By CARLOS TAUTZ*
It is not possible to overlook the role that personalities and institutions from the democratic and popular field played in the six-year delay in unraveling who ordered the murder of Marielle and Anderson
This March 14, 2024 comes with the inclusion of the names of Flavio Dino and Andrei Rodrigues to the list of brave men in the case of the murder of Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes. Flavio Dino, former Minister of Justice and now Minister of the Federal Supreme Court, and Andrei Rodrigues, Director General of the Federal Police, gained their minutes of fame by promising what they could not fulfill: revealing the names of those who ordered the crime on a certain date .
This is another piece of political marketing, now at the federal level, in a case that is a kind of historical landmark in the bankruptcy of the bourgeois rule of law in Rio de Janeiro. Within this federative entity, it has long been impossible to separate crime and legality, because both dimensions have become completely amalgamated – and the evident lack of will and political capacity of the Civil Police and, to a slightly lesser extent, also the state Public Prosecutor's Office in reaching to those who ordered and the reasons for the crime confirm that the state institution of Rio de Janeiro is nothing more than fiction and that real power imposes itself in everyday life and in the middle of the street.
Now, the explicit complicity of Rio de Janeiro's public security system with the real power that committed the double crime has led us to a dead end. After six inexplicable years without answers, many pieces of evidence and witnesses have long since disappeared or been destroyed, to such an extent that we are hostage to an alleged accusation that the operator of the shootings, Ronnie Lessa, had been negotiating with the PF for months.
In truth, this Ronnie Lessa – who is, until now, the operator of the fatal shots, a militiaman in high combat boots and an assassin requested by the police, the militia and Jogo do Bicho – has his own investigators in his hands. He is practically the only major source of information about the double crime that manages this accusation according to his interests.
We, who still want to meet the masterminds, are all hostages of Ronnie Lessa. We were condemned to this condition by the leniency of the Civil Police and the MP and by the structure of the real power of Rio de Janeiro, eternally waiting for the five successive delegates who investigated the case, prosecutors who are involved in internal struggles, and governors to carry out their main functions. people from Rio de Janeiro who rely on more and more mega massacres of their PMs to maintain and gain political support.
As it is an encyclopedia of information about the police, the militia and Jogo do Bicho, and their relations with formal political power in Rio, Ronnie Lessa and only Ronnie – a former member of the infamous PM Special Operations Battalion – today has the ability to manage the information he has at his pleasure. But he and his band are not the only ones responsible for this anniversary of the open secret and the revelation of the map of real power in Rio de Janeiro that could transform the resolution of the murders of Marielle and Anderson.
It is not possible to overlook the role that personalities and institutions from the democratic and popular field played in this absurd delay of six years. Why are those with deep knowledge of the real power scheme in Rio – such as former state deputy Marcelo Freixo, who presided over the Militia CPI in the Rio Legislative Assembly in 2008 – always operating to prevent investigations from being federalized and removed from the clutches of the Police Civilian from Rio de Janeiro?
Why was even Marielle Franco's family convinced to enter into this strategy and never agreed to have an international commission follow the investigations, when in the first second after the crime was revealed it was possible to realize that Rio de Janeiro's institutions would function as usual and not Would they carry out investigations that had the power to expose the hybridity between legality and illegality that structures real power in this state?
The reaction of these personalities to the federalization of the case was so strong that, in 2020, the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), unanimously, denied the request of the then Attorney General of the Republic, Raquel Dodge, to transfer the investigation into the case to the federal level. the murders.
In proof that she never even bothered to understand the circumstances of the crime, the rapporteur of the federalization request – which is technically called a “competence shift incident” –, the now retired STJ minister Laurita Vaz, committed this here in her opinion on the murder, which at that point had already taken place more than two years ago: “There is no shadow of neglect, disinterest, carelessness or lack of personal or material conditions on the part of the state institutions responsible for investigating, prosecuting and punishing those possibly responsible for the serious violation of human rights. On the contrary, there is a notable commitment from the team of civil police officers from the Homicide Police Station and the Special Action Group for the Repression of Organized Crime (Gaeco) of the Public Ministry of the State of Rio de Janeiro”.
Everyone interested in crime still rejoices today just remembering Laurita Vaz's words.
And from now on? What will be the consequences for the Civil Police of the eventual resolution of the crime by the PF, which clearly demonstrates the lack of political desire by the governments of Rio de Janeiro since 2018 to solve the case that was the political crime with the greatest repercussion in the country? Brazil since the far right exploded a bomb in Riocentro in 1981?
It should be noted that, if the crime is ever solved, it will be with the PF entering the case five years after the disappearance of evidence and even eyewitnesses, which were discovered years ago not by the police, but through the personal commitment of reporter Vera Araújo. She was the one who published it in the newspaper The Globe the existence of witnesses, after the Civil Police were not interested in this clue and dozens of police officers who crowded the crime scene just minutes after the murder chased away many potential witnesses.
Even more. If the participation in the crime of Domingos Brazão, now Accounts Counselor of the State Court of Auditors, is confirmed, what will the political alliances between the criminal organization headed by him and the current mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, favorite for re-election in November? ?
*Carlos Tautz is a journalist and doctoral candidate in history at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
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