Colombia bus bombing kills 22 in Cauca

A gas-cylinder bomb that tore through a bus on Colombia’s Pan-American Highway on 25 April left 22 civilians dead, according to El País, the country’s deadliest attack on civilians since 2003. Among them was Daniela Valencia, returning to the rural municipality of Cajibío after a dental appointment and shopping for her daughter’s birthday gift. Dissidents from the Central General Staff — a FARC faction that rejected the 2016 peace deal — said the device was meant for a military contingent but detonated as civilians were stopped on the road.

In Cauca, the highway is not just an artery for trade; it is one of the few predictable routes left for people who still try to live ordinary lives in contested territory. El País describes armed groups controlling access to rural areas, collecting extortion payments, and carrying out so-called “social cleansing” killings of alleged criminals. The state’s response, in practice, is often to reduce movement: security forces keep a minimal presence along stretches of road because patrols can be lured into ambushes, while residents are advised not to travel at night when armed checkpoints multiply. A stolen truck will not be recovered even with GPS, locals tell the paper, because retrieval would require entering zones where the state cannot guarantee its own personnel’s safety.

That pattern turns civilian mobility into an unpriced risk that households and small businesses absorb directly. The bus Daniela took was a weekly routine: neighbours heading to Piendamó to sell coffee, plantain and panela, the kind of informal commerce that depends on being able to reach a market without negotiating with armed men. When the road becomes a place where a guerrilla unit can stop a vehicle and plant an explosive intended for someone else, the cost is not only measured in fatalities but in the steady retreat of economic life into smaller, safer circles. The result is a de facto toll system enforced by violence, where “permission to pass” is granted by whoever holds the weapons.

Cauca’s deterioration also sits in the shadow of a political promise that has repeatedly run into the same constraint: negotiating with groups that finance themselves through cocaine and territorial control. El País notes that Petro’s peace talks with the Central General Staff collapsed in early 2024 after the assassination of an Indigenous leader who opposed forced recruitment of teenagers. Since then, the region has seen more military bombings, cocaine seizures, attacks on police stations and roadside detonations — a cycle in which each side can claim it is responding to the other, while civilians are left to plan their lives around the next roadblock.

In Cajibío, Daniela Valencia’s relatives told El País there is “no one to hold accountable for our dead.” On the Pan-American Highway, the most reliable authority is still the group that decides whether the bus stops.