November 1985 marks a before and an after in Colombia. On the sixth day of the month, a squadron of M-19 guerrillas stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. They took its staff hostage and demanded ransom from the president. A belligerent military response, carried out by the National Army of Colombia, resulted in at least one hundred deaths. Eleven federal judges died. Nine cafeteria workers were never found. For two decades, Colombia’s civil war had been raging on mountains and in jungles. Now, it had arrived in the country’s capital.
A week later, on November 13, a sleeping giant stirred some two hundred kilometers west of Bogotá. After lying dormant for over 140 years, the Nevado del Ruiz exploded in two eruptions. From the Andean volcano’s crater surged boiling lahars, which descended the mountain at speeds of one hundred kilometers an hour. The largest of these amassed 350 million cubic meters of mud and rock slurry.
This monstrous debris flow decimated almost everything in its path, engulfing the regional cotton-producing town of Armero and killing the majority of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Just two months earlier, Amero’s mayor Ramón Rodríguez had warned members of congress that the Ruiz volcano posed dire dangers. His pleas for evacuation went unheeded
Continue to full content
Read in e-fluxWe arrive at a deeper understanding of history when we pay attention to the feelings and emotions that survivors share with us
