For 1,826 days the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum has posted the same tweet from her account: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle? And why?” Today is the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Marielle Franco, a black, queer, favela-born socialist and human rights activist. On its website, the human rights organization Instituto Marielle Franco displays a counter, logging the days, hours, and minutes that have elapsed since the activist’s murder.

On March 12, 2019, two days before the first anniversary of the assassination of Franco and her driver Andersom Gomes, the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police announced the arrests of Élcio Vieira de Queiroz and Ronnie Lessa. Queiroz, a police officer before he was expelled from the force in 2016 for working private security at an illegal gambling house, drove the Chevy Cobalt that followed Franco four kilometers from the neighborhood of Lapa, where she had gone to attend an event celebrating black women activists. Queiroz followed Franco from the event to the spot of her execution on Rua Joaquim Palhares in Estácio. Lessa, a retired member of the Rio de Janeiro State Military Police Reserves who was only discharged from the corps this year, is accused of firing at the car thirteen times, killing Franco and Gomes. Franco’s assistant Fernanda Chaves was the lone survivor.

The bullets used in the murder cannot be sold to civilians. The investigating Civil Police have confirmed that they belonged to an allotment sold to the Brasília Military Police in 2006. This same allotment is also tied to the São Paulo Military Police’s massacre of seventeen people in the working-class municipalities of Barueri and Osasco of metropolitan São Paulo. Police believe that another Cobalt, also with cloned license plates, was involved in Franco’s assassination.