How has that influenced the way you think about politics?įrancia Elena Márquez Mina: I grew up in an ancestral land. You grew up in El Cauca, a rural region close to Colombia’s Pacific coast, in a strongly Afro Colombian community. Jesús Rodríguez: Let’s start by talking about your background. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. One thing Biden could do? Forgive the foreign debt of the nations hardest-hit by climate change. “The United States should be the first country to acknowledge that its global politics have helped keep Black people around the world and in Africa in a state of subjugation,” she says. chargé d’affaires in Colombia to help fortify her security.īut she’s undaunted - and clear-headed about her mandate to push for reparations abroad and the role Washington should play in the fight for climate justice. It’s a path that’s not without danger: Her security team recently found seven kilos of explosives on the road to her family home in what she denounced as an assassination attempt, prompting some members of Congress to ask the U.S. Today, Márquez and Petro face a political path ahead that’s riven with obstacles, as they navigate a rocky international peace process (the subject of the United Nations Security Council meeting she participated in while here) and assuage voters who fear that the country’s first leftist government will mean a reprise of the Venezuelan crisis next door. And last July, she hit the campaign trail in Brazil with then-presidential candidate Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva to highlight the Afro Brazilian fight against racism. Last month, she traveled to Geneva, appearing before the United Nations to demand “historical reparations” that would “transform the colonial system”. Just a few months into her term, she’s already become a voice for all such descendants in Latin America and around the world, too.
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“We’re descendants of free people who were enslaved.” “We’re not descendants of slaves,” she says in an exclusive interview with POLITICO Magazine. In her speeches, she sometimes draws inspiration from the African American civil rights struggle, from citing Sojourner Truth to evoking the Black Lives Matter movement.
The 41-year-old lawyer, single mother and former housekeeper now uses her position to fight for the rights of marginalized communities at home and consolidate support abroad for the ascendant political power of afrodescendientes. In 2014, she led a convoy of 80 women on a 10-day, 350-mile march to Bogotá to eradicate illegal gold mining from her community, which won her the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. And the Petro-Márquez administration has assembled a Cabinet of ministers and advisors that looks more like Colombia - in fact, Márquez borrowed this office in an unassuming Midtown East building from Leonor Zalabata Torres, an Arhuaca woman and the first Indigenous ambassador to the United Nations from Colombia.īorn and raised in El Cauca, home to the country’s largest Black population, Márquez says she grew up with the oral histories of ancestors fighting to keep outsiders from taking away their land. Kendi in the virtual pages of this magazine. Márquez, whose strikingly colorful wardrobe pays homage to her African heritage, has approached the history of racial, gender and class discrimination in her country with equal measures frankness and moral resolve, denouncing the unsolved killings of Black leaders and forging a Ministry of Equality and Equity, a government agency aimed at eliminating inequality similar to one proposed by anti-racist scholar Ibram X. While Black leaders have pushed for better recognition of their human rights from the state, government institutions have accused them of collaborating with armed guerrilla groups - or ignored them altogether. Seventy-seven percent of Black Colombians live in extreme poverty or are at risk for it, and they face disproportionate rates of police violence and diminished access to education. She turned into a symbol of hope for millions of Afro Colombians, who saw in her the opportunity to have a seat at the table in a country where discussions of race and class are often cast aside for fantasies of a post-racial society.Īccording to official statistics, the Afro Colombian population hovers around 3 million, or 6 percent of the total population, although Black leaders have argued that this figure is a vast undercount. Although she never received a response from Harris, she pressed on with her activism - weaving it into a career in electoral politics and becoming, in August of last year, Colombia’s first Black vice president, winning on a leftist ticket with now-President Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla rebel.
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