It’s a scene repeated across Colombia everyday: father and son return to the hearth, crossing the vale with mules and the fruits of their day’s work in the fields. The balancing of milk pails, the accompaniment of dogs, and a campesino’s thick ruana tells of the afternoon’s chill, as mist of the wetlands of the Central Cordillera begins to set in.
Social documentary photographer Carlos Pineda is no stranger to the life of campesinos, capturing pastoral moments with the faint light of day. Like other great photographers he is invisible, his eye non-invasive, his soul compassionate.
Pineda’s picture was captured in a place with a prophetic name for this newspaper, the Pa?ramo de letras, the Wetlands of Words.
The journey home across Colombia is long and winding, as this photo illustrates, much like our path to a possible peace.
The bilateral cease fire agreement signed by the government last month to silence the guns of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas may not lead to the peace many were expecting, but in a country blessed with so much, the road ahead now seems that much brighter, as some level of tranquility settles over the land.
