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My Year of Fire and Blood

2019 was a wild ride for the world, for me it was bedlam

Joshua Collins
11 min readDec 31, 2019
Protesters in Quito, Ecuador celebrate victory after a 12-day battle in the streets in October (Photo: Joshua Collins)

I came into 2019 on the Colombian/Venezuelan border with a head full of LSD in the company of a stunningly beautiful woman in a red dress. Marcela was all dressed up to go dancing, but once we started drinking, we never managed to leave the house.

She was about to break my heart for the dozenth time. It was madness.

In retrospect, I can’t imagine a more fitting entrance into a year in which half the world caught on fire.

We drank till dawn. cracking jokes and dancing on the balcony before she fell asleep in my arms.

That morning seems as if it happened years ago.

Since then I’ve seen a failed revolution, riots in four countries, the inside of a Venezuelan interrogation cell, unimaginably breath-taking beach-side sunsets, dawn in the andean mountaintops, people shot, mad-max scenes of indigenous tribes fighting police with spears in the streets of Quito, watched a friend exiled from his country, toured neighborhoods run by narcos that the Colombian police won’t enter and walked hundreds of miles with penniless refugees.

That’s just the synopsis, there’s a lot more.

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Joshua Collins
Joshua Collins

Written by Joshua Collins

A reporter on immigration and world affairs, based in Cucuta, Colombia. Bylines at Al Jazeera, Caracas Chronicles, New Humanitarian and more

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