Reports overnight describe a powerful earthquake tearing through western Colombia, though precisely how powerful depends entirely on which agency you ring first. The Colombian Geological Service initially reported a magnitude of 6.7, but later raised the reading to 7.4, which is either a rounding error or an entirely different geological event, depending on your appetite for institutional candour. Tremors were felt as far away as Bogotá, with residents evacuating homes and buildings across several parts of the country and into neighbouring Ecuador, and the epicentre was placed near San José del Palmar, roughly 400 kilometres west of the capital. One is reminded, inevitably, of the fact that this comes only weeks after two powerful earthquakes struck neighbouring Venezuela in late June — a coincidence the region's tectonic plates appear determined to treat as a running gag.
What is not in dispute, however measured, is that this ranks among the country's worst in a generation. Attention among the diplomatic classes turned quickly not to the plates but to the paperwork, after the Bureau of International Solidarity Messaging — a Geneva outfit nobody elected and nobody can quite remember hiring — confirmed it had, once again, reached for the boilerplate. "We simply do not have the creative bandwidth to write bespoke grief every seven weeks," said Mervyn Ashcroft-Pemberton, the Bureau's Head of Empathy Logistics, adjusting a lanyard that appeared to have survived several previous disasters. "What you're calling recycling, we call sympathy economies of scale."
The Bureau's methods came under scrutiny after an eagle-eyed junior clerk in an unnamed foreign ministry noticed that Monday's official statement of solidarity still referred, in paragraph three, to "the resilient people of [COUNTRY_NAME_HERE]" — a placeholder apparently left over from the Venezuela template and never quite swapped out, rather like a wedding speech reused for the wrong sibling. Mr Ashcroft-Pemberton insisted this was a feature, not a fault. "Grief is grief," he said. "The bracket is merely a formality. Frankly it saves everyone's blushes when the next one comes along, and it will."
