Colombia’s Francia Márquez named Petro’s running mate

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Francia Marquez Mina/Twitter

In a move that was anticipated after Francia Márquez won 783,000 votes within the Pacto Histórico coalition during the March 13 primaries, and second in the ballot to Gustavo Petro, the leader of Colombia Humana and presidential frontrunner has appointed the Afro-Colombian social leader as his vice-presidential running mate.

Francia Márquez, who before the 2022 presidential campaign was a relative unknown to the majority of Colombians, now takes center stage with this appointment and just after a week in which she got more votes than Sergio Fajardo of the Center Hope coalition, a two-time presidential hopeful.

The appointment of the 40-year-old activist and lawyer from the University Santiago de Cali, as well as recipient of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for having organized the women of the remote township La Toma to stop illegal gold mining on their ancestral land, marks an important political milestone for Petro as he works to expand his base with Afro-Colombians ahead of the May 29 election. Francia Márquez’s grass-roots campaigns have earned her international recognition from NGOs and civic movements working in Colombia’s conflict territories.

Márquez was born in Suárez, Cauca, the same community where FARC’s former top commander Guillermo León Sáenz, known by his war alias “Alfonso Cano” was killed during a military raid in 2011.

The social activist, who at age 16 became a single mother and worked in the gold mines of western Cauca until the day before she gave birth, has also helped organize communities against deforestation and protection of their water sources. At 21, Márquez became a mother for the second time, and with two mouths to feed, paid for her education working as domestic help to an affluent family in Cali. Representing vulnerable Afro-Colombian communities and member of the Permanent Assembly of the Afro-descendant communities of Cauca, Márquez participated as a victim of forced displacement in the ethnic chapter of the 2016 peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC guerrilla.

The naming of Márquez as Petro’s VP vindicates the importance of human rights defenders in Colombia’s post-conflict despite the country’s track-record for being among the most dangerous in the world for environmentalists and social leaders. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, 145 social leaders and human rights defenders were murdered in 2021.