REPORT: Washington Sends $26.5 Million to a Shattered Colombia, but Keeps Its Tariffs on the Rubble

Three days in office

Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in on August 7.

Three days later, the earth answered him.

On August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Colombia's Pacific coast, its epicenter near San José del Palmar in the Chocó department, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The strongest quake to hit the country this century, Reuters reports. It came from deep under the cordillera, from a place no camera will ever film.

The shock went through everything.

It woke Bogotá, four hundred kilometers from the epicenter. It rattled Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru — five countries hanging on the same wave.

A president seventy-two hours into his term watched his country crack open on live television.

No manual prepares you for that.

Not the campaign rallies, not the runoff won in June, not the slogans about being the shield of the Americas, not the inauguration photos still warm on ministry desks.

Geology does not read party platforms.

It arrived first — no warning, no campaign, no respect whatsoever for the political calendar — and it redefined everything.

Bare hands

The first hours belonged to the neighbors.

Before the excavators, before the dog teams, before the cameras, residents dug into the concrete with their bare hands, the Guardian reports.

Fingernails against slabs.

In Cali, Armenia and Manizales, authorities imposed curfews to clear the streets while hospitals in five cities went on red alert.

Some sixty buildings collapsed outright, roughly sixteen hundred more were damaged in the first counts reported by the Guardian, and hundreds stood upright without anyone knowing why.

Upright until the next aftershock, maybe.

Carmen Yasmin Garcia, forty-three, a volunteer, told Reuters what everyone was thinking: the first priority is getting people out from under the rubble.

A simple sentence. A sentence that organized thousands of lives for days on end.

The government declared a state of emergency, sent a thousand extra officers to Cali, promised rent subsidies to the displaced of Quibdó.

The Petronio Alvarez festival, the great celebration of Afro-Colombian culture, was postponed.

The music will wait.

In a country where celebration is a form of resistance, postponing the Petronio is an admission: this wound runs deeper than anything music knows how to heal.

The aftershocks, for their part, do not wait — more than twenty secondary tremors in the following days, each one emptying whatever buildings were still habitable.

This country knows the score by heart, and that is what tightens the throat.

In 1999, a far weaker quake killed more than a thousand people in these same central mountains.

Every family here carries a death by earthquake somewhere in its memory.

The baby on the fifth floor

Then there is Cali, and that five-story building folded in on itself.

Underneath, a mother and her six-month-old baby.

Rescuers pulled them both out alive, Reuters recounts. The video traveled across a country that needed exactly that image.

A six-month-old has no idea what an earthquake is.

One day he will learn he survived the quake of the century. Somewhere between the fifth floor and the ground floor of a building the maps no longer show.

Cali's mayor, Alejandro Eder, summed up the scene in one line after a hundred and twenty hours of searching: miracles exist.

A hundred and twenty hours.

Crews digging, listening to the concrete, silencing the drills to catch a breath.

Firefighters like Mauricio Andrade worked rotation after rotation without sleep, Reuters notes from amid the debris.

You would like the report to stop here, on the miracle.

The count, though, keeps climbing every morning.

The count

294.

That is the death toll as of August 15, according to Colombia's national disaster risk management unit, cited by Al Jazeera.

The first night, the toll stood at one hundred and eleven.

Then one hundred and eighty-one at the second official count, then two hundred and eighty-nine, and every morning the list grows by whatever the rubble finally agrees to give back.

294 dead, and families still searching.

Official missing-person figures run in the dozens while civilian reports run in the thousands, Global News reports, and nobody knows where those two truths will meet.

Two columns that do not speak to each other.

On one side, the state's registries — careful, verified name by name. On the other, calls from families describing a face, a floor, a last conversation cut off at the hour of the quake.

The rest of the disaster fits into a single administrative inventory: nearly four thousand injured, more than fourteen thousand homes destroyed, more than eighty thousand damaged.

Behind every line of that inventory, an address that no longer exists.

A school, a kitchen, a wall with photographs on it.

Matecaña airport in Pereira shut down, cutting an entire region off from its nearest air support.

Colombia has known guerrilla war, cartels, forced displacement — half a century of grief organized by men, counted by men, mourned house by house.

It had never seen the earth itself strike this hard in its entire modern history.

No culprit to put on trial, this time.

Only a geological fault, a swelling inventory, and a state discovering in real time what its emergency plans are worth.

The plans held better than in 1999, the numbers say; the hearts, nobody measures.

294, and it is probably not over.

The planes from Homestead

Now look at what Washington did, because it is real and it deserves to be said.

On August 11, one day after the quake, the State Department announced $15.5 million in emergency aid and deployed a rapid-response team, alongside humanitarian partners already working on the ground.

Three days later, on August 14, it added $11 million more: $26.5 million in total, committed in four days.

United States Southern Command launched its planes from Homestead, Florida, loaded with equipment and Starlink kits to reconnect the zones cut off from the world.

Two specialized urban search-and-rescue teams — Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles County — landed as early as August 12, the State Department specifies.

Fairfax and Los Angeles: the two call signs of American urban rescue, the crews other governments request by name when their own cities fold.

Those teams rank among the best on the planet.

They are the ones sent to Turkey, to Haiti, anywhere concrete swallows the living.

Specialists of the void, trained to crawl through crushed stairwells, equipped with snake cameras and seismic microphones that can hear a finger scratching.

Their trade fits in one rule: until you have listened, nobody is dead.

This time, they dug in Colombia, under the American flag, on the American taxpayer's dime.

On the ground, the American response team leans on humanitarian partners who already know every valley of the Chocó. Catholic Relief Services, the International Organization for Migration, the World Food Programme, World Vision. And the structural engineers of the Miyamoto firm, sent to assess what can still be lived in.

A complete chain, from the sniffer dog to the engineer.

From Homestead, outside Miami, the rotations kept coming over the Caribbean. Every aircraft touching down in Bogotá carried a piece of the answer: tents, generators, antennas.

In a valley cut off from the world, an antenna is a mother learning her son still breathes.

Read me carefully: this was a fast, concrete, professional response.

The Trump administration mobilized in four days what other governments take weeks just to sign.

When it is done well, you write it down.

It was done well.

An ally named Trump

The political context makes this generosity all the more natural, and the backdrop deserves a pause of its own.

Colombia's new president is no adversary of Washington.

A right-wing lawyer and unapologetic showman, de la Espriella won his June 21 runoff with the public backing of Donald Trump, who saw in him a rampart against the Latin American left.

He calls himself the shield of the Americas.

His election closed the Petro chapter and realigned Bogotá with Washington in a single electoral night.

A pivot delivered by the ballot box, at the start of the summer.

Put plainly: the quake of the century just hit the United States' favorite new ally in the hemisphere.

His presidency was three days old when the ground moved. So, in effect, was the alliance.

Helping Colombia, in that context, is geopolitics as much as it is humanitarianism.

You shore up a friend, you show the continent that alignment pays, you occupy ground China has been eyeing for years.

Beijing signs ports and credit lines; Washington, this week, signed rescues.

It is a competition for influence, and for once it pulled living people out of concrete instead of sinking bait into it.

I do not say this to stain the gesture.

Mixed motives still produced survivors lifted from the rubble, and the connectivity kits work no matter the ulterior motive.

I say it because nothing else explains what happened next.

Ten minutes on the phone

On August 15, five days after the shock, de la Espriella picked up his phone and called the White House.

Ten minutes on the line, very friendly and very cordial according to the Colombian presidency, quoted by Al Jazeera. Ten minutes between the president of the world's largest economy and the president of a country counting its dead by the hundreds.

What exactly was said in that call, we do not know; both capitals released only the adjective.

Cordial.

Then the Colombian president made his request public, in writing, on X: he asked Donald Trump to suspend American tariffs on Colombian goods.

In black and white, in front of the whole continent.

To give our entrepreneurs some air, he wrote, as they endure very difficult times because of the earthquake's effects.

The sentence is polite, almost timid, calibrated to offend no one in Washington.

It comes from a man facing a reconstruction bill above six billion dollars, according to early estimates reported by Al Jazeera.

The man is aligned with Trump, so he cannot demand: he suggests, he thanks, he waits.

The etiquette of the junior partner.

An ally who just won thanks to your backing, whose country is on its knees, asks you for a temporary tariff pause.

Not a check. Not debt forgiveness. A pause.

As of this writing, Bloomberg reports, the White House has not answered.

The tax on the rubble

Here is what that silence sits on.

In late July, ten days before the quake, Washington raised its tariff on Colombian products from ten to twelve and a half percent, with carve-outs for coffee and oil, Al Jazeera recalls.

A decision made in another world — a world from before, where Colombia was an ordinary trading partner in an ordinary negotiation.

That world collapsed on August 10 along with the buildings of Cali.

Run the math nobody in Washington seems willing to put on the table.

Twenty-six and a half million in emergency aid, against a reconstruction estimated above six billion: this week's American generosity covers less than half a percent of the bill waiting for Bogotá.

The aid saves the week. The tariffs tax the decade — the decade of reconstruction, the compound interest of misfortune.

The carve-outs soften the blow, that is true, and honesty requires noting it.

Except Colombia's economy does not boil down to two export products.

Flowers, textiles, food processing — the whole fabric of small exporting businesses de la Espriella talks about — pays the full rate while warehouses stand cracked and roads lie severed.

With one hand, Washington sends elite rescue teams.

With the other, it keeps a tariff hike decided before the catastrophe, as if the catastrophe had changed nothing.

Tariff schedules do not feel aftershocks.

The first hand saves lives this week; the second mortgages them for years.

Both hands belong to the same government. Both signatures come from the same desk.

You do not tax rubble.

What troubles most is the silence.

A no would have been brutal but clear.

A yes would have cost a fraction of what the rivalry with Beijing swallows every month.

The silence tells the entire hemisphere that even perfect alignment, even an election won under the Trumpist banner, does not suspend the tariff logic for a single quarter.

Every foreign ministry in Latin America read that post on X, and every one of them noted the date of the answer that never came.

Moscow and Beijing do not even need propaganda this week. They only need to translate the Colombian news feed and let each capital draw its own conclusion. The cheapest influence argument in the world is still a favor denied to a friend.

Diplomatic notebooks have long memories.

The two hands

So what remains of these five days?

The facts first, because they are stubborn and they honor the people who dig.

American rescuers pulled living people out of Colombian concrete. American planes reconnected entire valleys. And twenty-six and a half million dollars moved faster than most bureaucracies can draft a memo.

On the first week, this administration passed its test.

I say that without irony, because it is true and because Colombian families owe reunions to that speed.

Then comes the harder question, and I ask it as a supporter, not a prosecutor.

What is the point of winning an ally if you leave him begging for a tariff pause on a social network? Five days after the worst earthquake in his country's history.

Greatness, in foreign policy, is not only the plane taking off from Florida.

Greatness is also knowing when to put away the calculator — on the day the earth settled the trade debate on behalf of both governments.

294 dead have changed the nature of this trading relationship, whether Washington decrees it or not.

Suspending the tariffs for six months would not ruin the United States Treasury.

Colombia's entire trade is a speck in America's trade balance, and both presidents know it perfectly well.

Not suspending them could ruin something else: the demonstration, addressed to a whole continent, that being America's friend changes something on the day everything falls down.

That demonstration is worth more than twelve and a half percent of anything.

An ally is someone who arrives fast — and who does not leave with the cash register.

Trump sent the rescuers, and it was the right call, made fast.

What remains is deciding what the second hand is worth — the one still holding the tariff schedule while the other holds a stretcher.

One word from him would be enough.

The same man spent ten minutes on a very cordial call. He can sign a suspension in less time than an aftershock takes to empty a Cali neighborhood.

History will not remember the fine print of a tariff schedule. It will remember which hand America extended in the week Colombia counted to 294.

And you — if your house had just come down, which hand would you remember longer: the one that pulled you from the rubble, or the one that kept billing you?

Sources :

Sources Primaires :

USGS — M 7.4 Earthquake, San José del Palmar, Colombia (event page)

U.S. Department of State — United States Mobilizes Life-Saving Response to Colombia Earthquake

U.S. Department of State — Trump Administration Announces Additional Support Following Colombia Earthquake

U.S. Embassy in Colombia — Natural Disaster Alert: Colombia Earthquake, Update 2 (August 12, 2026)

Sources Secondaires :

Al Jazeera — Colombia asks Trump to suspend tariffs as country reels from earthquake

Bloomberg — Colombia Asks US to Pause Tariffs in Deadly Quake's Aftermath

Global News — Colombia's president asks Trump to lift tariffs to help earthquake recovery

Reuters — Earthquake on Pacific coast shakes Colombian capital

The Guardian — 7.4-magnitude earthquake shakes Colombia, causing serious damage