Colombia's mine-rescue register, obtained by petition: 2,467 deaths since 2005

Colombia's mining agency, the Agencia Nacional de Minería (ANM), runs the country's mine-rescue service. It publishes yearly counts and press releases. It does not publish the register behind them, one row per emergency, or a list of the safety sanctions it has imposed. So we filed public-records requests for both. The answers are now on /colombia and in Spanish at /es/colombia, with a page per company. The short version:

Coal kills most. Coal emergencies account for 1,779 of the 2,467 deaths. Four departments, Boyacá (618), Cundinamarca (491), Antioquia (472) and Norte de Santander (361), account for 1,942. The most common emergency is a collapse of rock or ground: 762 of them, with 707 deaths. Explosions are fewer and far deadlier: 204 explosions killed 540 people.

The worst days are coal-mine explosions. On 16 June 2010, an explosion at the San Fernando mine in Amagá, Antioquia, killed 73. La Preciosa in Sardinata, Norte de Santander, exploded twice: 31 dead on 3 February 2007 and 21 on 26 January 2011. On 14 March 2023, an explosion that the register files against nine coal workings in vereda Peñas de Cajón, Sutatausa, Cundinamarca, killed 21. The register's worst emergency outside coal is a 2007 landslide at an illicit gold working in Suárez, Cauca: 21 dead.

This year is already worse than last. By 24 September 2026, the register held 124 deaths, against 122 for all of 2025. The largest single loss this year came on 19 August, when ground gave way at an illicit gold working in Policarpa, Nariño, and killed 13. The newest row, four deaths in an explosion at Landázuri, Santander, on 24 September, was still half typed when ANM cut the file.

Illicit mining is a large share, not the majority. ANM classes each working as legal or illicit. 762 of the emergencies, and 913 of the deaths, were at illicit workings. Most deaths, 1,549, were at legal ones. ANM revises that classification after it publishes, so older ANM decks can show a different split.

The register is also a rescue record. It lists 3,108 people brought out alive, and marks 1,296 emergencies as attended by an ANM rescue team. 551 emergencies ended with no one dead.

The sanctions are fewer and smaller. ANM sent 240 resolutions it issued for serious and repeated breaches of technical rules, from February 2017 to September 2026. 213 are fines and 27 are caducidades, which cancel the mining title outright. The last cancellation on the list is from February 2025. Fines peaked in 2019, with 49, and ten were issued in the first nine months of 2026. Fines are set in three units: 152 in monthly minimum wages, where the median is 31.5 wages, and the rest in two other indexed units. Our pages do not add them together.

Most sanctioned titles have no emergency on file. Of the 223 titles ANM sanctioned, 81 also appear in the rescue register. Since 2017, when the sanctions record starts, emergencies at sanctioned titles number 179 of 1,199, with 219 of the 1,317 deaths. The other 142 sanctioned titles have no emergency filed under the same title number.

One mine shows how the two registers meet. Montgomery Coal holds two titles at vereda Ayacucho in San Cayetano, Norte de Santander. The rescue register lists five emergencies on those titles. Three single deaths came first, one in 2014 and two in 2019. On 9 March 2020, ANM fined the company 185 monthly minimum wages. Twenty-four days later, on 2 April 2020, an explosion at the mine killed six. ANM cancelled both titles that November and December. A worker died there in May 2022, and in December 2024 ANM fined one of the titles again. The national mining cadastre still lists both titles as active. Neither register says what became of the cancellations. The company's page is /colombia/company/montgomery-coal-s-a-s.

For the curious, here are the mechanics. On 17 September 2026, we filed two derechos de petición, Colombia's right-of-petition requests, with ANM: one for the rescue register and one for the safety sanctions. ANM answered the first on 24 September with the register from 2010 (petition 20261004878652, answer 20263410388661). We asked for 2005 to 2009 on 25 September, and ANM sent the full register back to 2005 on 30 September (petition 20261004896502, answer 20263410388871). The second delivery renumbered every row and swapped the accident hour for the report date, so the pages read the newest file. The sanctions came on 2 October (petition 20261004878842, answer 20263600212181). We asked for 2015 onward, and ANM's letter says its record starts in 2017. The files are archived unmodified, every table on the country page sorts, and each figure here can be checked against ANM's own answer.