Franklin de Sousa Martins is a Brazilian journalist who served as Press Secretary for the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
He started working as a journalist at 15, as an intern in the pro-Vargas newspaper Última Hora.
At 20, as a student of Economical Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Franklin was elected chairman of the Student's Executive and, soon after, vice-chairman of the Metropolitan Union of Students, in Rio de Janeiro. By then, Martins approached then fellow student leader José Dirceu, who was to become a founding member of the Workers Party and a grey eminence behind Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
As a youth, Martins was not only a student leader but after the 1964 coup d'état in Brazil, engaged in armed struggle and urban guerrilla. In the communist group MR-8, he was known as Valdir. During the military dictatorship, he had a prominent role within the movements which fought against the regime. The acts included bank robbery and assaults on police and military. The amount was used to buy weapons and bribe authorities to release fellow militants.