Two journalists, old acquaintances, sit down to eat pizza with a famous writer and a Colombian peace commissioner who are traveling to Ukraine for a war they have been immersed in for years, one because she is indigenous, the other because she has been covering this conflict for three years. They are sitting on the terrace of a restaurant in Kramatorsk when a missile hits the place and one of them is seriously injured and then dies. Immediately, we learn that the famous writer survived and that he will publish a book about this experience, clearly horrible, but ephemeral.
The name of the Colombian who survives does not appear much in the newspapers. They mainly call to put the famous person on the phone. The conscientious journalistic work he has carried out since moving to kyiv is also not revealed in broad daylight. “All war experiences are valid and worth recounting, but I prefer to tell mine little by little and focus on the real mourners,” he says of the fateful attack.
This is perhaps the great virtue of Catalina Gómez Ángel. It’s not the adrenaline of the correspondent screaming amid bullets that pushes her to be where she is, and even less what earned her the first Daniel Beriain International Conflict Journalism Prize, an award she received a few weeks ago in Artajona, Spain, and whose name highlights the big difference between being a war correspondent and a conflict journalist. “I am interested in the history, context, culture of a country and the nature of the political framework – which is often the sum of many conflicts – but I am most interested in ordinary people and their daily lives. »
At 32 years old and after writing a thesis on Iran to obtain his master’s degree in International Relations, The country (as his friends call him) visited this country as a tourist. Two years later, he obtained all the permits to study Farsi in Tehran, until in 2011 he managed to stay completely. There, he met Kaveh Kazimi, who was his partner for almost two decades, and began to look at “the veil revolution” with different eyes when he formed a close relationship with his mother-in-law, Janume Gol (Mrs. Flower, in Farsi). “Real resistance is more of a long-distance race than a hundred-meter race. It manifests itself in courageous acts like that of my mother-in-law, who took the risk, every March 21, of organizing a party in her garden to celebrate the Persian New Year in the country. sizdah bedardancing, drinking and dressing in complete freedom, unlike all these orders, like that of the veil, which seem so subtle and which, added together, make everyone feel caught in a straitjacket.
Thus, in the daily struggle of ordinary people, Gómez began to better understand the Middle East conflict. He has traveled to tell stories about Egypt, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Gaza, Nepal, Syria and Iraq. “I started writing a blog for a magazine Week and soon I was publishing on Time; The worldfrom Madrid, and The Avant-garde, from Barcelona, until I started developing audiovisual and radio formats for RCN and France 24.”
And it’s not that the proposals fall into his lap out of nowhere. Despite this beautiful phrase from journalist Robert Capa, who ironically said that the dream of every war correspondent was to lose his job, Gómez looked for a way to sell his stories, often without success, despite the situations that arose, because he preferred freedom to stability. She found this not so much financially as in the breaks she took to take a break with Kaveh in a cabin opposite Damavand, a snow-capped volcano that marks the highest point in the Elbourz Mountains, or to escape to Rome to visit her best friend, also the writer Marta Orrantia.
Years later, and a week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, Gómez began covering the conflict, which gave him a real and substantial perspective on what is happening in Eastern Europe. “The documentary that I made for Caracol and that we released a few weeks ago, about the Colombians who were on the Ukrainian front, gave me a great perspective on the conflict in my own country. Beyond the fact that the final cut is not my favorite, the experience raised my awareness and made me question the way we demean work and skill soldiers in Colombia.” She can also attest to what it’s like to fight the battle day by day and not feel like there’s strong support behind her. “I feel exhausted when the media asks for more for less, pressures me, or wants me to become Wonder Woman.”
Although Gómez honors the work of a war correspondent, it is clear that his thing is not to shout into a microphone in the middle of a bombardment, as if the feat were to seek personal recognition instead of giving voice to the real protagonists. “My job is to sit and listen to an interviewee for hours, not to extract one complete or a quote, but to understand their lives.” Sometimes what matters most to him is not the situation, but the transformation he sees when, months or years later, he hears about them again or visits them. “Remembering the conversation about cinema I had with the 25-year-old Kurdish commander, then seeing his photo because she fell in combat, or meeting again the local driver or producer who now has a son, is what allows me to see the nuances and the mutation of the conflict. Of course, there are moments when you grit your teeth and the driver says shut up and steps on the accelerator, but I’m not just covering clashes, but war in all its complexity.”
Today, Gómez is based in the Ukrainian capital, but constantly travels to combat zones. “Before, when driving through red zones to reach stabilization zones where soldiers arrived to receive medical treatment in makeshift operating rooms set up in bunkers, the driver would turn on music at full volume so as not to be frightened by the sounds of artillery or explosions.” Now, with the rise of drones, they prefer to travel at dusk and in complete silence to be attentive to the slightest buzz, even if the roads are covered with a sort of dome made of fishing nets that prevent these deadly machines from flying overhead. “The light at that time darkens the silhouettes and confuses the drones.”
Although she was not fascinated by the fact that she could have been the one who was murdered in that kyiv pizzeria, she accepted psychological assistance from the Foundation of Women Journalists to prevent post-traumatic stress, after the explosion in which her friend Victoria died. “I thought I was okay, but I realized I needed help before things started.” After so many years in the midst of conflict, it is now a learned reaction to lie down on the ground and cover your head at the slightest loud noise. “Being sensitive to these sounds is not an exaggeration, it is a duty. I have never taken it as a game.”
While building the dream of making a feature film with a more personal tone about the transformation of Iran over the last two decades, Gómez remembers this freedom that being her own boss gave her and that even her mother did not restrict her when she came to spend a few days with her family in her native Pereira, before going to participate in one of the already countless Hay Festivals in which she participated.
Now that his name resonates because he received an international award, certain media that once rejected his work are paradoxically those that applaud him the most. But that doesn’t matter to her, because it’s calling her father, who she almost always misses more than she needs to. Even though his mother is no longer there and has never congratulated him for his work, it is he to whom he reports all his personal struggles.
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