Image of Diane Mendes (left), Director of Strategies at the Marielle Franco Institute and Black Brazilian feminist, activist, politician, and human rights defender, Marielle Franco.

By Anastácia Flora Oliveira | English Translation by Evelin Rodrigues

Anastácia Flora Oliveira, Black Women Radicals’ inaugural Dandara dos Palmares Fellow, speaks with Diane Menders, Director of Strategies at the Marielle Franco Institute, about the life, leadership, and legacy of Black Brazilian feminist Marielle Franco.

Marielle Franco was a Black woman, mother, bisexual, activist, from the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, who was elected in 2016 as a Rio de Janeiro councillor with 46,402 votes. Her political mandate was interrupted on March 14, 2018, when she was assassinated along with her driver Anderson Gomes in an attack on the car they were in. Before she was murdered, Marielle was at the event “Jovens Negras Movendo as Estruturas” where she quoted Audre Lorde: “I am not free as long as another woman is a prisoner, even if their chains are different from mine”. Marielle was a Black feminist activist who defended human rights, especially in the favelas and outskirts.

When she lost a friend to a stray bullet during a shooting between the police and drug gangs in the Complexo da Maré, she actively fought against the violence and abuse of power in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. With a degree in Social Sciences and a master’s in business management, in her dissertation “UPP: a redução da favela a três letras” she criticized the role of police units in public security. She was murdered for her confrontational stance, but whoever had Marielle killed could not have imagined all the movement that arose in the wake of this brutality. The next day, millions of “seeds” rose up around the world to demand justice. In the meantime, Marielle Franco's family created the Marielle Franco Institute with the “mission of connecting, empowering thousands of young, Black, LGBTQIA+ and marginalized women to continue moving the structures of society” and fighting for justice.

On November 25, 2024, a week before the trial for the murder of Marielle Franco, I interviewed the Marielle Franco Institute's director of strategy, Diana Mendes, where she spoke about the importance of Marielle's legacy and the role of the Institute. On November 31, 2024, after six years of struggle and searching for answers, the judge of the Fourth Jury Court of Rio de Janeiro sentenced Ronnie Lessa to 78 years and 9 months in prison, and Élcio de Queiroz to 59 years and 8 months in prison. “Justice is sometimes slow, blind, dumb, unfair, crooked, but it comes,” said Judge (a white woman) Lucia Glioche as she read out the sentences of the convicts.

Diana Mendes, 33, from São Paulo's ABC region, is currently the director of strategy and sustainability at the Marielle Franco Institute. For the last nine years she has worked as a consultant for Black women's social movements and in philanthropy. Her journey is formed by the Black and Black women's movement, where she gained access at the university. In 2018, she co-founded the “Mulheres Negras Decidem” project with four other Black women, which aims to strengthen democracy by qualifying and promoting political agendas led by Black women in Brazil. This project was presented on the morning of the murder of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes and with the national and international mobilizations against political violence based on gender and race, the project is gaining prominence.

Photo of Diana Mendes. Photo courtesy of Diana Mendes.

Anastácia Flora Oliveira (AFO): The murder of Marielle Franco on March 14, 2018 has mobilized countless movements of Black women who, in response to the crime, have taken to the streets in huge demonstrations calling for justice for Marielle. Discussions about racial and gender-based violence in politics began to fizzle out and major mobilizations were and still are being held as an action plan for Black women to occupy political spaces. As a result, we saw an impact in the following elections, with many Black, LGBTQIAPN+ women elected to the legislature. What is the importance of turning mourning into struggle and seeing Marielle Franco's legacy reach the whole country, including the countryside?

Diana Mendes (DM): The Institute's work has many layers. There's the issue of the family transforming a moment of pain and personal struggle into a collective movement. How we manage to transform this moment of great violence and pain into a larger process is precisely because we are talking about a Black Women's project. So it wasn't just about Mari (Mari is Marielle’s nickname). This becomes very clear when it reverberates not only in Brazil but around the world. We like to call the people who are mobilized by Mari’s story, by this fight for justice, seeds. They are Marielle's seeds that spread and flourish in various places. The organization was created by the family after the brutality that happened to Marielle. It is a non-profit organization. The organization has been divided into four pillars since it was created, the first being the fight for justice for Marielle and Anderson. We understand that the issues involved are different, but Anderson was a worker who was doing his job; he has a family, he left behind a son and a wife. We are always in touch with Ágatha, who is his wife. The second pillar seeks to preserve memory, not only in the sense of saying who Mari's leadership was, what she left behind, how she acted; but also to combat hate speech, fake news and conservative narratives that continue to violate Mari, her image and everything she represents as a policy agenda for Black women, LGBTQIA+ people, the outskirts and the favelas. The third pillar is the multiplying of the legacy. We need to continue strengthening women who are involved in institutional policies in their territories. And finally, to water the seeds, we train other leaders in the territories to amplify the work.

“We like to call the people who are mobilized by Mari’s story, by this fight for justice, seeds. They are Marielle’s seeds that spread and flourish in various places.”

Collage of Marielle Franco by Jaimee Swift.

AFO: What formative role does the Institute play in ensuring that actions are carried out? What is the importance of the Marielle Agenda and the “Não seremos interrompidas” (“We will not be interrupted”) project?

DM: One of the lessons we've learned this year is the importance of working on articulation and mobilization in the territories. We were with the leaders, mobilizing and strengthening. The way we manage to see and mobilize is together with the leaders in the territory, thinking about these training and strengthening processes. This is the only way to see the multiplier capacity of the agenda. All of our work in the territories is only possible thanks to the seed networks, which are mostly Black women, older women and mothers who are working in their territories. They are very important to us, to make things happen together with us. There are more than 300 women mobilized throughout the country, in many different regions. Some regions are stronger, for example in the southeast because we are physically in Rio de Janeiro, but we have a network of seeds that are very mobilized in other territories such as Recife, Curitiba. We want to consolidate this national network project even more.

The Marielle Agenda is a set of practices that we've managed to make more specific in order to take forward what Marielle had already pointed out, wanted, had a vision of for the future. So, the Marielle Agenda is this instrument that has eight thematic pillars. It covers climate justice, public health, education, security, the right to the city... There are several thematic areas that we look at and we also look at the practices that Marielle would have liked. It's what drives the institute, which has to do with our principles and values. The Marielle Agenda is a very important tool that can make this process a reality and is also the place where we can see the commitment of both candidates and leaders, movements and individuals who would like to commit to this legacy and this political agenda. We have some indicators: this year there were more than 150 committed candidates, we also heard from more than 150 collectives, movements and organizations that helped to improve the agenda, which is now in its third edition. This was very important to make it more qualified this year, with the municipal elections in mind. The agenda is an instrument that helps us say which policy we are going to defend, which agendas we are going to put forward.

On the other hand, the “Não seremos interrompidas” (“We will not be interrupted”) campaign is precisely this place of mobilization to think especially about the political violence issue. So we work a lot with the members of the Marielle Agenda who are committed. We do a lot of actions with them in the campaign. Last year we launched the third edition of the research on political violence based on gender and race. We connect advocacy a lot with the campaign to mobilize people to report cases of political violence and we also support and refer to cases of political violence that come to us or that we know about. We use narrative and communication to boost support for these women, so the campaign is an important action in this process of mobilization and actions that the Institute carries out.

“The Marielle Agenda is a very important tool that can make this process a reality and is also the place where we can see the commitment of both candidates and leaders, movements and individuals who would like to commit to this legacy and this political agenda.”

Photo of Marielle Franco. Photo by Marcelo Freixo/Mídia NINJA. Wikimedia Commons.

AFO: A lot of incorrect and misinformation has been created about Marielle, linked to an extremist discourse on human rights. What is the role of communication and what is the Institution's strategy for ensuring that information reaches the public safely?

DM: Communication is very central to our strategy. We organize ourselves internally within the institutional structure. We have a programme department, a campaign department and this department is precisely the crossroads between communication, mobilization and coordination. Because none of our communication is just about communication. We understand that communication has to be closely integrated with mobilization. Communication needs to think: where is it going to mobilize? What is the narrative? What story is going to be driven forward? This has been going on since the institute was set up. It's important to honor Mari's memory by bringing this narrative to us, this protagonism for the family, for the work of the Institute and for Mari's work. When it comes to misinformation, the institute works as a network. Whether it's to boost our narrative and our content, for example, we have some training methodologies. The Marielle School is a methodology we use for training and we replicate it in various ways.

This year we launched an edition of the Marielle School with communication in mind. The first course was held in partnership with Alma Preta Journalism. We're going to do other courses in partnership with other Black media and communication organizations in Brazil. So we're always mobilizing to push our narrative forward. But we also engage in groups, articulations and networks that have to do with misinformation. We need to be in these networks where people are. What is being said? What fake news is linked? How do we create narrative strategies to bring out the elements that are important to highlight? So, beyond social media, we have a strategy with the press office. We bring the aspect and the role of the family into these versions so that we have reliable information about Marielle and also about Black women in politics in Brazil, because we also have distortions about this.

AFO: I'd like to take a moment here to share an excerpt from Mangueira's samba-enredo, which won the title in 2019 with the theme: “História pra ninar gente grande”: The story that history doesn't tell. The opposite of the same place. It's in the struggle that we find ourselves... Brazil, it's time to listen to the Marias, Mahins, Marielles, Malês.” When I looked up the pillars of the Marielle Franco Institution, I saw that defending memory was one of them. How does memory occupy a priority place in the institution's actions?

DM: Memory had already been at the heart of the Institute in a transversal way. It's through Mari's memory, it's through this legacy that we carry everything forward. From the family's point of view, this is very precious for things not to be lost and to see a horizon from what has gone before and who Mari was. Memory is crucial for us and we felt it was important to have an even more in-depth place for it. So last year we created the memory department and made it a priority. Mari's memory is sometimes bigger than that of the Institute itself. We have a medium and long-term desire to create a center for Marielle Franco 's memory and ancestry. In this memory center we will be able to access Mari's collection, which we are beginning to organize — the things she produced, the books, the objects — and also understand that this place has to do with Black women in spaces in Brazil and around the world and how we have an ancestral connection.

The desire of the family and the institute is for this collection to come to life and for us to be able to organize it and make it available, but also for this memory center to also be a place of public access, with training, a library for people to access and for researchers to be there. We understand that it will possibly be bigger than the Institute. We have a physical collection to organize, but also a digital collection. We have a lot of videos, recordings, documentaries, tributes that have been made that we organize. There are books that have been made, publications, comics, exhibitions. In 2023, the Institute itself organized a photobiography of Mari's story, which unfolded into a photo exhibition that toured many places in Rio de Janeiro. We already have some memorial actions that are being mobilized, such as the placement of Marielle's statue in the center of Rio de Janeiro, which was made possible by donations from several people through crowdfunding, with more than 1,000 people donating for this action to take place.

We had an artificial intelligence project that connected Marielle’s speech to specific moments in a timeline. You could access Marielle's voice. Which speech? What was her agenda? There are several things that we have been organizing with great care. We have been working to structure this area of memory even more in order to expand and unfold the actions. Memory is at the root of the process, not only for the family but also for us at the institute. It's important that we honor who Mari was and how we build and act towards our vision of the future.

“...[we] also understand that this place has to do with Black women in spaces in Brazil and around the world and how we have an ancestral connection.”

Photograph of the statue of Marielle Franco, in Buraco do Lume, in Rio de Janeiro, on July 28, 2022, the day after the statue's inauguration. Photo Credit: Parzeus. Wikimedia Commons.

AFO: Who are your references?

DM: It's difficult to talk about my inspirations because so many people cross my path, but I come from a family of very strong women. The women in my family are a place of great strength for me and of great firmness in my path and in my activism. Mari is a very remarkable person. I remember exactly the look on her face that day, I saw her the day it all happened. I was at the event she had organized in the center of Rio de Janeiro and I remember how she looked at me, how she greeted me.

Black women move structures and Mari keeps moving them. Our strength is of other dimensions, we can't predict it. I'm very fond of writing and poetry, so I'm going to mention two references that I have and that are very important to me. The first is Beatriz Nascimento, a Brazilian activist and writer. She represents many things that mobilize me. The way everything happened in her life, her writing about quilombo, about how we position ourselves as Black women. The fact that she stepped in front of her friend to defend her from the violence of her partner and that she was murdered at that moment, a victim of femicide, is painful for us to know that years later we are still talking about this agenda; we are still fighting, but we are still imagining a possible future as Black women.

There's an African writer from Malawi called Upile Chisala, she's a great storyteller and she has an ability to bring power to words that I think is important in the sense of self-care, of us looking inside ourselves as leaders and Black women. She is an important inspiration for me with the power of words and how to place yourself in the world. There are many others like Conceição Evaristo, Sueli Carneiro, Vilma Reis, Valdecir Nascimento’s –– these are leaders who push us forward.

For more information about the Marielle Franco Institute, please visit the Marielle Franco Institute website.

Marielle Franco's Legacy Spread Around The World: An Interview with Diana Mendes, Director of Strategies at the Marielle Franco Institute