The question dominating searches after the earthquake is painfully simple: how many people have died in Colombia? At the editorial cutoff for this version, on the morning of August 11, the verified public toll remained at least 224 deaths. The figure should not be treated as final: search-and-rescue operations are continuing, and in an emergency of this scale the count can change as information from cities, municipalities and rural areas is consolidated.
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck on August 10 has produced a human tragedy that is still being measured. Criminal law inevitably enters the discussion when people die, others are injured and buildings collapse. Yet the legal starting point should resist the instinct to identify culprits immediately: an earthquake is not a crime, and a death during an earthquake does not by itself prove that anyone committed one.
The criminal-law question begins later. It requires asking whether, in addition to the natural event, there was a legally relevant human act or omission: a design that disregarded applicable standards, construction that departed from approved plans, a known source of risk left uncontrolled, an evacuation decision that should have been made and was not, or a specific duty of protection that someone was able to perform and failed to perform. Without that reconstruction, criminal liability would be speculation.
The death toll matters; criminally, how each death occurred matters even more
A national toll helps measure the scale of the disaster, but a criminal investigation cannot be resolved through statistics. Each death would have to be connected to a concrete event, location, timeline and possible breach of a duty of care. Two people may die during the same earthquake and yet present entirely different legal cases.
One death may result from an unavoidable structural failure under extraordinary forces. Another may occur in a building whose vulnerability had been identified but never corrected. Someone may be injured during a poorly executed evacuation. Another person may be at a workplace where a response plan existed on paper but was never activated. The human consequences are equally serious; the criminal-law explanation may be completely different.
Negligent homicide requires more than proof of death
Article 109 of Colombia’s Criminal Code regulates negligent homicide. The decisive concept is negligence. Article 23 ties criminal negligence to a breach of the objective duty of care when a foreseeable result should have been foreseen, or when it was foreseen but the person trusted it could be avoided.
That means the duty must be identified before the outcome is used to judge conduct. What exactly was the person required to do? Where did that obligation come from? Which technical rule applied when the building was designed or constructed? Was a defect known beforehand? Was there a realistic opportunity to correct it? Did the conduct under investigation materially increase the risk that eventually occurred?
An earthquake may be the physical trigger of the harm without necessarily being the only legal explanation. It may also be so determinative that the result cannot fairly be attributed to human conduct. That boundary cannot be drawn by intuition; it requires expert evidence, documents and careful causal analysis.
Negligent injury raises the same problem for survivors
Article 120 addresses negligent personal injuries. The logic is similar: the fact that someone was injured during the emergency does not establish criminal liability. A concrete breach of the duty of care and a causal connection to the injury must still be shown.
This is why documents that might otherwise look administrative can become important evidence: permits, soil studies, structural calculations, construction logs, technical-supervision reports, maintenance records, vulnerability assessments, emergency plans, drill records, internal communications and earlier reports of damage.
A legal duty to act: when an omission can become criminally relevant
Article 25 of the Criminal Code recognizes that an offense may be committed by omission. It does not, however, make every person who “could have done something” criminally responsible. There must be a specific legal duty to prevent the result and a real ability to act.
A guarantor position can arise when a person has concrete responsibility for protecting a legally protected interest or supervising a source of risk. In a seismic disaster, precision is essential. It is not enough to say that a building manager, contractor, employer or public official “had to keep people safe.” The investigation must identify the specific legal duty, the limits of that person’s authority and the omitted action that could realistically have prevented the result.
This is one of the areas in which organizational failure, civil liability, administrative responsibility and criminal liability are most easily confused. They are not the same.
Collapsed buildings: seismic standards are evidence, not an automatic conviction
Law 400 of 1997 established minimum requirements for the design, construction and technical supervision of buildings exposed to seismic forces. Its stated purposes include minimizing loss of human life and assigning responsibilities to designers, builders and other professionals. The law also explains that a building designed under the seismic-resistance regime should be capable of withstanding a strong earthquake with possible structural and non-structural damage, but without collapse.
That rule can be legally important, but it still does not permit a court to look at a collapsed building and infer a crime. Investigators would first need to determine the age of the building, which standard applied, whether later alterations were made, whether construction followed the approved plans and geotechnical studies, what forces actually affected that specific site and what technical mechanism caused the collapse.
In a serious investigation, structural and geotechnical experts may be as important as criminal investigators. The evidence must separate damage attributable to seismic forces from damage that may reveal a prior breach of a duty of care.
Workplaces: an emergency plan cannot exist only in a binder
Decree 1072 of 2015 requires employers and contractors to maintain measures for emergency prevention, preparedness and response, covering workplaces, workers, contractors, suppliers and visitors. The rule requires the identification of threats, vulnerability analysis, risk assessment and response procedures.
That does not mean every workplace injury during an earthquake is attributable to the employer. It does mean that, if a criminal controversy arises, investigators may need to establish whether seismic risk had been considered, whether the plan was operational, whether routes were usable, whether responsible personnel had been designated, whether workers had been trained and whether decisions during the emergency were consistent with the plan.
Paper can carry a perfect emergency plan. Criminal investigations examine what could actually be done and what was actually done.
Causation may be the hardest part
Even after a technical violation or omission is established, one question remains: did that conduct legally cause the death or injury? In an earthquake, the interaction between an extraordinary natural force and possible human failures makes causation especially demanding.
Counterfactual analysis must be approached cautiously. If the structure had complied with the applicable standard, would the collapse probably have been avoided? If an evacuation had been ordered at a different time, would the person have survived or instead been exposed to another danger? If a known vulnerability had been repaired, would the outcome probably have changed?
Those questions cannot be answered through social media or by the seriousness of the outcome alone. They require technical and legal evidence capable of being challenged in an adversarial process.
Preserving evidence now may define an investigation months later
Immediately after a disaster, rescue, medical attention and site safety come first. Once that emergency phase permits it, however, lost documents, demolition without adequate technical recording or alteration of structural elements can make later reconstruction far more difficult.
Where there are reasonable indications of possible criminal conduct, original photographs and videos, metadata, plans, permits, studies, maintenance reports, earlier warnings and communications about decisions taken during the emergency may become critical. For victims and for people under investigation, the integrity of that evidence can determine the case.
At that point the matter stops being a general discussion about the earthquake and requires a criminal-defense strategy built on verifiable facts. Depending on the procedural position, victim representation in criminal proceedings may also become relevant.
The right question is not who is to blame for the earthquake
No one is criminally responsible for the movement of the earth. The legal question is whether a death or injury during the earthquake was preceded by human conduct that breached an objective duty of care, created or allowed a legally unacceptable risk to grow, and causally contributed to the result.
There may be cases in which the answer is yes. There may be many in which it is no. The scale of the tragedy does not justify premature accusations, but neither should it prevent investigation when concrete evidence points to serious failures.
While Colombia continues to ask how many people have died, criminal law has a different obligation: not to turn grief into automatic blame, and at the same time not to leave unexamined those deaths or injuries in which the evidence suggests that a natural risk may have been aggravated by avoidable human conduct.