UYUNI, Bolivia — Two passenger buses collided early on March 1, 2025, near Uyuni in Bolivia’s Potosí department, killing 37 people and injuring about 30 more in one of the deadliest road crashes the country has reported this year.
Police said the crash happened about five kilometers from Uyuni on the route between Uyuni and Colchani after a lane invasion. One of the buses was heading to Oruro, where the city’s Carnival was under way, which meant the road was carrying ordinary intercity travelers at a time of increased movement. Images published in Bolivian media showed a badly damaged coach with bodywork ripped off and luggage scattered across the roadside, a visual record of how violently the vehicles struck one another.
The two drivers survived, but their conditions differed sharply. Police commander Wilson Flores said one driver was in intensive care while the other was stable. The vehicles had been recovered by 10:00 local time, and injured passengers were taken to hospitals in both Oruro and Potosí. Officials had not immediately identified the dead or given a final breakdown of the injured, but the scale of the loss already made this one of the year’s worst transport disasters in Bolivia.
The report also said police were awaiting alcohol tests taken by the drivers, which means investigators were still looking at whether impairment played any role. That question remains open in the evidence packet, and it is one of the most important early inquiries after any fatal two-vehicle collision. Another obvious question is whether road conditions, fatigue or speed contributed to the lane invasion. None of those causes has been confirmed, but all are typical areas of scrutiny in this kind of crash.
Bolivia has a painful record of deadly road accidents. The evidence packet notes that more than 30 people were killed in a February bus plunge near Potosí and that 19 more died in a January crash in the same region. Government data cited by the report puts annual road deaths at about 1,400 in a country of 12 million people. Those numbers give the Uyuni collision broader context: it is not an isolated transport tragedy but part of a pattern of deadly crashes on roads where large buses and difficult terrain can become a lethal combination.
For local families, the first response will have been to search hospitals and wait for names. For authorities, the work will be reconstruction: which bus drifted, how fast the vehicles were moving and whether the crash was caused by an instant mistake or a chain of poor decisions. Until those answers emerge, the event is defined by its immediate result — 37 lives lost, 30 more injured and a road outside Uyuni turned into a scene of wreckage and grief.
The fact that one bus was headed toward a major festival also matters because it shows how ordinary travel turned into disaster. The route was not remote or seasonal; it was part of the everyday transport web linking southern Bolivian towns. That is what makes these crashes so devastating. They do not require extraordinary circumstances. A single wrong move on a road near Uyuni was enough to create a mass casualty scene in minutes.
