OPENING

Colombia and Israel are rated the same risk level right now. I found that out this week, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

This issue is about what that actually means — not for the traveler the index was built for, but for you. We're getting into why the numbers you've been taught to trust were never measuring your actual question, what to look at instead, and a few resources this week that'll help you do the research the government isn't doing for you.

Let's get into it.

01. The Imagined Traveler
Every risk index has someone specific baked into its methodology, even when it claims to be neutral. Ours is a two-week tourist, probably white, probably not thinking twice about walking into a room alone. Once you see that person hiding inside the numbers, you can't unsee them — and you start asking what the index would look like if it were built for you instead.

02. The Data Gap Nobody Names
Most global safety and LGBTQ+ rankings are built on data that's denser in Europe and North America than almost anywhere else. Countries outside that zone get flattened into a rougher, less accurate score by default — not because they're actually less safe, but because fewer people bothered to measure them well. Layer race on top of that and the gap gets worse: almost none of these indexes were built with queer BIPOC experience in mind at all, so a country can score "safe" or "unsafe" without anyone ever checking what that number means for someone who looks like you.

03. Belonging Is a Different Question Than Safety
Safety asks "will something bad happen to me here." Belonging asks "will this place hold me." A country can score well on the first and fail you completely on the second — and the reverse is just as true. I've lived both versions, sometimes in the same month.

Colombia and Israel are rated the same right now.

Level 3. Reconsider travel. Same tier, same warning color, same government website. Israel — a country currently trading missile fire with Iran. And Colombia — the country I'm actually building toward, the one I'll be filing paperwork to live in permanently by the end of this year.

I'm not saying Colombia has no real risks. It does. But something is broken in a system that can't tell the difference between an active regional war and the reason my mom keeps texting me articles.

Here's what I think is actually happening. The index isn't lying. It's just built for somebody specific — a liability calculation for the traveler risk departments actually worry about. Picture her: a sorority girl on a two-week trip, someone whose safety is being modeled on homicide rate, terrorism risk, and whether police show up when something goes wrong. For her, the index might even be accurate.

That's just not the question I'm asking. My question is quieter and it took me a while to find the right word for it. It's not "am I safe." It's "do I belong here." Those are not the same question, and an index can only ever answer the first one.

Belonging shows up in places a risk score doesn't look. It shows up in whether men and women get to move through a country the same way — because they don't, anywhere, and pretending otherwise doesn't protect anyone. American machismo is what gets a lot of the "passport bros" headlines into trouble; the risk profile for a woman building a life alone is a different calculation entirely, and no single number covers both of us.

It shows up in a moment I still think about from the Dominican Republic. I was at a resort — mostly white, mostly older guests, and every staff member was Black. Somewhere in the middle of that trip the line between guest and staff just dissolved. Extra shots showed up at the table. We took pictures together. Later that night we left the resort — the casino, a club, five men I'd met four hours earlier, one glass of aguardiente going around the whole group, everybody half in Spanish and half in English, laughing about something that involved, I swear, a pet chicken. I'm from Virginia Beach. I had no business being that comfortable that fast. But I was. I've felt that same thing in the rough parts of Medellín, in Spanish I'd only been speaking for three months, and I've never once felt it walking into a room full of white women back home — not because those rooms are dangerous, but because they were never going to feel like mine.

In Peru, right now, the people don't look like me. I noticed immediately. But I feel more at home here than I ever did in Spain.

Peru knows something Spain doesn't, and you can taste it. Chifa — Peru's Chinese-Peruvian food, born from waves of Chinese immigrants who came here, adapted, intermarried, and built something new out of necessity — exists because this country has been figuring out how to survive and absorb outsiders for centuries. Spain was the one doing the colonizing. Peru was the one surviving it. That's a different inheritance, and it shows up in how a place treats you even when nobody there looks like you.

Belonging isn't just about seeing your own face reflected back. Sometimes it's about landing somewhere that knows what it means to be reshaped by history and made something worth eating, worth keeping, out of the wreckage. Spain, for all its charm, never gave me that. Peru did, without a single person here sharing my skin.

And that's the thing history tells you that a crime map never will. Countries that fought off conquistadors, that had their own revolutions, that had to figure out for themselves how to survive — they don't always look pretty on paper. But dammit if the people in them don't take care of each other. That's not sentimental. That's survival passed down as culture, and it's more predictive of how you'll be treated than a homicide rate will ever be.

So check the index. Know what you're walking into. But the real research starts after that — find people who share your specific identity and have actually lived where you're going, not visited it. Ask them the question the government will never ask: will I belong here, not just survive here.

I'd rather be in a room of queer BIPOC women in a "dangerous" country than a room of strangers in a safe one. That math doesn't show up on any list. But it's the only math that's ever actually mattered to me.

That's it for this one. If the Colombia/Israel stat got you as much as it got me, screenshot it and send it to someone who needs the reminder that the index in their head was never built for them.

Next week: where we found belonging, and where we didn't.

Until then — go find your own sources. Don't take mine, or anyone else's, as the whole picture.

Until Sunday —
Cam Redd · Sovereign Sundays · [email protected]

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