By Juan Forero and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez
A large military transport plane carrying mostly Colombian army troops crashed Monday in the country's southern jungles, killing 66 and injuring dozens more as its fuselage was engulfed in flames after hitting the ground, officials said.
The aircraft, a Lockheed Martin Hercules C-130, was lifting off from Puerto Leguízamo, a town on the Putumayo River across from Peru, when it went down, said Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez.
"Military units are at the site," Sanchez said. "It had not been determined with precision the number of victims nor the cause of the crash."
The turboprop plane was carrying 117 passengers and 11 crew members, the Ministry of Defense said late Monday. Fifty-seven of the passengers were rescued and were being treated, one was unhurt and four haven't been accounted for, the statement said.
Puerto Leguízamo's top security and administrative aide, Carlos Claros, said that some of the soldiers, seeing that the plane was about to crash, jumped from the aircraft. Military authorities wouldn't comment directly about Claros's account.
"Talking to some of the injured they told us that they threw themselves from the plane," he said in a phone interview.
President Gustavo Petro said on X that the accident "should never have happened" and blamed "bureaucratic obstacles" that have prevented upgrades. He said that "young lives are at stake" while asserting that "the military has been losing capacity for 15 years."
"If the civil or military administrative officials are not up to this challenge, they must be removed," the president wrote.
The plane had taken off at 9:50 a.m. and made it about a kilometer and a half -- or about 1,640 yards -- when it crashed. "At this moment, we don't know details except that as soon as it took off it had a problem and plunged to the ground," Gen. Carlos Silva, commander of the air force, said in a video posted on X.
The plane was traveling from the town of 28,000 people to another town, Puerto Asis, in the same province, just 125 miles away. Putumayo province, with its large plantations of drug crops and the presence of heavily armed cocaine-trafficking militias, has long had a heavy presence of army counterinsurgency soldiers and navy marines. There was no indication the plane was brought down by armed groups, Sanchez said. He also said the aircraft was airworthy and the crew was qualified.
Social-media videos posted by Colombian press outlets showed a plume of black smoke rising from beyond the trees when the plane crashed.
Someone is heard in one video saying, "Oh, it fell," as the plane appears to lose altitude -- just before plummeting into the trees. In another video, flames consume the wreck and surrounding trees, with some of the ammunition aboard the plane going off. Videos also showed townspeople taking some of the injured away on their motorcycles.
The mayor of Puerto Leguízamo, Luis Bustos, said his government has tried to get authorities to improve the airport in the past.
"The Leguízamo airport has some particular conditions -- it has many deficiencies," he told Caracol Television. "We believe the runway is very short."
Two medical aircraft with the capacity to carry about 75 wounded people total -- one of them a C-130 -- transported the injured from Puerto Leguízamo to Bogotá, the capital, and a smaller nearby city.
Bustos the mayor said that the small hospital in the town, which lacks equipment for complex procedures, had been swamped with the injured passengers and was unable to provide them with the necessary medical treatment.
"We are attending in the spaces, in the hallways, wherever we can, because we don't have capacity," he told Caracol Radio in a separate interview.
Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 24, 2026 00:32 ET (04:32 GMT)
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