A government does not reveal its true hierarchy in its inaugural speech, but in the first seventy-two hours of a catastrophe, when time is short and there is no longer room to fake priorities. The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck Colombia on Monday, August 10, with its epicenter in San José del Palmar, Chocó, put that test to a government barely three days in office. What follows is not the chronicle of a natural disaster. It is the record of the decisions Abelardo de la Espriella made during that disaster, one by one, and of what each of them reveals about who his government actually serves.
A Cathedral Weeps, an Afro-Colombian Country Sinks
The first symptom was not a government decision but a gesture of mourning, and that is precisely why it was the most revealing. “Something that hurts me deeply, the damage suffered by the Manizales Cathedral, which is, truly, an icon for Colombia,” De la Espriella said that same Monday, before entrusting its reconstruction to the culture minister, Paola Holguín. No statement of comparable tone, addressed to the victims or their families, has since been verified. The hierarchy of suffering was fixed right there. A tower can receive presidential mourning live. The bodies under the rubble in Quibdó cannot.
From Quibdó that same day, De la Espriella promised something else. “Let this be the chance to tell the country that Chocó will never again be the land of the forgotten,” he said, acknowledging himself the historic abandonment of the department. The promise is always made over ground already abandoned, never before. San José del Palmar, the epicenter community, does not have a single public hospital, its entire health coverage consists of one clinic and one ambulance. Put that way, the presidential line sounds less like a commitment than a confession.
The bias is inherited, not born of the earthquake. The official toll concentrated its highest figures in Pereira and Cali, densely built cities outside the epicenter, while the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities of rural Chocó, the area that actually shook first, were left without electricity or basic services. A territory already stripped of infrastructure receives, mechanically, less visible help after the catastrophe. Colombia’s National Indigenous Organization counted 68,583 people affected across five departments and had to set up its own collection center in Bogotá, outside the state apparatus. The international press, meanwhile, chose as its dominant image the leaning tower of a cathedral.
The United States Geological Survey estimated the cost of reconstruction at between 1 and 10 billion dollars, up to 7% of Colombia’s gross domestic product. At least 807 schools were damaged and four collapsed entirely in Quibdó alone. (El País, August 12, 2026; USGS)
The death toll kept climbing. From 111 on Monday at noon, it rose to 265 by Wednesday, with 3,494 injured, 496 missing and 25,872 families affected. By Thursday the 13th it already stood at 273 dead, and a 4.2-magnitude aftershock struck Chocó again. Each new figure contradicted the last before the country had finished absorbing it.
A Headless State
No government inherits an emergency apparatus ready to function the day it takes office, but a serious one makes sure its head is filled before the earth puts it to the test. De la Espriella did not. When the earthquake hit, the National Disaster Risk Management Unit, the UNGRD, tasked with deciding which municipality gets help first, still had no director appointed by the new government. Carlos Carrillo had resigned in June, after a provisional suspension for improper political participation during the campaign. In his place remained Javier Pava Sánchez, appointed by decree on June 16 by Gustavo Petro and described by himself as close to Petro’s circle. Carrillo had warned, before leaving, that the incoming team would not know what it was inheriting. The catastrophe confirmed it.
That vacuum had immediate consequences for the figures themselves. The presidential toll on Tuesday the 11th put the dead at 181, while the sum of regional reports reached over 240, a gap of 59 people. Risaralda alone counted around 90. The discrepancy was not born of the confusion natural to a disaster but of an explicit instruction, all official information had to pass exclusively through the Presidency, de facto overriding local counts. The candidate who promised to decentralize power centralized, at the first real crisis, even the right to count the dead. That is not a paradox. It is a revealed preference, between deciding and being accountable, the government chose the former.
Rescue by Ideology
No bureaucratic error explains what follows, but a choice made in writing, dated and digitally signed, within the window of time in which a body still alive under the rubble still has some chance of being found. On Tuesday, August 11, at 1:45 p.m., Javier Pava Sánchez signed and sent the Foreign Ministry radicado UNGRD 2026EE14740, addressed to Minister Omar Bula Escobar, recommending against requesting or activating international urban search and rescue teams, known by their English acronym USAR. The document invokes “more than 25 groups with search and rescue capabilities” already deployed in Chocó, Valle del Cauca and Risaralda, and concludes it was not “necessary to request or activate the deployment of specialized international teams.” It elevates everything that follows from opposition rumor to fact documented by the government itself.
Later questioned by El País, Pava detailed the real criterion. The foreign minister had flagged four candidate countries, El Salvador, Peru, Israel and the United States. He ruled out the first two for lack of certification, and about the other two he said, with unusual candor, that “they have a political strategy.” The heaviest line of the whole episode came over Mexico. Pava stated that De la Espriella’s Foreign Ministry “did not initially want to receive support from Mexico, which has a left-wing government.” Minister Bula had said exactly the opposite in public, that his ministry worked “with no ideological or political consideration whatsoever.” That is the central fact of the whole file, the government’s own bureaucracy admitting that ideology weighed more than technical rescue capacity.
Javier Pava Sánchez, acting director of the UNGRD during the earthquake, to El País, “we did not initially want to receive support from Mexico, which has a left-wing government.” (El País, August 12, 2026)
David Tamayo, the director De la Espriella would later appoint in full, ratified the same selection of countries, but changed the argument. According to him, Colombia would only accept teams certified by INSARAG, the network that certifies rescuers, and he denied any ideological motive. The criterion does not, however, survive scrutiny of its own list. Pava had said El Salvador precisely lacked that certification. El Salvador ended up, nonetheless, among the countries Tamayo accepted. Either the Salvadoran situation changed without any statement explaining it, or the criterion was never as technical as claimed.
The confusion over Mexico repeated itself, in mirror image, over the Mexican teams themselves. Awaiting an official damage and needs assessment, known as an EDAN, that Colombia was slow to produce, the Topos Tlatelolco rescue brigade remained blocked. Topos Azteca, a separate group already operating in Venezuela, did manage to enter and join the rescue effort in Cali. “The Mexicans arrived” and “the Mexicans remain blocked” were both true at the same time, for two different groups, with no public criterion explaining the difference. Héctor Méndez, head of the Topos Azteca, known as the Topo Mayor, refused, live on Blu Radio, to say whether he had official authorization. “Don’t ask me that kind of question, sir. If we do that, we fall into petty politics, and that’s not what I came for,” he replied, before hanging up. A foreign rescuer who will not say on national radio whether he has permission to work says, about the country receiving him, more than he withholds.
China’s ambassador, Zhu Jingyang, unable to locate a single Colombian official, posted on X on August 11 a message that reads almost like a plea, “we hope the Colombian government will immediately make known the name of the official and their official contact (…) it’s urgent!” Only after Pava’s departure and Tamayo’s arrival did the Foreign Ministry receive, in the early hours of Wednesday, a first international team, 22 American experts, 51 hours after the earthquake. A country does not take 51 hours out of lack of capacity, it takes that long because it prefers, hour after hour, to control the narrative over rescuing its citizens. CNN compared the case to Venezuela, which had received dozens of international teams “without asking questions.” Foreign Policy was not exaggerating in its title, “Deadly Earthquake in Colombia Tests President Abelardo De La Espriella.”
The Golan, a Fund Called Miracle
Foreign policy does not stop because a country is burying its dead, on the contrary, it is precisely in those days that it best reveals its priorities. That same Monday of the earthquake, Colombia’s Foreign Ministry recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Syrian territory occupied since 1967, and restored relations with Israel along the way, ties broken by Petro in 2024 over the offensive on Gaza. Only the US, in 2019, had recognized it before. Syria condemned the move. No humanitarian urgency justifies that timing. Only an ideological one does.
On Wednesday the 12th, De la Espriella declared an economic emergency, the constitutional mechanism that allows legislating by decree without going through Congress, and named the reconstruction fund Fondo Milagro. Five days earlier he had promised to create no new taxes, the very emergency he declared empowers him, constitutionally, to do exactly that, and that is how he justified it to AFP, “this crisis catches us at a difficult time, amid a fiscal crisis, the most complex in our country’s republican history.” Finance Minister Miguel Gómez Martínez announced a 450-million-dollar credit line, cuts before taxes, he said, invoking the precedent of 1999, a comparable earthquake that killed around 1,230 people, from which the Forec, an institution dedicated to reconstruction, was born. Naming the fund a miracle, rather than giving it a comparable institutional architecture, is the confession of a government that prefers providence to governing.
The rental subsidy program, announced from Chocó that same Monday, turned out to be another promise with no substance. At the moment of the announcement, no monthly amount, no duration, no payment mechanism, no start date existed. The agency in charge, named Patria Milagro, admitted itself that the mechanisms were still to be defined. Announcing a subsidy with no amount, no term and no date is not transparency ahead of schedule. It is communication with no government behind it.
The mayor of Cali, Alejandro Eder, De la Espriella’s circumstantial ally after being called “incompetent” during the campaign, paid in the flesh for the gap between that messaging and real life in the neighborhoods. A stone hit him in the head on Monday, during a visit to an affected area. The next day, amid shoving and more thrown stones, residents shouted “we don’t want you” as his team evacuated him for the second time. A mayor stoned by his own constituents is not a folkloric anecdote of the crisis. It is the bill paid, on the ground, for a marriage of convenience that reality took it upon itself to disprove.
The Economist, in a report filed from Quibdó, summed up the substance of the matter with a line no Colombian press office will be able to deny. De la Espriella “is paying, too, for his foolish refusal to co-operate with the handover process initiated by the previous government,” the weekly wrote. “That was a ‘silly populist idea,'” said Luis Ernesto Gómez, a former interior vice-minister. None of these episodes stands alone, together they form a single gesture, that of a government placing ideological calculation ahead of the material management of its citizens’ lives and deaths. This was not improvisation. It was method, the same discipline with which a far-right government decides, without ever needing to say it out loud, whom it rescues first and whom it leaves waiting…
G.S.
Sources
- El País (via Almomento), Colombia rejects offers of international rescuers on the instruction of a Gustavo Petro official
- El País (Colombia), Colombia in the 72 hours after the earthquake, via AlbertoNews
- The Economist, “A big earthquake reveals two very different Colombias”, August 12, 2026, Quibdó
- El Espectador, Spanish-language summary of The Economist article
- Infobae, live summary of the magnitude 7.4 earthquake
- Semana, De la Espriella orders the restoration of Manizales Cathedral
- El Colombiano, the earthquake tests the new government with no UNGRD director
- El Diario, the short circuit in the transfer of power complicates earthquake management
- El Comercio Perú, De la Espriella puts the toll at 181, 59 fewer than regional data
- Infobae México, Mexican Topos will not be able to support rescue work in Colombia
- Infobae México, Topos Azteca arrive in Cali to join rescue work
- Publimetro, Mexican Topo Mayor loses his temper with Néstor Morales on Blu Radio and hangs up live
- Emol, Colombia decides to accept help only from the United States, Israel, El Salvador and Ecuador
- Infobae (wire), teams from the United States, Ecuador, El Salvador and Israel join the rescue effort, Tamayo’s statement on INSARAG
- Infobae, David Santiago Tamayo appointed director in full of the UNGRD
- Infobae, Gustavo Petro appoints Javier Pava acting director of the UNGRD on June 16
- KTVZ/CNN, Colombia limits foreign rescue teams as the earthquake survival window narrows
- Foreign Policy, deadly earthquake in Colombia tests President Abelardo De La Espriella
- Zhu Jingyang, original post on X, August 11
- SWI swissinfo.ch, Colombia’s new government recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights
- La Jornada (AFP), “the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella” announces the economic emergency
- Bloomberg Línea, what the economic emergency declaration entails
- El País (Colombia), government prepares a rental subsidy, mechanisms still to be defined
- Infobae, ONIC reports 68,583 indigenous people affected, warns of landslides
- Infobae, Cali mayor Alejandro Eder assaulted during a tour of affected areas
- El Universal, Eder booed and evacuated for the second time in Cali
- Infobae, De la Espriella called Eder “incompetent” during the campaign
- Religión Digital, structural racism as a key to reading the Chocó earthquake
- Vanguardia, toll rises to 265 dead and over 3,494 injured
- El Tiempo, August 13 update, UNGRD confirms arrival of international aid
