Marielle Franco’s Assassination: One of Tens of Thousands of Black Murders in Brazil

Every year, at least 60,000 individuals are killed in Brazil, at least 160 murders every day. The majority of the dead are black, young and from urban peripheries where the state is present only through its delinquent police force. Although the police are not responsible for all these deaths, it directly or indirectly pulls the trigger that kills black youth. Books, academic articles, brief-reports, film documentaries, op-eds all have ad nausea denounced this genocidal proportions of violence in the country known as “the land of cordial man.” It is a waste of time, energy and resources. Nobody cares or they care too little to turn these deaths into a national scandal. There is an underlying belief that the word genocide is an overstatement to depict what is going on in a country where racial boundaries are supposedly not rigid as in the United States or South Africa. Apartheid and the Jim Crow are usually mentioned to compare Brazil´s 'benign' race relations in opposition to these countries’ racial violence. The fact is that, consistent with its ugly history, Brazil maintains a regime of racial terror that does not differ from these two nations’ past and present system of racial domination.