“Reaching the presidency of Colombia is not an end, it is a means to continue pushing the struggles”, it states France Marquez Mina, that with his candidacy shook the political board of his country. Lawyer, social leader and environmental defender, Márquez seeks to become the first female president of African descent in a country where racism ranges from the most subtle to the structural. From racist expressions to the dispossession of ancestral territories. “Structural racism defines the conditions in which racialized people must live. We see how the neoliberal model and savage capitalism need these forms of oppression to maintain themselves “, explains in dialogue with Page 12.
“When these elite white men come to me to say that I do not have the merits to be president, then let them tell me what the experience they have is. His experience is of corruption, his experience is of condemning entire peoples to death, to war, “says Márquez at a conference at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA, together with the head of the National Institute against Discrimination, the Xenophobia and Racism (INADI), Victoria Donda.
“We have everything to win”
“We have nothing to lose because they have already taken everything from us. Part of that whole is that they continue to expropriate the human condition from us. We have everything to win and we have to make a path “, remarks the candidate for the presidency of Colombia. From his childhood to the present, the protection of his community and ancestral territory led Márquez Mina to lead mobilizations to demand time and again from the government to stop the dispossession of Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples.
“They certified that we were not a black community and therefore we did not have to be consulted and I found myself involved in politics”says the leader of the Soy Porque Somos Movement in reference to the circumstances that led her to politics. Because “Politically they are defining that my community, which has been in a territory since 1636, has to be evicted to privilege a multinational company that arrived ”, he relates.
“To privilege development. They have always sacrificed us for development. In the name of development enslaved our ancestors and ancestors. In the name of development they have racialized us and in the name of development the patriarchy has done what it wants with our bodies and with our territories. There I had to take part”.
Dispute power
In 2014, Francia Márquez led the March of the Turbans, Mobilization of Afro-descendant Women for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories. Along with more than 100 women they walked about 300 kilometers from the town of La Toma in Cauca to the capital Bogotá to demand that the government of then President Juan Manuel Santos withdraw the mining titles granted after a violent incursion into the ancestral territory.
“Like black women we leave our children in the care of other people to walk, to stop the mining that was poisoning the territory with mercury. In a territory where we have girls and boys with mercury in their blood. With levels of five mercury particles in the body of children who are 10 or 8 years old, “recalls the candidate.” That is also part of physical extermination, that is part of environmental racism. Not in all places are these territories poisoned. The poison is poured into those racialized territories. That’s when I realized that you had to fight for power, you had to participate because that was not going to stop ”.
That same year, Francia Márquez met the Honduran indigenous leader and environmental defender, Berta Cáceres, who in 2016, a year after receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize, was murdered in her home. In 2018, Márquez Mina won the same distinction. “It was very painful for me when she was murdered. The fight that she did was the same fight that we do and they ended up murdering her. It is not easy, but we are witnessing that. Our struggles are always drawn by risks, and that’s where we face each other.”, Explains to Page 12. Márquez recalled the words of Cristina Bautista, an indigenous governor assassinated in the department of Cauca. “If we keep quiet they kill us and if we talk too, then we talk because we have no other”.
“I am because we are”
In this sense, the candidacy of Francia Márquez is framed in the need of her people. “A people who are tired of not being allowed to breathe, tired of having their dreams taken away from them. This is the dream of young people who murder them every day and who justify their murders by calling them criminals, terrorists and vandals.”, Says the leader of Soy because Somos in reference to the death of young people who demonstrated during the social outbreak.
“I believe that Duque has insisted on destroying the peace and sustaining a policy of death that has been promoting Uribism for 20 years., even influencing foreign policy when we should respect the autonomy of each state, ”Márquez told this newspaper. “Here we are resisting, thinking about how to this bet to win the elections we can confront this system of death and dispossession towards a dignified, peaceful, just and egalitarian Colombia. Above all, a Colombia that re-establishes its relations with all the countries of the region.”.
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