On August 7, 2022, Francia Márquez became the first Black woman to be elected Vice President of Colombia. The following year, she was also sworn in as Minister of Women and Equality in the Cabinet of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Marquez, a noted social activist for Afro-Colombians, feminist, poet, singer, and promoter of climate justice, is from El Cauca, Yolombó, Suarez, the Republic of Colombia’s province with the largest population of African ancestry. She was born Francia Elena Márquez Mina on December 1, 1981, to Sigifredo Márquez Trujillo, a miner, and Gloria Maria Mina Lopez, a midwife and agriculturalist as well as a homemaker. Francia had eleven siblings. While Márquez is Colombia’s first Black woman vice president in its history, she is the second woman to hold the position, following Marta Lucía Ramírez Blanco, who served from 2018 to 2022.
In 1996, at the age of 15, Márquez joined “Soy Porque Somos,” a left-wing political party where she fought against the attempt by a multinational company and the government of Colombia to expand a dam on the Ovejas River, which would have flooded low lying villages in her province. She was also opposed to mining expansion while championing the ethnic and cultural identity of Afro-Colombian communities and preserving the right to their ancestral land. With community support, she helped stop both the expansion of the dam and further mining expansion in her region.
Márquez graduated from Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, a public vocational training institution, in 2000. In 2014, she organized “The March of Turbans,” a protest march of 80 women walking from Cauca to Bogota, a 10-day, 500-kilometer journey. In response to the protest, the government claimed the march was a national security threat and, in retaliation, vowed to seize what it claimed were illegal farms around the Ovejas dam, most of which were owned by Afro-Colombians. Despite these threats, in 2015, Márquez received the Colombia National Prize.
In 2018, in Paris, France, Márquez received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the environment, for the removal of all illegal gold miners and equipment from La Toma. Two years later, she earned a Bachelor of Law degree from Universidad Santiago de Cali. In 2021, she began serving as president of the National Peace and Co-existence Council.
In 2022, Márquez participated in the 27th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. There, she argued that it is impossible to have a conversation regarding climate change without discussing its effects on historically excluded populations such as the Afro-Colombians. She also demanded reparations for the crime against humanity regarding the mid-Atlantic slave trade, which forced millions of Africa’s children into slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean.
In 2023, the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in Bogotá awarded Márquez, the single mother of two sons, Carlos Adrian and Kevin Márquez, an honorary doctorate.