On the evening of Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Marielle Franco, a city councilor for Brazil’s Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), was killed as she was riding in a car in Rio de Janeiro. Reports suggest that a Cobalt-model car pulled up beside her and fired thirteen bullets into the vehicle. The bullets killed her and her driver. Franco’s press secretary, who was in the backseat with her, survived. According to an article titled, Who Killed Marielle Franco? in Jacobin magazine, currently, evidence suggest that Franco’s death was in fact a well-planned political execution. Before Marielle Franco was murdered, she had attended an event earlier that evening in Rio’s Lapa neighborhood called “Black Women Changing Power Structures.” While working and raising a daughter as a single mother, she pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees, ultimately defending a dissertation that criticized police “pacification” campaigns in Rio’s largest favelas. She wrote, “The police state is aimed at the repression and control of the poor. The most emblematic mark of this picture is the militaristic siege of the favelas and a growing process of incarceration.” She goes on to argue that “the campaigns worked to contain the dissatisfied or ‘excluded’ of this process, the majority of them poor, and increasingly relegated to the city’s ghettos and in prisons.” Today, AWNP will bring to you an recent conversation between Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and Dr. Vera Benedito that explored the deep implications of the recent death of Marielle Franco. Examining the origins of Franco’s politics rooted in fighting for a radical change in the Brazil’s sociopolitical and economic structures and mapping the future of Brazil’s black radical left, Keisha-Khan and Professor Benedito provide an important context of global violence and the African world. Initially trained as a journalist and literary critic, Dr. Benedito was a founding member of the Black Movement in São Paulo. She was recruited by the late Ruth Simms Hamilton at Michigan State University in the 1990s to complete her Masters and PhD in Sociology. She was an inaugural contributor to the African Diaspora Research Project that brought together scholars and activists from around the world to carry out collaborative and comparative research on black culture and politics. The late Minister of Racial Equality, Luiza Bairros, was part of that cohort of students at Michigan State who along with Dr. Benedito profoundly shaped African Diaspora Studies in the United States. She has written on the history of Caribbean labor migration to Brazil as well as to narrate the complex political history of the struggle for affirmative action in higher education and in the labor market. She returned to Brazil in the mid-2000s where she has worked as a teacher and administrator in the public school system while also training teachers to implement Afro-Brazilian and African history into the curriculum. In addition to being the newest member of the Africa World Now Project collective as an associate producer, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in the critical study of race, gender, and politics in the Americas Professor Perry is also author of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil. Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.