Voting from Bogotá in 2004

We sent in our absentee ballots from Bogotá and crossed our fingers.

Then we watched the election results in a Colombian diplomat's beautiful apartment. We: me, my husband, all the American teachers we taught with, and the Colombian diplomat, who served us beautiful drinks and commiserated with us as the results came in. As they came in, it felt to us like something was ending—a belief in the kind of country we wanted to return to. 

In my class the next morning one of my 12-year-old students suggested Colombians should have been able to vote, too. "Because the American President will have an impact here," he said. This kid never turned in his homework, but he remains one of the smartest students I've ever taught.

In reality, the kind of country we wanted to return to never existed. At the time, in 2004, the American government had already been directing billions of dollars to the Colombian military for years, in a deal negotiated by Presidents Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana. Plan Colombia’s objective was to eradicate cocaine production and the FARC’s threat to the government, but diplomatic efforts and any of Pastrana’s so-called “investments in the social field” took a backseat to beefing up the armed forces. Now, decades later, experts say that while Plan Colombia did, indeed, help stabilize the government, the militarized war on drugs only succeeded in increasing violence in the country while spreading the cultivation, production, and trafficking of coca to other nations in the region. Much of the recent waves of migration to the United States stem, in part, from our country’s own “war on drugs”—and a legacy of financial support for dictatorships—throughout South and Central America.

In 2004, being in South America made our disappointment in the American elections both especially acute and distant. Acute because we were surrounded by a population more sharply aware of the U.S. government than most Americans we knew back home. Distant because those anti-war marches we’d gone to in Seattle not long before felt like a hopeful thing we might have dreamed about.

The summer after John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, I attended a college admissions conference in Cambridge, where I met two admissions officers from a small college in Maine. One white woman, one Black man, both in their twenties, like me. Meeting them made the election results apparent in a physical way. Over lunch one day, they described the sense of collective depression after Kerry lost to Bush. The woman demonstrated how everyone in their town walked around right after the election: bodies slumped, barely able to meet each other’s eyes. I was preparing to move to China, and I felt relieved, like I had escaped her fate. But in 2016, the first time Trump won, I thought of her collapsed posture. I experienced a change in my own body then, and I haven’t fully recovered.

A friend recently said to me, “Something was revealed to us in 2016.” He was right; something very particular about people we knew and lived with became alarmingly clear.

But the larger truth is that our country has been revealing itself to us all along.