On the night of November 12, 1985, at exactly 10 p.m., the landline rang. “Get ready – the radio car is coming for you,” warned the night controller at the main station of Todelar, the national radio chain where I had been working for about a year and a half. Just a week earlier, we had covered the M-19 guerrilla’s siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá.
Throughout the day, ash had been falling over areas far from the crater, and nervousness was spreading over the activity of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano – 5,311 meters high, perched on the central ridge of the Andes in the department of Caldas, whose capital, Manizales, hosts the International Coffee Pageant.
“It looks like the volcano has exploded, and a mudflow may flood Armero,” the controller said.
Three reporters, a technician, and the driver – each of us young – set off, imagining we were going to cover severe flooding: displaced families, damaged cotton fields, ruined cattle farms, and household losses.
The driver sped relentlessly. Our mission was to open the 5 a.m. newscast with details of the avalanche and testimonies from those affected.
When we reached Mariquita, about 175 kilometers from Bogotá, there were no lights, no open shops – nothing. The only passerby we found told us something terrible must have happened: for hours, no cars had passed toward Armero, a route usually so busy.
Still, the radioguía pressed ahead, fast. Twenty minutes later we reached Guayabal, also cloaked in absolute darkness. A few kilometers on, we stopped short before an immense lake of mud, filled with swirling debris. The sludge was thick, nearly boiling, and a sharp sulfurous smell rose from it. “This is not a normal avalanche – this is a tragedy of incalculable proportions,” we thought. While our technician struggled to transmit a signal, we began preparing reports and dividing up the work.
As dawn broke, the images grew more horrifying. On the fetid, dense, dark mud floated hundreds of corpses – many mutilated. Cattle swept away by the force of the sediments drifted amid the wreckage. Cries for help echoed across the wasteland. And entangled in tree branches, snakes of all sizes swayed – carried along by the avalanche that had destroyed a serpentarium in what had once been known as the “White City.”
One of our colleagues, Carlos Gómez, climbed higher ground toward the town center. From above, he shouted: “There’s nothing left of Armero.” And it was true: the church, multi-story buildings, everything had been buried under the avalanche’s fury. Rescue teams soon arrived, followed by international support, to search for the few survivors. Even the town’s parish priest, Father Ramón María Idágarra – who had said Mass the previous afternoon, urging calm amid rumors of an eruption – joined the rescue brigades. He survived only because he had traveled to Ibagué for a church meeting after the 5 p.m. service.
The rescue efforts – for survivors and for the 25,000 dead – were arduous, relentless, and heart-rending. Among the most agonizing cases was that of Omayra Sánchez, trapped between twisted rebar and chunks of concrete, water rising to her chin. No available technology could free her. She died there, in prolonged and desperate agony.
In Guayabal, the neighboring town, an operations center was improvised. Wounded survivors arrived, children separated from parents, and thousands of bodies stacked one upon another in the main square – bloated, covered in mud, impossible to identify. As the hours and days passed, decomposition set in. The stench grew unbearable. Fears of an epidemic spread.
The authorities finally decided to bury the bodies in mass graves, with nothing more than a collective prayer from whichever priest was present. Caterpillar machines, their steel teeth gleaming, scooped up as many corpses as they could carry, dumping them into hundreds of trucks that shuttled endlessly to the improvised cemetery. The scene was Dantean, devastating – but the catastrophe left no alternative.
“This is divine punishment,” said one woman rescued from her rooftop, her face and arms injured, the wounds hidden beneath layers of mud. She was referring to the supposed curse surrounding Father Pedro María Ramírez, the Armero parish priest murdered by a frenzied liberal mob on April 9, 1948, following the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Accused of complicity in Gaitán’s death, Father Ramírez had been left in the street until a group of sex workers – who lived in one of the few areas later spared by the mudflow – took his body in.
In those days of tragedy, water and food grew scarce in Guayabal. Wails of grief could be heard everywhere. Survivors searched desperately for relatives. And then came terror of another kind: rumors that a second, even larger avalanche was imminent. At dusk on that fateful November 13, panic erupted. People ran wildly in all directions. The Red Cross and Civil Defense had to act swiftly to prevent a deadly stampede.
We, the radio crew, dragged our cables up a mango tree on the corner of the square and reported from its branches. Five years ago, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, I returned to that corner. The mango tree is gone.
Today Armero is an immense pasture overrun with weeds. Vendors and merchants sell religious figurines, and the tomb of Omayra – now a symbol of that infernal catastrophe – is a place of pilgrimage. Twenty-five thousand people died, victims of human negligence: a risk map had long warned of the volcano’s imminent eruption and its destructive potential. No one heeded the warning. Armero survives only in memory.
About the author: Hermógenes Ardila Durán is an economic journalist who has worked for Colprensa, Todelar, El Tiempo, and Portafolio. He has received multiple honors, including Colombia’s prestigious Simón Bolívar National Journalism Award.
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