Do we like them?

Do we like Francia Márquez?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of standing up for her community at real personal risk, but her years in office went unchecked here, so we can't score her higher.

Francia Márquez was born in 1981 in La Toma, a small hamlet in northern Cauca, Colombia. She started defending her territory at 13, when her community opposed a planned hydroelectric dam near her family home. That's the formative bit: she's been an organiser since she was a kid.

Life wasn't easy. She became a single mother at 16 and worked as an artisan miner and as a maid in Cali. She only started studying law at a public university in Cauca in 2014, and finished her degree in 2020.

Her big fight was over mining. She led protests against forced displacement caused by mining projects, including one by AngloGold Ashanti, and her community took the companies' plans to the Constitutional Court. Her community expelled the mining companies in 2010, and she won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018 for it.

It came at a cost. She fled the region after death threats from paramilitary groups, survived an assassination attempt in March 2019, and during the 2022 campaign received at least three death threats from the far-right group Aguilas Negras. That's abuse aimed at her, and it doesn't count against her.

She was a victim representative in the peace talks between President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC and received the National Human Rights Award in 2015. After a failed 2018 bid for a House seat, she got almost 800,000 votes in the Historic Pact primary and was named Gustavo Petro's running mate for the 2022 election. She became Colombia's first Black female vice-president.

On the harm test, nothing against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet turned up in what we read. Her whole public life points the other way, defending land and community from mining. Search coverage from 2022 also had her tying women's rights to LGBTQ+ rights in her campaign speech, but we couldn't open those pages.