source: ALLIANCE FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE
by David Escobar,
Professor of Journalism at the University of Valle de Cauca, Cali, Colombia, and member of La Direkta Video Collective
On August 10th, in the city of Cali, Colombia, I woke up to an earthquake so strong that for a few seconds the stairs in my house ceased to resemble stairs and became a kind of river of concrete moving beneath my feet. The first thing I did was go get my daughter, who is only a few months old, and take her and my partner down to the street, while the earth continued to shake with a force that seemed endless.
The day began with the impact of seismic movements that shook a large part of Colombia and had particularly serious consequences in the western part of the country. The epicenter was located in a rural area near the border between the departments of Chocó and Valle del Cauca, but the intensity of the tremor was strongly felt in Cali and other cities and towns in the region.
As soon as I left the house, I tried to contact the mother of my other child and the school where he was. The phone lines were down. The earthquake had also cut off communications in the city: the phones weren’t working, and during those first few minutes, we didn’t really know what was happening. So I decided to go pick him up from school myself.
The streets were filled with people who had come out of their homes. Some stood in silence; others were talking on the phone without being able to get through; and many stared at the buildings as if expecting one of them might start moving again.
Cali, a city of approximately 2.5 million people and one of the major urban centers in southwestern Colombia, suffered significant damage in various areas. Reports also began to emerge of fatalities, damaged buildings, uninhabitable homes, and structures that had partially or completely collapsed.
As I made my way toward the school, the first signs that this had not been just a scare began to appear before my eyes. There were collapsed buildings, damaged walls, and people trying to figure out what had happened to their homes and those of their neighbors.
The scale of the emergency, however, could not be judged solely by the initial figures. In the first few hours, it was clear that information from rural areas of Chocó would be much harder to obtain and verify, and that the number of people affected in other cities would continue to rise. These are vast departments, with isolated communities and a long history of difficulties with access and communication.
I continued on my way, searching for my son—with no cell service—until I reached his mother’s home, where I was finally able to find him. Our immediate concern was to make sure we were all safe. But we still had no clear idea of what had happened in the rest of the city.
As the hours passed, news began to trickle in in fragments. Cali had sustained significant damage, and reports were coming in from various locations of fatalities, destroyed buildings, uninhabitable homes, and entire communities trying to make sense of what had just happened.
Among the news reports that began to come in was the damage to the Universidad del Valle Hospital, a place I know firsthand because I am a professor at the Universidad del Valle. The news was particularly grave: the floors that collapsed were those housing the pediatrics, neonatology, and internal medicine departments.
There is something especially heartbreaking about this hospital being destroyed in an earthquake. It is the place where the vulnerable population of southwestern Colombia seeks care. I went to the site to take some photos of the collapsed building.
Reports of damage at other hospitals also began to emerge. The emergency was no longer limited to the people trapped under the buildings. It also involved a city that would have to care for its injured with part of its healthcare infrastructure damaged.
After the first few hours, my son and I continued our journey through the city. We wanted to see with our own eyes what had happened.
We came across damaged buildings and vehicles that had been trapped beneath the rubble. Some cars had almost completely disappeared under a mountain of bricks, concrete, and fragments of walls. Others were mangled by the weight of what had fallen on them.
The city seemed to have been covered by a second skin made of dust, bricks, and rubble. The streets were still there, but they were no longer exactly the same streets. In many places, we had to walk among the remains of facades and destroyed homes.
On the way home, we passed by the Alameda Gallery. There we came across one of the scenes that made the biggest impression on me during that trip.
Across from the gallery, a building had collapsed, and dozens—perhaps hundreds—of people were working amid the rubble. It wasn’t just emergency responders who were there. There were neighbors, workers, volunteers, shopkeepers, and citizens who had come simply because they knew there might be someone buried under those tons of bricks and concrete.
People organized themselves as best they could. Some removed bricks with their bare hands; others carried baskets and containers full of debris; still others formed human chains to clear the materials from the search area. Some wore gloves and hard hats; others had only their bare hands.
And it was all happening under Cali’s intense sun.
There was dust in the air, sweat on people’s faces, and an eerie silence every time someone seemed to hear something beneath the rubble. Then the noise of the stones, the voices, and people calling out to one another would return.
For hours, that crowd worked with a simple, desperate hope: that there was still someone alive beneath the rubble.
As we made our way through those sites, it was impossible not to think that every pile of bricks had a story behind it.
A destroyed house was not just a house. It was a family that had lost the place where it slept. A crushed car was not just a vehicle. It was someone’s livelihood. A collapsed building could mean an entire life cut short in a matter of seconds.
And for many people, the tragedy would not end when the earth stopped shaking.
Those who lost their homes would have to relocate. Those who lost their sources of income would have to find a way to survive. Those who had already been displaced by violence or poverty might now find themselves displaced once again by a natural disaster.
Cali and Buenaventura could become destinations for people coming from the affected rural areas. And in Chocó, Valle del Cauca, and Cauca—where there are rural and Afro-Colombian communities that have historically suffered from neglect, poverty, violence, and difficulties accessing basic services—the earthquake threatens to exacerbate vulnerabilities that were already present long before the earth began to shake.
When we got home, we still had no electrical power. We ate something, amid that strange silence that lingers after such a strong tremor, and I started searching online for the news reports that were coming in about the earthquake.
The images from that morning were still fresh in my mind: buildings torn open like wounds, crushed vehicles, the damaged hospital, people working in the sun amid the rubble, families trying to find their loved ones. Then a post by Jerome Sanabria, Espriella’s presidential advisor, appeared on X, in which she wrote:
“Milei said, ‘You leftist sons of bitches, tremble,’ and Colombia trembled.”
The statement might seem like just another of the many provocative remarks that circulate daily on social media, except that it appeared precisely when many families were grappling with the death of their loved ones, the destruction of their homes, and the loss of their property—while people were still searching for survivors beneath the rubble.
There is something deeply despicable about needing to turn a natural disaster into political ammunition. The earth had just shaken everyone equally: it didn’t ask who the people who died had voted for, nor about their political views, nor about their beliefs. Grief doesn’t ask those questions either.
That morning I had seen something completely different on the streets: strangers helping one another, forming human chains, hauling debris, searching for survivors under the sun. No one seemed to wonder who the other person voted for before lending a hand.
Perhaps that is the most brutal difference between what happened in the streets and what later appeared on some social media platforms.
In the streets, amid the rubble, the tragedy had no political color.
On social media, some rushed to paint it with the colors of their own pettiness.
And after seeing that day what a tragedy truly means—a baby in someone’s arms, a child who cannot be located, phones that don’t work, destroyed hospitals, people trapped under tons of concrete, and strangers working together to try to save them—it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of shame toward those who need to turn even death into an opportunity to insult their adversary.
This tragedy has no political color. Petty-mindedness does.
Perhaps one of the strangest and most difficult aspects of a tragedy is that, for a few minutes, all the differences that we humans have invented to set ourselves apart cease to matter. The earth makes no distinction between a humble home and a commercial building, between those who pray and those who do not, between those who voted for one candidate and those who voted for another. The earth simply shakes. And when it stops, the same questions remain for everyone: who is alive, who is missing, where are the children, who needs help.
That was what I found later as well. Not just collapsed buildings, but lives that had been shattered in places that almost never make the news. Among them, a small Christian school: El Nuevo Edén School.
A few hours later, at the intersection of Quinta Street and Guadalupe Avenue, I ran into a former classmate from the Universidad del Valle whose name is Kelly Díaz. Her ten-year-old daughter attends school there in Nuevo Eden. What she told me seemed to belong to another dimension of the earthquake—one that neither statistics nor official statements can capture: that of the children who watched their teacher and friend die while the world shook around them.
She told me she had dropped her daughter off at school just like any other morning. Then, as she was heading home, the quake began. First came that familiar swaying we’ve felt so many times in Cali; then the ground began to shake with such violence that she realized she had to go back.
And she ran back to find her 10-year-old daughter.
“The earthquake was so strong that it was throwing me from side to side. And when I finally made it there, my brain couldn’t process what was happening. To me, it was like a drill when they’re training you. My daughter’s best friend was there… and my daughter’s teacher was on the floor, completely mangled. And the children were watching everything, because nobody knew how to react to it. No one had done anything. So the first thing I did was go inside and check her vital signs. My daughter’s friend definitely had brain matter spilling out and scattered everywhere (…) What made it so hard was that she was a girl who had been to my daughter’s birthday parties, who they used to play with—we’d watched them grow up together. And her face was shattered, her head was shattered. And the teacher was even worse off… I think it was a little more traumatic for the teacher, since she took the full force of the impact from the wall, and her body was split in half. She had no vital signs. Even so, we had to tend to the children while they were lying on top of their bodies. Yesterday, the city was in collapse mode.”
There are experiences that defy description. That mother might say her daughter came home with a bump on her head; she might say she lost her teacher, that she lost her best friend, that after that she no longer perceives life or death in the same way. And yet, none of those phrases can fully explain what it means for a ten-year-old girl to discover, in an instant, that the world she knew could vanish.
The photograph accompanying this account was taken by her. It is a screenshot from her phone, a record of what she saw when she returned to school. A casual, almost accidental photograph—but precisely for that reason, all the more difficult to look at: it does not belong to a news agency or a historical archive. It belongs to a mother who ran back, searching for her daughter.
And then I thought again about that post I’d read hours earlier.
“Milei said, ‘You leftist sons of bitches, tremble,’ and Colombia trembled.”
There are phrases that, when written from the distance of a screen, seem like just another provocation. But all it takes is a few hours walking through the rubble for those words to take on a whole new weight. All it takes is knowing that while someone was writing that, a mother was searching for her daughter amid the destroyed school. That a teacher and a little girl lay lifeless. That other children were still there, forced to learn far too soon a lesson no adult should ever have to teach them: that death can come without asking permission, even at that Christian school.
The tragedy, then, had also entered a place where reactionary rhetoric could hardly accommodate it. It hadn’t asked about ideologies. It hadn’t asked about political parties. It hadn’t asked who prayed to which God. It had entered that school and left its tragedies among the desks, the walls, and the bodies of those who were there.
The earth had no political or religious preferences.
It made no distinction between believers and atheists. It did not separate those who supported the Espriella or Petro administrations from those who opposed them.
Earthquake.
The earth shook.
And after the quake, it was human beings who decided what to do about what had happened. Some went out to remove rocks. Others ran to the schools. Others searched for their children. Others lent a hand to pull strangers from under the rubble.
And some, in their political pettiness, decided to mock the pain of others from their phones.
