Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, June 10: Four Indigenous children “missing” for the last 40 days and wandering around the Colombian Amazon rainforest after a small plane crash that killed three adults have been miraculously found alive.
Though very weak, the four children aged just 13, 9, four and the youngest being just 11 months old, have survived on their own in the jungle before being found alive and rescued by the Colombian soldiers, President Gustavo Petro said.
“Today we have had a magical day,” Petro told the media in the capital Bogota after announcing their rescue. The announcement of their rescue on Friday brought a happy ending to a saga that had captivated many Colombians, a watch with highs and lows as searchers frantically combed through the rainforest hunting for the youngsters.
President Gustavo Petro celebrated the news upon returning from Cuba, where he signed a cease-fire with representatives of the National Liberation Army rebel group ELN. He said he hoped to talk with them Saturday, and officials said late Friday that the youngsters were being brought to Bogota to be checked at a hospital.
An air force video showed a helicopter using lines to pull the youngsters up because it couldn’t land in the dense rainforest where they were found. The craft flew off in the fading light, the air force said it was going to San Jose del Guaviare, a small town on the edge of the jungle.
“They are weak. Let’s let the doctors make their assessment,” Petro added. The president earlier posted a photo on Twitter showing several adults, some dressed in military fatigues, tending to the children as they sat on tarps in the jungle. One rescuer held a bottle to the mouth of the smallest child, whom he held in his arms. “A joy for the whole country! The 4 children who were lost 40 days ago in the Colombian jungle were found alive,” the president wrote on Twitter.
Originally from the Huitoto Indigenous group, the children had been wandering alone in the jungle since May 1, when the Cessna 206 in which they were traveling crashed. The pilot had reported engine problems only minutes after taking off from a jungle area known as Araracuara on the 350-kilometer journey to the town of San Jose del Guaviare.
The bodies of the pilot, the children’s mother and a local Indigenous leader were all found at the crash site, where the plane sat almost vertical in the trees. Officials later said that the group had been fleeing threats from members of an armed group.
A massive search by 160 soldiers and 70 Indigenous people with intimate knowledge of the jungle had been underway ever since for the youngsters, garnering global attention. The area is home to jaguars, snakes and other predators, as well as armed drug smuggling groups, but ongoing clues — footprints, a diaper, half-eaten fruit — led authorities to believe they were on the right track.
Worried that the children would continue wandering and become ever more difficult to locate, the air force dumped 10,000 flyers into the forest with instructions in Spanish and the children’s own Indigenous language, telling them to stay put. The leaflets also included survival tips, and the military dropped food parcels and bottled water.
Rescuers had also been broadcasting a message recorded by the children’s grandmother, urging them not to move. According to the military, rescuers found the children about five kilometres west of the crash site. Huitoto children learn hunting, fishing and gathering, and the kids’ grandfather, Fidencio Valencia, had said the children are well acquainted with the jungle.
Seventeen days after the children went missing, Petro announced that they had been found alive, but he retracted the statement a day later, saying he had been given false information. On Friday, he praised “the effective coordination between the military and the Indigenous people” during the search, saying it was an “example of an alliance for the country to follow.”
No details were released on how the four siblings managed to survive on their own for so long, though they belong to an Indigenous group that lives in the remote region. Petro called them an “example of survival” and predicted their saga “will remain in history.” The military tweeted pictures showing a group of soldiers and volunteers posing with the children, who were wrapped in thermal blankets. One of the soldiers held a bottle to the smallest child’s lips.
The crash happened in the early hours of May 1, when the Cessna single-engine propeller plane with six passengers and a pilot declared an emergency due to an engine failure. The small aircraft fell off radar a short time later and a frantic search for survivors began. Two weeks after the crash, on May 16, a search team found the plane in a thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board, but the small children were nowhere to be found.
Sensing that they could be alive, Colombia’s army stepped up the hunt and flew 150 soldiers with dogs into the area. Dozens of volunteers from Indigenous tribes also helped in the search. During the search, in an area where visibility is greatly limited by mist and thick folliage, soldiers on helicopters dropped boxes of food into the jungle, hoping that it would help sustain the children. Planes flying over the jungle fired flares to help search crews on the ground at night, and rescuers used speakers that blasted a message recorded by the siblings’ grandmother, telling them to stay in one place.
The group of four children were travelling with their mother from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare when the plane crashed.
They are members of the Huitoto people, and officials said the oldest children in the group had some knowledge of how to survive in the rainforest. Petro added that the children were first found by one of the rescue dogs that soldiers took into the jungle.
As the search progressed, soldiers found small clues in the jungle that led them to believe the children were still living, including a pair of footprints, a baby bottle, diapers and pieces of fruit that looked like it had been bitten by humans. “The jungle saved them” Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”