Black, feminist, green and vice-president: in Colombia, the “phenomenon” Francia Marquez

This year, August 7 is a doubly – even triply – historic date in Colombia. On Sunday, for the first time in the country’s history, a left-wing president entered the Nariño Palace, the Andean Elysée, in the heart of Bogota, at 2650 meters above sea level. Elected in June, the former guerrilla Gustavo Petro begins to exercise his functions that same day, for a period of four years, arousing the hopes of one part of the country and the fears of another, which fears a rapprochement with the Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorial Venezuela. August 7 also corresponds to the anniversary date of the Battle of Boyaca, Simon Bolivar’s historic victory in 1819 over the troops who remained loyal to the Spanish crown. An episode that consecrated the independence of Greater Colombia covering Colombia, Venezuela and Panama. This does not prevent Felipe VI of Spain from coming to Bogota to attend the inauguration of the new president of the former colony.

But it is on Francia Marquez, 40, who is all eyes. The new vice-president is both a black activist, feminist, environmentalist, from the social movement and of modest origin. A quintuple characteristic unprecedented at this level of power in Latin America, including in Colombia where Afro-descendants represent 10% of the 50 million inhabitants. This, too, is historic. Above all, the young woman has a solid charisma which has not escaped Gustavo Petro with whom she formed a winning “ticket”.

Wherever she travels, Francia Marquez stirs up crowds, even beyond borders. Guest of the Kirchner Cultural Center in Buenos Aires on July 31, for example, she appeared on stage to the cheers of the Argentinian public. “We who are nobody, we have come to power in Colombia!”, declares that day with a raised fist, the fiery lawyer. “My presence symbolizes these excluded, marginalized, denied peoples.” On June 19, she celebrated the victory of the left in these terms: “After 214 years, we have succeeded in having a government of the people, the government of people with calloused hands, of people who are on foot, of those which are nothing.”

Co-founder of the department of gender studies at the National University of Bogota, Mara Viveros rejoices: “An Afro-descendant woman vice-president in Colombia, it was unthinkable a few years ago.” The fact is that this country is historically dominated by a handful of wealthy white families from the Spanish colonization. And that in whole sections of society, racist prejudices die hard. The fate of Afro-Colombians is hardly enviable: according to the World Bank, 41% of them live in a situation of poverty, ie nearly twice as many as the rest of the population.

But for Francia Marquez, there was never any question of resigning herself to this injustice. The lawyer with a tempered steel character rose through the ranks to bring change to the top of the state. However, the path was strewn with pitfalls. Descendant of African slaves deported in the 17th century, she was born in 1981 in the lush hills of Suarez, a locality in the Cauca region (south) where the eponymous river flows in a jungle landscape.

Raised by her mother and her grandparents, the young Francia understood very early on the consubstantial link that united her community to the surrounding nature. As a child, she watched her ancestors struggle against the construction of the Salvajina dam, a few kilometers from her village. At the age of 14, she took action against a project to divert the Ovejas River, a source of water and life for the small community coveted by the multinational mining companies that colonized its banks.

Francia Marquez will make the fight against these giants of gold panning her hobbyhorse. Since 2009, she has denounced the operating licenses illegally granted to mining concessions. Five years later, the activist leads a hundred women in a long walk of 500 kilometers between La Toma, a neighboring village, and the capital Bogota. Objective: to demand that the government put an end to these activities. And she wins! Remained famous under the name of “March of the turbans”, the victorious episode propels the leader towards obtaining in 2018 the prestigious Goldman Prize for the environment, a kind of Nobel Prize in ecology awarded each year in California.

His activism opens the doors of national politics to him at the same time as his personal career gives him considerable credit with his fellow citizens. Single mother at 16, forced to interrupt her law studies and work as a domestic worker to support her two children, Francia Marquez knows the daily life of the most disadvantaged. “I know she can fight inequality because she has experienced it,” says Marwi Perdomo Rodriguez, for example, a 32-year-old woman who admits to having voted Francia Marquez more than Gustavo Petro. “She stands up for those who have never been listened to in this country.”

Targeted by an assassination attempt with explosives

Frank and eloquent, Francia Marquez attacks a state that she considers “racist, patriarchal, classist and which prevents Colombians from living with dignity”. She takes the defense of women and the poor, advocates the inclusion of ethnic minorities and LGBT. His speech “takes your hair” in the hushed world of Colombian politics, traditionally conservative. “Francia Marquez is changing the way of doing politics, continues researcher Mara Viveros. She reverses the stigma of those who have always been excluded by putting their knowledge, from territories and communities, at the service of an inclusive political vision. ”

In a country where there have already been 109 assassinations of social leaders since the beginning of the year, Francia Marquez’s fight is not without risk. As a child, she saw paramilitary groups proliferate in her native Cauca and, in their gruesome wake, the massacres of civilians that accompanied them. Today, these same groups do not hesitate to insult him. “Nigger daughter of a bitch,” they write in public statements that sound like death threats. Winner of the Goldman Prize the previous year, she herself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in her home province in May 2019, with a gun and a grenade, which left two injured. Forced to stay away from her village and her relatives for years for security reasons, she never allowed herself to be overcome by fear. It takes more to shake Colombia’s new strong woman.