Largest Brazilian media group implicates Bolsonaro in death squad execution of Marielle Franco
By Miguel Andrade
7 November 2019
In a remarkable move last Tuesday, Globo, Brazil’s largest media group, exposed evidence implicating President Jair Bolsonaro in the March, 2018 death-squad assassination of Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco.
Franco, a city councillor for the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), was brutally murdered in a carefully targeted operation. Street cameras picked up a car following her own vehicle from a political meeting in downtown Rio, until she reached a strategically chosen blind spot in the city’s closed-circuit surveillance, where forensic evidence found that dozens of rounds had been fired at her seat point-blank. The gunfire also resulted in the death of her driver, Anderson Gomes. One of Franco’s aides, seated to her left in the car, was unharmed.
The previously concealed evidence, acknowledged but described as “useless” by Rio’s district attorneys in charge of the case, involves the deposition of a doorman of the Vivendas da Barra gated community where Bolsonaro’s private Rio home is located. In February, Rio police arrested as the main suspect in Franco’s assassination Ronnie Lessa, a neighbor of Bolsonaro at Vivendas da Barr. The gatekeeper at the complex stated—and recorded in his log book—that Lessa’s suspected driver, Élcio de Queiroz, had entered the community after being allowed in by “Mr. Jair” only hours before the murder.
The decision by the right-wing media conglomerate to publicize the apparent leak from the Rio police department’s still classified investigation came amid growing nervousness within Brazilian ruling circles over a continued economic slump and the dead-end of Bolsonaro’s pro-US foreign policy. At the same time, there is fear that the vast acceleration of mass opposition to austerity worldwide, and particularly in neighboring Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, will spread to Brazil itself.
More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/07/braz-n07.html
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This has been a public topic for months. Surely wish some honest government officials would finally move in to do something about it. Of course, they would also realize their own lives are unquestionably in danger when they do. Murderous police killing members of the poorest sectors have been hard at work at their craft for many decades. Monstrous situation.