When the joy is so great that it barely fits in a body, then there is dancing. And that’s what the women of Yolombó do. With big grins on their faces, hands in the air and just jump. Because their Francia Márquez, the black environmental activist from this poor village deep in the tropical mountains in western Colombia, becomes vice president. Left-wing politician Gustavo Petro won the presidency, a feat in a country that never had a left-wing president. But here in this black community, here ‘Francia’ won on Sunday.
Dancy Adriana Trujillo, Márquez’s 49-year-old aunt, is stunned. She wears a Petro and Marquéz button on her blouse. “My chest is overflowing.” She feels the emotion filling her chest not only for her 40-year-old cousin who rose from the bottom up to the second most important position in government – today a story of five hundred years of oppression and deprivation took a turn. Márquez’s win is a victory for the 9 million Afro-Colombians in the country of fifty million inhabitants.
In the most tense Colombian elections in ages, a leftist former guerrilla and a populist businessman were on the ballot on Sunday. One promised a more social Colombia, the other an end to corruption. Three weeks earlier, Colombians made it clear that they had had enough of the right-wing politicians who had ruled their country for decades. In the first round of voting, Senator Petro and eccentric construction magnate Rodolfo Hernández defeated the incumbent candidate.
No room for doubt
The foul-mouthed Hernández, former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga, made a stormy advance out of nowhere. The anti-politician seemed a formidable alternative to the right. But on Sunday afternoon, the voter left no room for doubt. Barely an hour after the polls closed, the result was announced: Petro and Márquez got over 50 percent of the vote, Hernández got stuck at 47 percent (with a gap of blank votes between them) and quickly acknowledged his loss.
“Victoriaaaaa,” yells Maria Aidel, Yolombó resident. “I feel like crying.” She just has time to say, ‘We deserve everything. And more than that.’ Then she jumps towards the dancing company on the sports field next to the local primary school. From early in the morning until four in the afternoon, the villagers came to the school to cast their votes. Many lingered around a television set after the polls closed or crowded around telephone screens with results pouring in.
When 90 percent of the votes have been counted and the win can no longer be denied, it is mainly the women of Yolombó who dance. Because Márquez showed them that the impossible is possible, as a black woman. They sing: ‘We’re going to have a good life’, sabroso in Spanish, as people say here in the north of the rural province of Cauca. It became the slogan of Márquez’s campaign. As victory songs blare from speakers, the light slowly fades over the green mountains.
A boy grabs a Francia flag and runs up the main highway to a lookout point. Hundreds of villagers follow in an ecstatic sprint. Fire arrows shoot into the air, people scream and clap, in the distance a column of honking cars and motorcycles comes down the mountain road. ‘Thanks to Francia’, says her aunt Dancy Trujillo, ‘people will look at us differently. They will no longer say that we are not fit for politics, that we are only good for cleaning jobs.’
Violent History
In the village of Márquez, one of five Afro-Colombian villages scattered over the mountains, the violent history of the South American country comes together. In colonial times, enslaved Africans extracted the gold from the red soil. People who fought free or bought themselves free continue the small-scale traditional gold prospecting. The inhabitants still use wooden bowls to sift gold chunks from the riverbeds and mountain slopes.
Half a millennium later, the descendants of the first African Colombians are still at the bottom of the social ladder. They mainly live in the west of the country, in the tropical rural provinces along the Pacific and Caribbean coast. The same countryside that has been the bloody backdrop for a civil war between Marxist guerrilla groups, the military, far-right paramilitaries and drug gangs for the past half-century. Groups between which, with the passing of the years, the boundaries blurred.
Power and prosperity were concentrated in that other Colombia, that of the cooler and more prosperous Andes, in cities like Bogotá, Medellín and Bucaramanga. The profit of the former guerrillero Petro, with a black woman next to him, is a political earthquake in a country where left-wing politicians had to pay for their aspirations with death during the civil war.
On the Saturday before election day, Francia Márquez is in the same school in Yolombó. She visits her people in ‘her house’ one more time, before she is probably swallowed by national politics for four years. “I dream of the moment when we can live in peace,” says the little woman in the orange jacket. Gold earrings in the shape of Colombia hang from her ears. With great calm she addresses the approximately eighty people present: neighbours, aunts, uncles, cousins – women and men who know her as the girl next door who became an acclaimed climate activist. And since Sunday as the black teenage mother who made it to the vice presidency.
Endangered
There are eight heavily armed police officers around the primary school. Soft drops fall from gray clouds. As a local leader and environmentalist, Márquez was already under threat. She conducted her campaign these months partly from behind a small army of security guards. A painting on the school wall shows local female heroes who, like Márquez, battled a large reservoir in the 1980s and invasive mining in the first decade of this century.
Each time the story was the same: the state pretended that the black inhabitants of the region did not exist. Economic interests weighed more heavily, whether it was a reservoir that flooded many houses or the handing out of land titles to international mining companies. But Márquez led her community to gain in court, the land belonged to them. Industrial mining was gone, but illegal miners continued to excavate the ground with machines. Criminal groups threatened the local activists, Márquez had to flee her village.
The aggressive pursuit of gold and water is not the only danger threatening Yolombó. ‘Look,’ says Carlos Rosero, a long-standing comrade of Márquez. He wears a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a beanie over his afro. Rosero points from the schoolyard towards the valley in the distance, in the depths the river Ovejas flows. On the horizon, green fields climb up mountain slopes. ‘There you see the failure of the peace agreement. That’s all coca.’
farc
The government signed a peace deal with Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Farc, in 2016. On paper, the deal ended five decades of armed conflict. But after Colombia’s largest guerrilla movement disarmed, other armed groups filled the territories left behind by the Farc. Hence the coca cultivation around Yolombó on land where bananas, cassava and coffee used to grow.
That is why Márquez can still only dream of peace, despite the peace agreement of six years ago. Farc dissidents are still present in her mountains, guerrillas who rejected the accord. In the nearby town of Suárez, where the city council resides, ‘FARC-EP presente’ is written on the walls: the people’s army of the Farc is here. The Farc dissidents are just one of several armed groups battling for land and drug cultivation.
Last week it became clear again that peace has not yet been reached in the north of the Cauca, Márquez’s native region. Police killed the leader of the Farc dissidents. A few days later, a bomb went off near the Suárez police station, apparently in revenge. One officer was seriously injured. The headlight of the motorcycle to which the explosive was attached is still on the street over the election weekend. Residents pass the site of the attack without looking back. Violence is part of life.
The battle continues
On the schoolyard in Yolombó, those present one by one encourage ‘their’ Francia. “You represent me,” says 28-year-old Damaris Trujillo. ‘We are the nobody who will soon be at the top.’ Another fellow villager says, “You are to us what Obama is to the black community in the United States.” In Márquez’s wake, Mábel Lara also came to the mountain village, she is one of Colombia’s few black news presenters. “Never before has someone like Francia come to power,” she says, “a black woman.”
Márquez calls on her people one last time to remain militant, not to be intimidated: ‘I have never been silenced,’ she says. “When they say I don’t have the capabilities, I say, what about you? If you guys are so good at it, why doesn’t my village still have drinking water?’ The lack of water in Yolombó has become the symbol of a negligent government. While a few kilometers away the dam created a huge water reservoir and generates electricity, basic services such as clean water and electricity are scarce in the mountain villages.
But Márquez also warns. It will be tough, she says. Her gains are just the beginning of the change. “We are still a black people in a racist society.” Deep-rooted Colombian mistrust will haunt her as vice president. “You will read posts on social media that make you doubt me,” she predicts. ‘Don’t believe them. Don’t forget who I am.’ We are behind you, say her fellow villagers. The group raises a battle cry. ‘Be careful! The struggle of black people in Latin America continues!’