Miguel Polo Polo, the representative of black communities that many leaders say he is not

Representative Miguel Polo Polo was first famous and then a congressman. A staunch defender of Uribism and an open and hostile enemy of the left, he made a name for himself as an activist on social media before running for Congress in 2022 to occupy one of the two seats allocated to Colombia's black communities. The objections came immediately: the young man from Cartagena had no political experience. Above all, he did not have the profile that many expect from representatives of Afro-Colombian communities: he did not belong to any organization, and his interests did not include any of the community's demands. However, he won. Since then, rather than defending the needs of Afro-Colombians, he has devoted himself to being a scourge of Gustavo Petro's government, and for the elections on March 8, he is seeking re-election. His intention reveals the cracks in a special constituency that, although it has been an achievement for organized Black communities, is now the subject of debate due to its apparent instrumentalization. Polo Polo was elected in 2022 with the support of Democratic Center Senator María Fernanda Cabal, one of the leaders of the party's most right-wing faction. Once he took his seat in the House, he brought with him a style that combines the noise and stridency that made him famous on social media with the harsh and confrontational tone of his friend Cabal. One example that comes to mind is his sabotage of a memorial that had been erected in Bogotá's Plaza de Bolívar in honor of the victims of extrajudicial executions known as false positives in December 2024. The special constituencies for black communities, like those for indigenous communities, were created in the 1991 Constitution, which stipulated that both groups should have their own representatives in Congress to guarantee their political participation, which had been virtually non-existent for almost 200 years of republican life. Indigenous people were granted three seats, two in the Senate and one in the House, and black communities only two in the House. In both cases, candidates must demonstrate their connection or roots in indigenous or black communities. Polo Polo's apparent lack of such roots was one of the arguments used to challenge his election. However, in 2023, the Council of State ratified him as a congressman, as he had the support of the Afro-Colombian council Fernando Ríos Hidalgo, who represents the town of San José de Honduras, in the municipality of El Retén (Magdalena). It is a community of about 140 people, belonging to 30 families. However, this support from the Council of State is not enough for the majority of Afro-Colombian leaders to see Polo Polo as a representative of their community. Lawyer and human rights defender Leyner Palacios recalls that Afro seats were created to represent black people and to ensure that spokespersons who defend their rights are elected. He therefore believes that Polo Polo's candidacy undermines the purpose of the seat: “He claims to be black, but in the end he is not, because being black is not only about skin color, but also about cultural commitment and the defense of human rights and ethnic peoples, about recognizing traditional practices, about recognizing that historical identity of liberation and suffering, and he does not have that.” Leonard Rentería, an activist and Afro-descendant community leader from Buenaventura (Valle del Cauca), believes that he has given the seat a direction that is incompatible with the objective for which it was created: “I don't think he is being consistent with what a seat that seeks to address the reality of historical exclusion, the lack of real investment in black communities, and to break the inequality gap we have, represents. He has not done what was expected of him. That seat is one of vindication, not a seat to kneel before a system that treats black people the way it does.” Anthropologist Woslher Castro believes that the politician's election is an appropriation. “The arrival and permanence of Miguel Polo Polo in the Afro seat is not a historical accident: it is the most visible demonstration that the institutional design allowed actors completely unrelated to Afro-descendant agendas to appropriate a space reserved for ethnic-racial justice,” he wrote in a column in La Silla Vacía. In his opinion, this space created to redress an injustice has become saturated (more than 160 candidates for two seats), which fragments the black movement and facilitates the victory of politicians with greater economic muscle. “Today, the greatest injustice would be to allow the political capture of this space to become normalized,” he adds. The second representative for that constituency, Ana Rogelia Monsalve, also has no track record in Afro-Colombian communities. She was elected by the Colombian Democratic Party and got there thanks to the political machinery of her brother, Rumenigge Monsalve, now a candidate for the Senate, who was mayor of the Caribbean municipality of Malambo for the traditional Conservative Party. In a country like Colombia, where political decisions are based more on practical benefits than on adherence to theory, Representative Polo Polo has played his cards to seek reelection. To do so, on the one hand, he broke with María Fernanda Cabal, who was seen as his mentor, and stated in December 2025 that he owed his arrival in Congress to her. The representative, without getting into direct confrontation, responded that loyalty does not mean slavery, and distanced himself from the Democratic Center's presidential candidacy to embrace that of the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella, who is second in the polls for the first round of the presidential elections in May. His other decision was to withdraw, in September 2025, from the Fernando Ríos Hidalgo council because, he said, he no longer identified with it. Once the congressman's resignation became known, the party distanced itself: “He never represented our Afro-Colombian ethnicity, nor the social and historical struggles of our people,” the entity said. Now it is the community council of Gran Vía de Los Remedios that has endorsed him for reelection. He represents a community in Albania (La Guajira), 21 families with whom Polo Polo has not disclosed his connection beyond the endorsement. The representative is ambiguous. On the one hand, his invitations to support his candidacy do not focus on the Black community, as he insists that anyone can vote for him: “It doesn't matter if you are white, mestizo, mulatto, or Black.” In other words, as any candidate in an ordinary constituency would do. On the other hand, he says he never betrayed his constituents: "I fulfilled what I promised in my campaign. I said I was going to break the false narrative that all Black people or poor people have to be left-wing, and I did. I said I would be in opposition from day one, and I was." […] They can question my character. They can debate my positions. They can try to delegitimize me. But they can never accuse me of being a liar or complacent,“ he wrote on social media. Leonard Rentería rejects this justification: ”The Afro seat is not for debating who, being black, is on the right or in the center or on the left. That seat was created to make demands, to exercise political control over the rules that affect Black communities.“ He adds that the rules have allowed mestizo people to run for the seat that represents Black people: ”It ends up being a space exploited by a system that often struggles to recognize that Black and indigenous people are subjects of rights. In that sense, it is a seat that has been exploited.“ Leyner Palacios has a similar view: ”Like everything else in the country, the seat is used and commercialized, and people arrive who do not have the identity of the Black people, who do not know the history of suffering of Black peoples. It is another tragedy for the communities, because that hope is frustrated," he adds. Despite the momentum of his candidacy, Polo Polo still faces several proceedings before the National Electoral Council (CNE), the body that oversees the proper functioning of the voting process, some for dual party membership, others because they believe that his resignation from the Fernando Ríos Hidalgo council occurred outside the deadlines. For now, however, his candidacy to represent African Americans remains firm and on track, even though African Americans do not feel represented by him.