QUETAME, Colombia – Rescue teams with drones searched for survivors on Tuesday after a landslide triggered by heavy rain left at least 14 people dead and about a dozen missing in central Colombia, the authorities said.

Several homes were destroyed, and a major trade artery blocked, after torrential rain hit the Quetame municipality in Colombia’s Cundinamarca department late on Monday.

Cundinamarca governor Nicolas Garcia said “14 lifeless bodies have been found” by lunchtime on Tuesday, updating the earlier toll of eight.

Six rescued people were taken to hospital, he said in a video on Twitter.

Earlier, regional civil defence director Jorge Diaz told AFP the dead included one child.

Some 20 homes were razed in the deluge.

“It has not been possible to quantify the number of missing persons, but there is talk of 11... We are trying to identify the people who lived in the 20 destroyed houses,” said Mr Diaz.

Quetame Mayor Camilo Parrado said some households “lost two, three, even four family members”.

Mud was piled a metre high, up to 2m in some places, Mr Parrado told El Dorado Radio, making for a “very complex” search and rescue operation.

“Relief agencies with drones” were involved in the search, said the mayor.

The army announced it was deploying about 80 soldiers to aid in the search effort.

Firefighters have evacuated dozens of survivors.

Trucks trapped

Mr Diaz said the landslide buried part of a road linking Bogota to the south-east of the country – one of the country’s main freight routes.

It happened near a toll post some 60km from the capital, and destroyed a bridge.

Large rocks and mud obstructed the road between Bogota and Villavicencio, an AFP reporter observed, with several trucks and motorcycles trapped.

On Twitter, President Gustavo Petro offered his condolences to victims’ families and said the disaster demonstrated the need to bolster infrastructure around at-risk areas.

The rainy season in Colombia started in June and usually lasts until November.

In 2022, seasonal flooding in the country left some 300 dead overall, including 34 people who died when an avalanche swallowed up a bus and other vehicles.

Colombia declared a national disaster in 2022 over the rains linked to an exceptionally long La Nina weather phenomenon, which cools surface temperatures and causes flooding in some parts of the world.

Earlier in July, the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organisation warned that extreme weather and climate shocks were becoming more acute in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Many recent events in the region were influenced by La Nina “but also bore the hallmark of human-induced climate change”, it said.

The UN agency cautioned that an El Nino event that has taken route in the aftermath of La Nina, will “bring with it more extreme weather”. REUTERS