In Pereira you see gaps. They are the voids left by buildings that fell during the earthquake, that have been demolished or simply collapsed due to the rains that have affected the city in recent days. In the department of Valle del Cauca there are still answers to be given in the rural area. Some 500 municipalities in 16 departments suffered some type of damage. In almost all of them, citizen activation has not stopped contributing. This is Colombia after 90 days of that fateful morning.

First modification: 10/11/2026 - 05:05

August 10 in Pereira was a beautiful day. Deep blue sky, cloudless, the dawn sun was shining. But all that Christian Castañeda saw at 7:34 was a curtain of dust and, between one clearing or another, the crying faces and wounded bodies of others who, like him, woke up to the tragedy.

In the common staircase of his building, the violence of the earthquake had shaken him from side to side. Shortly before leaving, he remembers meeting neighbors who were also shaken while trying to find an explanation for what they were experiencing. Then he heard a crash and saw debris falling. He turned back. There was no longer any trace of the neighbors who were running after him.

Nor from his apartment. When the dust settled, he discovered that the second floor, where he lived until seconds before, had been completely crushed between the first and the two upper ones. “Wake up, wake up, man, this is a dream,” he said to himself as he tried to understand the pandemonium of pain and devastation around him.

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As the minutes passed, he began to discover the remains to which his life had been reduced: pieces of the washing machine that he was still paying for, a part of the photographic equipment that was his livelihood, his beloved plants scattered on the street.

Like Christian's, many lives changed that August 10th. He has returned to work thanks to the solidarity of people he doesn't even know. People from other cities, other countries, other languages, have donated cameras and accessories that have allowed him to be productive again.

But three months later, he and many Colombians are still waiting for the solution promised from various levels of government: municipal, departmental and national.

With a little help from my friends

Christian went to live with a cousin. Then with a brother. Her mother also had to leave her house due to the damage from the earthquake, although she managed to save her belongings.

Other people in Pereira, in central Colombia, have had to abandon their homes with structural damage. The authorities do not allow them to enter, for safety, but in the meantime, homes have been robbed by the increasing crime of a city that has lost many of its means of livelihood.

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Commerce, a fundamental sector of Pereira's economy, has also suffered serious damage, and this has aggravated the precariousness of many affected, people who, because they have not lost their home, do not have access to aid or subsidies, but who have been left without the job they used to live for.

“I felt very accompanied by friends, people I don't know, who through social networks donated clothes, food, money, even work equipment,” Christian acknowledges.

He has heard little from those who do have an obligation to attend to his situation and that of other victims. In a recent visit to Pereira, President Abelardo de la Espriella announced the delivery of 332,000 million pesos (about 102.8 million dollars) corresponding to 300 subsidies for the rehabilitation of homes in that city and nearby Dosquebradas, as well as the construction of 415 new houses.

But in Pereira alone there are some 17,000 people affected, many of whom have not even received the promised rent relief. “More than a month ago I received help of one million pesos (a little more than 300 dollars), although it was supposed to be three, and I have not heard any news,” says Christian. "My mother has not received anything, and so have many more people. They have announced a supposed Miracle Fund from which we have only seen hurdles, but no major progress."

From the Tent to the House: many sticks making a mountain

Laura Castaño Vargas spent five hours trying to remove an 18-year-old boy trapped under the rubble of a building located in La Libertad Park in Pereira. After many efforts, the doctor and volunteer rescuer managed to extract him alive from his cement grave and transfer him to a hospital, but just two days later, the boy died.

“Then I took the issue of the park very personally, an area that was already very stigmatized, where the first shelters began to be located,” says Laura, who had just arrived less than three weeks ago from working as a volunteer in Venezuela, providing medical help and accompaniment to early childhood due to the earthquake of June 24, when she was shaken by the tragedy in her own city.

Laura already had experience collecting help for her health brigades, itinerant activations in areas without access to health services in Amazonas and La Guajira with which she provides food and free medical care to children. But the scale of what he began to mobilize to help the victims of La Libertad Park was probably far above any other initiative he had carried out before.

"I noticed that there were many mothers with children in tents, at times when there were very strong drops in temperature. Having lost your home does not necessarily make you a person in need of medical attention, but these precarious conditions could expose very vulnerable populations to health problems that later become a snowball," he remembers concluding. “Ensuring that all spheres of people's lives are well, that is also medicine.”

Laura began bringing markets to the community kitchen that those mothers set up in the middle of their tents, and soon found herself collecting data on those populations: age of the children, employment status of the mothers, family context.

One thing led to another. She discovered that many of those women had lost their jobs. Also, those who managed to leave the tents did so by renting rooms per night, paying between 18,000 and 20,000 pesos for very precarious accommodations.

“I did the math and thought: that is equivalent to 700,000 pesos (about $215), which is exactly what a small studio apartment costs, so I decided that I had to get them out of those tents before diseases began to appear.”

This is how From the Tent to the House was born, an initiative that sought to obtain support to sponsor these family units and relocate them to a place where they would be safe. Laura appealed to the networks to obtain the resources and since then she has managed to accommodate 15 families in furnished studio apartments.

As a kind of rite of passage, every time a mother and her children got a new house, they took down the tent along with volunteers, “as a symbol of the opportunity to start a new life.”

Initially, each of these mothers received a supply of groceries every two weeks, as well as clothing and school supplies, but “the idea was also to begin to release them so that they could achieve their independence.” This is how the idea arose to give them grills, so that they could sell chorizos, arepas, chuzos and other fast street foods and generate income for their livelihood.

But Laura knows that they are partial and limited solutions. "It is not enough for one month's assistance to arrive from the government, because many families lost their homes and also their jobs. It is something that I feel is not being resolved."

"The concept of continuing with life has been greatly romanticized. One begins again, it is true, but after losing people, houses, jobs, even historical heritage, it is very difficult to begin again. The issue of the reconstruction of Pereira generates a lot of uncertainty, because the governments have allowed the same people to help each other. The aid comes from a company, from a neighbor, but not from the state. The mayors are mobilizing things, but this is something that surpasses them. There is much more to do," he warns.

She, meanwhile, sits at her old typewriter and types to make reproductions of works of art that she then sells. This is how you get resources to support your initiatives. He does so knowing that he is only moving a small stick in a mountain of needs.

The friend of a friend of a friend

On August 10, the phones of Daniel Zuluaga and his friends were active. “Are your people okay?” “Yes, what about yours?” Once they verified through the WhatsApp group that everyone's close circles were safe, they met where they always had.

“See you in Bajo Cuerda,” they agreed. Minutes later they were at the craft brewery of the good times, this time to face the bad ones. This is how Voluntarios Bajo Cuerda was born, a movement made in Pereira that has literally moved heaven and earth to support those affected by the earthquake.

“We thought it was going to be a matter of a couple of days, collect some help, deliver and that's it,” recalls Daniel Zuluaga, an industrial engineer who manages a hotel farm in Pereira. “We never imagined that it was going to be a snowball that was going to grow more and more and that three months later it continues to grow.”

Those first days they collected and transported tents, mats, clothing and food, but then "the friend of the friend of the friend started calling. 'Look, I'll send you a truck,' 'Look, I'll send you a truck,' 'I'll send you money.' We started telling on social media what we were doing and money began to arrive from abroad, from other cities in Colombia, from people who didn't know what to do, but wanted to help."

50 people started, almost all of them close friends. A waiter, a bartender, a graffiti artist, engineers, businessmen, their families. Today there are almost 300.

They even managed to get a plane, making contacts at different levels to get a shipment sent by reggaeton singers Ryan Castro and Nanpa Básico to land on the damaged runway of the Pereira airport.

They soon discovered that the initial attention they had given was insufficient. "Giving markets every three days was turning into welfare. And the other thing is that after 10 days people began to look for ways to get out of the shelter, either by going to a hotel or to the house of a friend or family member, but there were still people affected and we had the desire to continue helping, the capacity, the contacts, money in the accounts."

Thus they decided to reorient efforts towards reconstruction. “We got bricks, cement, roof tiles, tiles, sanitary pieces, and with the database we had we began to deliver the material, but only to people who had a master builder or had the knowledge to build safely.”

But there were still people left behind, to whom the Government still did not respond. Thus was born the most improbable of solutions: “we partnered with a company from Bogotá, which makes scenery for cinema, the same one that the town of Macondo did for the Netflix production ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and for many novels in Colombia.”

"They have the experience of making temporary assemblies that are easy to install and low cost. We had already tried everything: cement, guadua, wood, prefabricated, metal, importing houses from China, and this was definitely the fastest, most economical and highest impact solution."

The pilot test was set up in three days and allowed the construction of eight houses with a community kitchen, a teaching classroom and a battery of bathrooms and showers. Although it is a temporary residence, it resolves an urgency that cannot be postponed. “Once you have a safe place, you will be able to think about reactivating yourself financially, going to work, having your child go to school,” the friends reasoned.

A second project of temporary houses was built in the municipality of Zaragoza, near Pereira, but Daniel acknowledges that, as time goes by, the slowdown in aid is noticeable.

"It is logical, life went on for everyone and every day this issue has become more difficult. Aid is beginning to diminish and in parallel the government, both national and local, has been very slow in managing tangible solutions. In Pereira there is no forceful strategy for reconstruction or construction of new homes, but people who are outside do not appreciate the magnitude and believe that the problem has already passed, when that is not true."

Now Bajo Cuerda aims to take advantage of the holiday season so that “people who lost their company, their business, their premises, can have traveling fairs where they can sell their products.”

Depending on official help

The department of Chocó was the epicenter of the August 10 earthquake and although it has suffered considerable damage to homes and other services, such as schools and aqueducts, it continues to depend almost exclusively on support from the central government.

Organizations such as Doctors Without Borders have ended their care in the affected areas, which included physical and mental health consultations in populations that have suffered a double impact: that of the earthquake and the consequences of the armed conflict.

The Pies Descalzos foundation of the Colombian singer Shakira has promised support for the recovery of schools and Walt Disney+ Company Latin America has scheduled the re-release of the film 'Encanto' for November 12, with the aim of allocating box office profits to affected populations throughout the country.

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But Chocó continues to trust in initiatives such as the Miracle Fund, enabled by the Executive, as confirmed on November 4 by Governor Nubia Córdoba, who detailed that the initiatives for its financing have already been presented.

Interviewed in Noticias Caracol, Istmina Mayor Jaison Mosquera denounces that “to date there has been no reconstruction program” and his municipality does not even have debris removal machinery.

All this occurs at a time when the Government of Abelardo de la Espriella has been questioned for the use of donations received by the 'Colombia Luz y Sonrisas' foundation of the first lady Ana Lucía Pineda, to which a judge has ordered to deliver management reports.

Read alsoWhat happened to the donations from the earthquake in Colombia? The foundation of the first lady, under the magnifying glass

Look at realities with an adapted vision

Ayuda en Acción, a non-governmental community support organization, has been addressing the needs of Valle del Cauca, one of the regions most affected by the earthquake, from day one, articulating efforts between different levels of government, local coordination teams, the private sector and local leadership.

It does so with the challenge of learning to distinguish the realities in a region that has highly developed urban centers, such as Cali, rural areas with lack of resources as basic as water and even indigenous populations such as Vijes.

“I believe that there is an understanding of the differential effects of this emergency, and that makes us review how to make the interventions more effective,” comments Margarita Ramírez Leiton, regional coordinator of the organization.

Three months after the tragedy, Ramírez Leiton distinguishes a different phase of care: from the emergency we have moved on to the stage of stabilization and early recovery.

"This stage involves not only infrastructure, but the recovery of people's livelihoods, accompanying families so that they can progressively resume their daily lives. What do people tell us when we arrive? A significant number ask us about support for rentals, food security, clothing," he says.

Channeling support from different actors, Ayuda en Acción has managed to promote “small and medium-sized enterprises, to promote a recovery of purchasing power and that can generate more lasting solutions.”

Ramírez Leiton assures that in Valle del Cauca there have been important advances “so that educational institutions can return to the classrooms, for health services, because the hospitals suffered significant damage.”

The return to productivity has encountered realities such as the precariousness of employment. "In Valle del Cauca there is a significant percentage of people who live from informal jobs, from a remuneration that is not stable, but fluctuates, which depends on whether or not you go out to work. We must also pay attention to that, recovering economic autonomy reduces dependence on humanitarian assistance."

Ramírez Leiton recognizes that the needs go far beyond the material, and that the psychosocial component must remain present, even though three months have passed since the main event.

"Although we have tried to return to daily life, all of us still have a latent affectation, and the aftershocks have functioned as a reminder that it can happen again. For people, what we can give them is very important, but more important is that we listen to them, talk, validate what they are feeling, that we can do an exercise of containment, of care," he recalls.

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