Earthquake exposes Colombia's pattern of neglect in impoverished coastal city

Lorena Hipis stands in what remains of her living room, staring through the kitchen toward nothing in particular. The Pacific sun is merciless. One entire wall of her house is gone. The roof above her daughter's bedroom is a tangle of exposed rebar and fractured concrete, held together by nothing but the weight of its own collapse. Next door, a five-story building came down on Monday when the earth shook. Four people died inside it. Half of Hipis's home went with it. Her mother's house, nearby, was flattened entirely.

It was a 7.4-magnitude earthquake. Across Colombia, it killed 287 people. In Buenaventura, the port city where Hipis lives, 19 of them died. The quake destroyed 540 homes in the city and damaged another 3,416. It injured 330 people. But what troubles Hipis most is not the wreckage itself—it is the silence that followed. By Thursday, four days after the ground stopped moving, she had seen no one from the municipality, the state, or the national government. "The government is taking too long," she said. "And this is an urgent situation."

Buenaventura is home to 432,000 people and Colombia's largest port. It is also, by almost every measure, abandoned by the state. The city's poverty rate—measured in what economists call multidimensional poverty, which accounts for lack of access to education, healthcare, and basic infrastructure—stands at 15.4 percent. In Cali, the major provincial capital in the same region, it is 6.7 percent. More than double. In 2025, a civic monitoring group found that 72 percent of Buenaventura's residents could not find steady work. Seventy percent reported eating fewer than three meals a day. The city's population is 88.5 percent Afro-Colombian, a minority group with a long history of institutional marginalization in Colombia.

At the Luis Ablanque de la Plata District Hospital, the earthquake's aftermath exposed what chronic underfunding looks like in practice. Several wards stopped functioning. Dozens of injured people lay in beds under tents in the hospital's parking lot, waiting for treatment in the sweltering heat. Bryan Reyes, a 29-year-old shipyard worker, sustained three fractures in his leg jumping from a first-floor window to escape the quake. From his bed, he described the hospital's condition as evidence of something larger: "It is a total abandonment. It's like the people here just don't matter." He pointed out that before the earthquake, hospital workers had gone on strike because they had not been paid. There were never enough supplies. The doctors and specialists went unpaid. The earthquake, in his view, was simply the latest proof of a pattern that had been established long before.

In Barrio Oriente, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, Betsy Tenorio lost her grandfather, Arnulfo, when his house collapsed on him. He had paralysis on his right side and could not move fast enough to escape. The neighborhood is lined with worn brick houses and potholed roads. The mayor visited on the day of the earthquake. Since then, Tenorio has heard nothing from any authority. "We only received help for one hour," she said. Alfonso Grueso, who leads the Association of Community Action Boards, estimated that about 750 homes in Barrio Oriente were damaged—roughly 15 percent of the neighborhood's population. "What we need most is help from the state and the municipal government," he told reporters. "Practically none has arrived."

The lack of response has deepened an already fractured relationship between residents and government. Last year, 64 percent of Buenaventura's residents said they distrusted the mayor's office. Fifty-seven percent expressed distrust in the national government. Now, in the earthquake's aftermath, security has become another layer of crisis. In Cali, soldiers patrol the streets. In Buenaventura, a special military unit that had been patrolling the area was pulled away on the night of the quake to respond to a prison riot. Looting began almost immediately. Jorge Montez, a parking attendant, stood guard over an abandoned boat near a collapsed apartment building, watching as young people kicked through the rubble of what had been a computer shop. "There aren't enough military or police," he said. "We're short on security." For residents like Hipis, living in homes with no walls and no roofs, the absence of security is not abstract. It is a daily threat.

Experts warn that the earthquake will not simply fade. Iveth Dalissa Caceres, a social worker, predicted that poverty rates in Buenaventura and the wider Pacific region will rise. She sees the region's problems as cyclical: "Disasters generally occur in the Pacific. The highest poverty rates are in the Pacific. Violence is in the Pacific." But she also sees something else. Caceres is one of hundreds of residents who have organized relief efforts. She oversees a community kitchen that cooks and distributes 400 meals a day to affected areas. "We are an incredibly resilient community," she said. "We fall once and get back up ten thousand times. We were born in this situation. So that's what we've learned: to keep moving forward no matter what." The question now is whether the state will do the same, or whether Buenaventura will be left to rebuild itself once again.