(Popayan, Cauca, Colombia. All names changed.)

By 6:30 a.m. the street smelled of caldo and diesel. On market days the municipality opened the Victim Services Office early, but the blue door stayed shut, paint peeling around the lock like dried petals. A line bent along the wall: women with plastic folders under their arms, a man with the brim of his hat pressed flat between his palms, two teenagers whispering over a cracked phone. Four soldiers lounged beneath the Yagrumo tree, rifles slung, boots dusty from the checkpoint at the bridge. Across the street, a white motorbike idled, its rider’s jacket stitched with the initials of the new group everyone called by an old name.

María stood halfway down the line, the folder pressed to her ribs. She had packed it the night before: copies of the tutela her niece helped her file, receipts from the health post, three photographs—one of the schoolyard with weeds around the swings, one of the broken pipe that left their block without water for six days, one of her husband, Diego, taken the year before he disappeared. The photograph made her uncomfortable in public; she kept it tucked behind the receipts, as if grief were a document, one produced only when strictly required.

“Hoy sí nos reciben” (today they will receive us), the woman in front of her said. She wore church shoes, dusted clean, and spoke like a person who had learned to approach institutions with optimism, or at least with volume. María nodded. She had risen before dawn to cook rice for her grandson, who still slept with the fan on low because the night heat lodged in the cement. On the way out she had checked the gate twice. The new pamphlets pasted on the electric pole warned of fines for those who “disrespected community order.” The fines had a bank account number.

At 7:05 the door opened and a municipal employee in a cream blouse stepped out. “Buenos días. We will receive cases of displacement and collective reparations first.” She held a clipboard like a shield. People pushed forward, not roughly, but with a shared urgency. The teenager with the cracked phone raised his hand. “Señorita, what about the complaint about the police coming into the courtyard without a warrant?” “That is not today’s topic,” the woman said, and her voice became very soft. “Please organise yourselves. The soldiers are here to support everyone’s security.”

From the Yagrumo tree, a soldier flicked his gaze up and down the line, bored and alert at once. The man with the flattened hat glanced toward the motorbike. When he looked back, he caught María’s eye and offered a half-smile. “If you speak softly,” he said under his breath, “they won’t hear.” He tilted his chin toward the rider across the street. “But they always hear.”

Inside, the office smelled of bleach and heat. Two plastic fans rattled on a filing cabinet. A poster on the wall announced the state’s commitment to guaranteeing rights in conflict-affected zones—photos of a ribbon cutting, hands stacked on hands. The cream-bloused clerk pointed to numbered chairs. “Please sit in order.” When it was María’s turn, she laid her folder on the desk. “Buenos días,” she began, formal, the way her mother had taught her to speak to authority. “I came to ask about repairs to the water line and the school roof. We sent petitions in April and June. The JAC made a list of priorities.”

The clerk nodded, pen hovering. “And your personal case?”

María’s thumb found the edge of Diego’s photograph. She did not take it out. “No. Today I’m here for the neighbourhood.” She slid forward the photograph of the pipe and the letter stamped by the JAC. The seal had blurred where rain had soaked through the envelope on the walk home from the last meeting. “The children are missing class when it rains,” she said. “And the girls don’t want to use the toilets because the doors don’t close.”

Behind her, voices rose, then quieted. Someone at the door was asking about the new “security tax,” whether the mayor’s office had approved it. The clerk’s pen paused. “Security tax?” she repeated without looking up. “I don’t know what you mean.”

María exhaled. “The contribution that the group asks for,” she said gently, choosing words that neither denied reality nor pinned it to the clerk’s page. “They left a notice on the shop door. They say the money is to keep the peace.” She did not say: they called it a contribution to “community order,” as if order were a church raffle. She did not say: a boy not much older than my grandson delivered the message with a politeness that made her furious.

The clerk’s face had the careful blankness of someone who understood more than she could say. “I will register your petition about the infrastructure,” she said. “There is a programme from Bogotá that may consider it. For the rest, I cannot—” She looked past María’s shoulder, toward the open door and the street beyond. “You know.”

“Yes,” María said. “We all know.”

On the way out, a man stopped her, the one with the flattened hat. “Compañera, are you part of the JAC?” She nodded. He pulled a folded paper from his pocket. “We’re organising a minga to fix the roof if the municipality delays again. But we’ll need permission.” He flicked his eyes toward the motorbike. “From everyone.”

“From everyone,” she repeated. When she reached the street, the rider had disappeared. In his place sat a crate of bananas, the kind that stains your fingers with sap. Two schoolgirls in uniforms adjusted their backpacks and skipped over a crack in the pavement that looked like a river on a map.

At noon, the sun pressed hard. María walked home along the edge of the football pitch where the new group had hung a banner announcing a “community celebration” for next week. There would be music and prizes for good citizens. Last month, the mayor had spoken from a small stage beneath the same banner, promising to “recover the presence of the state” with a new patrol schedule and a pilot programme for youth. After the speech, the mayor introduced the “Committee for Civic Coexistence”—five men and one woman seated behind a table in plastic chairs. Everyone clapped. Later that night, three boys were stopped on the road and lectured about curfews by voices that did not announce their titles.

At home, María placed her folder on the table and boiled water for coffee that tasted faintly of metal from the new kettle. On the radio, the announcer read headlines from the capital: something about reforms, something about negotiations. She thought of the soldier under the Yagrumo tree, the clerk’s soft voice, the rider, the teenagers, the hat brim kept flat so the wind would not catch it on the walk home. She took Diego’s photograph from the folder and set it upright against the sugar jar. The eyes, once too sharp to look at, had softened with the years, as if the paper had learned mercy.

In the afternoon she would go to the JAC meeting. They would argue about the minga, about asking “permission,” about whether asking for permission was a kind of capitulation or a way to protect the boys who would climb the school roof. They would draft another letter and decide who would deliver it to the blue door, and who would deliver the other copy to another door that had no paint at all.

For now, she rinsed the coffee cup and wiped the table. She folded the folder closed, then opened it again to check that every page was still in order. On the corner of the photograph she wrote, in small, neat letters, “Para trámites, pero también para la memoria.” For procedures, but also for memory.