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De La Espriella announces recovery for Tolima as fires destroy 50,000 hectares

By The City Paper Staff - August 31, 2026

President Abelardo De La Espriella announced a sweeping recovery program for Colombia’s fire-ravaged Tolima department on Sunday, saying more than 50,000 hectares had been affected by wildfires and warning that investigators had found indications that many of the blazes were deliberately started. The announcement came during a nationally televised address from Bogotá in which De […]

Wildfires Consume 30,000 Hectares Across Tolima, Criminal Groups Suspected

By Richard Emblin - August 24, 2026

More than 30,000 hectares have been burned across Colombia’s Tolima department as firefighters battle one of the region’s worst wildfire emergencies in years, but authorities are now investigating a darker possibility: that some of the fires are being deliberately set by criminal groups seeking to divert security forces, destabilize communities and gain control of territory. Interior […]

Omaira Sánchez remains a symbol of the Armero tragedy, 40-years after her death. Photo: Archive/FILE

Armero: A Journalist Remembers the Night the Earth Turned to Mud

By Hermogenes Ardila Duran - November 12, 2025

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 […]

A Landscape of Loss: Forty Years After Armero

By Richard Emblin - November 11, 2025

Forty years after the catastrophe that erased Armero from the map, the landscape where the town once stood has taken on the quiet, uncanny stillness of an eroded manuscript. Vegetation has woven itself into the skeletal remains of walls and foundations, reclaiming what the earth so violently seized on the night of November 13, 1985. […]