On Monday morning, 19 October 2026, a landslide buried an unlicensed open-pit gold mine in Santa Bárbara de Iscuandé, in Colombia’s Nariño department in the south-west. Local authorities reported 14 dead and seven injured, four of them in a serious condition.

The department’s secretary for peace and human rights, Álex González, told Noticias Caracol that 13 bodies are in Iscuandé’s urban centre and one in Guapi, in Cauca. Gabriel Ocaña, of Nariño’s disaster-risk office, confirmed the same 14 deaths. The toll rose from the first nine deaths announced during the emergency.

NOS, drawing on Monday reports, wrote that rescuers were still looking for people under the debris and that about 30 people had been working in the mine, according to a Colombian outlet. The Nariño government later said the search ended on Monday night, with no one else listed as missing. Those about 30 people at the site are not the same tally as 14 dead and seven injured.

The accident happened around 8 a.m. on the banks of the Iscuandé river, in the community council of the river basin. The town is ringed by rainforest and reached by boat or small plane. Governor Luis Alfonso Escobar wrote that the priority was saving lives and supporting families. He also said entire families had died; we are not publishing names.

The national ombudsman’s office asked armed groups in the area to let humanitarian aid through. In Nariño, on the Ecuador border, unlicensed mining is widespread and FARC dissidents are active, according to the reporting. The presence of those groups is not a conviction of the dead miners.

The government noted that, in less than three months, two mine collapses in Nariño had killed 27 people. In August, 13 miners died in Policarpa, also in the department. Those are two accidents, not one count.

The statements consulted give no closed technical cause for this slide. NOS explains in general that rain and deep digging weaken a bank; that is not proof that rain caused Monday’s accident.

Image: Pasto city hall, Nariño, 10 September 2010, P.sutermeister, public domain, Wikimedia Commons. The hall in Pasto, not the mine at Iscuandé.

Sources consulted: Zeker 14 doden bij aardverschuiving illegale goudmijn in Colombia — NOS; Asciende a 14 el número de muertos por derrumbe en una mina de oro en Nariño: hay siete heridos — Noticias Caracol; Al menos 14 muertos y 7 heridos por el derrumbe de una mina de oro ilegal en Colombia — Euronews.