Gloria Arias Nieto

Our democracy doesn’t have to spend its life fighting over the country between two antagonisms. We are free to rebel against the karma of polarisation and overcome this mania for trading fears like footballer’s monkeys. We can choose to be…

4 January 2022. The Spectator Colombia, fourth day of the year 2022. The notebook has 365 pages. They say that the pages are blank, but it is not true: they are tattooed with the emotions, illusions and disappointments of the…

28 December 2021. The Spectator Last column of 2021. This year, five million people died in the world on account of COVID-19, not including the suicidal who were not infected by the virus, but collapsed from isolation, hunger or abuse;…

30 November 2021. El Espectador “In Bogotá you turn on the tap and water comes out”, but in the village of Vuelta Acuña – in Cimitarra, between Yondó, Puerto Parra, Puerto Berrío and the Carare river – there is no…

23 November 2021. The Spectator 24 November marks five years since the signing of a peace agreement that has so far saved 6,400 lives. The Peace Agreement made the impossible possible, disarmed the world’s oldest guerrilla group and brought us…

16 November 2021. El Espectador The strength of independent journalism will always be necessary; there is no day propitious for servility and no right time for falsehood. And in certain regimes such as the current one – in which a…

9 November 2021. The Spectator Gratitude lives in the most beautiful hemisphere of memory. It rises every morning to wind up each one’s sun, and remind us that we are not alone; they say it is intangible, but I feel…

A 13-year-old boy and three 17-year-olds arrived at Medicina Legal not in uniform, but in plastic bags. Their board was the minefields; their mentors, the ELN guerrillas; and their executioner, that monstrosity that results when child recruitment and state stupidity…

Millions of Colombians remember what we were doing on 2 October 2016 at four o’clock in the afternoon. The predictions, the fears and the hope; so many dreams, so many resurrections pending a result. That afternoon it became clear that…

7 September 2021. The Spectator Not all suns are the same. For example, this one today in the hospital, came mixed with the light of half past four, and a lot of interrogations; it is almost surreal to see how…