One man speaks after another on the platform without anyone paying attention to them.
The crowd that fills the central square of Santander de Quilichao, in the Colombian department of Cauca, watches the sun go down distractedly.
They have not come to see them.
The mood suddenly changes.
The protagonist has climbed onto the stage.
The public roars.
“Long live Francia Márquez, damn it!
The people don't give up, damn it!"
She smiles without showing her teeth, in her yellow dress, with the knitted bag hanging from her shoulder.
When she starts to speak, the atmosphere is completely different:
—They say that men don't have abortions, but I say they do.
In Colombia they abort every time they leave their children.
They abort their parental responsibility!
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Some poker face is seen on stage.
The crowd erupts in applause.
She does not change the gesture.
She is a 40-year-old black woman who as a child wanted to marry a white man.
She that she left her house threatened with death for defending her land, that she had two children alone because her parents disappeared, that she cleaned other people's houses to eat.
A Colombian who never imagined being up there.
That she's been scared for half her life.
That she became a mother when she was 16 years old.
That's why she now says what she wants.
As she pleases.
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I didn't ask to be in politics.
But politics messed with me and now we're messing with it.
You were not paid to be there, you came because you wanted to.
Here you have your daughter and here you have your vice president.
Francia Marquez, vice-presidential candidate of the Historical Pact movement, during her campaign closure, in Bogotá. Iván Valencia
Petro and Márquez lead all the polls for the first round, with a huge margin over the second.
Ivan Valencia
Márquez supporters during an event in Bogotá.Iván Valencia
Artists paint a mural of Francia Márquez in Bogotá, Colombia.Fernando Vergara (AP)
Francia Márquez accompanied by her security at a campaign event in Santander de Quilichao, this month.Juan Carlos Zapata
Márquez is accompanied by a security team due to the threats received by his running mate, Gustavo Petro.Iván Valencia
Campaign poster of presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and his running mate in Soacha, Colombia. Fernando Vergara (AP)
During the primary elections, Márquez obtained almost 800,000 votes. Iván Valencia
Francia Márquez has broken all the schemes of power in Colombia.
She today she is close to being the first black woman vice president.
Not only that, a left-wing Afro woman in a country where the left has never governed.
A position that she won alone when in March she was the third most voted candidate in the primaries of all the coalitions that are running for election.
She got almost 800,000 votes.
The result forced Gustavo Petro, the candidate with the most options to be the next president, to put her as
number two
.
It is not a secret that those were not her plans.
Their relationships have never been easy.
But here it is.
EN ESPAÑOL
Can Francia Márquez become Colombia's first Black vice president?
“We voted for France”
If Petro had closed the door on him, Lina Alegría would not vote for him next Sunday.
Because the Caucanos have never mattered to anyone, she says.
And the caucanas, less.
“Alternative men have been just as macho as those on the right.
She represents women, her territory.
That gives Petro.
We voted for France”, says the young woman.
She is 21 years old and belongs to a feminist group called Insurrectas.
Created here, in the Colombian Pacific, in the department most punished by violence, devastated by poverty, used as a drug corridor, exploited as manna from illegal mining.
A cradle of misery where the State is one more disappeared to add to the thousands of children who are looking for thousands of mothers in the villages.
Women like those who this morning have fluffed up their curls,
They have dressed in garish colors and wait under a tent and a stove sun that they see not only as a black woman, but as "their hope for a dignified life."
Perhaps the first hope they have come across so far.
Someone you understand when you say:
—It is painful to have to give birth to a child, to nurse it and to have to bury it.
Because a group takes him away, because they assassinate him, because they disappear him.
Let's stop putting the dead!
Márquez has traveled this weekend to her region, although for her there are forbidden territories.
She cannot get close to La Toma, her community in the Yolombó village, in Suárez, where she was born four decades ago.
Her death threats forced her to move in 2014, with her two small children of hers, already converted into a social leader capable of confronting the mining businessmen.
Her figure has not stopped growing since then, neither have the threats.
The women waiting for her in Santander, about 200, mix fear and emotion at the arrival of the activist whom they consider a miracle.
“Security isn't very good around here, she knows?
But among all of us we protect her ”, smiles Yisel Carabali, with a spectacular colorful dress and a terrifying story behind her.
Carabali had not set foot on her territory again until today,
after being displaced last December by the threats that have already claimed the life of her brother.
She is an ancient doctor, "a so-called witch," she says between laughs before becoming serious: "They kill me, but I don't go with any group."
The only men seen this morning, although they number in the dozens, will try to go unnoticed.
The day does not go with them.
They are part of the enormous protection scheme with which the candidate moves.
Army soldiers with long weapons, policemen with pistols and the indigenous and maroon guards with wooden canes, a symbol of their authority in these territories.
A police officer with a heavy shield hugs Francia as she steps out of her car, one of seven vehicles accompanying her.
The other men make a corridor for her to protect her while the women sing and dance, there is a strong smell of incense.
—From resistance to power until dignity is customary, France starts.
Followers of Francia Márquez during his closing campaign, in Bogotá. Iván Valencia
His direct, critical and sharp speech connects as much here as it screeches in other parts of the country.
The emergence of his figure in politics generated a wave of criticism.
In a deeply centralist country like Colombia, coming to power from outside Bogotá is difficult. To do it from Cauca, you have to break inertia.
Most of his critics point out his "poor preparation", while a few others, the loudest, stir up racism.
A singer referred to her as King Kong, to which Márquez responded by sending her "an ancestral hug to heal her."
The journalist Daniel Samper Pizano wrote about her: “I admire her as a brave woman, popular leader, environmental defender and fighter capable of overcoming the obstacles that Colombia poses to blacks, the poor and women.
Her life and her struggle are inspiring examples.
They guarantee good faith,
honorability and courage, but not preparation, experience or wisdom.
But they are not good for running a nation.
With that alone it is not governed.
And less a country as complicated as Colombia”.
—Those messages of 'you don't know, you don't understand'... You are not my parents.
We are not asking for permission.
You wrote history and now we have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a new one that allows our children to inhabit a better place.
Márquez studied Law in Cali to provide discourse and knowledge to his struggle as an environmental activist.
“I took seven years;
not because I didn't have the ability, it was because I didn't have the resources."
In 2018 she won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the most prestigious award for an environmentalist.
And two years later she announced her desire to be president of Colombia.
An intention that remains intact and that sometimes sneaks into her speeches as if unconsciously.
“President too, but vice president first”, she then concedes as she bursts out laughing.
The Cali of Marquez
From Santander de Quilichao to Cali there is an hour and a half by road.
It was the path that Márquez took when he fled one night with his children to save his life.
Commune 21 of the world capital of salsa became the second home.
And here, where taxi drivers warn visitors that it is a dangerous area, the candidate lands on Sunday among hundreds of people who have been waiting for her for hours, watching music groups and dancers go by on stage.
“Ready
to
live tasty?”, she greets them.
—Here the politicians come to buy our conscience.
But I don't have to come because I live here, this is my second home.
“This is your house, France!” shouts the crowd.
Cali became the epicenter of massive protests last year that brought thousands of people to the streets across the country.
The strikes froze the third city of Colombia for more than two months in which clashes between protesters, neighbors and security forces claimed the lives of more than 40 people, most of them young.
In the middle of the trenches that shielded the Caleño neighborhood of Siloé, a territory that neither the police nor the Army entered for weeks, Márquez went inside to chat with the young people without his escorts.
"Here I would have to defend them," he explained.
In that Cali, the candidate encourages to take the "resistance to the polls" next Sunday.
It was there that a young Márquez worked cleaning houses.
That is the memory that she uses the most when she speaks in public, the most graphic.
The one that serves to connect with those who listen to her here and the one that she uses to bother those who listen to her in Bogotá.
—They told us that politics was not for us, that our place as black women was as domestic workers.
Making their houses beautiful, raising their children.
To come back here to bury our own.
These chains of oppression must be broken.
The vice-presidential candidate at the end of her campaign closure.Iván Valencia
Petro and Márquez lead all the polls for the first round, with a huge margin over the second.
He, a man who has been in politics all his life;
she, a newcomer who fills the vacancies.
Their relationship has not been easy, but they have found a way to complement each other.
They are good for each other.
Márquez reconciles Petro with women, with feminism in which the candidate has slipped so much.
He brings it closer to Cauca, Valle, Chocó and the regions where the majority of the Afro population lives.
Petro boosts France with its niche voters.
She's riding that wave as a first round.
She then sucks everything on her own.
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