Tag: Colombia

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10457 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-04-22 17:24:08 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-04-22 17:24:08 [post_content] =>

Diana Dajer on community, technology, and the radical work of democratic care.

In a world increasingly shaped by political violence, authoritarian reflexes, and digital harm, peacebuilding can feel abstract—or impossibly distant. But for Diana Dajer, peace is neither theoretical nor inevitable. It is something that must be built carefully, collectively, and often quietly, through democratic practice.

Currently, Dajer is manager of citizen participation with Fundación Corona, a non-profit based in Colombia. We met in Barcelona after Build Peace, an international gathering of practitioners working at the intersection of technology, conflict transformation, and civic life. Among many compelling presentations, Dajer’s stood out—not because it promised technological salvation, but because it insisted on something more demanding: deliberation, care, and faith in people.

From Conflict to Participation

Dajer’s path into democracy work began not with innovation labs or civic tech, but with the social disruption caused by violence and loss. As a lawyer, Dajer worked on human rights cases for victims of Colombia’s armed conflict early in her career. Later, she joined the Ministry of the Interior during peace negotiations with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement.

While there, she listened closely—to victims, civil society leaders, and government officials. What became clear was unsettling. Violence in Colombia was not only the result of armed actors, but of long-standing democratic exclusion. When local communities lacked meaningful ways to influence policy or solve local problems, violence became one of the few remaining channels for human agency—the capacity to shape their own lives.

“That’s when I understood,” Dajer says, “that participation is the real name of peace in Colombia.”

Rather than focus solely on peace after violence, she turned toward democracy itself: how it is built, who it includes, and how power is shared.

Technology for Care, Not Control

Years later, that commitment would take shape in Bogotá through a rare experiment: a multi-year effort to embed deliberative democratic processes inside city government. Working with the City Council and civil society partners, Dajer helped create a “laboratory of democracy” to test new ways of engaging citizens—especially in a political culture where protest had become the dominant form of participation.

“Protest is essential,” she says. “But when there is no dialogue with institutions, real solutions don’t happen.”

Bogotá’s leaders made a strategic choice to move incrementally. Rather than treating technology as a standalone tool for deliberation, they used it to solve specific process challenges in order to make participation more open, inclusive, and effective. Drawing on behavioral insights to encourage constructive engagement, the team launched a public communications campaign across social media. City Hall’s chatbot, Chatico, helped scale participatory budgeting and created a more transparent, inclusive channel for the civic lottery process. The city also relied on practical, digital tools, which included building websites to support hybrid citizen assemblies and bring in voices beyond those physically in the room. An educational course delivered through WhatsApp prepared participants in advance.

These early pilots evolved into a citywide deliberative process backed by Carlos Galán, a leader shaped by Colombia’s history of political violence. The aim was never speed or one-off spectacle, but trust—built gradually through structured listening and collective reasoning.

In Dajer’s work, technology is never the starting point. It is a tool, carefully chosen, subordinate to context. Used strategically, it can help narrow the distance between governing institutions and citizens, opening new possibilities while respecting its limits. But she emphasizes it should never be the destination.

This ethic traces back to her mentors in the global peacebuilding community, who taught her to ask first: What problem are we trying to solve? And just as importantly: Should technology be part of the solution at all?

Leading as a Woman—with Awareness and Solidarity

Leadership, for Dajer, has always been gendered. “It is more challenging than being a man,” she says without hesitation. Like many women in public life, she learned early to manage others’ perceptions—how she dressed, how she spoke, how authority was read onto her body.

But she is also careful to name her privilege: Gender does not operate alone. Race, class, indigeneity, and access compound exclusion in ways that shape who is heard and who is erased. Conscious of this, Dajer sees her role not just as a leader, but as a bridge—using her position to elevate other women who face even steeper barriers.

What has sustained her is community: women working together across civil society, refusing isolation. Feminist leadership, she believes, is collective by design.

Faith as a Source of Strength

What is less often visible in conversations about democracy and technology—but central to Dajer’s life—is faith.

When asked where she draws strength and clarity, she speaks not of ambition or certainty, but of prayer. One prayer, in particular, guides her: Make me an instrument of your peace.

“I don’t always know where I’ll be needed,” she says. “So I pray for openness. That I can serve—whether the work is big or small.”

Her faith is not about control or moral superiority. It is about humility, discernment, and love—qualities she sees as essential antidotes to polarization. In moments of exhaustion or fear, prayer is a way for her to realign with purpose, especially as she balances leadership with motherhood and family life.

Resisting Authoritarianism with Love and Hope

Dajer is clear-eyed about the global moment. Colombia, the United States, and many other democracies are experiencing renewed threats to the rule of law and separation of powers. For women living through these pressures, she begins with solidarity.

“I see you,” she says. “I see the burden.”

Her advice is strikingly feminist: Resist not only through opposition, but through care. Much of her current work focuses on narrative—how language shapes emotion, and how perceived chaos blends with fear-based messaging to fuel authoritarianism. Facts alone, she notes, rarely counter hate. What does are stories rooted in hope, love, and a shared future.

This extends to digital life. She urges mindfulness about what we consume and amplify online, recognizing how social media can trap us in cycles of rage. The alternative is not withdrawal, but grounding—deep human connection, empathy, and collective action offline as well as on.

Youth, the Future, and Feminist Democracy

Despite everything, Dajer is hopeful, especially about young people. Her organization, Fundación Corona, has shifted its strategy toward youth engagement, informed by research showing that future-oriented democratic narratives can reawaken belief in collective power.

When democracy is framed not as a failing legacy but as a tool to shape the future, young people also respond. Deliberative spaces—especially when designed with care—can help further transform this hope into action.

Building Peace Together

If there is one message Dajer offers to feminists working for democracy, it is this: Do not do this alone. Authoritarianism thrives on fragmentation. Peace, by contrast, is built through collaboration—across differences, across sectors, and across borders.

Agreeing on fundamentals is hard, and deliberation is slow. But isolation changes nothing.

For Dajer, the work continues—not as performance, or branding, but as service. As manager of civic participation at Fundación Corona, she remains guided by faith, sustained by solidarity, and grounded in care. Her work and ethos is a necessary reminder that democracy is not only a system. It is a practice. And women are already doing the work of keeping it alive.

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April 22, 2026August 3, 2026

The Long Arc of Peace Is Built by Women

by Lorelei Kelly

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_content] =>

Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.

The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach.

In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.

When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized.

To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.

The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance.

It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?”

It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?

Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces.

Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.

I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

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September 9, 2025August 3, 2026

Food is Meant to Be Touched

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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