About

Julia Symmes Cobb is the Andean bureau chief for Reuters, based in Bogotá, where she leads a team of correspondents covering Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guayana, and Suriname

She has reported on four Colombian presidential elections, the 2016 peace accord with the FARC and the fragile processes that followed it, the ELN and the Clan del Golfo, the assassination of a presidential candidate, and the 2026 earthquake that killed hundreds in Cali. From Bogotá she has also covered Venezuela’s political transition and Ecuador’s descent into cartel violence. She has returned repeatedly to Colombia’s disappeared, from the forensic teams taking blood samples in provincial towns to the cemeteries where the unidentified were buried.

She is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. She is writing her first book, about Colombia’s disappeared, and lives in Bogotá with her husband and two cats.