标签： South America

A major volcanic eruption at Guatemala’s Mount Fuego has triggered mandatory evacuation orders for nearby communities, pushing emergency response teams into high gear to move residents out of high-risk zones. One of Central America’s most active volcanic formations, Fuego sits at the intersection of three central Guatemalan departments: Escuintla, Chimaltenango, and Sacatepéquez. This strategic location means that any eruption directly threatens hundreds of local residents living in the shadow of the volcano, whose slopes have long drawn settlement despite the constant risk of volcanic activity.

Local disaster management agencies have mobilized rapidly to coordinate the evacuation effort, deploying personnel and resources to guide residents to designated emergency shelters outside the danger area. Fuego has a well-documented history of powerful eruptions, including a 2018 event that claimed more than 150 lives and displaced thousands of people, leaving a lasting memory of the volcano’s destructive potential among Guatemalan communities. Current response operations are prioritizing moving vulnerable populations, including elderly residents and families with young children, first, while monitoring stations track volcanic activity around the clock to update risk assessments and response plans.

One of the Western Hemisphere’s most consistently active volcanoes has roared back to life in Guatemala, forcing emergency evacuations of nearby communities and putting the entire nation on high alert for further dangerous activity.

Fuego, a towering stratovolcano located just 10 miles west of Guatemala’s famous tourist hub Antigua, began ejecting glowing lava and thick plumes of ash on Monday. By early Tuesday, the country’s official volcanology monitoring agency confirmed that fast-moving pyroclastic currents – lethal mixtures of superheated gas, volcanic ash, and jagged rock fragments – were still cascading down the volcano’s southeastern slope, a sign that the eruption was far from over.

In response, Guatemala’s national disaster management agency Conred issued a nationwide orange alert, the second-highest warning level in the country’s emergency system. The agency issued a series of urgent public advisories, noting that ongoing volcanic activity could spawn additional pyroclastic flows and large ash clouds that threaten communities across the region. Residents were instructed to keep all windows and doors sealed to avoid inhaling toxic ash particles, while all classes have been canceled at schools within the danger zone near the volcano’s base.

Fuego’s proximity to Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage Site famed for its well-preserved Spanish colonial architecture that draws millions of international tourists annually, adds an extra layer of urgency to the emergency response. The active volcano itself is also a popular destination for adventurous hikers from around the globe. Conred has strongly warned both tourists and local residents to avoid all high-risk areas, particularly the steep slopes close to the volcano’s crater, and to follow evacuation orders immediately if instructed to leave.

This is not the first time Fuego has caused catastrophic loss of life. A devastating 2018 eruption of the volcano killed more than 200 people, most of whom were trapped by the fast-moving pyroclastic flows that swept through the Las Lajas ravine. That disaster remains one of the deadliest volcanic events in Central America’s recent history, and emergency officials are keen to avoid a repeat of the 2018 tragedy by acting proactively to move at-risk populations out of harm’s way.

A devastating aviation accident has claimed the lives of all 13 people aboard a small tourist plane that crashed near Peru’s iconic Nazca Lines archaeological site, Peruvian authorities and local media have confirmed. The crash, which unfolded on Saturday, occurred as the aircraft was conducting a scenic flight over the famous UNESCO World Heritage site, in the Pueblo Viejo region. The flight had departed earlier that day from an airport in Pisco, with the crash taking place at approximately 1:00 PM local time, equal to 7:00 PM British Summer Time.

On board the aircraft were 11 tourists and two commercial pilots, both employed by local Peruvian aviation company Aerodiana. As of the first official updates, investigators have not released details on the identities of the deceased, nor have they determined the root cause of the crash. Responding law enforcement teams have only recovered four of the 13 bodies so far, a process complicated by the remote desert terrain of the crash site. “Given the severity of the accident, there are no survivors,” Police Major Jorge Andrade told reporters from the AFP news agency.

Provincial government officials for the Nazca region released an official public statement online, expressing profound grief over the loss of life and extending sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed. The BBC has reached out to Aerodiana to request a formal comment on the crash, though no response has been issued as of yet.

Today’s crash marks the third fatal aviation accident involving tourist planes flying over the Nazca Lines in less than 15 years, adding to longstanding concerns over aviation safety for scenic flights to the popular attraction. In 2022, a separate small tourist plane crashed in the same area during a Nazca Lines overflight, killing all seven people on board. More than a decade earlier, in 2010, another tourist plane went down near the site, leaving six people dead.

The Nazca Lines, a collection of massive desert geoglyphs created by the pre-Columbian Nazca culture roughly 1,600 years ago, are one of Peru’s most visited tourist landmarks. The ancient drawings, which stretch across hundreds of square kilometers of arid desert plains, are best viewed from the air, making low-altitude scenic flights a core offering for the region’s tourism industry.

On a Saturday that began as a routine sightseeing excursion to one of Peru’s most iconic archaeological landmarks ended in tragedy, when a small tourist plane crashed into an open field just outside the city of Nazca, killing all 13 people on board, local Peruvian authorities confirmed.

The flight was operated by Peruvian aviation company Aerodiana, and had been carrying passengers on a popular aerial tour of the Nazca Lines — the massive, centuries-old geoglyphs etched into the coastal desert by Indigenous Peruvian communities. These massive ancient artworks, which depict a wide range of animal shapes, are too large to be fully observed from ground level, making scenic aerial flights one of the region’s most popular tourist attractions.

According to official details released by Nazca’s municipal government via a public statement posted to Facebook, the doomed flight departed from the nearby regional hub of Ica. Aerodiana’s official website notes that the company has built a 14-year history operating scenic flights over the Nazca Lines, relying exclusively on Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft for its services.

Peru’s Ministry for Trade and Tourism confirmed in an official statement that the aircraft carried 11 foreign tourists and two crew members. Peru’s state-run news outlet Agencia Andina further broke down the nationalities of the fallen passengers: two German citizens, two Spanish citizens, and seven Italian tourists were among those killed when the plane went down.

In the wake of the crash, Peruvian civil aviation and law enforcement authorities have launched a full investigation to determine the root cause of the accident. Multiple attempts to reach a representative from Aerodiana for immediate comment on the crash went unanswered in the hours after the incident.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia – A pre-dawn explosive attack targeting a provincial police headquarters along Colombia’s volatile border with Venezuela has left 11 police officers injured and killed a working police dog, with the Colombian government placing blame squarely on the country’s last remaining major insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The blast unfolded Saturday morning in Cúcuta, a strategic border city that has long been a battleground for competing drug trafficking organizations and rebel factions fighting to control lucrative cross-border smuggling corridors. According to General William Rincon, director of the Colombian National Police, the explosive device was hidden in an unoccupied truck parked directly outside the Norte de Santander Provincial Police Headquarters. The powerful detonation destroyed most of the building’s roof and shattered glass across the structure.

Rincon condemned the assault in blunt terms, calling it “a vile terrorist attack” and affirming that law enforcement would not pause operations until all responsible parties are apprehended and held accountable through the judicial system.

Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez echoed the accusation against the ELN in a post on social platform X, announcing a $60,000 reward for any information that leads to the capture of the bombing’s planners and perpetrators.

The attack comes at a critical political juncture for Colombia, just one week before the inauguration of incoming president Abelardo de la Espriella, an ultra-conservative leader who has campaigned on an explicit promise to end all ongoing peace negotiations with the country’s remaining armed insurgent groups. De la Espriella will be sworn in next Friday in Cali, a city that has also seen recent rebel attacks in recent months.

Founded in the 1960s by a coalition of union leaders, student activists and peasant organizers fighting for structural social change, the ELN has waged a low-intensity insurgency against successive Colombian governments for nearly 60 years. Today, Colombian authorities estimate the group has roughly 6,000 active fighters operating across Colombia and in neighboring Venezuela, and has evolved far from its founding ideological roots. Outgoing President Gustavo Petro, a left-wing leader who made peace talks a core priority of his administration, has repeatedly accused ELN leadership of operating as “drug lords dressed up as guerrilla fighters,” as the group now derives most of its revenue from illegal activities including unregulated gold mining and cocaine trafficking.

Petro, who was elected in 2022, centered his security strategy on a policy called Total Peace, which launched parallel negotiation processes with multiple armed groups across the country. Talks with the ELN collapsed early last year, however, after the group launched a series of attacks in rural areas north of Cúcuta that killed an estimated 78 people and forced more than 56,000 residents to flee their homes.

Critics of Petro’s peace strategy argue that ceasefires granted to armed groups during negotiations allowed many factions to regroup, rearm, and expand their control over illegal smuggling routes and rural territories. The current security landscape was shaped in part by the 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which led to the disarmament of more than 13,000 FARC guerrillas. While the deal ended decades of large-scale conflict, it also left a power vacuum in many remote rural regions that smaller groups including the ELN have moved aggressively to fill.

De la Espriella, the incoming president, has already laid out a starkly different approach to the ELN and other criminal groups, promising a massive increase in military pressure to counter insurgent activity. He has also pledged to resume the controversial aerial fumigation of coca crops, the raw material used to produce cocaine, a policy that was paused under Petro’s administration out of concern for environmental and public health impacts.