Colombia

Step onto a sidewalk in Medellín and you might see someone cut across four lanes of traffic, drop a wrapper without looking down, elbow past a line. Watch that same person descend into the Metro three minutes later and they queue. They fall silent. They offer their seat to a stranger who is older than they are. They treat a rolling steel box like a place of worship. Nothing about their character changed in the time it took to walk down the stairs. What changed was the story they were standing inside. …

My friend is Spanish. He was born in Toledo in the 1970s. He is not responsible for anything that happened in the Americas in the sixteenth century, and he knows this. What he did, over coffee one afternoon, was offer a symbolic apology — on behalf of something he did not do, on behalf of an institution that no longer exists in the form that did it, acting on orders issued by monarchs dead for four hundred years, which resulted in a catastrophe that reshaped the world I came from. …