is a narrative in which a people’s identity only exists as a consequence of the identity of the Other.
Now one cannot use the natural-born citizen or the drop-of-blood arguments in a highly miscegenated country as Brazil, so the language of differentiation borrows from class markers that thinly disguise the racial charge. There’s a component of cleanliness in both the moral and the segregation discourses presented in populist propaganda: as it turns out, these people are not ‘pure’. And Marielle was fittingly placed in the intersection between those two poles. And of course, she was a human rights activist and openly bissexual in a country that saw a spike of hate crimes against its LGBTQ population in 2017, where human rights activists are more targeted than anywhere else in Latin America and in which a woman is killed every other hour and a half. When it comes to embody the Other, Marielle was not in the Venn diagram, she was a Venn diagram herself.
Following the pattern that they used for the Queermuseum protests, MBL made viral this messages that a Rio Supreme Court judge had posted on a WhatsApp group conversation:
“The question here is that this Marielle was not just a ‘fighter’, she was in cahoots with criminals! She was elected by Comando Vermelho [Red Command, a Brazilian criminal organization] and didn’t fulfill some ‘promises’ she made to her supporters. We are sure that such behavior, which was dictated by her political engagement, contributed crucially to her tragic demise. Anything else is just leftist blablablah to aggregate value to a corpse as ordinary as any other.”
Marielle’s reputation as a fighter is not disputed here; her purity, however, is another story, and that’s what suffices. Again, ‘political engagement’ poisons her helplessly and it is conflated with her behavior, whatever that is, but which is not the behavior of a hardworking citizen. Because of all this, her body is disposable, not good enough to be an object of collective mourning. Ceticismo Político, a MBL website, amplifies the post with the lead: “State Court judge breaks the narrative of PSOL [Marielle’s party], says Marielle was involved with thugs and was an ordinary corpse.” In a telling slip, they reveal that what matters here is to recover the narrative that escaped them.
On the same day, a Democratas congressman tweeted that Marielle was typically the Left, but this time because she was a poor young single mother, something so abhorrent to ‘pessoas de bem” or respectful citizens, as being a criminal — which, again, is a given since she was from the Maré slums.
This blitz should have worked the way it had with Queermuseum. The problem was that Marielle was difficult to pin down. Her identity, like the concepts we have talked about today, was too fluid. Early attempts at bowdlerizing her in mainstream press failed.
Marielle’s assassination (and the following character assassination process) had galvanized people the same way Stoneman Douglas shootings stirred and changed the gun-control debate in the United States. In both cases, the quick reaction to established narratives made the difference. Volunteers set up a website to expose the main lies concerning Marielle’s life which were circulating on the Internet. Police officers and their relatives told stories of how she helped them. Her widow was respectfully remembered, And the traffic on social media gravitated towards other directions, outside the partisan bubble. Immediately after the councilwoman’s death, hashtags about Marielle flooded Twitter in 54 countries and 34 languages: 3,573,000 tweets in 42 hours, it was the most trending topic in Brazil ever. And most of these messages and the following likes and retweets basically gave visibility to her biography or were dedicated to debunk the false rumors that bots were trying to magnify. The quality of the social media users was different too. Until that moment, few had known Marielle or her work and there were people from Maré and other Rio favelas and poor communities. The ‘corrupting and corrupted leftist’ narrative did not stick much probably because Marielle and her community were given voices and faces in a swift manner — once again, much like the Florida students taking control of their story online and then elsewhere. The most shared tweet in those couple of days belonged to a 17-year-old self-taught black feminist raised by foster white parents from the lower class town of Queimados, in Greater Rio: Milena Martins, aka @badgcat, used her 280 characters to debunk the ‘criminal-loving politician’ myth. She got to know Marielle’s story as a form of virtual eulogy unfolded on social media and then influenced the later coverage of mainstream press. The story of the many identities of Marielle the Other coalesced into an amalgam that even the hardworking people eventually recognized: them is actually us.
