Timothy Pratt on his experiences of voting in Colombia, the right to vote and how, in some parts of the world, casting your ballot is an act of courage

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.

On Nov. 2 two years ago, I remember squeezing my then-7-year-old son Jesse's hand a little tighter before casting my vote at the Green Valley Library.

I was embarrassed to find myself crying.

It's a cliche, or maybe a song, but you don't know what you've got until it's gone, and it was my first time casting a vote on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

An unplanned mix of feelings assaulted me in that moment, and they returned Tuesday.

The feelings rode on a wave of memories of election days in Colombia, the place of birth of half my household and where we came from when we moved to Las Vegas in 2001.

It's hard for most people in the United States to imagine the contrast between how Election Day unfolds here and how it did five years ago in places such as Colombia, where choosing your political destiny is inseparable from internecine, horrific violence.

In Colombia, for me it meant pumping up the volume on an already near-deafening inner voice of fear.

It meant trying to read the impossibly cryptic tea leaves that three rogue armies and two drug cartels would leave for an entire nation to see: Where would the bombs blow up? And when?

Votes cast on issues like extraditing cocaine barons to the United States meant someone would get killed in your neighborhood, or nearby.

To make matters worse, and more surreal, the period before and after Election Day was always under dry law, meaning no liquor could be sold - in the open.

Which somehow was always treated as an excuse to stock up, or, if you knew the corner-store owner, which you do in most Colombian neighborhoods, all you had to do was knock, and thus gain entry to a closed-door, all-day party.

So besides getting in the way of a bomb on the way to the polls, you could also run into a drunken pistolero shooting into the air, driving home his position, whether liberal or conservador.

And sometimes, a liberal would shoot at a conservador. Or vice versa.

In fact, before the era of drug barons and guerrilla armies, Colombia during the 1950s was locked in a period known simply as la violencia, a drawn-out nationwide bloodbath between members of the two main political parties.

More than 200,000 people died, ostensibly because of how they voted, or intended to vote.

As I pulled up to the library to cast my vote Tuesday, news of another election came across the radio. Early results seemed to show that Daniel Ortega, who 26 years earlier led a Marxist guerrilla coup, was the new president of Nicaragua. I had also filed reports from that country, another place on the map where choosing leaders has not been without bloodshed.

I stepped out of my car onto tiny, yellowing leaves under a wide, blue sky with thin clouds. The polling place was calm and orderly.

I was sad that millions of children like Jesse were still growing up with violence in Cali, the city where he was born, and other cities around the world, regardless of whether they live under a system called democracy, as is the case with Colombia.

I wished I could explain it all to him, and his little brother, Dylan, who was born in Henderson shortly after we came here.

The violence. Politics. Elections. Democracy.

I was also excited by being able to decide something important, or at least have a voice. A vote.