From Colombia to Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua:
Reflections on Travel, Memory, Inequality, Resistance, and the Human Condition
Travel is not always a geographical movement from one country to another. Sometimes, it becomes a psychological, historical, and social process—one that compels a person to cross not only political borders, but also the invisible borders within themselves.
In such journeys, one encounters more than landscapes, cities, and cultures. One encounters forgotten memories, unresolved grief, old wounds, and questions that have remained unanswered for decades.
This journey began in South America and moved through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua before returning once again to Panama. Yet what unfolded was far more than tourism. It became an informal field study of societies, historical memory, inequality, resilience, and the contemporary human condition in parts of Latin America—a region shaped by colonialism, foreign intervention, dictatorship, revolution, poverty, resistance, and enduring aspirations for justice.
Travel as an Encounter with Contradictions
One of the first realities that emerges across Latin America is contradiction.
The contrast between wealth and poverty.
Between globalisation and exclusion.
Between expanding infrastructure and persistent social inequality.
Throughout the journey, modern airports, luxury hotels, and international business districts often stood only a short distance away from communities where people continue to live with limited access to essential resources.
Such observations raise an uncomfortable question:
Can development without social justice become merely a more sophisticated reproduction of inequality?
Colombia: Between Historical Violence and the Reconstruction of Hope
Colombia has endured decades of internal conflict, armed groups, narcotics-related violence, and external political pressures. Yet everyday life in many cities remains remarkably vibrant, culturally rich, and sustained by subtle forms of collective endurance.
Among ordinary people, one senses what might be called the normalisation of suffering—a society that has learned how to carry historical trauma while continuing to live.
From a social psychology perspective, this reflects a form of collective resilience.
Yet resilience does not necessarily mean healing.
Sometimes resilience simply means survival.
Panama: Geography, Capital, and the Architecture of Power
Panama represents an extraordinary intersection between geography and global capital.
The Panama Canal is more than a shipping route. It is an emblem of power within the international economic system—a passage through which enormous volumes of wealth, commodities, and strategic interests circulate.
Yet an important question remains:
To what extent does geopolitical significance translate into broadly distributed social prosperity?
In Panama City, the contrast between financial districts, high-rise towers, and economically marginalised areas is often striking.
It offers a compressed image of contemporary global capitalism:
The accumulation of wealth alongside the persistence of poverty.
Yet Panama is not only skyscrapers and commerce.
In certain regions, time appears suspended. Some communities evoke the atmosphere of decades past, while in isolated areas limited healthcare access and underdeveloped infrastructure raise further questions:
Does national development necessarily mean equal development?
And do peripheral communities bear the cost of progress concentrated elsewhere?
Costa Rica: An Alternative Model of Development
Costa Rica presents a markedly different trajectory within Central America.
Its historic decision to abolish the military and invest instead in education, healthcare, and environmental protection created an alternative model of state-building.
This experience invites reflection:
If a society can achieve relative stability without prioritising militarisation, perhaps conventional assumptions about security deserve reconsideration.
Yet even within Costa Rica, poverty remains visible. Development rarely arrives without contradictions.
Nicaragua: Revolution, Memory, and the Complexity of History
Perhaps the most profound encounter during this journey occurred in Nicaragua—particularly in León.
León is not simply a city.
It is a living archive of memory.
For many, the Sandinista Revolution symbolised resistance against dictatorship and imperial domination. Yet, like many revolutions, time introduces difficult questions:
How do liberation movements transform after gaining power?
How are ideals of justice reshaped within state institutions?
Can revolutionary projects remain immune to the erosion that accompanies authority?
Visiting prisons, museums, and speaking with individuals who directly experienced these historical processes reveals something important:
History never fully belongs to the past.
It continues to live within people.
Despite visible poverty, Nicaragua also demonstrates attempts to provide public services, educational opportunities, and healthcare access—legacies connected, in part, to political choices shaped by the Sandinista period.
Such realities resist simplistic narratives.
When Public History Meets Personal Memory
This journey was not solely an encounter with Latin American history.
At times, Latin America’s past intersected with my own.
Decades ago, behind prison walls in Iran, news of the Nicaraguan Revolution arrived through newspapers.
Years later, standing in Nicaragua itself, memory returned differently.
In such moments, the boundaries between past and present become uncertain.
History ceases to be abstract.
It becomes personal.
Grief, Travel, and the Search for Meaning
This journey also unfolded during a period of mourning—the loss of my mother.
Psychologically, travel after bereavement can serve contradictory purposes:
Escape.
Or the search for meaning.
Perhaps both.
Writing continuously about people, cities, memories, and encounters suggested something deeper:
For some individuals, writing is not simply documentation.
It is a form of psychological resistance.
A way of surviving.
Ordinary People, Unrecorded Histories
The most important encounters often did not occur in museums or historical sites.
They occurred among restaurant workers.
Drivers.
Women carrying invisible burdens.
People living with disabilities.
Former revolutionaries.
Local residents whose names may never appear in official history.
Yet history itself is frequently built upon the shoulders of those whose stories remain unrecorded.
Conclusion: Travel as a Return to the Self
After crossing multiple borders, histories, and cultures, perhaps the most significant discovery is this:
No matter how far a person travels, eventually they encounter themselves.
Their fears.
Their losses.
Their hopes.
Their memories.
Perhaps this journey was less about discovering Latin America and more about revisiting a self shaped by imprisonment, exile, migration, grief, and struggle.
And perhaps writing, in the end, is simply another way of remaining alive.
Nasser Kamali
Panama — End of a Central American Journey, Return to London
May 2026
Colombia
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