When the march happened, I was in the Caffè Nero above Blackwell’s trying to write a story about Luz, a woman I had met doing fieldwork in Colombia on polarisation. Luz, a friend of a friend, had campaigned for the ‘Yes’ vote in the peace referendum. I met her for a beer in a gloomy restaurant in the coffee region, where she told me about how she tried to counter the disinformation spread by opponents of the peace deal with the leftist FARC guerrilla. The peace deal with turn your children gay! people said. But the peace deal is about ending fifty years of war! said Luz. They’ll legalise abortion! Colombia will become communist! they replied.
I remembered her tired eyes under her shiny brown fringe, and felt her frustration as she described not being able to talk about what was actually in the peace deal, because everyone was focussed on the scare stories. The bits she really wanted to talk about were the measures that sought to address the unequal impact of the armed conflict on women. Luz worked for a women’s rights NGO, and was excited because this was the first peace process in the world to have a gender focus. But in her campaigning, she never managed to get to those gender measures, because evangelical churches had told people the peace deal would impose ‘gender ideology’, which people thought would destroy the ‘traditional Colombian family – “whatever that is”, said Luz – so any mention of gender and peace was dynamite.
At home in Oxford, I couldn’t stop thinking about Luz. I thought her story could show an international readership something about Colombia, but also, perhaps, something about themselves. I didn’t want to depict Colombia as a faraway, exotic country, to be studied for global north curiosity, but as a mirror for societies like my own, struggling to understand whether something about politics today really was more divisive, as so many people seemed to think, and if so, what that something was.
But I was stuck in the writing. I was trying to cover too much political and historical context, and it was getting in the way of this human story. Without the context, it was hard to explain it all—but maybe I was explaining too much. Maybe explaining was the problem.
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