At around 9:30 p.m. on March 14, 2018, in central Rio de Janeiro, a silver Chevrolet Cobalt pulled up alongside a car carrying the city councilor Marielle Franco, her driver Anderson Gomes, and her press officer. Franco had just finished moderating a roundtable on black women and structural change and was heading home when the vehicle drew level and an assassin brandishing a submachine gun fired a precise burst of thirteen shots, striking Franco and Gomes multiple times and killing them before speeding away.

In a city accustomed to public bloodshed, the nature of the crime was, for many, immediately clear: this was not a robbery or a gang hit gone wrong but a political assassination. Franco, thirty-eight at the time of her death, had become one of the most prominent figures on the city council, representing the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). An outspoken leftist and advocate for black, LGBTQ, and favela residents, she chaired the city’s Women’s Defense Commission and played an important role in monitoring and denouncing violent police raids, many of them ordered by the right-wing state government. She had grown up in the impoverished Maré favela, the daughter of parents who had arrived in the city with little and urged her to work hard. She took a job at age eleven to help support her family and later won a scholarship to attend university, where she wrote about the state’s policing policies.

Just as Franco’s rise embodied the promise of Brazil’s democracy, her death exposed its limits. She was killed because she had become one of the most visible opponents of Rio’s militias and one of the most forceful advocates for disenfranchised favela residents. More than arms smuggling, contract killings, or even drug trafficking, the militias — right-wing paramilitary mafias made up largely of former military men and police officers who claimed to fight crime — reaped enormous profits from illegal land-grabbing and property development in Rio’s favelas. Before her election, Franco had worked with state representative Marcelo Freixo on a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the militias, which led to the indictment of militiamen and militia-aligned politicians. Franco represented everything the right wing detested: a relentless socialist willing to expose corrupt officials, she posed a genuine material threat.

“Marielle was a poor black woman who was challenging the interests of militias. What stronger message could be sent?” Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes asked as the long investigation came to a close on February 25. The court’s ruling brought seventy-six-year prison sentences for the Brazão brothers, state-level politicians who had ordered the killings, in addition to the earlier conviction of the two ex-policemen who carried them out.

The case took so long to resolve in part because militia-aligned officials at the highest rungs of power, emboldened during the tenure of the now-imprisoned far-right president Jair Bolsonaro — who refused to condemn the murder and whose family maintains ties with the militias — worked to obstruct it. The conspiracy to stymie justice extended deep into the state itself. The destruction of evidence and diversion of leads were later shown to have been directed by Rio’s police chief at the time, Rivaldo Barbosa, who received an eighteen-year sentence.

Following her murder, “Who ordered Marielle’s killing?” became a rallying cry in Brazil and around the world. The eventual answer, coaxed from one of the killers through a plea deal, exposed far more than the depravity of the Brazão brothers. It revealed a coordinated subterranean network of influential right-wing politicians, police officers, and paramilitaries — not unlike the conspiracy to overthrow the government that later led to Bolsonaro’s imprisonment. As the far right consolidates power and threatens democratic institutions around the globe, Franco’s killing should stand as a stark warning: the political violence lurking just beyond far-right rhetoric must be taken seriously.

Though the path to justice was winding and fraught, the federal investigation and Supreme Court adjudication of the case, despite fierce resistance from the Right, also showed that Brazilian institutions remain capable of defending democracy. “Today Brazil’s justice system honored the memory of Marielle and Anderson,” said Anielle Franco, Marielle’s sister and Brazil’s minister for racial equality in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration. “Brazil begins a new historic chapter in confronting political violence based on gender and race. Impunity cannot be part of our democracy.”