A year of plague, fire and blood: but also hope?
2020 was a collective trauma, but also a year of the people
Forty thousand terrified and angry people, dressed in rags and improvised cloth masks yelled at police, begging not to be left stranded on the wrong side of a closed frontier. Oily black smoke from trash being burnt on the Venezuelan side blotted out the sun, and riot police stood by, ready to respond with physical violence. Global plague had reached the Colombia-Venezuelan border, and the result was apocalyptic, more reminiscent of zombie films than the cold reality it truly was.
It was March, and authorities across Latin America were closing all land borders with little to no advance notice. For all of us, the true moment of crisis crystalizing into reality was different, depending on where we were in the world, but for me, I was on the border watching a desperate multitude of vulnerable people trying desperately to get back home.
I struggled to get a flight back to Bogota, where I live, before airports closed. I made it onto one of the last planes to leave before domestic transportation completely shut down. At the time, a girl I was dating was supposed to visit from Ecuador two days later. Coronavirus and closed borders kept us apart for 10 months. Despite our efforts during that time to find workarounds, I…
