Cali car bomb kills six as Colombia confronts twin rebel attacks

# Cali car bomb kills six as Colombia confronts twin rebel attacks

A car bomb killed six people and injured more than 60 in Cali on August 21, hours after a separate drone strike on a police helicopter killed 12 officers near Medellin.

Event date: 2025-08-21

Colombia was hit by two violent attacks on August 21 that together killed at least 18 people and wounded dozens more, deepening what the BBC described as the country’s most serious security crisis in decades. In Cali, a car bomb exploded on a busy street and killed six people while injuring more than 60 others. Earlier the same day, a drone attack on a police helicopter killed 12 officers in a rural area outside Medellin. Authorities said the attacks were linked to dissident factions of the former Farc rebel movement.

In Cali, eyewitnesses said the explosion struck near the Marco Fidel Suárez Military Aviation School and killed civilians in the street while damaging nearby houses. Mayor Alejandro Eder responded by ordering martial law for the city, banning large trucks from entering and offering a $10,000 reward for information. The measures showed how quickly local officials judged the bombing to be more than an isolated criminal act. For them, the response had to be immediate, public and forceful.

The second attack widened the sense of crisis. President Gustavo Petro said the helicopter had been on a mission to eradicate coca leaf crops when it was hit by a drone and crashed, killing everyone on board. Defence Minister Pedro Sánchez blamed the EMC guerrilla group, the largest offshoot of Farc, and separately accused the narco network linked to Iván Mordisco of the Cali bombing. The government said it would lead a security council meeting to define extra protection measures for the public.

The combination of a car bomb in a city and a drone strike on a helicopter in the countryside underscored a shift in Colombia’s violence. Drone attacks have become more common in recent years, with 115 recorded in 2024, and last week three soldiers were killed by a drone attack in the country’s south-west. The BBC report said the violence has intensified in recent months as security forces clash with dissident rebels, paramilitaries and drug gangs. Those conflicts remain local and fragmented, but the scale of the two August 21 attacks made them feel national.

The timing also matters. Colombia is heading toward elections next year, and the violence poses fresh challenges to fragile peace efforts. The state’s response therefore has to do more than punish two attacks; it has to show that security institutions can still function in places where rebels and criminal groups are testing their reach. That is why the Cali bombing and the helicopter strike were treated as more than separate incidents. They were read as a coordinated challenge to the state’s authority.

The Cali blast also hit a city that has repeatedly been drawn into the country’s wider conflict. By using a vehicle bomb near a military school, the attackers placed civilians, soldiers and the urban environment in the same blast radius. The fact that the explosion damaged houses as well as killing people in the street made the attack feel less like a purely military act and more like an assault on ordinary city life.

Colombia’s security forces now face a familiar but sharpened dilemma: how to respond to rebel splinter groups that rely on drones, roadside explosives and cocaine-linked funding while trying to avoid further destabilising the political landscape. The August 21 attacks did not answer that question, but they made the urgency impossible to ignore.