Colombian Citizenship

Reg · November 1, 2026, 7:43am

I became a Colombian citizen.

One day, I just looked in the mirror and asked, are you doing this shit or not, Reggie? Or are you going to keep up the expat cosplay for a few more years? A few more years of waffling. A few more years of lying to yourself that it’s just as good to renew the R visa when it expires. Is that really who you want to be?

It wasn’t. I did it. It wasn’t easy. It took years. This was my journey.

First, a bit about who I am, or more specifically, who I’m not. I am not an influencer or a content creator or a travel writer. I see YouTube videos from some guy on his second trip who is now proclaiming himself an expert, sharing his wisdom and insights, and I feel contempt. I meet some old expat who has lived quietly in El Centro de Medellín for 20 years and knows all his neighbours and I feel respect. From what I can see, most expat content is produced by Instagram heroes who took three trips on tourist stamps and then ran when they saw the online forms for a visa were all in Spanish.

This is not that.

This is a first-person account from a guy who went through the actual Colombian naturalization process: application, delays, document requests, translations, radicados, approval, oath, and then finally the Cédula de Ciudadanía and Colombian passport, the last two still in process as of this writing. This document will be updated as things unfold. The master copy link is in the footer.

I am not claiming to be the final authority on Colombia or even a particularly good authority on Colombia. I am not saying your journey will be the same if you try to do this yourself. I am saying I walked this specific road myself, and this is what I encountered on my way. If that’s of value to you, read on.

Why Colombia Mattered Enough to Do This

Why? Honestly, Isa. My wife of the last decade. Neither of us has been perfect and we’ve both made our share of mistakes, but after ten years we’re both pretty clear that we’re in it for the long haul together.

As with any Colombiana, her family is part of the package, but, unlike most Colombianas, she has the good sense to not be too close to them. This suits me extremely well. I like some of them, but others are toxic, and yet others are as weird as hell and I want no part of them.

Isa and I lived for four years in the little pueblo of Mosquera, not far from Bogotá, and then for two years in Bello, just outside of Medellín. We survived each getting Covid, my two surgeries in Colombia, her thyroid cancer in Canada, economic turmoil in my business, and plenty of bad decisions along the way from both of us. By the end of it all, Colombia was just part of me. It felt wrong to not be a citizen. Like I was lying to myself about what this really is because I wanted to keep one foot out the door. I’ve quit lying to myself. Colombia is in my blood.

The Criteria

You don’t fly into Colombia and apply for citizenship. You climb a ladder with three rungs, and each rung has its own clock. There are no shortcuts.

Rung one: the M visa. M is for migrante. It’s the visa you get when you have a real reason to be in Colombia for more than a vacation: a Colombian spouse or partner, a job, a business, a pension, a property. Mine came through my relationship with Isa. The M visa is good for up to three years at a time, and its only job in this story is to start the clock for the next rung.

Rung two: the R visa. R is for residente, and this is the one that matters. You get it by accumulating time on an M visa: two continuous years if your M visa was as the spouse or permanent partner of a Colombian, five if it was anything else. Mine was issued in Bogotá in November 2020. The R visa is the permanent residency, and for most expats it is where the story ends. It’s good, it’s renewable, and it lets you put the decision off forever. I waffled on it for years.

Rung three: citizenship. Here are the rules, as they stood when I went through it, taken from Ley 2332 de 2023 and the Cancillería’s own pages and boiled down to what actually matters. The law changed on 25 September 2023, four months before I applied. My own application letter cited the old law. Nobody cared.

You need the R visa, and the clock starts the day it was issued. Not the day you arrived in Colombia, not the day you got your M visa. The day the R visa was stamped.
Five years of continuous domicile on the R visa. Two years if you are married to or the compañero permanente of a Colombian, or have Colombian kids, or come from a country that gives Colombians the same deal (Spain). One year if you were born in Latin America or the Caribbean. I was in the two-year lane because of Isa.
Continuous means continuous. Leave the country for a year or more and the clock resets. This rule is the reason I flew back to Colombia in August 2026 even though the carta had already been signed. I wasn’t going to find out the hard way whether the rule applied after approval.
The paperwork. A signed letter to the Minister saying who you are and why you want this. Copies of your R visa, your cédula de extranjería and your passport. A birth certificate that shows exactly where and when you were born, translated into Spanish if it isn’t already. Proof of how you make a living. Proof of the marriage or union if that’s your lane. And a line in your letter authorizing the Ministry to pull your tax and confidential records. Your cédula and passport have to stay valid the whole time, which can be years.
The fee. COP 700,000 in 2024, paid online when I filed. About CAD 250. The cheapest part of the whole thing by far.
The exam. The Constitution, national history, culture and geography, in Spanish, plus a Spanish test if Spanish isn’t your first language. You get two tries, six months apart. I’m not sure what happens if you flunk both, and have no desire to find out. You are exempt if you are over sixty, if you finished high school or university in Colombia, if you have a cognitive disability, or if you belong to an indigenous community on the border. Having a foreign degree recognized in Colombia doesn’t get you out of it. I started this process when I was fifty-eight, knowing I’d be over sixty when it completed. I’m sixty-one as I write this.
An interview, maybe. The law says the Ministry can call you in. It never called me.
It’s discretionary. This is the part people miss. Meeting every criterion gets your file read, not approved. The law says naturalization is a sovereign and discretionary decision of the President, delegated to the Foreign Minister. There is no appeal to fairness. You ask, and they decide.
You keep your old passport. Colombia doesn’t make you renounce anything. I am as Canadian today as I was the day before the oath.
Then the oath. Approval comes as a Carta de Naturaleza. It isn’t citizenship yet. You have six months to swear the oath in person before the mayor’s office of the municipio where you live, and if you miss that window the carta dies. Then, and only then, you are Colombian, and you can go get a cédula and a passport.

That’s the list. It fits on a page. The years are the hard part, not the list.

The Full Timeline

This is the part I wish someone had shown me before I started. Not the law, not the list of documents, but what actually happened, in order, with dates. Two years and nine months from filing to oath, and most of that was silence. If you are in the middle of your own silence right now, this is what it looked like from inside mine.

Before 2024: The Groundwork

Living in Colombia. Six years living in Colombia: four in Mosquera, near Bogotá, then two in Hacienda Niquía, Bello, on the edge of Medellín. Covid happened in the middle of it, and it changed how I felt about being a foreigner there. More on that below.
The First M visa. Isa and I had been together for several years, and after we got married, I applied for the M visa. I got that first visa in 2017.
The First R visa. Visa R, residente, issued in Bogotá on 17 November 2020. Permanent residency. The citizenship clock started that day, though I didn’t know it yet.

2024: Filing, Then Nothing

18 January, 2024. Filed the application in the Ministry’s online filing system, SITAC, and paid the fee the same day. COP 700,000. The letter cited the old law, Ley 43 de 1993, which had been replaced four months earlier. Nobody ever mentioned it.
9 May, 2024. Isa wrote to ask what was happening with the file. Four months in and we had heard nothing.
14 May, 2024. The Ministry’s service centre wrote back: naturalization is discretionary, and here is the link to the status portal. That was the whole answer. It was also, I would learn, the normal answer.
2 July, 2024. Wrote to Manuel Lozano, an acquaintance of Isa’s at the Consulado en Vancouver, and asked him to find out what was going on. This is the thing about consulates that nobody tells you: they can ask questions on your behalf that you cannot ask yourself.
18 July, 2024. Manuel forwarded the official response from the GIT de Naturalización in Bogotá. The file was alive and in the queue.
29 July, 2024. While I had the consulate’s attention, got the visa R transferred into my new Canadian passport. Keeping the visa and the cédula valid during the process is a requirement, not a nicety.
6 August, 2024. New cédula de extranjería issued, valid to 2029. This had nothing to do with my citizenship application. Some law changed and they made me renew early, but it was good luck as my cédula would’ve expired if this hadn’t happened.

2025: The Requirements

November 2024 to July 2025. The Malaysian birth certificate. This was its own drama. I was born in Malaysia, but the race riots of 1969 prompted my Christian parents to leave when I was four years old. Many of my relatives stayed and were fine, but my parents didn’t want to live in a Muslim country and Canada was accepting applications. Long before my first day in school, I landed in Vancouver, Canada, the only country I had ever called home. My Malaysian birth never really caused me problems until Colombia required me to provide a recent official birth certificate (issued within 6 months of the application). I knew nobody in Malaysia. I contacted some distant relatives but none of them responded (although they all like my Facebook posts within a few minutes). I honestly thought my Colombian citizenship dream might die here, but I found a way, got the certificate, and brought it on my next trip to Colombia for official translation.
11 to 14 February, 2025. Got my RUT, the Colombian tax registration, with Alejandra, my contadora (accountant) doing the legwork. The Ministry pulls your tax record, so you want one to exist.
25 April, 2025. The application was marked REQUERIDA, which means the Ministry needs documents from you. The Ministry wanted two things within six months: a translated passport data page, and a translated birth certificate. The birth certificate was already in hand by then, which is the only reason this was a letter and not a crisis.
25 to 28 July, 2025. Tania Kerrigan, a certified translator in Bucaramanga, did the translation of my passport and the rest of the required documents. The birth certificate had already been translated once in Malaysia, and now a Colombian translator was certifying it again. I submitted the lot in July 2025, hoping the Ministry wouldn’t balk at a document that had been through two translators. It didn’t.
2 September, 2025. Migración Colombia asked for copies of every passport, every visa and the cédula, all in one PDF. I sent it the next day. When a Colombian official asks for something, give them the answer the same day or the next, in exactly the format requested. Nothing else works.

2026 January-August: The File Disappears, Then the Carta Appears

24 April, 2026. I had been checking my application status weekly since September of the previous year. It always showed “In Process”. Then suddenly, on 24 April, 2026, my application number was no longer visible in the system. No notice, no email. It had simply gone. Filed an inquiry and got a radicado, the Ministry’s filing number for a request: 1770268-CO.
2 May, 2026. The Ministry acknowledged the inquiry and passed it to the competent internal group. The file wasn’t lost. The system had been changed and it had fallen out of view.
5 May, 2026. At the request of Migración Colombia, I sent an updated copy of the cédula de extranjería to replace the expired one on file, radicado 1784519-CO. Receipt confirmed 13 May.
17 June, 2026. I received official notification of the Carta de Naturaleza No. 373 of 2026, dated 10 June and signed in Bogotá. They requested an acknowledgement and I replied the same day confirming I had read it and agreed. The Ministry acknowledged the next day. I was very, very close. The carta isn’t citizenship until you swear the oath, and the oath happens at the mayor’s office of your municipio, in person, within six months.
31 July, 2026. Asked the Ministry how the oath would be arranged. Answer: the carta would be sent to the Alcaldía de Bello in the second week of August, and Bello would schedule it.
9 August, 2026. Flew to Colombia on short notice to make sure I had not been out of the country for a year. The carta was signed, but I wasn’t going to test whether the continuity rule still applied. It was the most expensive visa run I had ever done. Short notice international flights out of Canada aren’t cheap, but I wasn’t going to mess this up on a technicality after coming this far.
20 August, 2026. The Ministry notified Bello. Shit started getting real.

2026 September-October: The Oath

4 September, 2026. Bello’s Secretaría Jurídica, in the person of a guy I will never forget, let’s call him Jorge (not his real name), sent a memorando asking for four documents before scheduling: cédula, passport, the resolution, and a constancia de vecindad from the local Inspección de Policía. The first three I had. The fourth is a certificate that says you live where you say you live, issued in person by an office in Bello, and I was in Canada.
6 to 9 September, 2026. First plan: I tried to get a family member in Bello to fetch the constancia for me. That fell through. Two days of calling the alcaldía’s number went unanswered. The constancia was not going to happen.
11 September, 2026. Emailed Jorge the three documents I had and, for the fourth, offered to swear a declaration before the Colombian Consul in Vancouver that Bello was my home and I was temporarily abroad. He replied within hours: the oath could be scheduled for the end of October, the original carta was at his office waiting for me, and he needed something certifying my time in Colombia. I replied the same day with exactly what I would do and bring, and proposed 26 to 30 October. He confirmed that afternoon: 28 October, 4:00 pm.
15 September, 2026. Flights booked, Vancouver to Bogotá via Toronto, out 25 October and back 31 October. Every trip for two to Colombia from Vancouver is about five thousand dollars, so I did not book until there was a date in writing.
17 September, 2026. Signed the declaration at the Consulado General in Vancouver, before the Cónsul General: six years in Colombia, the last two in Hacienda Niquía, Bello is my home, I am in Canada, I will appear on 28 October. Sent the scan to Jorge the same day and confirmed I would be there. He replied back immediately, “Confirmo”.
25 to 31 October, 2026. Took an Uber to YVR and boarded a big Air Canada jet. Vancouver, Toronto, Bogotá, Medellín, Bucaramanga, and then back to Bogotá, Toronto, and Vancouver. Entered Colombia as a foreigner for the last time. Shit was now extremely real.
28 October, 2026. The Carta de Naturaleza. I will remember this day until the day I die. Isa and I arrived at the Secretaría Jurídica of the Alcaldía de Bello, just outside Medellín. Jorge wasn’t there. He was in Santa Elena. Yes, this is the guy who replied with “Confirmo”. The lady there, an angel named Sara, looked at the Confirmo email and escalated to another angel named Manuela who listened to me explain that we had flown in from Canada to do this and I had confirmation down to the exact documents I would be bringing, and this guy wasn’t even in the right city. She started the application again from scratch, did all the things Jorge failed to do, and sent a third angel named William to get the Mayor’s signature at 6 pm, presumably at her home. Jorge was supposed to have arranged a solemn ceremony where I would swear allegiance to Colombia. Instead, at about 6:30 pm, in a tiny office in Bello with chairs and unused furniture stacked on one side, I raised my right hand and said, “Sí, juro”, and Sara handed me my Carta de Naturaleza and declared me a Citizen of the Republic of Colombia. It was the most beautiful ceremony of my life, aside from my wedding. We then bolted from Bello to Rionegro (opposite ends of Medellín) and somehow made our flight to Bucaramanga.
29 October, 2026. The Contraseña, which lets you get your Cédula de Ciudadanía. The Registraduría in Bucaramanga said the contraseña for a first cédula takes three business days and the card is collected where it was requested. I had two days left. They told me I could do it from Vancouver and I adopted that plan.
30 October, 2026. Woke up, changed my mind, and went back to the Registraduría anyway, for the hell of it. This time I caught the same lady in a better mood and she called Bogotá to fix a system problem, got my application expedited, and sent me the contraseña by email while I stood there. Same office, one day apart, opposite answers. I was now a Colombian citizen with a cédula number. Flew to Bogotá that night and back to Canada on Halloween morning. All the counter agents at Air Canada had silly Halloween makeup on and they thought my grin was about that. I let them think it.
Cédula de Ciudadanía. The physical card will arrive in Bucaramanga sometime next week or the week after. I will be in Canada. I will use their online portal to request it be transferred to the Consulado in Vancouver, where I’ll walk over from my office and pick it up.
Colombian passport. While I’m at the Consulado, I will also begin the process of applying for my passport, which I can do entirely from Vancouver, including pickup.

What the Timeline Shows

Filed in January 2024. First real demand from the Ministry in April 2025. Carta in June 2026. Oath in October 2026. Two years and nine months, and if you add up the days on which something actually happened, you get maybe thirty. The rest was silence.

Here is what I took from that.

Silence is not failure. Fifteen months went by between filing and the first request for documents. Nothing was wrong. The file was sitting in a queue behind other files, in a system that does not tell you where you are in the line. If you need reassurance every month, this process will break you. If you can file, check the portal, and get on with your life, you will be fine.

Applying is a document process, not a people process. Nobody at the Ministry ever asked me a question in person. Nobody checked whether my Spanish was any good. Nobody asked why a Canadian programmer wanted to be Colombian. They asked for documents, in a specific form, by a specific date, and when they got them, they moved on. The quality of your file is the quality of your application.

Answer exactly what they ask, exactly how they ask it. Migración Colombia wanted every passport, every visa and the cédula in one PDF. Not three PDFs. One. I sent one the next day. That is not pedantry on their part. The person reading it has two hundred files and no time to assemble yours. It works the other way too: say what you will do and what you will bring, don’t ask open questions that invite new requirements, and don’t send more than you were asked for.

Keep everything. Every email, every radicado number, every receipt, every screenshot of the status page. When my application vanished from the system in April 2026, the radicado number was the only way to ask where it had gone. Without it, I would have been a guy with a story.

Expired documents will bite you. My cédula de extranjería on file expired during the process and they asked for a new one. My visa had to be moved into a new passport. Both of those could have stalled the file if I had let them lapse. The law says your migratory documents have to stay valid throughout, and it means it.

Follow up, but through the right door. Isa’s email in May 2024 got a form answer. The consulate’s question in July 2024 got a real one. The PQRS form, the Cancillería’s online petition form, got a real one too. The Ministry answers quickly when you ask through a channel it recognizes. It does not answer the ones it doesn’t. The system is opaque; the people inside it are not.

Patience, yes. Passivity, no. I did nothing for months at a time, because there was nothing to do. But when there was something to do, it got done the same day. That is the balance.

No Personal Interview

I want to say this plainly because I spent two years worrying about it. There was no interview. Not in person, not by phone, not by Zoom. Nobody from the Cancillería ever spoke to me. The whole thing was documents, email, the SITAC portal and its radicados, one exchange through the consulate, and the oath. The law allows the Ministry to call you in. In my case it didn’t. That is what happened to me, and I cannot promise it is what will happen to you.

Lawyer, Agency, or Do It Yourself

I did it myself, with Isa.

I’m not against lawyers where they’re useful, but I honestly don’t believe this is a case where they are. The Cancillería wants to hear from you, personally, and speaking for myself, I want to write to them. Directly. Not through someone else’s filter. Not getting someone’s interpretation of what they really mean. I want to ask them questions. I want to read their original words.

What a lawyer costs you, aside from money, is visibility. When the Ministry marked my file REQUERIDA, I read the exact words, the exact list, the exact deadline. When Migración wanted one PDF, I knew it wanted one PDF, and I knew how to combine multiple PDFs into one. When the file disappeared from the system, I noticed, because I was the one checking it every week. With an agency or a lawyer in the middle, every one of those messages goes government to agency to me to agency to government. Each hop adds delay, and each hop adds someone’s interpretation of what was said. The interpretation layer added nothing I wanted. It would only have added uncertainty and another chance for human error to occur.

There is another thing. When I wrote to Bello and offered a sworn declaration in place of a document I couldn’t get, that was me, in my own words, taking responsibility for my own file. I think that read as credible precisely because there was no intermediary. A lawyer would have sent the same proposal on letterhead and it would have read as a lawyer’s manoeuvre.

My take: do it yourself if you can read Spanish, keep records, and answer emails the day they arrive. Hire someone if you can’t, or if your case is messy. Don’t hire someone because the forms look scary. The forms are the easy part.

Pros and Cons of Colombian Citizenship

I’m not going to pretend this is all upside. Here is the honest ledger.

Pros

Permanence. Nobody can decide I don’t belong in Colombia any more. No renewal, no visa run, no counting days out of the country. I will never again be a guest in Colombia who can be asked to leave.
Belonging. This is harder to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. For nine years I had one foot out the door, and that is a way of living that corrodes you. The oath closed the door behind me. It’s almost like when I finally told my wife I loved her. I had loved her for ages already but I was too much of a coward to tell her, because it left me open to being hurt. I stopped being a coward. I love Colombia. I am a part of Colombia. I’ve got real skin in the game, now. If bad things happen to Colombia, I will be personally hurt.
Family. Isa is Colombian. Her life is in Colombia as much as it is in Canada. Being a citizen means I can be in Colombia with her on the same terms she is, for as long as either of us wants.
Options. A second passport, a second country where I can legally live, work, own, vote and retire. I don’t know what the next twenty years hold. Now I have two places to spend them.
Documents. A cédula and a passport. Everything in Colombia runs on the cédula. Banks, phones, contracts, the health system. The cédula de extranjería works, but it marks you, and it needs explaining almost everywhere. The cédula de ciudadanía doesn’t.

Cons

Years. Two years and nine months in my case, and I had a clean file. Budget three to four.
Money. The fee is nothing. The translations, the fees, and above all the flights are not. Count on several trips to Colombia you would not otherwise have made if you split countries like I do.
Paper. You will need a document from every country you have ever belonged to. For me that meant Malaysia, a country I left at four. You cannot know in advance which document will turn into a six-month problem.
Uncertainty. It is discretionary. You can do everything right and still be told no, and nobody has to tell you why.
Consequences you haven’t thought of yet. Tax residency, military and civic obligations, what a second nationality means at borders, what it means to your first country. None of these has bitten me, but I would be lying if I said I had fully mapped them before I signed.
Weight. Swearing allegiance to a country is not a lifestyle choice. If you are doing it for the passport ranking, don’t.

Why I Chose to Do It Anyway

Because the cons are all about process and the pros are all about life.

Colombia had already become my life. Not a place I visited, a place where I had a wife, a home, friends, a doctor, a dentist, two surgeries, a business that nearly went under and came back, a pandemic. By the time I filed, the question was not whether to become part of Colombia. That had happened years before. The question was whether I would admit it.

Covid was the thing that made me admit it. In March 2020 the world shut its doors in a week, and I was in Colombia on a visa. I was fine. Colombia was good to me. But I realized clearly, for the first time, that I was there at the pleasure of a government that owed me nothing. I had no right to be there, only permission. If permission had been withdrawn, I would have had to leave my wife and my home and go. That feeling never left me, and it was the beginning of the end of the waffling.

Nothing about this replaced Canada. Canada is where I grew up, where my business is, where I will probably die. Becoming Colombian didn’t take anything from that. It added the other half of my life to the record, formally, in a way nobody can take back.

Practical, emotional and symbolic, all three. I’m not embarrassed by the symbolic part. I said “Sí, juro” in a cramped office in Bello with my wife beside me, and I meant it.

Practical Lessons for Others

The things I would tell a friend who was starting tomorrow.

What happens where. The filing is online, in the Cancillería’s SITAC system, and so is the status check. Everything after that is email: the Ministry’s requests, Migración’s requests, the alcaldía. The consulate was the place for questions the Ministry wouldn’t answer directly, for the visa transfer, and for the sworn declaration. Migración Colombia came in once, to ask for copies of my passports and visas. Nothing happened in person with the Ministry until the oath.

It is all in Spanish. Every form, every email, every document you submit. If you can’t read a government email in Spanish and write one back, you are not ready to do this alone. The Ministry will not switch to English for you.

Translation. Anything not in Spanish gets a certified translation. For me that was the Malaysian birth certificate, translated in Malaysia and then handled again by a certified translator in Bucaramanga, and the passport data page. Budget time for this. The Ministry gave me six months and it was about right.

Get the birth certificate first. Before you file. It was the only document in the whole process that could have killed it, and the Ministry wanted a recent one. Start now.

Keep every document valid. Cédula, passport, visa. Renew early. An expired cédula on file is a request from the Ministry you don’t need.

Know how long each phase takes, roughly. Filing to first request, fifteen months. First request to carta, fourteen months. Carta to oath, four and a half months, and only because I pushed. Your mileage will vary, but if you are at month ten with no word, that is normal.

Mind your age. If you are in your fifties, look at when the exam would fall, not when you file. Sixty is the number under the current law.

Plan the oath trip around the cédula. The oath is the last thing the Ministry does for you. The cédula is the first thing you do for yourself, and you need the contraseña in hand before you leave Colombia. Give yourself a week in one city after the oath, and if the first official says no, go back the next morning and ask the second.

What I would do differently. Get the birth certificate before filing. Allow a week after the oath instead of two days. And stop dithering sooner than I did.

What I would tell someone starting now. It is achievable. It is slow. Nobody will hold your hand. Keep your documents valid, answer the same day, keep every piece of paper, and be ready for the one problem you didn’t see coming. Mine was Malaysia. Yours will be something else.

Now That I Have It, What Am I Going to Do with It?

Honest answer: on most days, nothing different. I will get up, work, argue with Isa about dinner, and go to bed. Citizenship is not a lifestyle. It is a change in the background of a life, and the background is where it does its work.

The passport first. That is one concrete task left. It gets done at the Consulado in Vancouver, on the contraseña, with the carta in my hand, and it is the last piece of paper in this whole story. When it arrives I will have two passports, and I will use each for what it is good for.

Travel, a little. The Canadian passport is still the better document for most of the world and I will keep using it for most of the world. The Colombian one does a few things it can’t. It gets me into Colombia as a Colombian, through the citizens’ line, with no entry stamp and no count of days. It lets me cross most of South America on a cédula. And yes, it gets me into Russia without a visa, which is not a priority, but it amused me enough to look it up.

Colombia on the same terms as everyone else. That is the real change. I can open a bank account, sign a lease, buy a place, see a doctor, get a phone, and vote, and none of it starts with an explanation of what a cédula de extranjería is. For nine years every transaction in Colombia began with me being the exception. Now I’m just a guy with a cédula.

Planning without a clock. Isa and I have never planned our life more than a year ahead, because a year was the length of the leash. How long can I be out? When does the visa need renewing? What if they change the rules? That clock is gone. We can decide where to be and for how long based on what we want, not on what Migración will allow. I don’t know yet what we will decide. The point is that it is ours to decide.

Retirement, maybe. I am sixty-one. Somewhere in the next decade I will stop working, or slow down, and when that happens Colombia is a place I can simply go and stay. Not as a pensioner on a visa, but as a citizen going home. That option has a value I can’t put a number on, and it is one of the main reasons I did this.

How I see myself. That night in Bello was one of the most beautiful ceremonies of my life, and I’m still not going to pretend I woke up on 29 October feeling Colombian. I felt the same as the day before, which is to say half Canadian, half Colombian, and all of neither. Both of those things are true at once, and I think that is what citizenship actually is. What changed is that the paper now matches the life I had been living for years while carrying a document that didn’t. That gap was the lie I talked about at the start, and it is closed.

Practical value: a passport and a cédula and a life without a visa clock. Emotional value: a door closed behind me. Which one mattered more? Ask me in ten years. Today I’d say the door.

Final Thoughts

It took two years and nine months from the day I filed. It was slow, it was paper, and most of it was waiting. I never hit a wall that stopped me. But there were two or three moments when the whole thing suddenly felt much bigger than filling in forms, and the biggest of those was the Malaysian birth certificate. You read that story in the timeline. I thought that might be where it died, and it wasn’t. If there is one lesson in this whole account, that’s it: the process is achievable, but only if you are willing to deal with the next problem in front of you without quitting, over and over, for years.

It was not impossible. It was not magic. It was not instant. No lawyer, no agency, no fixer. I did it myself, with Isa beside me reading the emails and telling me when I was about to say something stupid to a government office, which was often. The timeline above is the proof, and the only credential I’m claiming.

Becoming Colombian did not erase being Canadian. Nothing was taken from me. Something that had already been true for years was finally written down.

One day I looked in the mirror and asked myself whether I was doing this or not. I did it. If you’re standing in front of your own mirror right now, that’s a part of this I can’t do for you. For me, the cosplay just ended.

Last updated 1 November, 2026. The master copy of this document is posted at regnatarajan.com - Colombian Citizenship and will be updated as new information emerges. Still pending as of this date: the physical cédula de ciudadanía and the Colombian passport.