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Timbiquí, the Colombian people who are not afraid of change

2022-06-26T10:50:13.897Z


The municipality reached the highest percentage of votes in favor of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez: 98.57%. An example of the efforts made by the Colombian Pacific so that participation would win over skepticism


In Timbiquí a tie was not possible.

Last Sunday, when Colombia expected a close result between presidential candidates Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, this town on the west coast was preparing to break a record for one of them.

In the second electoral round, Timbiquí was the municipality in the country with the highest percentage of votes in favor of Petro and his vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez: 98.57% for the winning formula.

There were 8,633 votes that swept the 110 votes that Hernández achieved, 1.25%.

In Timbiquí, all the motorcycle taxis in the urban area campaigned by pasting

stickers

with the faces of the candidates, and a banner with the figure of Márquez still hangs in the main square.

A Hernández voter, on the other hand, is almost impossible to find.

“We wanted to get a vote that would make us visible because we are invisible,” Elbin Dioniosio Rodríguez, a 40-year-old lawyer who in these elections was the municipal coordinator of the Historical Pact, the left-wing coalition that supports Petro, tells EL PAÍS.

"The 'nobodies' are now known, we are someone," adds Deiner Ángel Alegría, 31, another coordinator of the Pact in the municipality.

Rodríguez and Alegría savor victory together with two other colleagues in a restaurant overlooking the small square in the urban center of Timbiquí, a fishing, agricultural and mining municipality where some 26,000 people live in wooden houses, the vast majority Afro-Colombians, who they feel very isolated.

Located in the middle of the tropical jungle of the Colombian Pacific coast, Timbiquí is not connected to the rest of the country by road, the easiest way to get there is by taking a boat for an hour by river, and like many other towns on the Pacific it does not have a good power grid.

“Timbiquí is so scattered that some communities are six hours away by boat,” adds Rodríguez.

However, Petro owes his victory in part to isolated towns like Timbiquí.

For the second round, in the four departments of the Pacific, Petro and Márquez swept: 81.94% of the votes in the department of Chocó;

80.91% in Nariño;

79.92% in Cauca;

and 63.85% in Valle del Cauca.

The participation in favor of Petro and Márquez increased in the second round in a corridor that goes from the municipality of El Tambo (Cauca) to Quibdó (Chocó).

The left-wing candidate managed to increase his vote for the first round largely due to his alliance with Francia Márquez, a well-known activist in the area.

But for the second it grew thanks to the work that his allies did, for three intense weeks, to reduce abstention in the most isolated areas of the country.

"I've been feeling a slight tachycardia for all the work we've done these weeks," says Rodríguez, half joking and half serious.

"I cried with emotion on election day, but then I just wanted to go to sleep."

The historical pact of Timbiquí

Fighting abstention involved first a logistical challenge —moving people who live in isolation to their polling place— and then another discursive one —convincing skeptics or apathetic people to go out and vote.

That pointed to the most obvious: going to visit all those who saw in the presidential elections something so remote that it was as if it were the democratic process of another country.

"We managed to get several older people to tell us 'I don't normally vote, but since you came to my house, I'm going to give you that vote of confidence,'" says Elkin Navarrete, coordinator of the Soy por Somos movement, from Francia Márquez, who spent several weeks convincing neighbors house to house.

Alegría, from the Historical Pact, adds that other people did not want to vote if it was not in exchange for something: money or food.

“Some people asked us, 'Where's the soda?'” he says.

"We said that maybe at this moment the soda is not with us, that we came to argue, and that if it goes well for all of us, then suddenly we can all drink soda in the future."

A girl crosses in front of posters of the political campaign of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez. Christian Escobar Mora

For the logistics part, the committee received some financial aid from the Historical Pact to pay for gasoline for motorcycle taxis and boats, the main transportation of the municipality, although its members say that many boatmen put out of their pocket to mobilize people.

One of them confirmed it to EL PAÍS and said that he left that day at seven in the morning to transport voters.

“So many people took out their boat that day that they had to be careful not to collide with another in the river,” he says.

Timbiquí has ​​three main rivers: the one that bears the name of the municipality, plus the Bubuey and the Saija.

The three of them had the traffic of an urban avenue that election morning.

"People don't understand that we have the most expensive transportation in the world, which is river transportation, but we did this because it wasn't about me winning but about Colombia winning," said another of the boatmen.

Then you had to find the apathetic.

Rodríguez, the municipal coordinator, says that after the first round they looked closely at who were those who had not gone out to vote, and identified that these were the youngest.

Alegría, his colleague, adds that “then we told the young people about how Petro talked about bringing the university to the territory, about being able to study here, because many of their parents live from fishing and they have very little to take out the children. young people here."

And it is that the thirst is high in Timbiquí to access higher education.

If they want to go to university, high school graduates usually have to go live in the cities of Popayán or Cali, a boat and a plane away.

The vote of the young people, they say, did mobilize with that university dream in hand for the second round.

Days later, when the president-elect asked all the mayors of the country to "ready lots with legal titles to build university campuses," the message read as if it were sent directly to the boys of Timbiquí.

One of the first to respond to Petro's call was the mayor of the municipality.

"President!

With almost 99% of the votes in favor of her proposal, Timbiquí proved to be ready to bet on transformations,” she, Neyla Yadira Amú Venté, wrote.

"Children and young people deserve everything."

There were other ideas, in addition to the university, that mobilized votes in this municipality: the proposal for an agrarian reform was central, for example, because the majority of the inhabitants live in rural areas.

Or the guarantee not to return to glyphosate to end coca crops, and the promise to seek peace in these territories where war has been felt for decades.

Several armed groups such as the ELN and FARC dissidents are present in the department.

The weekend of the elections, nine people were murdered in the neighboring municipality of Guapi.

Despite the presence of the armed groups, however, no civil society organization or citizen registered pressure from these groups for citizens to vote in favor of a candidate, or to abstain.

Aerial view of Timbiqui, a municipality in Colombia on the Pacific Coast. Christian Escobar Mora

98.57% of the votes in Timbiquí were for the winning formula of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez. Christian Escobar Mora

Two young men organize fish to dry in front of the market square. Christian Escobar Mora

Several armed groups such as the ELN and FARC dissidents are present in the department. Christian Escobar Mora

A motorcycle driver travels through the unpaved streets of Timbiquí. Christian Escobar Mora

A woman prepares arepas at a street stall in the streets of the town's urban area. Christian Escobar Mora

Two young men carry wooden planks in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Timbiquí. Christian Escobar Mora

The inhabitants of the community take advantage of the river port to wash clothes. Christian Escobar Mora

A man wears a cap with political advertising for the campaign of Francia Marquez, Gustavo Petro's vice-presidential formula. Christian Escobar Mora

The massive vote for Petro and Márquez, rather, was a continuation of the vote for peace that Timbiquí made in 2016, when he voted 'Yes' in the plebiscite on the peace agreement.

Some 5,800 voters approved it, and some 370 rejected it.

“After the peace process we feel calmer, those of us who live here have lowered our blood pressure,” says Alegría, from the Historical Pact.

"The peace agreement was perhaps not the best, but for us, who began to live more peacefully, it was the best."

The pact of women with Francia Márquez

But another cornerstone for the victory of Petro and Márquez in Timbiquí was the groups of women from the Pacific, who for years have been organizing themselves in associations such as the Matamba and Guasá network —an Afro-feminist group that has at least 2,000 women from the Pacific— , Women on Foot, or Las Playadoras.

And faced with the macho speech of Rodolfo Hernández, the other finalist in the second round, it was not very difficult to mobilize them.

“How am I going to vote for an old man who says that women should stay in the kitchen?” says an arepa vendor in the plaza of the urban center in Timbiquí.

“I am the head of a family with three girls, I voted for change, I voted to stop raising the price of the family basket.”

Luzbia Hurtado is a 37-year-old social worker who is part of a WhatsApp group entitled:

Francia Márquez Mujeres Poderosas.

"I think that women took the baton in the second round," she says Hurtado.

"We created it several times after the first presidential round, because the truth is that we fell asleep for the first one, we trusted that we were going to win," she says.

Hurtado talks to EL PAÍS from the living room of a wooden house, while a heavy rain falls outside and she offers a glass of Viche – a traditional Pacific liquor.

She says that the strategy of the women organized by Petro and Márquez was similar: going house to house to convince people to go out and vote, broadcasting voice messages in WhatsApp groups advertising, bringing people closer to their polling place, or organize community pots to talk about the elections.

“Women in the kitchen actually have a lot of power, and it is the power to care,” says Ella Hurtado.

On June 11 they also did a 'feminist scarf' in the main square, singing songs in favor of "a more humane Colombia."

"It was time to do the uramba," adds Hurtado, a term that evokes the meeting, or in this case the fact that everyone has done something on their part – from salt to the political program – to talk with others.

Francia Márquez has enormous electoral power in this municipality and not only because she is a black woman from Cauca.

She, unlike all the presidential candidates, is the only one who visited Timbiquí in the first presidential round, and she has also been in solidarity with the women's movement there for years.

“France came in 2018 to accompany Mujeres Rompiendo el Silencio, a group that emerged from a femicide,” says Yoceline Ocoró Carabalí, a 27-year-old who also campaigned as part of the network of young women.

"She came to talk about feminism with the people, to talk about how women are also great and participate in the economic, social and political development of a country," she adds.

And both old and young remember her there.

Francia Márquez, adds Carabalí, also brought from Cauca a political lexicon that the Andean center of the country is just beginning to understand.

His project of 'living tasty', for example, which defends a more just and peaceful life, is perhaps new to Bogotá but old in a place like Timbiquí.

"She has a language that creates realities, and one sees oneself in that language," says Carabalí.

“We do not vote here for one ethnic group or another, but we vote for a representation that goes beyond the color of the skin.

And I always tell others that this process is really for them to really see us there from this context.”

Herminsa Gomez (l), Luzbia Hurtado Montaño (c) and Yoceline Ocoro Carabali (d), three members of the women's group in support of the Historical Pact in Timbiquí. Christian Escobar Mora

Hurtado follows her and says that “the country always speaks in another language, and perhaps that is why we had not gotten so involved in politics.

France's struggle, on the other hand, is very local for us: she speaks like us and speaks beyond our world.

We have spent years trying to contextualize here the political projects that come from Bogotá.

Now we want a political project to be created, but from here and for Bogotá.”

In the end, they made it.

The seven Afro-Colombian community councils of Timbiquí, and its four indigenous reservations, came out to vote no matter how far away or how expensive gasoline was.

That Sunday, June 19, 1,358 more people voted than in the second round: Timbiquí went from a participation of 47% of the electorate, to one of 56%.

And although it was said that Petro had reached its electoral ceiling, the Pacific got him some 586 thousand more votes for the second round.

The municipality now not only prides itself on being the best producer of viche, the second largest producer of coconut, and the home of the famous musical group

Herencia Timbiquí

.

Now he celebrates becoming the municipality that most united in favor of the change that Petro and Márquez offered, the one that made the invisible visible.

EL PAÍS tried to interview the minority of Timbiquí, that strange 1% who voted for Rodolfo Hernández.

Not only are voters hard to reach, but when they do show up, they prefer to avoid the conversation.

“I don't want the others to lynch me,” says one of them, a man who prefers not to reveal his name, although his family already knows that he is the only one who voted for Hernández and they don't quite understand why.

He just adds: “What do you want me to tell you?

Well, yes, that's the story, that everyone here voted for the change...now we're going to see what happens”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-06-26

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