On November 13, 1985 Colombia suffered one of the biggest natural disasters in its history. The volcano at el nevado del Ruiz erupted and took with it the entire town of Armero. The aftermath of the eruption totaled about 25,000 deaths, over 20,000 injured and displaced the remaining survivors. To add injury to pain, the prior week, the country had lived through the attack of the palace of justice by the M-19. Sadly the death toll in Armero could have been prevented, as the volcano had started fuming the prior year, and a number of seismologist had predicted that it would erupt.

For those of us that were in Colombia the images of this tragedy, as well as the aftermath, including years of nightly public broadcasts of young children looking for their parents from whom they had been separated in the chaos of the disaster, will forever be engraved in our minds…

You can access Wikipedia’s Spanish language entry for the tragedy at Armero here, and the English entry here (they are different articles) . You can read the original report from the BBC here. The English entry at Wikipedia for the siege at the Palace of Justice is here. The English entry for the M-19 is here.

Image from the encyclopedia Britannica online.