Since the murder of councilor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, in March 2018, sectors of the left have tried to implicate former president Jair Bolsonaro in the crime. However, the final report of the Federal Police (PF) investigation into the case does not confirm any of these suspicions. These conclusions are not even mentioned in the 479-page document, which covers the Civil Police’s initial investigation into the case and the PF’s own investigations, which began last year, which sought to uncover who ordered the councilor’s murder.
In March of this year, the PF concluded the investigation and arrested Rio de Janeiro Court of Auditors advisor Domingos Brazão and his brother, federal deputy Chiquinho Brazão (União-RJ), as alleged perpetrators of the murder. The former head of the Rio Civil Police Rivaldo Barbosa was also arrested, but his defense claims that there is no evidence of his connection with the Brazão brothers in Marielle’s murder. Lawyer Alexandre Dumas, who defends Rivaldo Barbosa, says that there is a hasty lynching of the police chief.
Based on the plea bargains of former police officer Ronnie Lessa and driver Élcio Queiroz, denounced as perpetrators of the crime, PF investigations showed that the Brazãos were the most interested in retaliating against Marielle, due to a dispute over illegal land in Rio de Janeiro .
In addition to contracting the crime, they also tried to divert the focus of the Civil Police investigations to incriminate other people, allegedly buying the direction of the investigation from Rivaldo Barbosa, who commanded the corporation at the time.
The left’s first accusations against Bolsonaro were based on the suspicion that Marielle’s murder was involved by militias.
For some time now, politicians from the PT and Psol in Rio have associated the former president with these paramilitary groups, formed mainly by police officers and firefighters who, decades ago, began to carry out private and clandestine security activities in regions of the city afflicted by the violence imposed on communities by drug trafficking factions. Over time, these groups began to extort residents for neighborhood surveillance, and then to tax the supply of gas, telephone and internet services. In recent years, they began to promote invasions and land grabbing to sell lots, where they would also exercise control.
Such is the context presented by the PF in the report, which at no point mentions Bolsonaro’s alleged involvement with the militias. The entire investigation points to the Brazão brothers, who, according to the investigation, commanded the first militias that dominated neighborhoods in the West Zone of Rio, such as Jacarepaguá, Tanque, Gardênia Azul, Rio das Pedras and Osvaldo Cruz.
For the PF, they would have ordered Marielle’s death together with a militia member they trust, Edmilson Macalé (murdered in 2021) who, in turn, would have called former police officer, militia member and hired killer Ronnie Lessa to carry out the crime. . He was arrested in 2019 along with Élcio Queiroz, identified as the driver of the vehicle that followed Marielle’s car and where the shots came from. Both signed a collaboration agreement with the PF last year, when the corporation took over the case, to reveal who the masterminds would be.
While Élcio Queiroz focused on detailing the execution of the crime, Ronnie Lessa talked about the meetings he had with Domingos Brazão in 2017 to receive the task. In these meetings, the councilor would have said that, by order of delegate Rivaldo Barbosa, who headed the Homicide Division, the ambush should not take place on the routes that Marielle took to or from the City Council Chamber, but on the way to her apartment, in Long River.
The idea was to try to separate the crime from any political motivation, which could attract the investigation to the federal sphere and, therefore, remove control of the investigations from Rivaldo Barbosa himself, according to the PF. The great repercussion of the case, however, ended up forcing the investigations to reach Lessa and Queiroz, but without moving forward to discover who the masterminds were.
But the PF does not explain why the police identified and arrested Lessa and Queiroz. In theory, if the then police chief Rivaldo Barbosa was truly corrupt, then it wouldn’t make sense for him to let the investigation progress until the arrest of the councilor’s executors.
Based on their testimony, the PF investigation concluded that the motivation was political, as Marielle was opposed to projects by Chiquinho Brazão to regularize areas of illegal occupation and allocate them for middle and upper class housing and commercial establishments, and not for benefit the low-income population that lived there, as the councilor wanted.
“The elements presented by the collaborator’s speech can be summarized in two primary issues: the supposed animosity between Brazão and members of Psol […] and the actions of Marielle Franco with residents of communities dominated by militias, notably regarding land exploitation and illegal subdivisions”, says the PF.
Left used Élcio Queiroz’s visit to Bolsonaro’s condominium to accuse former president
In addition to the assumption that Bolsonaro had links to militias, part of the left became suspicious of the former president when, in 2019, the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro stated that, on the day of the crime, on March 14, 2018, Élcio Queiroz visited the Vivendas da Barra condominium, where Ronnie Lessa and also Bolsonaro lived, before being elected president.
When consulting the reception notebook, which recorded the arrivals of visitors, there was a note that that day, in the afternoon, Élcio Queiroz had asked the doorman to call Bolsonaro’s house number 58, so that he could be authorized to enter. On that day, Bolsonaro was in the Chamber of Deputies, in Brasília, according to official attendance and voting records in the house.
In October 2019, when Bolsonaro was already president, the case was reported on national television. On the same day, he did a live broadcast, straight from Saudi Arabia, where he was visiting. He accused the then governor of Rio, Wilson Witzel, of leaking this part of the investigation.
“Making it very clear that something is very wrong in this process. I would like to talk a lot about this process, talk to these delegates. Put a clean sheet on what is happening in my name. Why do you want to destroy me? Why this thirst for power, Mr. Witzel? protested the former president.
This episode of the ordinance is also not taken into account in the PF’s final report on the case. In an interview given in 2022 to the website The Intercept Brazildelegate Giniton Lages, who first headed the crime investigations, said that the doorman was wrong to record that Élcio Queiroz asked for permission to enter Bolsonaro’s house – investigations showed that he always asked for permission at Ronnie Lessa’s house, and there went on the day of the crime, to find him.
“We searched for all names close to Lessa who entered the condominium with his authorization. At this point, we already saw Élcio as someone close to the target – and he caught our attention more than the others. The analyst did not notice what the next team saw: the entry note on the day of the crime with house number 58, where the Bolsonaro family lived. Then they found that the audio did not match and, therefore, it would have been a clerical error on the part of the doorman,” said the delegate.
In the PF investigation, Giniton Lages is suspected of, together with Rivaldo Barbosa, trying to direct the investigations so as not to implicate the Brazão as masterminds. The main suspicion against him is that he did not capture all the security camera images from properties neighboring the crime scene in the following days. In the 2022 interview, he said that there was a technical procedural error in capturing the recordings. Still, he said that the fact did not harm the identification of the killers’ car and reaching Ronnie Lessa and Élcio Queiroz.
The PF investigation points out flaws in Giniton’s work using parameters collected in a press report. The PF cites a report about another unrelated investigation, where the police were able to track a criminal over a 40-kilometer journey and charges Giniton for not having the same efficiency.
“Rash lynching”, says Rivaldo Barbosa’s defense on the PF’s conclusion
Rivaldo Barbosa’s defense denies that he acted to protect the Brazão brothers, an accusation that, according to him, is based solely on Ronnie Lessa’s accusation.
“I believe this is just a ruse that was created to implicate ‘doctor’ Rivaldo in the homicide. This report is a preliminary imputation that needs to be resolved through criminal investigation. It’s a hasty lynching, due to half a dozen words in the Federal Police report”, said Alexandre Dumas, Rivaldo Barbosa’s lawyer, to GloboNews.
