Millions of Brazilians and people all over the world are mourning the death of Marielle Franco, progressive council member who represented Favela da Maré, a poor community of mostly Afro-Brazilian dwellers. Franco was a member of the left-wing Party for Socialism and Liberty (PSOL, for its Portuguese initials), a broad umbrella organization that groups together several parties.

Marielle Franco’s senseless murder on March 14 led to mass mobilizations in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilians cities. She was 38 when four bullets ended her life. Her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes also died from gunshots “after a car pulled alongside theirs and opened fire” according to Human Rights Watch.

Writing in The Independent, journalist Glenn Greenwald recounts her life:

A black LGBT+ woman in a country notoriously dominated by racism, sexism and traditional religious dogma, she was raised in one of Rio’s largest, poorest and most violent slums, the Maré complex.

She became a single mother at the age of 19, but graduated college, obtained a masters in sociology, and then became one of the city’s most effective human rights activists, leading often dangerous campaigns against pervasive police violence, corruption and extra-judicial murders that targeted the city’s poor, black residents with whom she grew up.

As she became increasingly political, Franco joined Brazil’s new left-wing party, the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL), and quickly became one of its stars.

In 2016, she ran for public office for the first time as a candidate for Rio’s city council and was elected with a massive vote. The results stunned the city’s political class: as a first-time candidate, a black woman from Maré became the fifth most-voted candidate in the city (out of more than 1,500 candidates, 51 of them were elected).

That success solidified Franco’s status not only as a new political force to be reckoned with, but as a repository of hope for Brazil’s traditionally voiceless and excluded groups: its favela residents, its black and poor people, and women.