Colombia’s earthquake left two lists: community censuses and the official register
By the third bend of the San Juan River, the mud had swallowed Amparo López’s sandals to the ankle. She stepped from a narrow wooden canoe and followed a footpath into the trees. At the first house, sheets of corrugated metal sagged over a mattress soaked by rain. Farther uphill, a crack split the wall of a schoolroom where children had been studying days earlier. Plantain stalks lay flattened behind it. López opened the small notebook she carried against her chest and wrote down what remained: a family name, five people, one damaged home, food, roofing sheets. Then she closed it and kept walking. Another bend. Another settlement. Another name. The river carried her toward the next community. Seventy still remained.
At 7:34 a.m. on August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck near San José del Palmar, Chocó, the strongest recorded in Colombia this century. The quake eventually affected 15 departments and, by August 21, the national government counted 284,185 people affected and 321 dead. Along the San Juan, however, López was helping build a different record. López, a community census coordinator with the Consejo Comunitario General del San Juan (ACADESAN), was helping document losses across the organization’s collective territory, which spans 72 Afro Colombian communities and is home to roughly 15,000 people.
People did not come to us speaking in numbers,” López said in an interview. “They said, ‘My roof fell. My children are sleeping next door. The school is cracked. Write us down.’ So that is what we did.
Writing a family down, however, is not the same as making that family official. Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) directs disaster victims to register through their municipal government in the Registro Único de Damnificados (RUD). Municipal disaster-risk coordinators, not community councils, enter those records into the national platform. The RUD is designed to identify and characterize victims so government agencies can determine the scale of an emergency and generate assistance.
“That distinction matters,” David Valencia, a municipal disaster-risk official in the San Juan basin, said in an interview. “A community can tell us that 40 families were affected, and that is essential information. But the RUD needs households identified individually. We have to verify the information and enter each case. In a place where getting to one community can take hours, that process does not happen at the speed people need.
[...]