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going to start today, and which ends in the Casa de Nariño [the presidential residence].”

Francia Márquez, who only last July launched a campaign to become president of Colombia, won an astounding 783,000 votes toward that goal during the March 13 election primaries. She did not win the presidential nod—that role was awarded to Gustavo Petro. But her obviously wide approval rating among the electorate led Petro to ask Márquez to join his efforts to form the next administration to lead the South American nation.

“We are writing a new story for Colombia,” Márquez announced on her Twitter page. “From the vice presidency we will join our President @ petrogustavo in the task of achieving a government for life, peace, justice and social equality.”

Márquez depicted as leftist threat

Márquez is a nationally recognized activist and member of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras en Colombia (Black Communities Process of Colombia). Internationally she is well-known for having received the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize because of her organizing to stop illegal gold and resource mining in southwest Colombia’s Cauca region.

Her presidential campaign gained a large following among Afro Colombians, Indigenous peoples, farmers, feminists, the LGBTQI community and youth groups by promising to govern with an ear for the concerns of the traditionally marginalized. “We are breaking with centralism which is one of the challenges this country faces,” she said. “We want to govern from the territories, from the peripheries, from the regions where people live collectively. This implies decentralizing the state apparatus. This implies that if I have to go to Medellín and govern from there, we will do it. This implies that if I have to go to one of the most excluded regions, where historically the state has not been present, then this is the government of the people and since this is the government of the people, it is from the regions—from the historically excluded territories—that we will make this possible.”

That’s why Francia Márquez is now also receiving death threats.

As soon as she was named a vice presidential candidate, race-based attacks began decrying her colloquial use of language and claims were made that she is a Venezuela-aligned leftist—in the vein of that nation’s former president, Hugo Chávez. Colombia’s former right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe, posted a fake tweet of Márquez which showed her promising to do away with capitalism. Gustavo Petro commented that Uribe’s ‘Fake News’ campaign was pure slander. Yet the far right-paramilitary group, the Águilas Negras, are using the image of Márquez as a left-leaning reformer as fodder for their claims of a need to do away with her: “All those who intervene in our struggle and interfere with our fight for a free country will be eradicated from the map,” the paramilitaries wrote in a death threat sent to Márquez, which she posted on Twitter: “There will be no presidential campaigns in the southwest of Colombia, that kind of proselytism and money distribution will have to end.”

Afro Colombian and Indigenous activists are regularly threatened and murdered in Colombia—a total of 145 community activists were killed in the nation in 2021.

Afro Colombians creating a political presence

Gustavo Petro’s naming of Francia Márquez as his vice-presidential candidate is in line with an unprecedented trend in this year’s Colombian elections. Afro Colombians—the third highest population of Black people outside of Africa (with the United States and Brazil taking the first two spots)—have been prominent in national elections this year. All five white presidential candidates have named a person of African descent to serve as their vice president. The other vice-presidential candidates this year are Luis Gilberto Murillo, Sandra de las Lajas Torres, Ceferino Mosquera, and Marelen Castillo. Some observers claim that the white presidential candidates are including Blacks on their presidential cards as a way of merely pandering to the electorate, but there is a growing sense of pride among Colombia’s Black community as they see their issues finally being recognized. “This is actually a really a big deal,” U.S. Naval Academy Professor of History, Sharika D. Crawford, told the Amsterdam News: “It has in part to do with the fact that emerging from 2015 there’s just been an unending wave of violence targeted towards Afro Colombians, particularly the youth and social activists. That, coupled with the fact that Afro Colombians are increasingly living in areas that are under more intense violence—particularly in the Pacific region where you see gold and other rich natural resources being mined. A lot of people have been displaced and I think they are people who are just tired. They’re tired and they’ve been able to mobilize, and they see an opportunity to perhaps change the direction of Colombia with their votes.”

The latest polls suggest that Gustavo Petro has a wide lead over the other presidential candidates. The first round of Colombia’s presidential elections takes place May 29; if there is no outright winner, a second round will take place on June 19.

If Petro and Márquez are elected to govern Colombia, Márquez would join Costa Rica’s Epsy Campbell Barr and the United States’ Kamala Harris as one of a growing list of Black female vice presidents in the Americas.

Community

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for mechanics, engineering, electronics, programs for building solar panels, plumbing, carpentry, and building homes. We need to address poverty and unemployment, not pay lip service with petty cash.”

Our children are a bi-product of what they see, absorb around them, and what they are exposed to, said LifeCamp Inc. founder activist Erica Ford. The national, but Queensbased activist told the Amsterdam News that the Crisis Management System has a holistic approach. “Violence is a disease, and the beginning, the middle, and the end to violence is trauma. The only way to resolve these issues is to holistically and comprehensively address the disease. We have to build strong systems that include, but are not limited to, healing a troubled recovery, intervention, child placement, education, mentorship, arts and culture, community organizing and advocacy, building etc., etc.” Ford added, “We can’t take shortcuts. Cure Violence is limited, by its definition. The New York City Crisis Management System is holistic in its approach to address the disease of violence. We need to build a strong system led by the people with the tools they need, at the time they need them. These young people running around with guns…we have to understand that it’s bigger than just the act of shooting the gun. Let us understand that it is only in the Black and Brown community where our children don’t have access to quality education. They don’t have access to recreation, arts and culture. They don’t have access to quality housing. They’re living on an uneven playing field. We have to address it holistically. Violence is a disease, and will continue to spread if we don’t help the people heal and transform communities and individuals. Our children are the bi-product.”

Inez Barron concluded, “It must be recognized that our people still suffer from the vestiges of the trauma of being enslaved— without ever having received acknowledgement of that fact, or any reparations, or adequate mental health resources. As we