Two ex-police officers went on trial in Brazil on Wednesday over the 2018 assassination of charismatic black LGBT activist Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro councilor who was gunned down in an attack that shocked the country. Franco, who grew up in a Rio slum and was an outspoken critic of police brutality and of militia actions in poor neighbourhoods, was 38 at the time of her death. In posterity she has become an icon of the fight against racism and for the welfare of people living in the country’s gritty favelas.