The plastic chairs in the campaign office always smelled faintly of cheap gasoline and stale coffee. It is a scent known to anyone who has ever tried to change a corner of Colombia from the ground up. You sit under the fluorescent lights, the heat of the Valle del Cauca pressing against the windows like a physical weight, and you fold paper.
To the outside world, democracy is an abstract concept. It is a series of percentages flashing on a television screen, a speech delivered from a bulletproof stage in Bogotá, or a headline buried in an international news feed. But on the streets of Cali, democracy is a stack of flyers. It is a young volunteer wearing a brightly colored vest, walking into a neighborhood where the wrong question can get you killed.
Two people went to work for a right-wing presidential campaign last week. They had names, families, and reasons for believing that their candidate held the key to the country's fractured future. They carried no weapons. They carried ideas, printed on glossy paper.
They never made it home for dinner.
Blood on the pavement is the oldest currency in Colombian politics. For decades, the act of campaigning has not been a debate; it has been a calculation of risk. When gunmen pulled the triggers, they were not just eliminating two campaign workers. They were sending a message to anyone else who dared to reach for a stapler or open a voter registration log. They were drawing a line in the dust, reminding the populace that power in the provinces is still negotiated with gunpowder.
The dry wire reports will tell you the dates, the political affiliation, and the body count. They will frame it as an incident, a spike in the volatile chart of a nation's electoral cycle. What they miss is the silence that follows. They miss the way a neighborhood holds its breath. They miss the sudden, terrifying weight of a campaign vest that suddenly feels like a bullseye.
Consider the anatomy of a political assassination in a country still wrestling with the ghosts of a sixty-year civil war. It rarely happens in the grand plazas. It happens in the blind spots of the state, where the police presence is thin and the local armed groups operate as judge, jury, and executioner. A motorcycle idles. A visor goes down. The world changes in three seconds.
For the candidate at the top of the ticket, the tragedy becomes a press release, a moment of silence, a rallying cry for more security. But for the remaining volunteers in the local office, the tragedy is an intimate horror. Do you show up tomorrow? Do you put on the hat? Do you walk down the same street where your friend’s blood has been washed away by the afternoon rain?
The temptation is to look at this through a purely ideological lens. The victims belonged to a right-wing movement, so the immediate reaction from commentators is to map the violence onto the familiar grid of left versus right. But that analysis is shallow. It ignores the deeper, more insidious reality of Colombian political violence. The bullets do not care about economic theory. The violence is structural, designed to enforce conformity and punish disruption, regardless of which side of the aisle the disruption comes from.
To understand the stakes, you have to look past the rhetoric of the candidates and look at the geography of the vote. In the urban centers, campaigning is digital, loud, and relatively safe. But as you move toward the margins—the barrios that cling to the hillsides, the rural municipalities where the shadow of the conflict never truly lifted—the terrain shifts. Here, politics is personal, tactical, and territorial. To campaign for an opposition candidate, or even a mainstream candidate challenging the local status quo, is an act of defiance.
The system is designed to exhaust the brave. It wears down the idealistic until only the cynical or the desperate remain. When a volunteer is killed, the loss is not just human; it is institutional. It chips away at the fragile belief that a ballot can replace a bullet. It tells the young person who wanted to organize a neighborhood meeting that their life is worth less than a politician's promise.
We often talk about the consolidation of peace as if it were a document signed in a European capital, a ceremonial pen scratching across parchment while dignitaries applaud. It is not. Peace is the ability to hand a piece of paper to a stranger without wondering if someone is watching you through a rearview mirror. It is the mundane, unglamorous freedom to disagree without becoming a statistic.
The flyers from that afternoon are still drifting through the streets of Cali, kicked along by the wind, gathering dirt in the gutters. The ink is dry. The promises printed on them remain unfulfilled. And in a small room with fluorescent lights, a group of people are looking at a stack of undistributed paper, trying to decide if the next name on the list will be their own.
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