“People need to know that their privileges come at the cost of the suffering of many communities” – An Interview with Francia Márquez

Six months into Márquez’s Vice Presidency we decided to translate this interview by Arianna Giménez Beltrán conducted back in 2018. In this conversation Márquez gives very personal insight into how her involvement in local activism and politics began and helps us understand the drive that would, five years later, eventually lead her to a position of national leadership.

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Francia Márquez, Colombian community leader and tireless defender of human rights and the environment, reveals how people continue to be assassinated in her country simply for opposing multinational corporate plundering. Her words, which start with an acknowledgement of the suffering of her ancestors under slavery, stress that peace has still not been reached in Colombia.

This is another face of Colombia: winner of the Goldman Prize – also known as the Environmental Nobel Prize – this Afro-diasporic woman descended from enslaved ancestors shares her experiences with the Colombian community abroad, in Barcelona. The audience listens in silence. Francia Márquez Mina, community leader and tireless defender of human rights and the environment, is not only an example of what fighting back looks like, but also of the costs that come with such a fight in her country, namely forced displacement, or death.

Márquez was awarded this prize for her resistance work against illegal mining in Colombia. Honduran activist Berta Cáceres and Mexican community leader Isidro Baldenegro also received this award in recognition of their respective fights against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project and the unregulated felling of trees in the Western Sierra Madre, Mexico. Both have since been murdered.

Thousands of kilometres away from their parches – as Colombians refer to a community of friends – hearing news of community leaders being assassinated back home has become commonplace. Moreover, two years after a peace agreement was signed between Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the South American country finds itself burying the first victims of what may well be a genocide.

— Why do they want to get rid of all of you? Who’s behind the killings?

— My ancestors were enslaved for the sake of a developmental economic model. If we take a look at the history of international trade, the first mass commercialisation was that of people. They objectified individuals, taking away their humanity and rendering them into mere things. Today we still have the same model, though based on an extractivist economic system that calls for the removal of natural resources from the regions where we live. They can no longer turn us into objects, but they cast us aside all the same. For us, these lands are not a source of accumulative wealth; they are a source of life for future generations and we oppose the interference of multinational corporations and their plundering of resources. That is why they kill us. In Colombia they aren’t killing people just because they feel like it, but because these people defend human rights, including the rights of their communities. The right to food, to a healthy environment, to water. To live in peace. They kill or displace people who stand up to a deadly economic model – such as mining – which, if you pay attention, is really based on the same historical economic model as slavery. Full stop. They even declared me a military target for opposing the introduction of multinational corporations into my region. We’ve been there since 1636, when they brought our ancestors from Africa and now we’ve created a community and have established relationships in this location. We are an obstacle to development. Europe and the rest of the world have to reconsider their way of life. People need to stop consuming so much and know that their privileges come at the cost of the suffering of many communities such as ours. What is happening today with migration in Africa is not without cause: Africa was raped and ransacked by Europeans, and if that isn’t clear enough, you could ask where all the weapons in Africa come from, weapons that only lead to violence within the continent. What industries make these weapons available so that communities can kill each other? Which industries plunder and pillage and cause people to literally starve? These countries that claim to be developed have to change the way they view life, because otherwise, we’ll keep adding to the ranks of the dead, while they continue to enjoy the privileges that they often don’t even realise they have. 

— It’s not the first time that Europe has committed genocide in the name of development. You say that the conflict in Colombia is not only a question of the last 60 years, and that we need to look back to the era when the Spanish invaded Latin America. 

— The conflict has indeed worsened, but it cannot be separated from historical conflict. For people of African descent, the conflict didn’t start 60 years ago. Ever since colonisation, when they brought us from Africa to the Americas, we have been submerged in violence. The invasion of the Americas by Spain and Europe, in one way or another, generated the conditions that later resulted in the people taking up arms: consolidation of land ownership, inequality, structural racism, and many others. These problems are nothing new; they began during the colonial era. The community leaders that have died this year are becoming nothing more than statistics, and previous leaders who have been killed are simply forgotten. I find it terrible that their memory is being lost. This has been the case with violence throughout history: the violence of 60 years ago is what matters, while the violence that we experience as racialised, Afrocolombian and Indigenous communities does not. Nowadays they talk about reparations for victims of armed conflicts, but what about reparations for communities of African descent and Indigenous communities? 

— What should these reparations look like?

The first step is for these countries to stop plundering our communities. Showing good faith in providing reparations involves, at the very least, stopping the destruction of our lands. It’s economic pressure that is killing people. I am not thinking about economic reparations as just a way to get money and be done with it. Reparations have to enable us to dignify our humanity, because this humanity is what they took away from us. It needs to involve human dignity and a life in dignity, allowing us to live in respectable conditions in the regions where we’ve ended up. Real reparations need to enable us to live freely as communities of African descent, as Indigenous communities. They need to allow us to practise our own form of democracy, not an imposed democracy based on developmentalist discourse.

— You began to get involved in activism when you were barely 15 by defending the Ovejas River and managing to keep the government that was in power at the time from diverting the course of the river towards the Salvajina dam, which would have had an enormous impact on the local population and environment. What got you to say “enough is enough”?

— We enjoyed the river so much. It was everything to us, and suddenly in the blink of an eye, they had built a dam. Unión Fenosa, a Spanish company, owned the reservoir and wanted to divert the river to another dam, the Salvajina dam, to increase its productive output. The community opposed this and I joined the fight. Salvajina had already caused us so many environmental, cultural, economic and health problems and the people simply said no. It was as simple as that. We put on plays at meetings and that’s how I started educating myself, seeing myself as a woman of African descent. I felt empowered and got involved in different organisational processes and community activities. In 2014 a group of us, all women, mobilised to condemn the way that illegal mining was destroying the region, just like unconstitutional mining [Márquez often refers to mining with this term]. In other words, this mining was promoted by the government without prior consultation during the armed conflict, giving rights to third parties and denying us our ancestral rights over this territory. We set out as a group of 15 women, our number growing to 80 by the time we arrived in Bogotá. We ended up forming the Mobilisation of Black Women for Vital Care and Ancestral Lands. As women, we used the motherly love we feel when caring for our children to take care of our land for the next generations. Today I am part of the national Black Community Process, one of the largest organisations in the country, which helped make Laws 70 and 93 a reality, pushing for the right to public consultation and free and informed prior agreement that we as a community of African descent seek every time there is a project or law that is going to affect us.

— That 2014 mobilisation resulted in death threats that forced you to flee the region. I imagine it must be impossible to summarise or put into words the psychological and emotional effects you’ve suffered because of this displacement?

— The effects are huge: something like that changes your life. Sometimes you end up no longer feeling happiness, no longer living the dreams you once had, and as an individual, you end up throwing everything into the struggle. When I had to flee I felt that the world was crashing down on me, that my life no longer had meaning and that everything was coming to an end for me. I had to keep fighting for my two kids and for a community that was also at risk. It’s not just Francia’s job, it’s collective work passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated, thinking that it’s not possible, but there have been moments when I’ve suddenly been struck with great inspiration and said, “Yes, we have to keep moving forward.” Having hope has been important for me, I love fighting the good fight. I believe in justice for humanity, the land and the planet, so I appeal to the need to seek and fight for justice. We human beings have been very selfish. We’ve destroyed the planet, our own home. It’s time to rethink everything.

— Many Colombians in the diaspora also suffer severe psychological and emotional effects, particularly those who are undocumented. Over the past few days in Barcelona, you’ve been able to talk with some of these individuals, but how can networks be formed when so much distance separates these communities?

— We have to work on education oriented towards freedom, autonomy and life because what we have today is education oriented towards death and destruction. How many people study just to put themselves in service of death, of multinational corporations, of the violation of community rights? We also discussed people’s economic situations – how to rethink alternative ways of development that allow for other kinds of economies. The beginnings of an organisational strategy emerged, in which we can at least begin to communicate with each other.

— As someone who was displaced because of armed conflict, you were invited to Havana to dialogue with negotiators for Juan Manuel Santos’ government and FARC. Currently, you are a member of the National Council for Peace and Coexistence which is in charge of safeguarding the reconciliation process in the country. With nearly 400 community leaders assassinated in the last two years, why are the agreements failing us?

— Peace has not yet come to the regions plagued by violence. We have to be very clear about the fact that the agreements signed in Havana for the cessation of armed conflict are a very important step towards peace, but they do not equate to peace per se. Peace involves social transformations, closing the gaps of inequity and inequality, putting an end to structural racism. It involves giving up the model of death that made people take up arms in the first place. If we do not put an end to the causes of the armed conflict, then it will be very difficult to carry out the peace process. Now dialogue has been established with the ELN (National Liberation Army) that is making no progress because the new government, which is strongly far right, opposes it. The government that said “no” to peace won and is now backtracking on all the agreements, leading to the exacerbation of violence in these regions. This is very worrying because, particularly on the international level, we are made to think that this isn’t the case, that a peace agreement was already reached in Colombia, that everything is fine. But peace is not just a piece of paper. Peace means transformative actions leading away from violent situations, from situations that generate even more violence. I was talking about this at the Basque Parliament with their president and she said, “Really? There isn’t peace in Colombia? I thought you had already established peace!” I thought it was absolutely ridiculous because peace isn’t made by signing an agreement. Peace involves concrete actions, and these actions are exactly what the current government is rejecting.

— If the agreements don’t guarantee peace in these regions or the end of violence against different communities, who can guarantee the survival of these people? 

— You have to help get the government to assume the responsibility of implementing the agreements and creating the right conditions for transformation and advancement towards true peace. We need the kind of peace that lets us live safely instead of further impoverishing the people and plundering the land. The international community can play a very important role in terms of how peace is manifested via social justice and real guarantees for communities. Upholding the Havana agreements is important – it’s a very important step towards not having armed groups shooting one another throughout our regions. 

Spain also forms part of this international lack of awareness and silence that Márquez refers to. Since moving into the Casa de Nariño in August, two very different (at least on the surface) political representatives – Pedro Sánchez and José María Aznar – have visited Iván Duque, the new President of Colombia. Both of these representatives see Duque as a guarantor of peace, but nothing could be further from reality. Since his arrival in office, assassinations of community leaders have skyrocketed (especially in Cauca, Marquéz’ home region), and his mentor Álvaro Uribe led the campaign against the talks in 2016. For a while now, Uribe has been associated with paramilitarism, drug trafficking, targeted assassinations, extrajudicial executions and corruption. The last presidential elections in Colombia – the first since the peace agreements were signed – meant a return to power for “uribism”, but also marked Márquez’ first time participating in institutional politics. She states that she never believed much in politics and had no interest in entering the political arena, but she ended up doing so via the political party Colombia Humana, with Gustavo Petro.

— A lot of people got their hopes up with Colombia Humana, but change ultimately proved impossible. Even so, something did change in Colombian society. Has a seed been planted in these recent months?

— Yes, without a doubt. I believe that change is starting to happen. No progressive government ever managed to get three million votes in Colombia. The right always got so many votes and was always present. This time they had to use lies and trickery [during their campaign Uribe’s party, Centro Democrático, was accused of spreading fake news]. Even so, I think that people aren’t buying it. There is a movement that is thinking about alternatives to development, fighting for the environment, for dignified living conditions, all the while faced with the same situations of inequity that created a political establishment that has been in place for more than 200 years. Colombia Humana lost, but there is an alternative political movement that is growing. Uribism also took advantage of a political ignorance that has been sowed for many years to keep people from thinking about change. But this change will come. 

— During the time of slavery, your ancestors braided cornrows to create maps that showed how to escape from plantations. These were escape maps, a secret code that enabled the enslaved to flee. How would you draw an escape map for Colombia today? 

— I don’t believe that there is any escape map today. On the contrary: we resist so that we can stay in our regions. These lands are essential for creating Afro-Colombian community. We are part of Colombia. We built and put our faith in this country, and the only thing we want is to live with dignity and in peace once and for all, but structural racism doesn’t allow this. We are resisting with all our strength to get them to let us govern ourselves, foster autonomy and imagine a good life for ourselves, sometimes using our body, and other times our soul and spirit. We are staking our claim to a space that was not given to us, a space that cost our ancestors many years of suffering and labour. In that sense, we are continuing the process of liberating our people.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License

– Translated by Timothy McKeon
– Edited by Alex Minshall
– Original Spanish-language article published on Pikara
– Interview and images by Arianna Giménez Beltrán