Marielle Franco and the Fight for the City Statute in Rio de Janeiro

On March 14, 2018, Marielle Franco, Rio de Janeiro’s only Black councilwoman, and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were murdered after leaving a panel event in north Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. News of her death roiled the international activist community, proliferating through the viral hashtag #MarielleVive (#MarielleLives) and was the subject of 3.6 million tweets in just 42 hours (Ramaswamy 2018). Released in 2024, a 487‑page Federal Police report suggests that Franco’s assassination was the result of her opposition to corrupt housing policy (Calheiros 2024). This case study explores the relationship between Brazil’s City Statute and Rio de Janeiro’s militias, asserting that Franco’s death is not a matter of linear causation but of cyclical synergy between two complementary systems of violence. [1]

Intersectional social stratification, favelas, and the City Statute

Critical to understanding Franco’s assassination and its continued relevance in housing struggles are the City Statute and social inequalities in Brazil. The former, at the time of its inception, was believed to be key in remedying the latter. Rapid urbanization during the mid‑20th century attracted millions of rural residents who were landless and/or lost their agricultural jobs to mechanization (Caldeira 2000). Private interests had no financial incentive to construct affordable housing for the migrant population that accounted for the bulk of service and manufacturing jobs. Soon, low-income workers began fashioning their own housing in the urban centers without the oversight of building codes and regulations, giving rise to the numerous informal settlements, or favelas, that exist today (Duncan 2007). Often depicted as dense pockets of crime and illicit drugs, favelas are often thriving communities with strong networks of solidarity and are home to 1,500,000 Rio de Janeiro residents (Albuquerque 2023; Goldstein 2013; Perlman 2003). The Federative Constitution of Brazil’s Urban Policy section includes Article 182, which states that the objective of urban policy is to organize the full development of the social functions of the city and that urban property has a social function (Brazilian Constitution 2017). The Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute), a direct result of Article 182, mandates the legalization of land occupied by low-income residents and prioritizes “urbanização … context-sensitive infill approaches that [upgrade] informal settlements…” (Stiphany and Ward 2019, p. 312).

Interconnected, about 120 million Brazilians, or 56% of the population, define themselves as Black or mixed race, making Brazil home to the second-largest population of people of African descent in the world, trailing only Nigeria (Brito 2022). Some 70% of Brazil’s most impoverished citizens are Afro-Brazilian, comprising the majority of informal settlements’ or favelas’ residents (Goldstein 2013; Hanchard 1999; Perlman 2003; Twine 1998). The data overlaps with gendered experiences, as Black women are more likely to be murdered by gun violence than their white counterparts regardless of age group (Monteiro, Romio and Drezett 2021). The odds are no less daunting for the queer community in Brazil with around 65% of all reported murders happening within queer Black and mixed-race populations (Malta 2024).

Militias and land-regularization schemes in Rio de Janeiro

Despite being the second-wealthiest Brazilian state, Rio de Janeiro has a housing shortage of roughly 500,000 units with more than 330,000 units concentrated in the metropolitan region (Regueira 2023). The shortage has been an opportunity for militias (coalitions of off-duty firefighters, police officers, and military troops) to pervert the intentions of the City Statute, exploiting its mandate for land regularization by building poorly constructed homes to be sold on the private market (Globo 2021; IDMJRacial 2024; Pope and Sampaio 2024). Brazilian militias gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s and were tacitly accepted within the hierarchy of urban governance in Brazil as they undertook brutal crackdowns on drug traffickers before taking advantage of an era of government rollbacks and privatization, hijacking essential service markets, including housing (Cano 2008; Pope and Sampaio 2024). [2]

Militias quickly became brokers in local systems of urban clientelism, often trading votes for political influence before infiltrating government through election to public office (Cano 2008; Hirata, Cardoso, Grillo, dos Santos Junior, Lyra and Dirk 2022; Ribeiro and dos Santos Junior 2011). Due to their synergistic relationships with state officials (or their own public offices), the militias fund construction with their illicit revenues, maximizing profits by seizing affordable housing developments or building on land that is historically or environmentally protected or unsuitable for construction (e.g. hillsides, swamps), and extorting the new neighborhoods for “protection” (Pope and Sampaio 2024).

The Federal Police suggest that Franco’s opposition to Bill 174/2016, also known as the Land-Grab Bill, instigated her death. Introduced by fellow councilman Chiquinho Brazão, a member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), the then majority party of the body, the Land-Grab Bill lowered the requirements for land allotment and irregular construction. [3] Franco, a member of the leftist Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), third-largest in the body, quickly denounced the bill as a scheme to further empower vigilante militias to prey upon the vulnerable favela populations in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone and urged residents not to purchase militia-built homes. [4] The Land-Grab Bill was approved the day of Franco’s assassination, with 27 votes in favor, just one more than the required 26. After her death, Franco’s assertions were validated. Data revealed that in 2021 alone, 555 complaints were logged in the State of Rio de Janeiro regarding irregular housing with most of the calls being about locations in the West Zone, the home of the city’s militias (Verenicz 2024). A report by the Right to Memory and Racial Justice Initiative demonstrates that, between 2021 and 2024, 89% of legislative requests to regularize land for real-estate development were concentrated in Rio’s West Zone (IDMJRacial 2024). Ultimately, the Land-Grab Bill was declared unconstitutional but not before it was used to regularize 149 new developments.

Synergies of violence in the struggle for housing

So, what is to be gleaned from the Brazilian case and why does the death of Marielle Franco continue to resonate beyond the borders of Rio de Janeiro? First, the City Statute has been hijacked by militias and corrupt politicians for personal profit rather than achieving the egalitarian right to the city whereby favela residents can “[create] a future in the present” (Verbitsky 1957, p. 16). The establishment of a few special interest zones aside, there is an ever-growing consensus that the City Statute has failed to effectively implement urbanizaçao in a transformative manner, attributing the shortcomings to several factors including real estate speculation, a lack of redistributive wealth policies, and the enduring nature of urban clientelism (Bechtlufft Cardoso 2023; Caldeira and Holston 2015; Fernandes 2017; Friendly 2019; Máximo and Royer 2023).

Next, I question the ease with which militias were able to infiltrate local politics and seamlessly incorporate the tenets of the City Statute into their (illicit) business model. I suggest that the violence of legalized urban marginality and speculative real estate pair well with the extrajudicial brutality wielded by militias, creating a vicious cycle of exploitation. The congruence of legal and illegal predation has contributed to Rio de Janeiro’s inability to successfully implement urbanizaçao and the full aims of the City Statute. The assassination of Marielle Franco further demonstrates the synergy of this system, with her challenge to one aspect of its violence giving rise to her death by the other.

Moreover, Franco’s social identities are intrinsically bound up in her murder because her advocacy “reckon[ed] with the inherent ways capital accumulation is derived from the exploitation of racialized subjects” while the aspects of her being allowed the assailants and masterminds to believe that she could be assassinated with impunity (Dantzler 2021, p. 18). The Brazilian case is particularly salient as the site of the largest population of the African Diaspora, and where racial capitalism collaborates with the myth of racial democracy to limit the impact of progressive, and ultimately, liberatory frameworks (Freyre 1943). Upholding the interests of Rio’s most vulnerable residents while simultaneously existing as one of them, Franco, a Black, queer woman from a favela, understood that although people are often pushed to the physical margins of urbanity, they often exist at the heart of development policy even, or especially if, the policy is one of exclusion or, in this case, exploitation (Robinson 2020; Dantzler 2021).

Herein lies an overlooked cornerstone to reorienting our strategies for resistance and change: the legal and illicit systems of housing violence do not punch down on the marginalized but orbit them. Individual legislative bills and specific acts by militias serve to obscure that we confuse living on the margins for existing at the periphery. Oppression is often conceptualized as a top-down pressure but those who have lived in its grasp understand that oppression is constraint, limiting the possibilities for growth and inhibiting opportunities to thrive. In brief, the City Statute has failed because it was not devised to disrupt a violent system that was squeezing Rio de Janeiro’s most vulnerable, but instead was designed to integrate into it, allowing another to prey in chorus.

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