On June 19, 2022 C.E., Colombia made history when Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez won the presidential election with 50.4% of the vote — making Márquez the country’s first Black woman vice president. A single mother, former housekeeper, and Goldman Environmental Prize-winning activist, Márquez rose from the impoverished Cauca province to the second-highest office in the land on a platform centered on equality, environmental justice, and the rights of those she called “the nobodies of Colombia.”
At a glance
- Francia Márquez: Born in Suárez, a rural municipality in Cauca province where around 80% of residents live in some form of poverty, Márquez worked as a housekeeper before becoming a prominent environmental activist and political figure.
- Goldman Environmental Prize: Márquez received the prestigious award in 2018 C.E. for her successful grassroots campaign against illegal gold mining in her home municipality — work that also brought her death threats from armed groups.
- Equality ministry: Beyond the vice presidency, Márquez was appointed to lead a newly created equality ministry, with a mandate to advance women’s rights and expand poor communities’ access to health care and education.
A voice for the overlooked
Speaking on election night in Bogotá, Márquez addressed her supporters in front of a banner reading “change is unstoppable.” Her words carried the weight of more than two centuries of exclusion.
“After 214 years we have achieved a government of the people, a popular government, a government of people with calloused hands,” she said. “The government of the nobodies of Colombia.”
That phrase — “the nobodies” — is more than rhetoric. Márquez has spent her adult life representing Afro-Colombian communities, Indigenous groups, and rural women who have been systematically left out of Colombia’s political and economic life. Her election to the vice presidency gave those communities a seat at the table they had never held before.
From grassroots to government
Márquez’s path to national office runs directly through environmental activism. In Suárez, she organized local women to resist illegal gold mining operations that were poisoning rivers and displacing communities. That campaign drew international attention — and made her a target. Armed groups threatened her life. She kept organizing anyway.
The Goldman Environmental Prize, often called the “Green Nobel,” recognized that courage in 2018 C.E. It also gave her a global platform that she carried into the political arena.
When Márquez entered the coalition primary in March 2022 C.E., she finished second — but her 783,000 votes exceeded the total won by the winner of Colombia’s entire centrist primary. That showing signaled something real was happening. Daniela Cuellar of FTI Consulting, speaking to Reuters at the time, described it plainly: the Colombian population was looking for change, and socio-environmental issues were becoming central to that demand.
What it means for Afro-Colombian communities
Colombia has one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in Latin America — estimated at between 4.4 and 10 million people, depending on how the count is made. That population has faced entrenched poverty, displacement, and political marginalization for generations. Cauca province, where Márquez grew up, reflects that reality starkly.
Her election did not end those inequalities. Colombia’s Afro-Colombian communities still face disproportionate exposure to armed conflict, land dispossession, and environmental harm from extractive industries. The gap between a historic election and structural change is wide, and Márquez herself has acknowledged the work ahead is long.
But representation has value beyond policy. When a former housekeeper from one of Colombia’s poorest provinces becomes vice president, it changes what is imaginable — for girls in Cauca, for environmental activists everywhere, and for a country still working through deep divisions.
A new chapter for Colombian politics
The Petro-Márquez victory was also Colombia’s first-ever election of a leftist president, ending decades of center-right dominance in a country shaped by civil conflict and conservative political culture. The win reflected a broader shift across Latin America, where voters in several countries have recently turned toward left and center-left governments after years of inequality and social unrest.
Márquez’s role as head of the equality ministry gives her direct policy reach. Her priorities — women’s rights, rural health care, and educational access — map closely onto the conditions she grew up in and spent her career fighting to change. That alignment between lived experience and formal power is, by any measure, unusual in national politics.
She takes office in a country where the machinery of change moves slowly and where powerful interests have long resisted reform. Her own history suggests she already knows how to push anyway.
The phrase on that banner in Bogotá — “change is unstoppable” — may be more aspiration than guarantee. But on June 19, 2022 C.E., a woman who once cleaned other people’s houses became vice president-elect of Colombia. That part, at least, already happened.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Reuters
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- U.K. cancer death rates drop to their lowest level on record
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Colombia
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