Efforts to find survivors of the earthquake which killed at least 715 people stumbled on in chaos yesterday, rescue workers said.
Rudimentary equipment such as searchlights were in short supply despite the worldwide response to Colombia's need.
"We have a big problem. Everything is bureaucracy. We are in meetings while thousands of people are dying under the rubble," said a senior provincial government official, who did not wish to be named.
There was little co-ordination between the Red Cross, civil defence and fire-fighters, he said, accusing each group of operating like a separate club.
The quake, which measured 6.0 on the Richter scale, struck on Monday afternoon. Armenia, capital of Colombia's coffee-growing Quindio province, was the hardest-hit area in the disaster zone, which includes 20 towns and villages in five provinces.
Fatigued and hungry rescue workers, who used their bare hands to search for those still buried in the rubble, disputed the official state-run civil defence agency death toll of 715 and predicted the final toll in Armenia alone could exceed 2,000.
"I've been working here since yesterday on just bread and soda. I've not been able to sleep," said one fire-fighter from the south-west city of Cali as he begged television crews to turn on their camera lights to allow him to continue to search ruins near central Plaza Bolivar square.
Night-time searches have had to be scaled back because teams have no search lamps. Up to last night the national government had failed to send in an official to co-ordinate relief efforts.
The regional head of the Red Cross said rescue efforts would end at 2 p.m. (local time) today, as hopes faded of finding more survivors beneath tons of broken concrete and tangled metal.
"The situation is very grave. My impression is that efforts are very unco-ordinated," Ms Cecilia Ramirez, head of social development for the Quindio provincial government, told Reuters.
"Only 5 to 10 per cent of the food needs of survivors are being met. People are hungry," she said, adding that many donations of food and clothing were held up in Bogota because of unexplained distribution problems.
The worst-hit southern and central districts of Armenia, with a population of 280,000, were still without power and faced water and petrol shortages yesterday.
A group of volunteers from a neighbouring province could not set up three power generators, however, because local government and rescue officials could not agree where to locate the units.