Natural Disasters

Remembering Armero

Dreadful images bind Colombians together. It doesn´t matter if you are rich or poor; from the coast or from theAndean highlands; if you side with the left or with the right, the one thing we all share –probably the only one- is a collection of iconic events condensed in a single tragic shot.
Granted, every country has its own tragedies imprinted in its collective memory. For Americans, the images are the tumbling Twin Towers , the Abu Ghraib prisoner leashed doglike to the woman soldier, maybe the Rodney King beating. The difference is that for Colombians one dreary image overlaps the former in a matter of months, sometimes even hours.
Only seven days after Army tanks stormed the government building where M-19 guerrillas held Supreme Court judges hostage, , the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz Volcano swept away the town of Armero. And the image of the Palace of Justice –and 11 magistrates consumed in flames was quickly replaced by that of Omayra Sanchez.
Omayra was a 13-year-old girl, only two years younger than me at the time. Her house –like her whole town- disappeared under a huge avalanche of lava. When the TV crews found the child, she was trapped up to her neck in mud and debris, her legs tangled in concrete. Despite the efforts of the rescue team, this girl of bright black eyes and curly short hair died of gangrene and hypothermia after three days. Colombians were shocked by her TV-transmitted agony, only made worse by the fact that other 23,000 people had faced a similar –though less mediatic—fate.

When some months later, I went to Armero with my mother, a psychologist writing her thesis dissertation on the tragedy’s post traumatic effect, I kept looking for some trace of Omayra’s short life. But there was only the barren land.

Many survivors remembered the terrifying roar of the river, the  noise of the gigantic rocks embedded in the mudflow that destroyed everything they found on their path. One woman kept talking about her little baby girl, who was wrenched from her arms by the river of lava. And one young man burst out crying, consumed with guilt, for having crashed into one person, or maybe three, with his pickup truck while trying to escape the avalanche.
Many years later covering the war in Colombia, I heard worse stories of suffering, because the pain was inflicted by men, not nature. But up to that moment those were the saddest stories I had known. Nonetheless, they did not haunt me during many nights afterwards as did the eyes of those other Armero survivors, of those who were unable yet to speak. They were in the refugee camps, sitting on makeshift chairs, looking into the nothingness, that now was their place on this earth.

Juanita León, author of the prizewinning País del Plomo, is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.