Editor’s Note: To help our international readers understand this Unicorn Riot story, we provide the following context. Roof Depot is a closed warehouse that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed a Superfund site, which means it has been identified as a candidate for cleanup of hazardous materials. Further, East Phillips is a neighborhood in the U.S. Midwestern city of Minneapolis. Find here a scan of the physical press release that has been cited below.
MINNEAPOLIS, United States—East Phillips residents and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) started an occupation of the Roof Depot site in the early hours of Tuesday morning in resistance to the city’s plan to demolish the site which sits atop decades of arsenic contamination. Demands include an end to the demolition plan, no more additional polluting facilities and an end to evictions of encampments. [After the publication of this article, the occupation was evicted by Minneapolis Police on Tuesday evening. Eight people were reportedly detained and released.]
In the “arsenic triangle” in the most diverse neighborhood in Minnesota, the Roof Depot site is set for demolition next week against the wishes of many in the community who are fearful of the toxic impacts on their health and the health of future generations.
A tipi was erected in the morning, along with over a dozen tents and a sacred fire. In the morning, Unicorn Riot livestreamed the beginning of the occupation as well as an afternoon press conference.
Watch the press conference that took place at 1 p.m. at 27th Street and Longfellow Avenue below.
A press release from Defend the Depot said the community is demanding the city officials cancel the demolition and made seven specific demands. They also provided a brief history of the past century of heavy pollution on East Phillips, where the Roof Depot EPA Superfund site exists.
“For generations, East Phillips, a neighborhood of over 70% residents of color and home to the majority Indigenous Little Earth housing development, has been treated as an environmental sacrifice zone. For the last century, East Phillips has been zoned for heavy industrial pollution. According to US EPA data, the area within a one-mile radius of the Roof Depot site ranks nationally in the 89th percentile for diesel particulate matter, the 99th percentile for Superfund Proximity, and the 96th percentile for hazardous waste proximity.”
Press release from Defend the Depot – Feb. 21, 2023
The list of demands includes an end to encampment evictions and the creation of a new ‘navigation center’ for the unhoused people to access support, referrals, and resources:
Total relocation of the Hiawatha Expansion Project
Hand over control of Roof Depot site to the community
Plans to remove of Bituminous Roadways and Smith Foundry [Bituminous Roadways and the Smith Foundry are sources of legacy contamination near to the Roof Depot]
Enact a moratorium on encampment evictions [According to a Wilder Foundation Study Indigenous people make up 1 percent of Minnesota’s adult population, but a disproportionate 13 percent of the houseless population. A survey of a large encampment in Minneapolis in 2020 found that nearly half of the 282 people living there were Native.]
Provide funding for peer support workers
Invest in pilot programs to provide shelter and services to the houseless community like the former navigation center
Provide funding for the community’s vision for an indoor urban farm at the Roof Depot site
“The area around the Roof Depot warehouse is a former Superfund site, and the Depot building itself sits atop a reservoir of legacy arsenic contamination. Public health and environmental experts have spoken out about the risks of demolishing the building and exposing arsenic beneath the site and releasing it into the community. The city’s own Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW) acknowledges the risk of “fugitive” dust, which experts say will likely contain arsenic and other contaminants, but the city declined to carry out more intensive environmental studies and has delivered no information about protection plans to those living near the demolition site.“
Press release from Defend the Depot – Feb. 21, 2023
"I appreciate everybody that has come out here to fight for our people. We can't stand any more pollution. You know, our kids are sick, our elders are sick, and, we can't do this, we're gonna fight, so I hope you're seeing this, Mayor Frey." – Nicole Perez pic.twitter.com/5IUxTrCMlU
— UNICORN RIOT 🦄 mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot 👈 (@UR_Ninja) February 21, 2023
On Sunday, a protest at the Roof Depot site brough together the resistance against the planned ‘Cop City’ in the Atlanta Forest and the East Phillips struggle against the Roof Depot demolition. At the action, AIM member Rachel Thunder told people to be expecting actions at the site and that “you’re gonna know in our words and our thoughts and our prayers and our songs, that we’re not gonna back down. We’re gonna make a stand here.”
During Sunday’s protest we heard from Cassie Holmes, an East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI) board member, about some of the history of the East Phillips community dealing with the Roof Depot site over the last several years.
In late January, the Minneapolis City Council voted 7-6 that the site was to be demolished. Unicorn Riot has been covering this story for several months, documenting protests and city hall meetings.
Daniel Schmidt, an organizer with the EPNI’s Communications Team, provides insight on the history of environmental racism in Minneapolis, including the origin of the arsenic plume that lays dormant underneath the East Phillips Roof Depot site.
For unionized rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety / credit: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.
On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. 50 out of 100 train cars ran off the tracks, igniting a massive fire that could be seen from miles away. Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an evacuation order on February 5, due to the possibility of a major explosion. Local community members and activists across the country have sounded the alarms regarding the impacts the incident could have on public health and environment. Many have pointed to reports of animals dying en masse as evidence. Yet, despite the public outcry over the environmental and public health catastrophe, the actions of Ohio authorities reflect an attitude of concealment.
A reporter with NewsNation was recently violently arrested while covering one of Governor DeWine’s news conferences regarding the derailment. Police officers claimed that the reporter, Evan Lambert, was being too loud while the governor was speaking and in response, tackled him to the ground and handcuffed him. Lambert was released from jail the same day. “No journalist expects to be arrested when you’re doing your job,” Lambert toldNewsNation.
Ohio officials claim that they have received no reports of animals dying in or near East Palestine, despite multiple public reports of local animal deaths. NewsNation obtained a video of dead fish in the Ohio River near East Palestine. According to Wildlife Officer Supervisor Scott Angelo, these fish could have died due to toxic fumes dissolving oxygen in the water, although the causes have not been confirmed. Farmer Taylor Holzer claims that his foxes have fallen mortally ill after the derailment.
Many concerns of East Palestine residents, as well as those of the rest of the nation, stem from the fact that the derailed train had 20 cars carrying hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern Railroad conducted a “controlled release” on February 6 of several tankers that ran the risk of explosion. State officials are yet to inform residents of East Palestine about what effect this “controlled release” of toxic fumes, combined with a massive fire burning for five days, will have. Five of the derailed cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen linked to various forms of cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is monitoring two other toxic chemicals: phosgene and hydrogen chloride. Public health experts have already indicated that the effects of these chemicals could last decades. “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Silverado Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, toldNewsNation. Most recently, the EPA discovered that three other toxic chemicals were present in the derailed train.
Railroad Workers Point to Cost-Cutting As the Culprit
For unionized rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety. Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union workers’ organization, writes, “in the last 10 years, the Class One carriers [rail companies with the highest revenues] have dramatically increased both the length and tonnage of the average train, while cutting back on maintenance and inspection, and we have a time bomb ticking.”
A report by The Lever highlighted that in 2017 during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency, Norfolk Southern lobbyists successfully rescinded regulations aimed at improving railroad safety regulations. Specifically, the company successfully beat back measures that would require train cars carrying hazardous, flammable materials to be equipped with electronic brakes which can stop trains more effectively than conventional brakes. Railroad company donors delivered over USD$6 million to Republican Party campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, but still claimed that safety regulations would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”
Norfolk Southern made a record of over USD$12 billion in revenue last year, and recently announced a USD$10 million stock buyback program.
Last year, railroad workers in the United States were on the cusp of a strike, which would have shattered the U.S. economy as rail workers are some of the most essential workers in the nation. Workers were demanding more sick leave to combat the effects of “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” a corporate scheme to cut costs by demanding more work from fewer workers. Infamously, U.S. President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress blocked rail workers’ right to strike by rapidly passing legislation that forced workers to accept an agreement without sick days.
Railroad Workers United argues that Precision Scheduled Railroading, and the overworking, lay-offs and lack of safety measures that unionized workers were fighting for last year were a primary reason for the derailment. One of the causes of the derailment, RWU argues, is that a damaged car was allowed to leave a terminal due to cut inspection times and layoffs. The train was also not blocked properly, the group claims, because blocking a train properly takes longer and therefore has been mostly done away with by rail companies. More Perfect Union has pointed out that rail companies have cut 22 percent of railroad jobs since 2017. Unionized workers were planning to use their right to strike to combat this trend in 2022. Instead, they were forced back to work on penalty of arrest.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, by Dan Kovalik (Hot Books: New York, 2021)
Academic and activist Dan Kovalik’s new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, was written on the frontlines of the twin struggles of our time, the class struggle and the fight for Black liberation. Reading it brought me back to so many magical and contradictory movement moments that I could not resist writing a review.
‘White People Go to the Back of the March’
On the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in 2017, thousands of protesters took to Fifth Avenue and the frigid streets of New York City to demand criminal charges against the police who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; and hundreds of other unarmed Black and brown men. Some Black Lives Matter march marshals had determined that Black and brown families and activists—presented as the only real victims and fighters—would march in the front. White people—presented as all equal benefactors of white supremacy and white privilege—were assigned to march in the back, separated from the youthful, militant front. It was a strange scene. Forty-nine years after the U.S. state assassinated Dr. King for risking his life to organize a multiracial movement against white supremacy—and in his final months, a Poor People’s Campaign against the capitalist system—surely he would find it curious we no longer needed outright white supremacists like Bull Connor or George Wallace; we were now capable of segregating our own marches.
Malcolm X’s only meeting with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 26, 1964, during the U.S. Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964 / credit: Marion Trikosko
So many questions leapt into my mind as my eyes traced the 10-block-long protest. Where did poor whites belong? Veterans? Whites who had been through the prison system? How about Black students who had both parents in a position to pay their tuition out of pocket at NYU or Columbia? They had all earned the front? Then there was my Ernesto Rafael, my son, half Dominican, half poor-white, harassed by the police too many times in the Bronx. Where did he “belong,” according to the marshals?
This was but one example of the new racial dynamics on display across the country in the BLM movement from Oakland to Boston, and everywhere in between. For class conscious revolutionaries throwing down in the heart of this mass movement, it represented a series of fresh, unique challenges.
When I picked up Kovalik’s new book, I was intrigued by his biting class analysis of the similar experiences he had. In chapter 2, “Cancellation of a Peace Activist,” he writes directly about being a participant on the frontlines of the BLM movement in Pennsylvania, ducking and dodging police batons as organizers collectively figured out their next strategic moves. Kovalik, a union and human rights lawyer and professor, based out of Pittsburgh, dives deep into the contradictions he and so many others experienced. Kovalik slams both the arrogance of isolated white anarchists whose faux militancy puts all protesters at risk, as well as the bullying tactics and racial reductionism of some radical liberals. This took me back to the explosion of protests following the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, which brought millions of people into the streets to denounce the epidemic of police terror in Black and brown communities. Millions were in motion and different political tendencies vied for leadership. Kovalik examines key lessons to be drawn from the almost decade of collective experience we have as a movement in what came to be known as “Black Lives Matter.” This is but one must-read chapter in Kovalik’s exciting new book.
Woke Capitalism
Kovalik’s book is an expose of Woke Capitalism and the cancer of cancel culture.
While millions took to the streets to stop President George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the peace movement was eerily silent when Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, became “the drone-warrior-in-chief, dropping at least 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone.” (pg. 109) He critiques the peace movement for going quiet every time a Democrat is (s)elected to the oval office.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
This page-turner exposes today’s liberal establishment, which touts “racial equity” without ever questioning the underlying structure that intensifies white supremacist control of society’s institutions. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is but one example of a liberal who bloviates over the U.S. Capitol rioters and their violent methods. Yet, he advocated for the bombing, sacking and recolonization of Iraq. (pg. VIII) The book exposes corporate and campus departments that pay hefty salaries to “experts” to lecture on “racial justice” without ever touching the structures that buttress white supremacy and racial and class segregation. These defenders of racial capitalism—from the academy to the pressroom—give political cover to hucksters, who make a killing by bullying white liberals into forking over money, lest they be labeled racist. As one class-conscious scholar sarcastically asks in Black Agenda Report: Do we really “wonder why these rural voters didn’t just go to their local Barnes and Noble to purchase a copy of How to Be an Anti-racist before the election?” Are all of the books that have emerged from the White Privilege Industrial Complex reaching that mass of “deplorables,” whom Arlie Hochchild refers to in her monumental sociological exposé as “strangers in their own land”? (“Own land” as in stolen Indigenous land).
Kovalik takes on the Frankenstein-esque outgrowth of cancellations in academic institutions and beyond, asking what are the political forces behind them? He offers the real-life example of the canceling of Molly Rush, an octogenarian peace activist who reposted a quote that took on a life of its own. Instead of speaking with her face to face to clear the air, internet activists dragged her down and expelled her from the movement, like a group of pre-teens playing a game of Telephone. (pg. 13) Kovalik surmises that many keyboard warriors who have never stared down police lines or even handed out a flyer don’t want dialogue and growth. They want to score woke points and “likes” to the detriment of other comrades.
Liberal bully politics short-changes us all. Kovalik takes a big leap to the international realm to examine the West’s arrogant dismissal of Cuban medical internationalism, the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and China’s success controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. China had two deaths in 2021. Kovalik concludes:
“It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain. In so doing, they have taken ‘cancel culture’ to the very extreme, and they may get us all canceled, permanently, in the process…” (pg. 139)
A sit-in protest on July 8, 2016, in San Francisco in response to the Alton Sterling shooting / credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen
We Never Give Up on Our People
It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.
How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.
This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?
When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?
A Boston police mug shot of Malcolm X, following his arrest for larceny in 1944
As Marxists, revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, we believe nothing is permanent; everything is in a state of flux. The watchwords are growing through contradictions among the people, healing and restorative justice. We don’t have the luxury of discarding comrades. There has to be a path back or we risk cannibalizing and condemning our own ranks. Who would Malcolm X have been if everyone had given up on him in his 20s, when he was imprisoned? How many young Bobbies, Hueys and Assatas are sidelined right now? How can we be less judgemental and give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes?
The Other White America
Black and Brown people in the United States, and those in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, have every right to be angry. But angry at whom?
Most white people are not CEOs or members of the ruling class; many more are National Guard soldiers, correction officers and other reactionary rent-a-cops, the overseers of a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. But the racial portrait of state repression is more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of the Atlanta police force is Black. Over half of Washington, D.C.’s police force is Black.
A liberal portrait of white privilege fails to tell the full class story in the United States. Seventy million people received Medicaid in 2016—43 percent were white. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white. Over 100,000 overdoses took place in the past year. The overwhelming majority of opioid overdoses occur among poor whites, roughly 72 percent. Are these cast-off layers of our class our enemies?
A demonstrator raising awareness of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015 / credit: Voice of America
Kovalik points out that similar to white people, “the top 10 percent of Black households hold 75 percent of Black wealth.” (pg. 96) Is every brother your brother?
Given the complex class and racial terrain, do we cast poor and working-class whites away as “a basket of deplorables” or do win them over to defend their class interests? Wouldn’t sticking all white protesters in the back of marches with more yuppified layers only alienate them more? Is the movement a “safe space” for them, or more importantly a revolutionizing space?
Cancel This Book refuses to give up on the other white America—the poor, forgotten and de-industrialized “oxy-electorate” (writer Kathleen Frydl’s term for white people who live in the U.S. Rust Belt, where OxyContin addictions are on the rise). Those white people are full of disappointment and hatred for this system—between the tens of millions who refused to vote for another neoliberal Dixiecrat like Hillary Clinton, and the tens of millions of others who were duped into believing a spoiled, trash-talking, billionaire, real-estate mogul hoax and punk with infinite air time was their white knight.
As Malcolm X taught: “The truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it is against the oppressor.” We can win over workers who have only ever known the american-dreaming chauvinism they have been fed. Bursting with ideological perspicacity and revolutionary hope, this book pushes us not to get caught up in the liberal webs of identity politics and call-out culture.
Kovalik also challenges the white liberals who unknowingly acted as “masochists at the protests.” This constructive critique is not meant to take away from anyone’s hard work and real contributions. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was one outgrowth of these liberal politics, which relegated many well-intentioned, liberal, student and petite-bourgeoisie (“middle-class”) whites to cheerleader positions. Is this the militant mass-movement that is going to stand up to the State Department, the Pentagon, the police and the intelligence agencies? When Malcolm held up white abolitionist John Brown’s life as an example of real struggle to follow, he was challenging these liberal politics.
Amidst the ever-evolving dialectics of our movement, Kovalik’s book comes as a breath of fresh air. It is a clarion call about the damage we are collectively doing to our movement if we do not center class politics next to the need for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.
The left-wing candidates of the Pacto Histórico coalition ticket in Colombia celebrated a win Sunday evening in Bogotá / credit: Evo Morales / Twitter
Editor’s Note: This article was updated at 7:40 a.m., June 20.
JUNE 19, 2022—Celebrations took place this evening as people took to the streets of Colombia after left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro was deemed the winner of the second-round election. This victory makes his running mate, Francia Márquez, the first Afro-descendant woman who will serve as vice president once the term begins in August.
The Pacto Histórico coalition candidates won more than 50 percent of votes. Petro’s competitor, Rodolfo Hernández, conceded the election.
“I called Gustavo to congratulate him on his victory and offer him my support to fulfill the promises of change for which Colombia voted today,” Hernández tweeted. The millionaire ran on the League of Anti-Corruption Governors ticket and had been likened to a “Colombian Trump” for his brash manner. “Colombia will always count on me.”
Llamé a Gustavo para felicitarlo por el triunfo y ofrecerle mi apoyo para cumplir con las promesas de cambio por las que Colombia votó hoy. Colombia siempre va a contar conmigo.
— Ing Rodolfo Hernandez 🇨🇴! (@ingrodolfohdez) June 19, 2022
Aminta Zea, a U.S. citizen who observed the elections today, documented Colombians in the southern city of Calí embracing each other, jumping, waving flags and honking horns.
Beautiful to see Colombianos celebrating Petro’s historic win in Cali. Just see for yourself. What a huge and important shift not only for Colombia but also for Latin America and the world!! pic.twitter.com/WC7QQ1e1tp
Petro’s first tweet came within an hour of the announcement.
“Today is a holiday for the people. Let […] celebrate the first popular victory. May so many sufferings be cushioned in the joy that today floods the heart of the Homeland,” he tweeted. “This victory for God and for the People and their history. Today is the day of the streets and squares.”
Hoy es dia de fiesta para el pueblo. Que festeje la primera victoria popular. Que tantos sufrimientos se amortiguen en la alegria que hoy inunda el corazon de la Patria.
Esta victoria para Dios y para el Pueblo y su historia. Hoy es el dia de las calles y las plazas.
Márquez attracted many voters because her campaigns for both president and vice-president prioritized lifting out of poverty and oppression the country’s historically marginalized groups. She won the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for her activism.
“This is for our grandmothers and grandfathers, women, youth, LGTBIQ+ people, indigenous people, peasants, workers, victims, my black people, those who resisted and those who are no longer…” she tweeted. “Throughout Colombia. Today we start writing a new story!“
Esto es por nuestras abuelas y abuelos, las mujeres, los jóvenes, las personas LGTBIQ+, los indígenas, los campesinos, los trabajadores, las víctimas, mi pueblo negro, los que resistieron y los que ya no están… Por toda Colombia. ¡Hoy empezamos a escribir una nueva historia!
— Francia Márquez Mina (@FranciaMarquezM) June 19, 2022
What’s Next for Latin America?
This victory marks a shift in the Western Hemisphere. While left-wing revolutions and candidates have over the decades swept states like Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, Colombia remained a militarized U.S. ally.
At least one observer had dismissed Petro’s earlier comments against the Bolivarian revolutionary process underway in Venezuela as a way to distance his popular left-wing campaign from a neighboring country many in Colombia have seen as a failure.
Congratulations came pouring through from officials and former officials in Bolivia, Mexico and other states.
Felicitamos al pueblo de Colombia, al hermano @petrogustavo, flamante presidente electo y a la hermana @FranciaMarquezM, primera vicepresidenta afrodescendiente de la historia de ese país por su indiscutible triunfo en las urnas. Es la victoria de la paz, la verdad y la dignidad. pic.twitter.com/fmC8fxvxGA
Los conservadores de Colombia siempre han sido tenaces y duros. El escritor José María Vargas Vila relataba que los dictadores de su país "mojaban en agua bendita su puñal antes de matar". 1/3
Felicito a Gustavo Petro y a Francia Márquez, por la histórica victoria en las elecciones Presidenciales en Colombia. Se escuchó la voluntad del pueblo colombiano, que salió a defender el camino de la democracia y la Paz. Nuevos tiempos se avizoran para este hermano país. pic.twitter.com/FxodCn9Uqx
In May, the United States invited Colombia’s defense minister to Washington to announce Colombia as a “major non-NATO ally.” The South American country’s closest access point to the Atlantic Ocean is the Caribbean Sea. The $4.5 billion in military arms and training the United States has poured into Colombia now remains a question for the incoming left-wing pair that have remarked on changing relations with the United States. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence throughout the countryside, as well as death threats to Petro and Márquez, threaten to amplify tensions in Colombia.
The Petro-Márquez Agenda
While his millionaire competitor—Hernández—claimed to be of the people, Petro said he would call a national emergency upon entering office to address hunger in Colombia. Joblessness, empty bellies and dangerous housing plague the country. The situation prompted last year’s month-long national strike.
Petro had been criticized for announcing he would end oil and gas exploration as well as phase out fossil fuels as a way to address global climate change and transform the economy. Coal and oil shipments account for almost 40 percent of the country’s exports. His announcement worried the industries.
Afro-Colombian activist and community official Victor Hugo Moreno Mina was with Márquez when armed men shot at their group during a meeting in a rural area on May 4, 2019. He said in the following exclusive interview with Toward Freedom that many areas of Colombia’s economy, as well as the societal structure, need to be transformed.
The Petro-Márquez win comes six years after peace accords were signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), which agreed to put down arms to end decades of violence. Rodrigo Londoño, a former FARC-EP commander, hailed today’s results as a victory for the peace process.
The second-round election was marked by reports of irregularities, as was the first round held on May 29.
Alejandra Barrios, director of Misión Observadores Electoral (MOE), an independent agency that coordinates domestic and international election observers in Colombia, reported some ballots had been marked off before voters had a chance to choose a candidate.
Voter intimidation and threats were cited for low turnout during the first round.
AfroResistance, an organization that supports Afro-descendant women and girls in the Americas, brought delegations into the country to observe both rounds.
“It was [a] clean and fair election in Colombia. Democracy won. Black people won,” the organization tweeted.