The support of the ‘nobodies’ who saw in France a real alternative to the old traditional politics, blind to colors and privileges, earned him the recognition as a vice-presidential formula days after the inter-party consultations
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Francia Márquez, the activist who is running for the vice presidency
If Francia Elena were not Márquez Mina, but a woman with a surname with ancestry, born in a golden cradle in the country’s big cities, blonde, light eyes and with a youth of few responsibilities, possibly she would have dedicated her sweet soprano voice to the scenic or performing arts. As she was not, today she aspires to the vice presidency of Colombia for the left-wing movement Historical Pact ; although she has come a long way to get to this point.
Regardless of whether the people who did win that population lottery call her a victimist or resentful social, Francia Márquez knows that the story of her life did not begin on December 1, 1981 in the municipality of Suárez (Cauca), when she was born. She reminds society at every opportunity she gets, in case her listeners forget from her privilege and comfort.
“I am an Afro-descendant woman; I grew up on ancestral territory dating back to 1636″, she said sheepishly as she began her acceptance speech for the 2018 Goldman International Prize for the Environment, which she was awarded for organizing women in her community to stop mining illegal on a large scale in its territory.
The daughter of a mother who is the head of a household and had twelve children, Francia Márquez grew up in the village of La Toma together with their brothers and neighbors. There, children and adults dedicated themselves to growing corn and fruit or artisanal mining on the banks of the Ovejas River.
It was part of the landscape that children worked to help at home. Although exclusive schooling is related to a better quality of life for future adults, the Colombian political class of the 1980s and 1990s cared little about what happened in everyday life in Cauca, with their children and the elderly.
< p class=”paragraph”>Despite the precariousness and neglect, the culture in the Pacific is profoundly optimistic and does not miss an opportunity to celebrate life and accompany death. In this cultural context, the voice of Francia Márquez, before being a voice of protest, was a singing voice. “The first time I saw her was at a youth event. They invited her to sing some things to us and write poetry,” Víctor Hugo Montero told La Silla Vacía.
Francia Márquez had a childhood dream of being an artist, perhaps a singer, dancer or actress. She even she she claimed that she got to audition for the music competition show Factor X and she was not accepted by the juries . She told that story in April 2022, after being called King Kong by singer Marbelle, one of the former jurors on that reality show. The video of Márquez’s participation, if any, is still a piece of lost media.
“Fleas dream of buying a dog and nobodies dream of getting out of poverty, that some magical day good luck suddenly rains, that good luck rains in buckets; but good luck does not rain yesterday, or today, or tomorrow, or ever, nor does good luck fall from the sky in drizzle”. The Nobody, Eduardo Galeano.
Francia Márquez has been seen wearing the green scarf, representative of the feminist collectives that seek the decriminalization of abortion in Latin America. “Today those who abort are girls, they are adolescents, they are impoverished, indigenous and peasant women, Afro-descendants, who have not had training processes in the face of sexuality, versus the reproduction of life”, he said in a debate in the magazine Semana.
According to figures from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), 91,215 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 19 became mothers during 2021. Adolescent pregnancy is a public health problem because it reduces the possibilities of social mobility, and this is a problem especially in impoverished adolescents. On the other hand, Colombia is one of the countries with the most single mothers in the world; the support network of the mother and the child in these conditions is even more fragile.
She is very clear about it today, but she didn’t know it when she was a teenager. “When I was 16 years old, I was pregnant by a mestizo white man, who saw me only as a sexual subject, he impregnated me and bye, he left! So, I had to assume maternity and paternity at the age of 16, while studying at school”, France confessed in an interview on the YouTube channel of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso).
In the same interview, he recalled that he had to interrupt his high school studies while waiting. “I had to work in the mine, as well as the entire pregnancy, and since I was going to give birth today, I didn’t go to the mine and gave birth to him at dawn the next day,” she said.
The possibilities of Francia Márquez to enter higher education in that socioeconomic condition were minimal. By force, priorities changed. School plays, cununos and alabaos were left behind. Survival became paramount—and it was hard enough.
“The nobodies: the children of no one, the owners of nothing. The nobodies: the nobodies, the nobodies, running the hare, dying of life, screwed up the nobodies, screwed up: That they are not, even if they are. They do not speak languages, but dialects. They do not practice religions, but superstitions. They do not do art, but handicrafts. They do not apply culture, but folklore. That they are not human beings, but human resources”. The Nobody, Eduardo Galeano.
Francia Márquez had another son at the age of 20. By then, she had already gained some recognition as an activist in her region. It all started when His community prevented them from diverting the Ovejas River, the same river that left them gold to collect on its banks, so that its waters could feed the Salvajina reservoir hydroelectric plant, an infrastructure project that is fed by the Cauca River and has been the focus of multiple environmental and social crimes, according to reports from various NGOs.
Due to her participation in community assemblies, the young but brave woman entered the Black Communities Process (PCN), a network of social organizations with 29 years of history that is dedicated to defending the dignified lifestyle of Afro-Colombians: their culture, their resources, their rights and their permanence in the territories.
In 2009, their community resisted the possible dispossession of their territory, in which mining exploration by AngloGold Ashanti would begin. What the national government saw as a development opportunity — to the point of having issued mining exploitation titles — would take place without first consulting with the community or waiting for their approval. This reaction turned Francia, her children and brothers, into a target of the paramilitaries in the area.
At that time, Francia Márquez made the decision to take the Law career and enrolled at the Santiago de Cali University, one of the most recognized private institutions in Valle del Cauca. He took seven years to graduate. During that decade, she worked as hard as she could to support her children and earn tuition money—she even worked as a general service clerk.
Time seemed short with so many duties in tow, but in those years he made history and entered the national debate with force.
“The nobodies: the children of no one, the owners of nothing. They have no faces, but arms. That do not have names, but numbers. That do not appear in universal history, but in the red chronicle of the local press”. The Nobody, Eduardo Galeano.
Things did not improve over the years: by 2014, the land regulatory bodies in the country were doing what was sung to them with the mining titles and the companies would enter to exploit the territories without any shame at any moment. The noise of the yellow machinery would not let them sleep at night and the movement of the earth would contaminate the river. They had to do something.
They tried: there were demonstrations, letters and sit-ins, but they did not find much willingness from the regional entities. The Caucanos who protested were the nobodies and were out of the watchful eye of those who made decisions.
Faced with this reality, the now university student Francia Márquez decided to go to the door of someone more powerful: the central government. Her idea was walk from Cauca to Bogotá to denounce that the Ovejas River was threatened with death, as well as the subsistence of the people on its banks. At first, only four neighbors accepted.
After much talk, fifteen women started the March of the Turbans in November 2014. When they arrived in Bogotá, twelve days and 600 kilometers later, the protest had already gathered 150 women. All of them took over the premises of the Ministry of the Interior for a week, even at night. They weren’t fighting just for the waters of the river, but for their right to exist as an ethnic group and community in that space.
The march achieved its goal: the women were able to sit negotiate face to face with the president at the time, Juan Manuel Santos, and the Minister of the Interior, Juan Fernando Cristo.They reached several agreements: among the most important, to stop this large-scale exploitation immediately and recognize 27 Community Councils of the North of Cauca as subjects of collective reparation.
“The nobody: Nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the nothings, the nobodies, who cost less than the bullet that kills them”. The Nobody, Eduardo Galeano.
At that time, Francia Márquez put herself on the radar of Colombian politics and the defense of human rights of racialized and impoverished populations. He won recognition such as the National Award for the defense of Human Rights in Colombia, for having led the March of the Turbans.
In addition, in 2016 he was able to travel to Cuba to put the ethnic question at the dialogue table with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Her management as a delegate of the PCN and the Ethnic Commission for Peace resulted in the ethnic chapter of the Final Peace Agreement.
This recognition also had a price: also came under the scrutiny of violent actors who disagreed with their struggles. She had to stop living in his mother’s house and settle in Cali to protect her safety and that of her little ones. Her activism became a very high-risk activity. On one occasion she approached Santander de Quilichao for a community council, and suffered a terrorist attack.
In 2018, he tried to make the definitive national leap through the legislature: he presented himself to the Afro constituency as head of the list of the Yurumangui River Community Council, but received less than eight thousand votes. However, the impulse came from an unexpected place: in December of that year he received the Goldman Prize, which is on a par with the Nobel prizes in the field of ecology.
The ceremony took place in San Francisco, California (United States). France invited her mother to the event and had a curious problem: The lady has worked so hard with her hands that she no longer has fingerprints. “I am going to get her passport and she can hardly travel with me. How many mothers in Colombia, in Latin America, have lost their handprints working in family homes, doing whatever it takes to raise their children?”, she said in the interview for Clacso.
At the end of his welcoming speech he exclaimed “Long live Colombia Humana!”, in a clear nod to the movement led by today’s presidential candidate Gustavo Petro. The politician supported the candidacies of the movement that had endorsed her and she felt a great affinity for the project, but at that moment the relationship between Francia Márquez and the left represented by him was definitely strengthened. Of course, it has not been a relationship free of disappointments.
She decided to run for the Presidency of Colombia after being moved by the Llano Verde massacre. In August 2020, in the east of Cali,Five young people between the ages of 14 and 16 were murdered. For this act, Juan Carlos Loaiza Ocampo and Gabriel Alejandro Bejarano, alias El Mono, have already been convicted. The situation became known in the midst of the general commotion due to the pandemic and shocked the country for dealing with minors in a sector of social vulnerability.
Francia Márquez was moved because a stray bullet took her niece from her years ago. Convinced that no mother should attend the funeral of her children stolen by hunger or violence, she announced her intention to arrive at the Casa de Nariño. However, the Soy Because We Are movement —founded by her— failed to gather enough signatures to promote her candidacy her. This is how she came to the Historical Pact through the Democratic Pole.
It goes without saying that Francia Márquez is a woman who says what she thinks without fear of the consequences, because she has already faced them head on and they haven’t been able to with it. That yes, the debate has not been able —nor wanted— to escape in these five months of campaign. When some figures of the Historical Pact have treated her like the black woman in the photo —the person who is included to feign ethnic representation without really granting it—, she He has stopped short without saying a word.
With elusive financial resources and immersed in controversy, Francia Márquez promoted his candidacy with a view to March 13, the date of the inter-party consultation. She assured that he would not carry Gustavo Petro’s suitcases in an interview, he confronted the Historical Pact for relegating his candidates for Congress to inaccessible positions on the closed list, he publicly confronted figures such as Alberto Saade , and made several feints of leaving the Covenant.
The definitive fracture with the Historical Pact was very close, after Petro and Gustavo Bolívar, congressman and old friend of the candidate, assured that the former mayor of Bogotá would not accept the second place in the consultation of the left as vice-presidential formula, despite the fact that that was part of the pact. In any case, since the alternatives from the center of the country were all aligned in this coalition, France ended up staying in the consultation.
It was a good decision. With 780,000 votes, Francia Márquez came in second place in the poll, but obtained much more support than candidate Sergio Fajardo, winner of the Coalition of Hope and with an extensive resume in politics. She also surpassed the votes of candidates like Álex Char and Enrique Peñalosa, who were also backed by years of experience and the political machines of the country.
This was a resounding blow of opinion. The support of the nobodies who saw in France a real alternative to the old traditional politics, blind to colors and privileges, earned him recognition as a vice-presidential formula days later.