Gloria Arias Nieto

9 April 2024, El Espectador On 7 April 1948, the World Health Organisation was founded, and on 9 April Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated. The 7th was established as World Health Day and the 9th was the Day of Remembrance…

On Calle 26 in Bogotá, a corner has become a meeting place for the living and the dead, for the irreversible and the avoidable, for demonstrators and the disappeared, for denunciations, carnations and wakes. There, on the western side of…

23 January 2024, el Espectador I should have written this column on 1 January… sorry for the delay, but today’s Pazaporte is about Claudia López, former mayor of Bogotá. I met Claudia shortly before the elections, one informal evening, at…

Once upon a time, there was a country where prosecutors were respected and respectable people, and to become attorney general you had to have legal soundness, ethical strength and a résumé (not due to who knows what dreadful things) that…

9 January 2024, El Espectador It will be a real new year when the world announces that the dictators have gone back to their caves, that hunger has been satiated, and that there are no more rivers silvered by mercury,…

It is hard to say Merry Christmas when in 10 weeks 19,000 Palestinians have been killed, 85% of Gaza’s population has been displaced, and the state of Israel insists it will not stop its attacks until Hamas is exterminated. Netanyahu…

One of the decisions one must make when living in Colombia is not to throw oneself into the arms and embers of fear. Fear is a bad emotional business, in which one can easily feel a little dead, walking on…

In the Middle East war, every death on one side or the other, every heart-rending scene, every indefensible shooting becomes justification and ammunition for the extremes that sustain that horrible thing called fanaticism. There are too many wise men (learned…

7 August 2023, El Espectador This is a difficult moment for the government and for Colombia. Difficult for the president’s family and for the human being who wields power. Institutionalism will be key for democracy to endure without dying in…

It is catharsis and art to paint forgiveness, to carve it in stone or cast it in metal; but more difficult than sculpting marble is to carve the spirit and, after a tragedy, to dedicate oneself to work for the…