In the highlands of southwestern Colombia, roads are more than roads.

They carry coffee and coca, soldiers and schoolchildren, buses full of workers, families returning home before dusk. They cut through mountains wrapped in mist and valleys green with rain, threading together towns where church bells still ring and market stalls still open at first light. The Pan-American Highway, long and restless, is one of those roads—a ribbon of asphalt binding cities, farms, and histories that have never fully settled.

On Saturday, the road opened.

Not in the ordinary way roads open into distance, but in violence. In the El Túnel sector of Cajibío, in Colombia’s troubled Cauca department, an explosive device tore through the highway, carving a crater into the earth and sending buses, vans, and cars into sudden ruin. The blast killed at least 14 people and injured more than 38 others, including children, according to local authorities.

The morning was broken in an instant.

Sheets were drawn over bodies in the road. Twisted metal lay scattered across the pavement. Windows shattered into glittering fragments beneath the gray Andean light. Smoke rose in slow dark columns while rescue workers moved through the wreckage, searching for survivors and for those still missing.

In places like Cauca, the earth remembers.

This is a region where peace has often arrived in speeches and departed in gunfire. Coca-growing hillsides, remote villages, and difficult terrain have made Cauca one of Colombia’s most contested landscapes—a place where the state, armed groups, and criminal networks have spent decades negotiating territory with bullets, truces, and broken promises.

Authorities say dissident factions of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were behind the attack.

These are the remnants of a war thought by some to be ending after the 2016 peace accord. While many fighters laid down arms and entered political life, others refused. Some returned to the jungle. Some formed splinter groups. Some now operate under commanders like Iván Mordisco, the country’s most-wanted fugitive, whose name President Gustavo Petro invoked as he condemned the bombing.

Petro called the attackers “terrorists, fascists, and drug traffickers.”

The language was sharp, but the scene itself needed no explanation.

Authorities say assailants blocked traffic with a bus and another vehicle before detonating the device in what military officials described as an indiscriminate attack against civilians. Five children were among the injured. Search teams continued to comb the site for missing persons as helicopters circled above and security forces moved into the region.

The bombing comes just weeks before Colombia’s presidential election.

That timing lends the violence another weight. Elections in Colombia have often been shadowed by conflict, and the attack has renewed fears that armed groups are seeking to destabilize the country at a politically vulnerable moment. In recent days, officials have reported a wider wave of attacks across southwestern Colombia, with shootings, drone threats, and assaults on infrastructure adding to the sense of escalation.

In Bogotá, emergency meetings have been called.

Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to the scene to coordinate rescue and response efforts. Cauca Governor Octavio Guzmán condemned the bombing as an assault on civilians and urged stronger intervention from the national government. A national-level security council has been convened.

Still, in Colombia, councils and condemnations often arrive after the smoke.

The deeper wound is older.

It lies in the long unresolved tension between peace agreements and armed realities; between the government’s “total peace” policy and the fragmented insurgencies that continue to profit from narcotics, extortion, and territorial control. It lies in roads that remain vulnerable and in communities that live with the knowledge that a journey home can become a headline.

As evening settles over the mountains, the mist may return to the valleys of Cauca.

Traffic may slow. Rescue lights may continue blinking in the dark. Families may wait at hospital bedsides or for names to be confirmed. The crater in the road will eventually be filled. Asphalt will be laid again.

But the memory will remain.

A road torn open.

A country nearing an election.

And beneath the Andean sky, the old war whispering once more through the mountains.

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Sources: Reuters CNN Deutsche Welle Agence France-Presse The Associated Press