Renata Souza calls it the most painful moment of her life: the day gunmen murdered her friend and fellow activist Marielle Franco, an outspoken black and LGBTQ rights activist whose murder sparked an outcry in Brazil and beyond.

But four years later, Souza – who like Franco describes herself as “a black woman from the favela” – is continuing the fight as the murdered councilwoman of Rio de Janeiro and running for state MP in Brazil’s Oct. 2 elections.

Wearing large gold earrings in the shape of African maps and colorful clothing that contrasts with the monochromatic tones of the Rio State Assembly, Souza follows in Franco’s footsteps and dares to fight for the rights of the poor and black people in a deeply divided Brazil.

That means fighting a daily battle in the state Legislature, a “hostile” place where she was even barred from using the elevator reserved for elected officials because people assumed she was on the cleaning staff, she says.

“You get there and you say, ‘I’m a black woman from the favela, and I’m here to fight for all of this,’ and people get scared,” says the spirited 40-year-old in her small living room family home in the Favela Mare in northern Rio – the same slum that Franco came from.

“People like me have always been marginalized in politics.”

Souza won her seat in 2018, the same tumultuous year that saw Franco killed in a hail of bullets and Brazil elected President Jair Bolsonaro – the far-right ex-army captain who is now running for re-election.

In a year that saw Bolsonaro’s win dramatically move Brazil to the right, Souza won the most votes of any left-wing candidate in Rio State.

She remains a hugely popular character at the Mare, constantly greeting people as she weaves her way through the narrow, busy streets.

Souza, the youngest of three children, dreamed of becoming a journalist in hopes of countering traditional media’s portrayal of favelas as havens for violent crime, she says.

The only one in her family who went to university, she met Franco in high school and engaged with him in activism, demanding justice for police killings in the slums.

“They killed friends of ours. It arrived near their home. So defending human rights started to look like self-defense,” she says.

In 2006, her friend and fellow campaigner Marcelo Freixo — now a candidate for governor of Rio — asked her to help him run for the Chamber of Deputies.

Souza was repelled by politics, she says.

But Freixo reminded them that two police officers were walking on a platform to step up armed raids on the favelas.

“He convinced me with one sentence. ‘Renata,’ he said, ‘I have to run because our enemies are running,'” she recalls.

On that election day, the reality of their struggles broke in: Renan, her boyfriend’s three-year-old nephew, was killed by a stray bullet during a police operation.

It’s an all too common tragedy in Rio. According to the monitoring organization Fogo Cruzado, 116 people were killed by cluster bullets in the metropolitan area last year.

“I heard that shot,” says Souza, still shaken. “I said to myself, ‘Here I’m fighting and they’re killing a child! It’s pointless.'”

Despite this, she remained involved in politics behind the scenes.

When Franco decided to run for office, Souza worked as her campaign coordinator and then, when she won, became her chief of staff.

She says she felt like giving up when her friend was murdered on March 14, 2018 at the age of 38 – a crime for which a perpetrator has yet to be brought to justice

Instead, she ran for office herself – and won.

She is one of only five black women in Rio’s 70-member legislature, even though more than half of the state’s population is black or multiracial.

She was forced to leave the Mare after receiving death threats from pro-Bolsonaro groups.

But she’s proud to have passed legislation that prioritizes investigations into murdered children and clamps down on the abuse of pregnant black women in the health care system.

“I lost my freedom. That’s a high price to pay,” she says.

“But it was worth it for these victories.”