Monica Benicio says ‘there is inertia’ in the investigations into Marielle Franco’s death

Tradução: Leandro Ramos

Monica Benicio has stamped countless news headlines since she became the widow of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco from the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) on 14 March 2018. Beyond the newspapers, her face and raised fist have become one of the images of the struggle for justice for Marielle. On the streets, at demonstrations, political and academic events, the architect travelled around Brazil and passed through several countries to denounce the murder of his wife as a political execution.

Monica adapted a traditional greeting in memory of militants who die: instead of “Marielle, present!”, she asked thousands of people to join her in the cry “Marielle, justice!” Since January 1, 2021, the scenario in which she will wage the fight for justice is different. With 22,919 votes, she was the 11th most voted councillor in Rio de Janeiro, for the PSOL, with a non-negotiable commitment to defend the agendas of the LGBTI+ population and women.

On the eve of the three-year anniversary of the death of Marielle and her driver, Anderson Gomes, but with investigations still unanswered, Monica Benicio occupies a seat in the same plenary where her wife played politics and annoyed powerful people. And she intends to continue struggles started by Marielle and go beyond: she wants to fight fascism and Bolsonarism, as she says.

But Monica does not hesitate to say that, even before being a councilwoman, her own body is political – woman, left-wing, human rights defender, lesbian and socialist. For all this, and for Marielle’s legacy, her mandate promises to be resistance amidst a hostile political scenario.

With the support of social movements and the artistic class, Monica competed for the presidency of the Women’s Commission in the House, a strategic place to guide feminist public policies and in defence of women. She will occupy the vice-presidency, but her demonstration of strength after only two months in office did not go unnoticed.

In this conversation with Agência Diadorim, made via video call, Monica Benicio talks about politics, Marielle’s legacy and the struggles she wants to trace as a parliamentarian. And she asks: “It is important that we keep pushing for the revelation of who was behind it and for this investigation not to lose steam.”

DIADORIM — Your campaign and mandate were announced as feminist and anti-fascist. What is the challenge of doing politics in an extremely macho environment – out of 51 councillors only 10 are women?

MONICA BENICIO — Look, it is certainly a challenge. We are talking about a macho and patriarchal society and a government – today, not only installed in Rio de Janeiro, but in Brazil – that is extremely misogynist and has as a project of power to eliminate women’s bodies, mainly from the institutional political debate. So it is not an easy task. It is a great challenge. But since the beginning of the movement, including in the campaign, it has had a very significant welcome and sum. The challenges are being revealed on a daily basis, but also in this pandemic context we are working in a hybrid way, so I haven’t been to the Chamber often, I’ve been doing the sessions in a virtual way, which also provides a different time. (…) That space is very inhospitable and hostile to our bodies and to do politics, because I’m not only a woman, I’m also a leftist woman, a socialist, a lesbian woman, who fights and places herself from this place. So there is an intersectionality that crosses this composition and this debate, which makes it more difficult.

Since the beginning of the campaign – and this is where I set my life – we set the tone – the place of the dispute of being a feminist woman, of a feminism that is not just any feminism, a feminism that is for the 99% who do not accept that bodies are left behind. Therefore it is an anti-racist feminism, it is anti-capitalist, there is no LGBTphobia, no transphobia of any form within it, it is ecosocialist. So all these agendas mean that the debate inside that house is not as fluid as possible, because it is a house that has no interest in dialoguing with these agendas.

The truth is that we have today in Brazil a policy, a power in office, which has no interest in dialoguing with these agendas. On the contrary: it aims to eliminate them. So there is a difficulty. At this moment, in the Chamber, we have been going through the dispute of the commissions, of occupying them. Recently we made a movement that was the launching of a manifesto, made with the support of civil society and social movements, for me to occupy the chair of the Women’s Commission. This is still under debate, but there is an internal difficulty in the house, because who really decides this is the house, the councilmen and women present there. So, the movement of civil society is important to make a point, but in the end, this is decided within the house. It’s in these movements and decisions that we see what kind of politics this house is willing to build. And, in the face of these movements, we put forward a confrontation to make it more inclusive, so that our bodies are in fact a tool for the transformation of that space and of institutional politics, but also an inspiration for this external collectivity. An external collectivity that looks inside that house and sees it being occupied by a Marielle, by a Monica, by a Tainá de Paula, by a Thaís Ferreira and gets inspired there to be disputing this space, understanding that this space should, yes, be occupied by all bodies, without us being there setting the agenda for an index of violence that they commit to take us out of this debate. So, it has been difficult, but there has been a lot of acceptance and reception by society as a whole.

In less than two months — in fact, on the first day we were effectively in the House — we filed three bills: the first, on the Lesbian Visibility Day (which is a resubmission of a bill that was Marielle’s), one against feminicide and another against fake news. So this is a start that shows where we are coming from and what kind of work we will do in that house.

As you yourself pointed out, there are 51 councillors and only 10 women – and they are not all from the left. So it’s not enough to be a woman there, you need to represent their interests and their lives. It is challenging, but we have a mandate that is composed of a team that part of it was part of Marielle’s team, and, without a doubt, it is a team that is very excited and engaged in building a work of excellence.

DIADORIM — What is your assessment of the work and importance of the Commission for the Defence of Women, which, in 2020, met only twice (according to the records made available by the Chamber). Marielle chaired this Commission between 2017 and 2018. How strategic is it for your mandate to occupy that space?

MONICA — The Women’s Commission was for a long time underused, precisely because it was always occupied by women who were there building the right-wing camp. Marielle was the first left-wing woman to assume the presidency of the Commission, and because of that she was able to do an outstanding job. And that’s why the Women’s Commission became visible, because it was never disputed in that house, because it’s not where the big politics goes through and the environment itself was so macho that there wasn’t even any interest from councillors for the space, so there wasn’t a more delicate discussion about the issue. As I said before, it is not enough to be a woman to occupy the Commission, it needs to be a woman who is interested in building agendas that talk about the preservation of life and the struggle of women.

The great delicacy of this story is about who is in the chair of this Commission and what kind of political act this will be – because it may be none, it may be neoliberal, it may be sexist, it may be feminist, and so on. Now, regardless of whether or not we have the presidency, our dispute will be based on the gender debate and guided by feminism – whether we are in the presidency, only participating in the commission or even outside it. This will not prevent us from doing a job that has feminism and the gender agenda as its main axis, speaking of a place where the right to the city is disputed, especially in relation to the women’s perspective, because we understand that a safe city for women is a safe city for all bodies.

It is clear that when you are in the chair of the commission or within the commission, you can use institutional politics as a tool to operate outside the house. I think the big interest is to make politics outside the House. The City Council should, in theory, be the people’s house, but the people are very little represented there, because most of the councillors make their deals on give and take and legislate for their own cause, so this is the debate to be had. But regardless of the position we occupy, we will do politics with the intention of transforming the lives of women effectively in this city.

DIADORIM — Still regarding the agendas of your mandate, I understand that the LGBTI+ agendas are a priority. How do you evaluate the public policies aimed at this population in the context of Rio de Janeiro?

MONICA — Look, I could tell you that the situation at this point is serious or tragic, but I would be being optimistic using any of these words. So, making a more neutral analysis of the situation, so to speak, I would say that the LGBTI+ situation today is very serious. In general, Rio de Janeiro reflects a little what the national conjuncture is. It’s no wonder that the Bolsonarist policy is born in the sewer of Rio, so Rio is a kind of laboratory of this national policy, which ended up in this fascist and disastrous government. Now the LGBT policy has a specific cut, because it’s a layer of vulnerability that is even greater. When we say that Brazil is one of the countries that most kills its LGBTI+ population in the world, this is very serious.

Rio de Janeiro, for example, once ranked second in the ranking of tourist interest for the LGBT population, but today, if I’m not mistaken, it’s in 49th position. It is no longer of interest to the LGBT population to have Rio as their tourist destination, and this is due to the increase in violence, which became much more accentuated after 2018 with Bolsonarist politics moving forward and getting elected. So what we have today is a very fragile policy, which in a pandemic context becomes even worse, because we know which bodies are the most vulnerable.

We don’t have a policy to combat LGBTphobia, we don’t have incentive, reception or prevention policies, no kind of policy that looks at this population. And speaking of the City Hall, it’s very serious, because we’re talking about a House that is extremely fundamentalist. We just took the city out of the hands of a bishop [former mayor Marcelo Crivella (Republicans)], who scrapped the city and left it in a sorry state. We are now in a government – which is the government of Eduardo Paes [DEM (Democrats)] – which is far from being a government like Crivella’s – (…) to which we are opposition, but which flirts with the progressive camp and sets up its secretariats like this. However, it is a liberal government, it is a government that is working on behalf of companies, the big market and capital.

I think the great difficulty in the House will be to seek dialogue with this camp that claims to be progressive, that says it wants to rebuild a city that is in a state of total abandonment – but we will see this in practice, as in the case of the approval of the Lesbian Visibility Bill, which was not approved by two votes, in 2017, when Marielle presented it. Let’s see how willing this House is to talk to the progressive field, to dialogue with these new agendas – be it the feminist agenda, be it the agenda of the LGBT struggle, be it the agenda of the anti-racist struggle – let’s see how this will work out in practice, if it remains only in discourse or if we will actually put things into practice to have effective changes.

DIADORIM — Has the PSOL caucus in Rio been in dialogue with other mandates and left-wing parties to build a front or articulation for the LGBTI+ agendas?

MONICA — At this moment we haven’t opened these dialogues because we effectively started the term on February 18. But before that we were in these special commissions (I was in the Budget one) and now we are starting to talk about the regular [compositions of the] commissions. The house only really starts working after the committees are installed. And then we start the rush of politics and try to make alliances, agreements. But what we have today as opposition bench there is the PT [Worker’s Party] bench and the PSOL bench. The PSOL, along with the PT and DEM, is among the three that have seven councillors. The PSOL and the PT have about 10 councillors, but the PT has a policy that in some moments aligns with the PSOL and in other moments not so much, but I believe that in the LGBT agendas there is no divergence. There are also other councillors who are not from this field, but with whom there is a certain dialogue, because they are not fundamentalists, and depending on the issue you present (not only the agenda is enough), I believe you won’t have great difficulties. But it does not mean that we have a majority to approve projects on this agenda, this will always have to be done very carefully, with a lot of work. The PSOL does not have the practice of making the policies of give and take, so we have to make a policy much more tied, much more elaborate. It’s a little more difficult to make policies inside that House, but it’s possible. I’m optimistic that we will be able to do a good job on the LGBT agenda.

DIADORIM — We enter 2021 with an aggravated pandemic context. There is an impoverishment of the population, hunger knocking at the door of many people… What have you been thinking, especially in relation to the black population, the peripheral population, which suffers most from the precarious economic situation?

MONICA — This debate has been going on throughout the PSOL bench, and it even comes from the previous bench, with the defence of the implementation of the basic income and, on the health issue, with specific attention to the favelas and peripheries, which are the most affected places. And this has been a constant struggle. In the Budget Commission, for example, the suggestions were that we should take from the taxpayers’ pockets, from the civil servants, that old story that we already know, to be able to fill economic holes in the municipality, which is very serious, because we know that the most affected population is the population that is on the margins, the black women, the black population in general, the peripheral population, the slum population. So it is not by cutting spending and taking from taxpayers’ pockets that we are going to promote [assistance policies]. On the contrary, when we can move capital, when we can inject capital, we know that the population will be able to consume and move the economy.

So, we went in the direction of defending basic income, of implementing basic income, so that we can take the population out of extreme poverty, because, as you said, there are people going hungry. We’re not talking about luxury, because there are councillors who think that because of this amount people will stop working and become lazy. The most barbaric things you can imagine are heard there in defence of this discourse of not offering the basic income. This is precisely the debate, we must first make people understand that it is a human right, we are talking about a question of humanity. So today what we are doing in these first days is fighting for the implementation and payment of a basic income. But this is already a movement of the PSOL in Rio that has been going on since the old legislature.

DIADORIM — This month marks three years since the assassination of Marielle Franco. What assessment do you make of the progress of the investigations, which still have many unanswered questions, and how do you intend in the House to press for justice in the case?

MONICA — Look, I think that our campaign was beautiful and powerful the way it was, it has already begun to open a dialogue and a sign of what this mandate represents, of Marielle’s widow occupying that space. So we tried to run a very responsible campaign in relation to Marielle’s memory. And, at a time of pandemic, it was a campaign with few streets, with a lot of care, with little money, but the fact that we reached such a significant vote is in itself a kind of message and a demand for justice, that we will not accept this non-response from those who ordered the assassination of Marielle and Anderson.

Regarding the investigations, I think that the situation today is very worrying. We have prisoners accused of being the perpetrators, both the driver and the shooter, and they have not yet been brought before a jury, so it is important that we demand that this happens as soon as possible. We want to see them held accountable, but not only them. We want all those involved [held accountable]: the intermediaries, and, mainly, the people who ordered this serious crime against democracy.

Recently, there was a change in the Public Ministry. In January, we had a renewal of both the investigating prosecutors and the Rio de Janeiro public prosecutor – and, last year, there was another change of prosecutor and public prosecutor as well. So there were many changes, and there is not much that can be done within the bureaucracy, but inevitably there is a lot of concern because we are talking about an investigation that will be three years old and is very voluminous. I follow it very carefully and very closely. We are talking about a murder that, unfortunately, was very sophisticated, very well carried out and there were mistakes in the investigation at the beginning, which are now damaging towards the end.

This is no reason to be discouraged or to have any kind of disbelief about whether we will find the ringleaders — on the contrary, the more pressure we generate, the more we keep this investigation going. What personally worries me a little — considering that Brazil is a country known for having a very fragile memory — is that at some point Marielle is placed only in the place of memory, in the place of resistance, and that we lose the understanding that it is fundamental, including out of respect for that memory: to reveal who ordered these murders.

It is important not to lose sight of this. And at this moment the situation is very delicate, because there have been these changes [in the Public Prosecutor’s Office team], so until the new investigators, prosecutors and the attorney general himself become acquainted with the entire investigation, there is a lot of work to be done. The impression I get now, from where I follow, is that very little has been done since the change, that there is now inertia regarding the investigations into the case of Marielle and Anderson. And we need to demand this, especially because we are coming up on almost three years, and, in any investigation, the more time goes by, the more difficult it becomes to reach a result. It is important that we keep up the pressure to reveal who was behind it and that this investigation does not lose steam. This is very important.

DIADORIM — Rio de Janeiro is a bit of a thermometer for national politics. The Bolsonaro family is from Rio and is also in the City Council. And Rio de Janeiro is also extremely emblematic territory when it comes to political violence against women – as in the case of your coreligionists, federal deputy Talíria Petrone and councillor Benny Briolly in Niterói, who are suffering recurring threats. How have you and your team been dealing with this security issue – which I imagine was discussed in your campaign and now that you are a councillor?

MONICA — This issue of political violence against women is a theme that needs to be debated, denounced, as we have been doing. Also because what we have today is a politics that is not ashamed of oppressing women’s bodies, and that makes shameless politics even in this sense. Marielle was a democratically elected councillor, a black woman, who was in a lesbian relationship, representative of the LGBT agendas, representative of the agendas of minorities, who denounced the genocide of black youth, which was all that this house does not want to talk about, that this house does not want to look at or do politics for – and when this woman is executed in a political crime, the message that is given is that the politics that she did and represented cannot occupy these spaces.

The message that society sends is precisely the opposite of that, because there has been no retreat – on the contrary, there has been progress. In 2018, more women put themselves forward and were elected, and this is growing. Society, even when it takes all this barbarism, all this pain and turns Marielle into a symbol of representativeness and resistance, it does that collectively. So this is a response that is not only symbolic, but important to be understood as a resistance in itself. However, with the non-reveal of the people behind [Marielle Franco’s murder], what we have today, in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil as a whole, is to assume that there is a group capable of murder as a way of doing politics. Therefore, the murder of councilwomen and parliamentarians in the interior of Rio and elsewhere in the country is not something surprising. What has a differential in the case of Marielle’s murder is that she was murdered in one of the largest capital cities in the world, at nine o’clock at night, returning from a work schedule – and she was executed as a political warning. So that turns the key, that makes us understand today that what is in dispute is democracy versus barbarism, it’s not the left or the right. While we do not respond to this murder of Marielle, it seems that it becomes legitimate in society to reproduce violence against women’s bodies, especially in institutional politics – after all, the certainty of impunity is there.

Of course there was a debate about security, about becoming a candidate or not, but this was never a question for me. I would never refuse because of that, but we did it with responsibility and also understanding that today my security is a collective responsibility. It is a responsibility, even with a policy to be built and continues to be built. I have a precautionary measure granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, of the OAS [Organization of American States], which means that if something happens to me, it is a problem for the Brazilian State and I become a diplomatic incident. In addition, I am in the Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Brazil, and we also take security measures, which I cannot say. In short, today, thinking about security is important for all the women who are competing in the field of institutional politics. We even saw right-wing women being attacked, but mainly women who are in the progressive camp and who are fighting for democracy, are defenders of human rights – because the more vulnerability markers the bodies that are occupying institutional politics have, the more violence [against them].

Not by chance, the violence against Talíria is increasing dramatically. The violence against Benny Briolly, who is a black and trans woman, in an extremely conservative city, which is Niterói, grew in a very short period of time. So there are bodies with markers that make this violence more acute. We also need to take this clipping of race and class into this debate on the security of politics, because they are fundamental markers – mainly because who attacks women today is the Bolsonarist politics, which has its markers of a certain target, and this is what we need to confront.

DIADORIM — You speak a lot about the fascism potentiated by the Bolsonarist hate speech. What do you consider as strategies to confront this bolsonarism from the City Council?

MONICA — Look, there is a previous construction [to the mandate of councilwoman], as a human rights defender – which makes that around my image there is an accumulation of history, including struggle, which was precisely in the construction of this policy of combating bolsonarism. And since the beginning of the campaign we also said that this political body was to be used for a programmatic construction of the left to defeat bolsonarism, so it is also a question that comes from an accumulation of an image.

In these almost three years [in search of] justice for Marielle, I have accumulated as human rights defenders, as a socialist, feminist and lesbian woman. By denouncing Marielle’s case around the world, I automatically denounced Bolsonarist politics, because they are related. The violence against Marielle and what she represents is, in fact, related to this Bolsonarist politics, because Marielle’s image is what Bolsonarism wants to destroy. Marielle’s struggle, the policy she defended, goes in the opposite direction of the Bolsonarist policy, because there is no agreement with the fascist. With fascism we don’t dialogue, we destroy. So the idea of putting this as an agenda comes from a natural construction in these almost three years, and, from the City Hall, what we will do are the actions, like those that have already been done, including: the PL of Lesbian Visibility and the fight against fake news (which is a backbone for the Bolsonaro government to work, a government that is guided by fake news, which has at its service operating the office of hate). To speak of the fight against feminicide, in a government that has as an object of hate, as an object of destruction, the body of women, this in itself is already a confrontation with the Bolsonaro policy.

My political body — and here [I refer] to Monica, not the councilwoman — is at the disposal of this fight first of all as defenders of human rights, and, as a mandate, our goal is to make a policy that goes directly against the Bolsonarist policy, that directly confronts this policy, which is a fundamentalist, misogynist, racist, LGBTQIphobic policy. We cannot talk about democracy while we are in a Bolsonaro government.

DIADORIM — What do you consider to be Marielle’s main legacy for women who have entered institutional politics or who have gone to the frontline of the fight against this Bolsonarism?

MONICA — Look, I believe that it is mainly this inspiration for resistance. Because it has always been a very hostile space. For Marielle’s body, that was not an inviting space, on the contrary, it was an extremely violent space. And what makes women today dispute politics, including respecting and considering the memory of Marielle, is precisely not accepting this violence that was imposed on us for so many years and that ended, at the limit, by executing a woman who fought the struggles she waged and who fought for our lives. So I think the main legacy is this place of inspiration, the place of inspiration to resistance, because the legacy of Marielle is built, in my view, on a daily basis, in the actions of these women who went to the front, who did not retreat, who understood that disputing another society, however dangerous, is urgent. It is urgent because when we are disputing the city, when we are disputing politics, we are no longer talking about the safety of our lives, but the safety of those who will come and respecting those who came before us – and I think Marielle had a lot of respect for this, especially when she said that our steps come from afar, speaking from her place as a black woman, occupying and fighting for that space.

I think respecting this is very important, but looking at this as an inspiration, to not withdraw from the debate, on the contrary, to find the strength to continue is for me the main legacy – because in my personal opinion, as a companion, this speaks volumes of the energy of what Marielle was, which was this thing of resistance, of pulsating life and always moving forward, believing that change is possible. So I think Marielle’s legacy is for women not to retreat, but to be inspired to keep going, for her and for us.