Marielle Franco's fiancee on the grief of losing Brazilian LGBT activist and Bolsonaro's rise: 'A nightmare has become my actual life'

‘As long as the culprits do not pay for what they have done, other people are at risk. Only someone who thinks they are very powerful could articulate such a barbaric act and still trust that they would go unpunished,’ says Monica Benicio

Monica Benicio (left) and Marielle Franco. Benicio says she agrees with media reports that claim the murder was planned and involved politicians and security forces

Monica Benicio sensed something bad had happened as she waited for her partner Marielle Franco to return home on the night of her death.

Benicio had called Franco – a Brazilian feminist LGBT+ human rights defender she was due to marry later this year – many times as she became increasingly anxious about her whereabouts.

“A friend came to my house to break the news,” her fiancee recalls. “I already knew something was wrong because I had talked to Marielle when she was in the car on the way home. I tried to talk to her, called her many times, already worried about her delay. I knew there was something wrong. The first reaction is always not to believe. I could not believe in what I was hearing.”

Franco was shot four times in the head on 14 March last year after leaving a public meeting in downtown Rio.

Benicio, who had been in a relationship with the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman for 13 years, believes the killing was political. She lamented the fact that 10 months on from the murder, there are still no official answers about who killed her life companion.

“Marielle´s murder was well executed and the involvement of militiamen and or politicians places the Brazilian state under the spotlight,” the architect and urban planner says. “Brazil faces international embarrassment for being incompetent and not presenting any result for one of the most important political crimes in the country’s history. There will be no democracy while Marielle’s execution is unanswered.”

Earlier this week, it was revealed suspects in Franco’s murder have ties to the family of Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. The country has been swept up in a swelling scandal involving one of Bolsonaro’s sons, the recently elected senator Flavio Bolsonaro.

Rio broadsheet newspaper O Globo linked his son with members of a Rio de Janeiro death squad called the Escritorio do Crime (The Crime Bureau). Police and prosecutors reportedly suspect members of The Crime Bureau were behind Franco’s murder last year.

But Flavio has rejected the report, claiming he was the victim of a defamation campaign designed to hurt his father. “Those who have made mistakes must be held accountable for their acts,” he said in a statement.

Benicio says she is very worried about the election of Jair Bolsonaro, saying the LGBT+ community is similarly anxious and homophobia is rising in the country.

“I cannot speak for the entire LGBTI community, especially because we are diverse in our ideas,” she says. “But I do believe the feeling is a widespread concern for our lives. After all, Bolsonaro has been attacking us directly for years. I worry about more bodies being victimised, about setbacks in laws and the insecurity of not being able to know the course of politics.”

Benicio was thrust headfirst into a state of disbelief and denial after being told that Franco had died.

“I could not believe it,” she says. ”I said I wanted to go to the hospital where she was because she was going to be okay. And I was told that she had no chance of going to a hospital.

“I fainted at the gate and when I woke up I was inside the house and some friends and family were already there. I broke things at home because I could not understand all that pain. I just wanted to wake up from what seemed to be the worst nightmare of my life. Every night I wake up dreaming of that moment, it is hard to live with the fact that the nightmare has become my actual life.”

Marielle Franco and Monica Benicio

The pair had met on a trip with friends when Benicio was 18 and Franco was 24 but their relationship had often found itself interrupted due to their families’ and friends’ inability to accept it.

Benicio lost 11kgs in the space of just a month after Franco died, saying she stopped eating and doing anything associated with pleasure.

“It was not easy to see life as a place where I wanted to be,” she says. ”It is still not. The passing of the months changes things, but the pain still hurts, and every morning it is difficult to get up. The immersion in endless militant activism is a way of feeling that I still have her beside me.”

Benicio was writing her Master’s degree dissertation about violence in public spaces and rights in the city from the perspective of slum dwellers until the tragic night of Franco’s death. This has now been put on hold and she has instead thrown herself into human rights activism and justice for Franco. She says she has stopped therapy but is still taking antidepressants and tranquilisers.

Benicio says she agrees with media reports which say the murder was planned and involved politicians and security forces. She even says there are lines of investigation that confirm these involvements.

“As long as the culprits do not pay for what they have done, other people are at risk,” she says. “Only someone who thinks they are very powerful could articulate such a barbaric act and still trust that they would go unpunished. Only a politically powerful person could plot something so heinous.”

The police have previously said that details of the case were released as a way of protecting witnesses and relatives to ensure the success of the homicide investigation.

Benicio argues it is typical for blacks, women and LGBT+ people to be murdered in Brazil and thus reduced to a grizzly statistic.

Brazil has long been the world leader in overall homicides, and its murder rate is also one of the highest. More than 1,000 women were killed in hate crimes tied to their gender in 2017.

Last year, research revealed violent deaths of LGBT+ people in Brazil had hit an all-time high following a sudden spike in 2017. According to LGBT+ watchdog group Grupo Gay de Bahia, at least 445 LGBT+ Brazilians died as victims of homophobia in 2017 – a 30 per cent increase from 2016.

“I often say that even the title of parliamentarian did not protect Marielle,” Benicio reflects. “She was the personification of everything that this racist, sexist, LGBT-phobic state rejects.”

In her view, justice for Franco’s death is inextricably linked to denouncing the impunity of other deaths. She argues the lives Franco represented are disposable for those in power.

Benicio was born and raised in the Maré complex – one of Rio’s largest, poorest and most violent slums – where Franco also grew up.

Monica Benicio and Marielle Franco

Franco, who became a single mother at the age of 19, dedicated her life to fighting for LGBT+ people, Afro-Brazilians and the poor to be liberated from discrimination and violence. She passionately criticised police killings in the Rio favelas where she grew up and led often dangerous campaigns against pervasive police violence, corruption and extra-judicial murders that targeted the city’s poor, black dwellers.

According to an Amnesty International report, of 1,275 registered cases of killings by on-duty police between 2010 and 2013, 99.5 per cent of the victims were men, 79 per cent were black and 7 per cent were between the ages of 15 and 29.

Just a day before she was killed, Franco tweeted: “Another murder of a young man that could be entering into the [military police’s] account. Matheus Melo was leaving the church. How many more will have to die for this war to end?”

Latin America’s largest nation is one of the most unequal societies in the world, a place where six men possess as much wealth as half the population and where only 10 per cent of congress members are black despite the fact Brazil is majority black or mixed race.

Back in 2016, Franco ran for public office for the first time as a candidate for Rio’s city council and was elected with a gargantuan vote. Thousands descended on the streets of Central Rio to weep and embrace the day after she died.

Bolsonaro – famed for making offensive, incendiary, off-the-cuff comments about women, black people and sexual minorities – won the general election in October and was sworn in as president at the beginning of this month.

The leader, who has been branded the “Trump of the Tropics”, previously told a congresswoman she did not deserve to be raped because she was too ugly and has said the birth of his daughter had made him weaker. He has said the mistake of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) was to torture, not kill left-wing activists.

Benicio notes that Brazil is one of the countries that kills the greatest number of its LGBT+ population, and says she is concerned the numbers of victims of this hatred will now rise.

She believes Bolsonaro’s declared homophobia has increased violence and discrimination against the LGBT+ community in Brazil.

A mural depicting Marielle Franco (Getty) (Getty Images)

“There were several reports of violence during the electoral period.” she says. “People have taken up the streets and social media with words and actions of hatred, feeling that he makes them legitimate. Some say that if we have a closed regime they will leave. But the majority will stay. Brazil is our land and we will continue to resist.”

Earlier this week, Brazil’s first openly gay congressman said he would not serve the new term for which he was re-elected due to death threats and he now planned to live abroad.

Jean Wyllys said that he hardly left his Rio home, saying the climate of violence in Brazil had worsened since the election of Bolsonaro.

Benicio, who says she thinks Bolsonaro’s arrival will also roll back women’s rights in the country, admits there is not one of his government’s proposals she is not anxious about.

“There are no progressive proposals for human rights, labour, the environment, economy, health, education, security – not one proposal that does not withdraw rights,” she says. “It is regrettable to see a government being founded on such retrograde agendas and with a discourse fundamentally built on hatred.”

Benicio says Franco would have responded to Bolsonaro’s election with the same indignation felt by thousands of Brazilians. “None of us thought his election would be possible,” she says. “His candidacy was confirmed only very recently. But it is always worthwhile to remember that over 80 million people voted blank, null or for Haddad. It was not a victory.”

She says she has little hope Bolsonaro will prioritise investigations into Franco’s death – noting that he, the vice president and his party had made a number of declarations violating Marielle’s memory and mocking her execution.

“Ten months after her brutal murder, in spite of all the global attention on her case, Brazilian authorities have failed to take her killing seriously and her case remains unsolved,” says Jurema Werneck, the executive director of Amnesty International Brazil. “Every day that goes by without developments casts fresh doubt on the effectiveness of the investigation.

“Brazilian authorities must ensure a prompt, thorough and impartial investigation into the tragic killing of Marielle. A terrifying precedent will be set if her murderer is not brought to justice. That’s why it’s so crucial that people speak out now and demand justice. We will not stand by and let human rights defenders be killed with impunity.”

Brazilian authorities did not respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

Benicio casts her mind back to the last time she saw her life partner. It was at Franco’s office on the afternoon of her death – a place they rarely went.

“We had lunch together in her office,” she recalls. “We ate the food she had prepared that morning. We stayed together, talking and making out during her lunch hour. Then she walked with me to the elevator.

“It was hard for us to say goodbye. The elevator operator was amused because the elevator went up and down 20 times and I didn´t go in. We stood there, exchanging farewell kisses. When I finally got in the elevator to leave, she stood at the door looking at me, threw a kiss and said, ‘I love you’. This is the last image I have of her.”