Brazil’s Supreme Court declares the accused responsible for the death of councilor Marielle Franco

This Tuesday, Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court (STF) named three people accused of being the masterminds of the death of councilwoman Marielle Franco, shot dead on March 14, 2018, on a street in the city of Rio de Janeiro, along with her driver. Anderson Gomez. The three accused were found guilty unanimously by the five judges of the First Panel of the STF, who accepted in full the complaint filed by the Office of the Attorney General (PGR).

Federal deputy Chiquinho Brazao, his brother Domingos Brazao, an adviser to the Court of Auditors of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and the former police chief of the same state, Rivaldo Barbosa, were named as defendants. All three were arrested by the Federal Police (FF) in March last year and deny all charges.

In addition to the three accused of organizing the double murder, two more defendants were charged and are also in prison. Rio de Janeiro Military Police Major Ronald de Paula, accused of spying on the activities of Mariel Franco in order to choose the best time to kill her, and Robson Calixto Fonseca, former adviser to Domingos Brazan and accused of supplying powerful weapons to which the adviser and her driver was killed in one gulp.

The confessed author of the shooting, former sergeant of Rio’s elite military police unit Ronnie Lessa, who has been imprisoned since early 2019, entered into an agreement to cooperate with the justice system, naming the Brazao brothers and the former police chief of Rio de Janeiro as the mastermind of the brutal crime, which had an international resonance. As one of the judge’s cooperation partners, Ronnie was last week transferred from the high-security federal prison of Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, to the state prison in Trememba, in the interior of Sao Paulo state. , very closer to Rio de Janeiro, where the family lives, and much less strict than the previous one.

According to Lessa, the Brazao brothers, very powerful in Rio de Janeiro, hired him to kill a young 36-year-old first-term left-wing councilor because she was obstructing illegal mega-real estate projects that Brazao intended to run. in a vast region in the west of the city of Rio de Janeiro, dominated by the militia under his command. Rivaldo Barbosa, who until the day of Mariel’s murder was the director of the homicide department and two days later was appointed chief general of police of Rio, was responsible for disrupting the investigation of the crime in order to divert attention from the Brazao brothers. and all the other participants, almost all of them are connected with politics and the police.