For those of us who haven't known her long ago, her fight began almost a decade ago when, in 2014, she led a march of women from her community to draw attention to the crimes that illegal gold mining has been committing in Colombia for decades.
They are crimes of all kinds, scandalously unpunished, that for centuries, all those related to the exploitation of gold in America, which have not yet ended, have claimed many human lives in our countries.
In Colombia, as in Brazil and Venezuela, to name just two South American nations, they continue to compromise the future life of millions of inhabitants of the most plundered, and at the same time, most abandoned regions.
That was a memorable march that was opposed to absolutely everything that the powerful of the world usually oppose to suffocate the respect and solidarity that people like Francia Márquez manage to instill in even the most indifferent.
The struggle of this admirable woman, barely 40 years old, is already on a par with that of the most legendary champions of the poor in Ibero-America at any time.
Márquez has recounted on many occasions the helplessness and discouragement that overwhelmed his community of La Toma, in the Cauca Valley, when he decided to travel the 350 kilometers that separate it from Bogotá, leading a pilgrimage of 80 women that changed not only his life but the political physiognomy of Colombia in such a radical way that no one could have foreseen it at that time.
His adversaries were nothing less than the mining multinationals, the paramilitary drug trafficking organizations, the secular, complicit inertia of the Government, the condescending cynicism of the media, the perverse Colombian party-chieftain system, the stupid indifference of the majority in a tired and skeptical country.
Francia Márquez has explained on many occasions the circumstances that gave rise to their struggles.
In his account a date recurs: 1636, the year that the annals set as the arrival in La Toma of the African ancestors of that community, enslaved during the Conquest to exploit, precisely, the gold mines.
Numerous environmental and feminist organizations around the world have incorporated into their records the exemplary career of Francia Márquez as an environmentalist.
In a continent where the defense of the environment is often paid with life, activists like her act under constant threat of death.
Just last year, Colombia was shaken by the murder of Gonzalo Cardona, a dedicated environmentalist, defender of the “yellow-eared” parrot, a beautiful species, endemic to the department of Tolima and threatened with extinction.
The Afro-Colombian population is estimated at 10 million, in a country with more than 50 million inhabitants.
The candidacy of Francia Márquez for the vice-presidency of the Republic, in a duo with the leftist candidate Gustavo Petro, is not a media calculation of the electoral consultancies but the result of the unavoidable fact that, in an open consultation on pre-candidacies, Márquez obtained more than 770,000 votes , being the third most voted person.
I have now lived seven years in a row in Colombia, a country that I have been visiting for thirty years, and I have had to closely observe the drastic changes that the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 has brought about in the country's electoral mood.
This year's presidential elections will be the second to take place without a climate of war prevailing and also the first in which the left has a clear chance of winning the first round.
The mere possibility that an Afro-descendant and feminist lawyer, single mother and legitimate representative of a systematically neglected community could be a candidate for the vice presidency would have made one hope that the forces of the
status quo
—which undoubtedly include the left that mostly supports Petro — things would be taken, if not with tolerance, with the temperance typical of a consolidated democracy.
This has not been the case: from the barons of the "liberal" right to the best supporters of Gustavo Petro's court, they have scandalized the sayings of France with undisguised racism.
They react as if the pre-eminence achieved by Francia Márquez were a grace granted by a patriarchal estate.
As if her candidacy were an artifice of electoral marketing.
All of this has reminded me of the opening sentences of
The Invisible Man,
the shocking novel by the great African-American writer Ralph Ellison:
“I am an invisible man.
Not a specter like the ones that haunted Edgar Allan Poe.
Nor an ectoplasm of Hollywood cinema.
I have substance, I am flesh and bone;
I am fiber and fluids and it would even be said that I have a mind.
I am invisible simply because some people refuse to see me."
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