Francia Márquez Mina: The granddaughter returns

By JESÚS CHUCHO GARCÍA Special to the AmNews

Translated by KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO Amsterdam News Staff

For the first time in the history of the Republic of Colombia, a woman of African origin—Francia Márquez Mina—was elected to serve as vice president. Millions of voters democratically supported her candidacy.

This is extraordinary: In one of the most racist countries of “Our America,” where the most retrograde, sexist, and racist bourgeoisie has traditionally governed, a Black woman reached the vice presidency by aligning herself with the Pacto Histórico political coalition, headed by Colombia’s current president, Gustavo Petro.

Francia’s second surname, Mina, indicates that she is a woman of African descent––an offspring of the African civilization in what is today the Republic of Togo. She is not an invention of the media or a ruling elite creation. She is the product of an ongoing struggle against the country’s extreme poverty, something that African descendants have been sub- jected to since they were kidnapped from their mother continent.

Márquez Mina was born on Dec. 1, 1981, when Colombia was in a prolonged armed conflict against guerrilla armies. She was born in the town of Suarez in the Cauca region. Despite extreme poverty, she was able to study at the University of Santiago de Cali and graduated with a law degree. At the beginning of her struggles against the environmental destruction caused by mining, as well as the effects of Plan Colombia, which was destroying her native region’s ecological balance, Márquez Mina joined the Afro Colombian organization Procesos de Comunidades Negras (PCN), which was led by the activist Carlos Rosero.

The PCN has been working since the 1990s at the continental level with an agenda focused on combating racism, including African descendants in public policies, reparations, the promotion of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024), and more.

This writer met Francia Márquez Mina in 2018 at the University of