Moses M. Naranjo

Moses M. Naranjo is part of the Galeras story in the way many local collaborators are part of disaster history: central to the event, less remembered in popular retellings, and indispensable to the work itself. He was one of the Colombian participants on the summit expedition, helping bridge the gap between foreign scientists, local knowledge, and the practical realities of operating on a dangerous volcano in Nariño.

In field science, support roles are often invisible to the public, but they are essential. Someone has to know the terrain, manage equipment, read conditions, and help keep the expedition functioning when weather, altitude, or slope make every movement harder. Naranjo’s presence reflected that local expertise. He was not an accidental bystander. He was part of the scientific enterprise that had climbed Galeras in search of better understanding.

His death underscores a harsh truth about multinational disaster risk: the burdens are rarely evenly distributed. Local collaborators often bear the same physical exposure as visiting experts while receiving less recognition afterward. At Galeras, that imbalance became part of the tragedy’s human cost. Naranjo’s life and death remind us that the mountain’s danger was not abstract. It entered directly into the work lives of Colombian professionals and assistants who knew the volcano as both a scientific object and a local reality.

The record of his biography is thinner than that of the famous volcanologists, which is itself telling. Disaster archives often preserve the names of those who wrote the reports more faithfully than the names of those who carried the instruments, guided the route, or made the fieldwork possible. Yet the loss of Naranjo matters because it reveals the full social shape of the event: this was not only an international scientific calamity, but also a Colombian one.

In the afterlife of the eruption, his death became part of the argument for stronger protection of field teams and better acknowledgment of local expertise. The Galeras disaster is more ethically complete when his role is named. To remember only the famous victims would be to miss the social reality of volcanology, where knowledge depends on many hands and where catastrophe often claims those hands without ceremony.