After giving a speech about violence on San Andrés Island and inviting the community to write to me about what they are living, not to expose anyone, but to begin breaking the silence that has been growing around overpopulation, cultural erosion, and the violence affecting the Raizal people, messages began to arrive in ways I did not anticipate. Some emails were only a few lines long, others were carefully written as if every word carried risk, and some felt hesitant, almost apologetic, as if the person writing was still deciding whether it was safe to speak at all. I read every one of the 236 messages I received and answered them one by one, because behind each email, there was someone trying to make sense of fear. I chose to speak publicly about one, not because her story was the most dramatic, but because it carried the same feeling that appeared again and again across so many voices.

“I am afraid,” she wrote, and then added, “I am afraid of everything now.”

I will call her María. What she described was simple, almost restrained, and perhaps that is what made it so heavy. She spoke about seeing young boys carrying guns, shooting at each other, people running, and hiding, and confusion entering a place that had never lived like this before. She said that after that day, leaving her house no longer felt natural, something inside her shifted without warning, and what once felt safe began to feel uncertain. Like many Raizal people, she wrote with sadness and a quiet sense of hopelessness, because San Andrés had once been a territory where fear........

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