Voices of el pueblo: the road to the Colombian elections
By Sara C Motta
7.Jul.22
On June 19, los y las nadies/the nobodies of Colombia represented by Gustavo Petro as president elect and Francia Elena Márquez Mina, or just Francia, as vice-president elect ruptured politics as normal in Colombia and arguably more globally. This is the first government of the Afro, Indigenous, Mestiza-subaltern majorities on the peripheries in the history of electoral democratic politics in the country. These majorities are composed of formally organised social movements in urban and rural movements, radical elements of combative unions like the teachers’ unions. and the non-formally organised working classes and informal poor. It is Francia, AfroColombian single mother, displaced activist-lawyer from Cauca department in the southwest of the country that is at the heart of the roots and soul of this historic rupture. She enfleshes a politics built around the three threads of soy porque somos (I am because we are), hasta que la dignidad se haga costrumbre (until dignity becomes the norm) and vivir sabroso (living pleasureably).
These three threads emerge from the black intersectional feminisms forged through the lineages of struggle and resistance and of the ancestors which Francia embodies and who she walks with. However, it is precisely her presence that is negated, devalued and cruelly ridiculed by Colombia, Western, Australian media and political analysts both mainstream and ‘progressive’. Why? Because she is the embodiment of another Colombia, of another project of life, pleasure, dignity and liberation that has been emergent and co-woven over decades in the underside of the peripheries in regions like Cauca, Valle de Cauca, Choco. As she declared in her and Petro’s victory speech ‘after two hundred years we have achieved a government of the people … of the nobodies. Now we will live with dignity.’
The enormity of this political victory and its revolutionary potential is embodied through Francia’s role in it. It can be fully felt if we understand how Colombia’s economic and political elites through their control over the state and political institutions have treated its majority peripheries with contempt and a strategy of extermination. These racialised peripheries have been relegated to disposability and dereliction, and have suffered a massive process of dispossession and violent political silencing.
Colombia has one of the highest rates of murder of social leaders and of displacement due to the violence of the war on drugs and purported peace process. These have been used to clear the way for transnational capital and Colombian elites to violently displace Afro, Indigenous and peasant communities from their lands. The other(ed) Colombia has been subject to ongoing violence of a modern colonial-capitalist project tied to the project of blanqueamento (whitening).
More:
https://overland.org.au/2022/07/voices-of-el-pueblo-the-road-to-the-colombian-elections/