A massive blackout plunged most of Colombia into darkness today, halting trading on the Bogota stock exchange and turning congested city traffic into gridlock.

The blackout is blamed on a fault at a hydroelectric power plant near the southern city of Pasto. It remains unclear whether the fault was accidental or caused by the FARC, who have a heavy guerrilla presence in the region.

The blackout affected all the major cities of Colombia from the Ecuadorian border to Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. The eastern border region of Colombia was not affected, as electricity there is imported from a hydro scheme in western Venezuela.

The power went out roughly around 10am local time. Although official reports claim power was restored by 12noon, power even now remains sporadic throughout the country, as power is restored city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood.

For more coverage, see the Associated Press or Reuters. For some especially bad reporting, see the BBC, who report the outage affected only southern Colombia.

It’s not fair. How come I never hear the bombs when they go off?

Yesterday the talk of the town was the bomb Sunday night that ripped the face off the main Cali police station, less than a kilometer from my house. The car bomb destroyed many surrounding businesses and killed a bunch of cops and an unlucky taxi driver who happened to be driving by.

Of course, the bombers were obviously FARC. The question is why they chose Easter Sunday late at night to blow up a bomb in Cali.

Either it’s because they wanted to make the point that they can still blow shit up when they want to, but didn’t want to kill any civilians in the process (you can’t have a revolution without a sympathetic civilian populace); or, it’s because the only time they felt they could get away with it without getting caught was on a quiet off-night like Easter Sunday night.

I’m just bummed I didn’t hear it go off. Everyone was saying the windows were rattling and the plaster was falling from the ceiling. I must have slept right through it.

Update: There’s Spanish language coverage of the event here, also a good photo of the destroyed building here.