Just two days before the March 14 one-year anniversary of Marielle Franco’s assassination, civil police arrested two men alleged to be directly involved in the murder of the black, favela-born, bisexual city councilor for the Radical Left Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver Anderson Gomes. Marcelo Freixo, Franco’s fellow PSOL member, political mentor, and friend, called the one-year wait for arrests “unacceptable.”

The arrests seemed almost deliberately timed to coincide with mass mobilizations in Rio and across Brazil demanding an answer to the questions: Who killed Marielle and Anderson — and more importantly, who ordered them killed? It’s one more coincidence in a case in which everything reeks of coincidence and conspiracy.

Ronnie Lessa, the man suspected of firing into the car carrying Franco, Gomes, and Fernanda Chaves — Franco’s aide who survived the attack and just recently returned from hiding in Europe — happens to live in the same gated community in Rio’s Barra de Tijuca neighborhood (Rio’s glitzy, fake version of Miami) as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. This, despite a meager pension of 8,000 reais (slightly over $2,000 USD). The District Attorney also confirmed that Bolsonaro’s youngest son, twenty-one-year-old Renan, dated Lessa’s daughter. But, the office emphasized, those are just coincidences.