By Trevor Kraus, Managing Editor

In 2023, Cristian Javier Romero left Colombia for the first time in his life, on a trip to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for a pro-liberty event called Nueva Democracia (New Democracy). He didn’t know a soul in the room. Nearly everyone else there belonged to Students For Liberty. He didn’t — yet.

“It’s so uncommon to meet people who share my views,” he said. “And not only that; they seemed like good people.”

He arrived a touch conservative — skeptical, even, of free markets. But, once on SFL’s mailing list, a series of emails led to a short course on Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. 

“The Cristian of six months earlier was a totally different person,” he said. “I stopped thinking that the state — the arbiter, as we call it — should fix this or that. I started thinking about what Cristian should do.”

He joined SFL while finishing a Master’s in Criminal Law, and Cristian channeled his new worldview into a specific ambition: to be one of the very few Colombian attorneys who defend liberty rather than the machinery of the state. “Most lawyers defend the state apparatus,” he said. “Some defend private property in the abstract, but they don’t fully understand that it’s the basis of life, of human action.” 

At the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, where socialism dominates student politics, he started writing and publishing his opinions — and picked up a following, along with, in his own words, some “hatred.”

He turned his small following into an organization. In his first year as a volunteer for SFL Colombia, the team grew steadily, but stayed mostly in Bogotá. But by his third year, they had grown to a network of 14, expanding from university classrooms into secondary schools nationwide — reaching even the small, remote towns.

That growth took logistics skills that most 22-year-olds never have to master. Twice, Cristian and his team secured the salon of the Congreso de la República — one of the hardest venues to book in the country, customarily reserved for the country’s most established institutions — to host LibertyCon Colombia.

Their boldest event was a debate among presidential pre-candidates that drew 340 people. Cristian and a fellow volunteer wrote questions designed to hold the candidates’ feet to the fire. “If you were president of Colombia tomorrow, what would you do to advance capitalism?” one asked. Another: “What do you think about taxes? Which ones would you raise, and which would you lower?”

In 2025 alone, he organized and led 56 events, reaching 1,643 people across Colombia — all while finishing a Master’s degree. Add up the hours, and Cristian spent nearly half the days of the year in service of liberty.

In recognition of his efforts in 2025, Cristian was nominated for SFL’s prestigious Student of the Year Award. See the video that introduced the three nominees at the awards ceremony:

Some of his most consequential work skipped college campuses altogether. Alongside SFL’s volunteers across the country, Cristian helped lead La Ruta de la Libertad — the Route for Freedom — carrying ideas about free markets, entrepreneurship, and individual responsibility into secondary school classrooms. Many of those classrooms were in violent communities, where those concepts had never been taught. 

Through a market-simulation game, murals painted in the name of freedom, and basic economics workshops, more than 800 high schoolers in dozens of classrooms got their first exposure to the idea that they could be agents of change rather than passengers of circumstance. 

One student told an organizer, “These sessions gave me the tools to imagine a different future. To create, not just wait.” But Cristian considers something he wrote himself his single greatest achievement: a proposed Libertarian Constitution for Colombia. 

What began as a seven-page academic exercise was posted on social media, then placed with opinion outlets, then on Students For Liberty’s website. Across its 15 articles, Cristian’s proposal reimagines Colombia as a federal republic of 32 autonomous states, each with its own fiscal authority and, under his design, greater electoral weight the more it protects economic freedom and growth. 

It enshrines life, liberty, and property as inviolable, guarantees the right to bear arms and to choose one’s own currency, separates the economy from state control, and lets citizens settle disputes through private arbitration as readily as through the courts. Even its amendment process is built to protect itself, requiring a two-thirds vote in Congress and a public referendum before a single article can change.

This seemingly endless fountain of ambition, he insists, does not come from a desire for fame or power — but from gratitude to his family’s humble roots. “People say libertarians tend to be rich,” he said. “I come from a family with very few resources.” 

His parents never owned a house or a car. His father is an electrician. His mother raised her children first, then went back to school at night, eventually earning a degree and becoming a health and pharmacy administrator. “My parents didn’t pay attention to the way the state tries to inculcate the poor,” he said. “But thankfully, they didn’t play victims. Thanks to the force of my parents, we advanced.”

Cristian hasn’t ruled out a future in politics, but for now, he’d rather spread the ideas of liberty as a lawyer. “Liberate your potential,” he likes to say, “liberate the world.”