The last memory of Doris Rueda, 59 years old, is a trip she took with her husband to visit a relative just a couple of days before the worst earthquake in the country so far this century. She still cannot speak fully, babbling some words, a result of the head traumas that kept her in an intensive care unit for two weeks. She can barely move her shoulders, blink, and recognize her three children with her eyes. The doctors are still trying to recover her legs.
—It’s a miracle— says Katheryn, one of her daughters.
A month ago, at 7:34 in the morning, when the magnitude 7.4 earthquake occurred in San José del Palmar, in Chocó, which was felt in 28 departments of the country, she was with her husband, William Ramírez, 62 years old, in their apartment on the fifth floor of a building a few steps from the Bolívar square in Pereira. She clung to her dog Lulú and he opened the apartment door as soon as the earthquake intensified. The man, however, when taking a step, fell into the void as the stairs collapsed.
—My dad says he managed to grab some cables and that softened the blows; he ended up with a fractured rib, while my mom ended up under the rubble with multiple fractures in her tibias and a severe head injury— continues Katheryn.
The building collapsed along with 742 others, according to yesterday’s report from the UNGRD. The official report accounts for 331 deceased, 4,505 injured, 364 rescued, and 111 missing. In total, 202,002 homes were damaged and 36,326 destroyed.
The impact extends to basic infrastructure, with 400 health centers, 4,313 educational facilities, and 6,033 community centers affected; 521 roads, 141 aqueducts, five airports, 102 vehicular bridges, and 13 pedestrian bridges. And 3,277 animals affected and 3,003 rescued.
The reconstruction
The emergency focused on five capitals: Quibdó, Pereira, Cali, Manizales, and Armenia, which remained on red alert.
The State’s response began on August 10 with the declaration of a national emergency, three days after President Abelardo De La Espriella took office as head of state.
The fundamental measure arrived on August 19 with Decree 1261 of 2026, which declared a state of economic, social, and ecological emergency for 30 days and authorized the Executive to issue decrees with the force of law regarding budgetary, tax, and credit matters.
For reconstruction, the Government announced the ‘Miracle Plan’ and a ‘Miracle Fund’, which took as a reference the Forec, the fund created after the 1999 Coffee Axis earthquake.
The Government set the start of reconstruction in Quibdó, the capital closest to the epicenter and one of the poorest departments in the country.
On September 7, marking his first month in office, the President returned to that city with a delegation of major businessmen and announced a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the department. There he presented the roadmap and announced one trillion pesos for five roads and an airport, half through works for taxes and half through donations, plus 5,000 million in seed capital for affected entrepreneurs and a special manager to coordinate reconstruction.
Specifically, the National Government estimated the cost of reconstruction at 30 trillion pesos, about 24.5 trillion in buildings and 5.5 trillion in other types of infrastructure, with a fiscal impact close to 1.8 percent of GDP and a time horizon of three to four years. That figure is preliminary and the Executive itself warned that it will change as the damage assessment progresses in the country.
In direct aid, the rent subsidy for households with destroyed or uninhabitable housing, announced between 875,452 and 1,050,000 pesos monthly for three months, began to be disbursed at the end of August, based on the Unique Registry of Victims (RUD), along with the first 4,480 tons of repair materials.
The Colombian Red Cross, one of the entities that supported the response in the affected territories, places the number of people registered in the RUD at 661,205.
The contributions
On the private side, aid announcements total nearly 1.56 trillion pesos. The list is led by four of the country’s main businessmen with personal contributions of Luis Carlos Sarmiento with 200,000 million, Jaime Gilinski with 150,000, and David Vélez and the Santo Domingo family with 100,000 each, plus a company that requested anonymity for another 100,000 million.
They are joined by the campaign ‘Companies United for Colombia’ by Andi, which raised 201,637 million from more than one hundred companies, and the regional guilds ProAntioquia and ProPacífico, with 200,000 and 220,000 million, respectively.
Also the banking sector, through Asobancaria, announced 1.1 trillion in credit relief for the affected and victims.
From abroad, contribution announcements amount to around 115 million dollars (about 360,000 million pesos). The United States leads with 26.5 million, followed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia with 10 million each and contributions from China, Spain, and Italy.
The multilateral banking adds the mobilization of the CAF for 48 million dollars and the IDB for another 16.7 million for works and roads. Outside that account is the World Bank loan, 200 million dollars already disbursed as debt, and the global cooperation offer of 1.3 billion dollars, a mixed fund that already includes several of these donors.
In that sense, private announcements and foreign contributions total 1.92 trillion pesos (about 614 million dollars). This equates to 6.4 percent of the value that reconstruction would cost.
Immediate challenges
One of the major challenges for the regions, as this newspaper found in the affected cities, has to do with housing. More than 238,000 households suffered some damage between destroyed and damaged.
In that regard, the Minister of Housing, Jaime Andrés Beltrán, announced that he will request an additional four trillion pesos in the 2027 National General Budget, which would add to the 6.65 trillion that the ministry has allocated in the budget project being discussed in the Congress of the Republic. “This will allow the reactivation of the construction sector in many of the affected areas, but also the guarantee that families will be supported with an option to have housing again, and with short-term solutions in six months and long-term in two years,” he assured.
Some announcements have been seen this month in that regard. On August 28, in partnership with a private construction company, the Government delivered four furnished apartments to families victims of the tragedy, including Ana María Saavedra, the triplet who survived the collapse of her building in Cali, where her parents and two sisters died. In that same event, when a girl approached to ask for housing for her mother, the President responded on camera with “I’ll put in half” and committed two more apartments. The rest remain announced, with 24 properties recovered from organized crime to be enabled in Cali and quick-build houses offered by the private sector for Chocó.
However, experts warn about the intention of several victims to start rebuilding their homes on their own, something that could be counterproductive and would maintain a latent risk for the future. “We would like the Government to understand that, although we are standing, we are still hurt,” says Kevin Gamboa, a young man from the Ser para Ser Foundation in Cali, whose home was affected and waited weeks for someone to come to his house and tell him if it was still habitable. The official census closed and, according to him, neither visits nor announced aid reached his block.
The other challenge, linked to the previous one, is humanitarian aid. The national executive director of the Colombian Red Cross, Francisco Moreno, explained that the first stage, six months, prioritizes health care, first aid, psychosocial support, damage assessment, emergency assistance, water, sanitation, hygiene, protection, and reestablishing contact between family members. Moreno warned that the recovery phase will last two years and will require coordinating the public sector, private sector, and communities to rebuild clinics, hospitals, schools, and community centers and recover livelihoods.
Chocó concentrates another of the challenges. The Quibdó Mayor’s Office assured that there are still families outside the national registry of victims, as well as neighborhoods that cannot be rebuilt on the same land due to instability and require resettlement. President De La Espriella promised that this department would never again be the land of oblivion, and that promise remains the standard by which his government will be measured.
DATA AND SPECIALS UNIT