Cross-border abortion in Colombia, gas shortages in India and daily life in Cuba
DISPATCH №63
Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you summaries of three compelling articles from media beyond the Anglosphere. It’s our way of helping us all read the world a little differently.
This week, we begin in Colombia, with a powerful piece on how Venezuelan women seeking abortions are crossing the border to access healthcare, and the challenges facing them when they get there.
From India, we have a reminder of the ongoing gas crisis – essential for cooking and heating – as a result of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
And from France, we have a piece of long-form reportage on the sanctions situation in Cuba, how it is affecting daily life and the challenges it poses for both Cuban society, and the regime which has ruled it since the 1950s.
Before we get to the summaries…
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…ok, back to this week’s summaries. Enjoy the read!
This side of the bridge
Venezuelan women cross into Colombia for abortions they cannot legally have at home, only to find that this “right” is not always easy to reach
In Venezuela, abortion remains a crime. In Colombia, since a landmark Constitutional Court ruling in 2022, it has been legal for up to 24 weeks. The distance between those two facts, measured in river crossings, missing documents, and hostile waiting rooms, is charted by a recent investigation by the feminist Colombian outlet, Volcánicas.
The piece opens not at the border but in a coastal Venezuelan city, where on February 5 this year, police raided a medical clinic and arrested a 69-year-old obstetrician allegedly mid-procedure. The doctor, Frank Peña, had delivered children for generations of local families. Dozens came out to defend him online and in the streets; one TikTok user described him as her gynaecologist for 26 years, through three pregnancies. The woman being treated at the time of the raid was transferred to another clinic. Official reports say her vital signs were stabilised. Whether she was ultimately able to make her own decision about her body is not recorded.
Absences – inadequate information, protection and recourse – are at the core of this article. Journalist Mariángela Urbina Castilla goes through the key elements of Venezuela’s crisis: a penal code that criminalises both the person who aborts and the person who performs the abortion; a healthcare system operating at a “fraction of its capacity” due to years of political and social crisis; a long-standing contraceptive shortage; and religious groups that have continued to accumulate political influence through each successive crisis. Magdymar León Torrealba, a clinical psychologist and director of Venezuela’s leading sexual education association, is clear about the consequences: criminalisation doesn’t prevent abortion, it silences it. Women internalise the fear of being judged, reported, or mistreated. They delay. They manage alone.
For many, travelling to Colombia is the response. That country’s 2022 legal ruling is explicit: all women on Colombian territory, regardless of nationality or immigration status, are entitled to a free, timely abortion through the health system. No documents required. No payment. No delay. According to organisations working with migrant women, the lived reality is different. They are asked for papers they don’t have. They are told to pay. They are shuffled between appointments and worn down until many simply give up. The Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres association (Table for Women’s Life and Health) has been by the side of two hundred women in this situation since 2022. Those are only the ones that managed to reach them in the first place.
Castilla follows four women through the maze. Victoria, a Venezuelan journalist living in Bogotá, was still breastfeeding her first child when she unintentionally fell pregnant a second time. She knew the law and she used it – she explicitly named the court ruling when a functionary tried to delay her access and was treated the same day. She was assigned at random to a doctor who wore a green handkerchief in her hair and had a sign on the wall that read: “You decide, I follow.” Victoria paid nothing. She is clear that in Venezuela, the same process would have been, in her words, “a nightmare”.
Yolima, a 25-year-old migrant from Venezuela and mother of three, was facing a fourth unwanted pregnancy with no support network or stable income. Frightened, she shared her story with some in her local community, and through the kindness of strangers the word spread. A health official made a referral. A rights’ monitor made calls. Costs – including transport, cost and accommodation -- were covered by local associations. As a result of such support, Yolima was able to access the care she needed with dignity. A spokesperson for one of the associations notes: “a trajectory of exclusion was transformed into a story of success and care”.
Only a bridge separates the border towns of Ipiales, Colombia, and Tulcán, Ecuador, where activist Yanni Ximena Caicedo has spent years building infrastructure to help women in need. It started with a Google search of what women in Ecuador might face. The results were, she says, terrifying: unsafe providers and fundamentalist misinformation. She is Catholic, an anthropologist, and known in her city as “Yanni, the abortion one.” After the 2022 ruling, she began crossing into Ecuador to spread the word of the new rights women were entitled to in Colombia. Ecuadorian women of means, she notes, come to Ipiales to terminate pregnancies discreetly, in hotels. Venezuelan migrant women are treated differently – not with gentle social condemnation but stigmatised as incapable of mothering anyway.
Tatiana Cordero, coordinator of the feminist organisation Mujer y Futuro in the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, rounds out the picture. She spent years navigating bureaucratic certification processes to register her organisation as a healthcare provider to help Venezuelan women becoming, in her own account, architect, engineer, and nurse. Now her organisation offers teleconsultations and sends medications by post, reaching women in Chocó, Medellín, and wherever else they are, up to ten weeks of gestation. Given the amount charged by local hospitals in the state of Santander to perform an abortion – 14 million pesos rather than a national average of five – it can make sense to fly women to Bogotá for treatment. “It’s a form of conscientious objection through pricing”, she says.
The article ends where it begins: at the border. On one side of this line, the right to abortion exists. On the other, it does not. In between, there are women who have spent years building the bridge; one body at a time, one decision at a time.
The original article ‘Del puente para acá abortas’ by Mariángela Urbina Castilla was published in Spanish by Volcánicas on March 16, 2026.
It is available here.
Volcánicas is an independent Colombian feminist journalism outlet founded in 2017 that specialises in gender, reproductive rights, and social justice reporting.
Summary by TMH
Running on empty
As war in the Middle East disrupts energy flows, millions of Indian households are left scrambling for gas
As Indian publication Khabar Lahariya reports, the ongoing conflict between the United States, Iran and Israel – specifically the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – has been wreaking havoc on the streets of India. A fall in imports has led to gas shortages, panic buying and, importantly, a run on gas cylinders – a source of portable energy which provides heating and cooking for millions.
[This isn’t the first time Translator has touched on this subject: Issue #1 contained a Street Talk from N’Djamena in Chad, where the search for a “bouteil” of gas constituted a daily grind for many of the city’s residents].
The consequences of all this can be fatal. Khabar Lahariya takes the case reported in the Indian Express of a seventy-year-old man in Uttar Pradesh, fabric worker Mukhtiyar Ahmed, who died complaining of chest pains after being forced to wait in line for an extended period. Elsewhere, in Punjab, sixty-six-year-old Bhushan Kumar arrived to pick up a gas cylinder early one morning, spent two hours in a queue, and collapsed.
The issue is not just supply shortages of gas itself, but the public response, and how others have been able to capitalise on the situation. Fear around being caught short has meant that people are booking gas cylinders ahead earlier in an attempt to get ahead, exacerbating the sense of shortage. Companies have taken to social media to try and calm the situation.
In some places, a black market has emerged, with LPG gas cylinders being sold at double or triple the normal price, cylinders being stockpiled and racketeers getting in on the action. In Mundka, West Delhi, police confiscated over six hundred cylinders being stored illegally. In the state of Madhya Pradesh Amar Ujala, another Hindi-language daily, reported on the formation of a special task force to uncover illegal storage. According to News 18, by mid-March, nearly five thousand raids had taken place in Uttar Pradesh.
It’s a salutary reminder that while many around the world may be tracking the oil price, interest rates or the share market, more immediate and tangible consequences are being felt throughout the world in terms of the ability to cook and heat themselves – and have been for weeks, without a clear end in sight.
The original article by Suchitra Hindi, ‘LPG Gas Cylinder Shortage: दिल्ली, यूपी और एमपी में एलपीजी गैस सिलेंडर की कालाबजारी शुरू और भारी मात्रा में गैस सिलेंडर जब्त’ was published in Hindi by Khabar Lahariya on March 17, 2026.
It is available here.
Khabar Lahariya is an independent, women-led Indian digital news organisation founded in 2002, originally as a print newspaper in Uttar Pradesh, offering fearless feminist journalism.
Summary by TMH
Special Period II
How Cuba is faring in its economic war with the US, and what it bodes for the future of the island’s regime
In this mix of reportage and analysis published a little earlier this year by the left-wing French publication Le Vent se Lève, journalists Vincent Ortiz and Pierre Lebret take us inside the worsening daily situation in Cuba, and the stresses it is placing both on society, and on the regime which has ruled the island since 1959.
Faced with an energy crisis prompted by the drying up of oil imports from Venezuela after the American intervention there, the government has issued an edict for the nation to “Do more with less”. “It’s what Cubans have been doing for decades”, an interviewee retorts. Inventiveness, adaptation: these have been watchwords for Cuban citizens trying to get by with what they have, what little they can purchase, or receive in direct support from the state.
In one of Havana’s working-class districts – the finca of Marianao – a retired schoolteacher reuses the water she has cooked her rice in to feed the plants. Coconuts serve multiple uses: the milk can be reused as skin cream, the husk can be mixed with a little bit of charcoal and paper (in this case, a few pages of the local Communist party newspaper) to make fire for cooking. State rations – the “libreta” – buy much less than they used to. School breakfasts have been cut. Rates of child mortality (historically one of the best in Latin America) have doubled since 2018, the article reports. A minister recently resigned after stating that Cuba had no beggars – a claim contradicted by daily evidence on the streets of Havana.
For some, the current situation recalls a version of the “special period” following the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its subsidies to the fraternal Cuban regime. [For a different take on this, read Abrahám Jiménez Enoa’s wonderful piece ‘The Hunter’ in Issue #1 of Translator, translated by Lily Meyer]. Ortiz and Lebret suggest that even those Cubans who oppose the current regime have a soft spot for Fidel Castro’s rule in the 1990s, when the Cuban regime managed to survive the Soviet collapse that proved fatal to most of the world’s other avowedly Communist states.
The election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela offered Cuba a lifeline, the article suggests – a lifeline that has now been cut. But there was another, trickier set of alliances that served the Cuban regime in that time. In a fascinating aside, the article looks at how the regime got around the American embargo – reinforced with the 1996 Helms-Burton Act – with the help of hyper-capitalist commodity traders (the article cites Vitol, Trafigura and Marc Rich) ready to run the risk of American ire in return for a handsome profit. For a while, instead of the USSR, Cuba’s lifeline was Vitol SA, a Switzerland-based company which bought and refined Cuban sugar in places as far away as Kyrgyzstan. A French bank operated on the island through its Channel Island affiliate.
Then things started to get trickier – not under Donald Trump, but under Barack Obama – with American authorities using the dollar by financial institutions around the world as a tool to get them to follow American rules. The article cites a French businessman whose French account was shut down for making a trivial €8.50 transfer to Cuba. Under the first Trump administration, the article explains, things tightened further, with little pushback from Europe. Under Trump II, Latin American countries have been forced to repatriate Cuban medical missions (a source of Cuban soft power and income) while tourism has become trickier.
Cuban businesses operate more freely than the Cuban state does (for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed it’s legal to export petrol to a private Cuban company, as long as it has no links to the state). But this, the article suggests, poses a different kind of ideological challenge. Le Vent se Lève speaks to a young Communist cadre: “America’s entrepreneurial mentality is seeping in, bit by bit”. The solidarist expressions she grew up with have become the subject of social media memes.
Marielisa, affirms her support for the regime’s “orthodoxy” and its talking points. Electricity cuts mean the streetlamps are out. On the other hand, “In which other Latin American capital could one walk home at night, in the dark, without being attacked at once?”, she asks. She fears liberalisation – but knows her position is a minority one.
The journalists attend a public meeting on the parlous state of Cuban healthcare. There’s real tension between fears of how liberalisation might change Cuban society, and the need to address growing shortages. “Things can’t go on like this”, one participant says. It’s a painful insight into a society struggling with the consequences of a burned-out economic system, amid a geopolitical environment that offers very little support.
The original article by Vincent Ortiz and Pierre Lebret, ‘La Havane, abandonnée face à l’embargo le plus dur de son histoire’ was published in French by Le Vent se Lève on March 8, 2026.
It is available here.
Le Vent se Lève is an avowedly left-wing progressive French publication operating since 2016, highly critical of what it terms the oligarchy in control of mainstream French media, in opposition to the ideological dominance of neo-liberalism, and in response to the success of the far-right in occupying the information space on social media.
Summary by CEM
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