--- title: "Landslide at an illegal gold mine kills 13 in southwest Colombia" description: "A slope gave way onto workers at an unlicensed gold mine in Narino department on Wednesday night, killing 13 people and injuring seven. Most of those who worked the site belonged to the Quillacinga indigenous community, and four of the dead came from one family." category: "World" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/world author: "Hannah Brooks" published: 2026-08-21T04:45:08.000Z updated: 2026-08-21T04:45:08.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/landslide-at-an-illegal-gold-mine-kills-13-in-southwest-colombia tags: ["colombia", "mining", "narino", "disaster", "indigenous-communities"] --- # Landslide at an illegal gold mine kills 13 in southwest Colombia A slope gave way onto workers at an unlicensed gold mine in Narino department on Wednesday night, killing 13 people and injuring seven. Most of those who worked the site belonged to the Quillacinga indigenous community, and four of the dead came from one family. Thirteen people were killed and seven injured when a slope collapsed onto workers at an illegal gold mine in southwestern Colombia on Wednesday night, [local officials said on Thursday](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/20/13-workers-killed-in-colombia-mine-landslide-local-official). The mine sits in a rural part of [Policarpa, a municipality in Narino department near Colombia's border with Ecuador](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-13-workers-killed-landslide-143420836.html). Fredy Gamez, government secretary for Narino, said that ["due to the activity taking place in the mine, a slope collapsed onto the people"](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/20/13-workers-killed-in-colombia-mine-landslide-local-official). Authorities initially received reports of an explosion at the site before establishing that the deaths were caused by a landslide. ## The search ended before dawn Firefighters, emergency crews and residents worked through the night with excavators, [searching until around 2 a.m. on Thursday, when officials said everyone reported missing had been accounted for](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-13-workers-killed-landslide-143420836.html). The relatively short search reflected the scale of the site rather than any ease of access: this was a hillside worked by hand and small machinery, not an engineered shaft with mapped galleries and a roll call of who had gone underground. [About 50 people worked the mine regularly, most of them members of the Quillacinga indigenous community, and four of those killed belonged to the same family](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-13-workers-killed-landslide-143420836.html). The names and ages of the dead had not been released publicly in the hours after the collapse. ## A hazard built into the work [Fatal accidents are not unusual at Colombia's unlicensed mines](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-13-workers-killed-landslide-143420836.html), where people dig for gold and other metals outside any system of inspection, engineering sign-off or enforced safety standards. The absence of a permit is not merely a legal detail. It determines whether anyone assesses the stability of a slope before people work beneath it, whether the excavation is shored, and whether there is a plan for what happens when ground gives way. Informal and unlicensed mining is deeply established across rural Colombia, sustained by a combination of scarce alternative work, high international gold prices, and the involvement of armed groups that have found metals a durable source of income. Successive governments have alternated between attempts at formalization, which offer miners a legal route to permits, and enforcement operations that destroy equipment and shut sites down. Neither approach has displaced the underlying economics, and communities such as the Quillacinga are frequently caught between them: dependent on the income, exposed to the danger, and without the legal standing that would come with a licensed operation. The Policarpa collapse is unlikely to change that calculation on its own. What it does is put a precise number on the cost of a system in which the safety of the people doing the digging is nobody's formal responsibility. ## Sources - [Landslide kills 13 at illegal gold mine in Colombia's southwest](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/20/13-workers-killed-in-colombia-mine-landslide-local-official) - [At least 13 workers killed in landslide at Colombian gold mine](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/least-13-workers-killed-landslide-143420836.html) - [Colombia gold mine collapse kills 13 workers](https://www.mining.com/colombia-gold-mine-collapse-kills-13-worker/)