On Saturday in Bogota, Colombia, military personnel unloaded one of four indigenous children from a plane that went missing following a deadly plane crash.
Ivan Valencia/AP
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Ivan Valencia/AP
On Saturday in Bogota, Colombia, military personnel unloaded one of four indigenous children from a plane that went missing following a deadly plane crash.
Ivan Valencia/AP
BOGOTA, Colombia – Four Indigenous Children Survive 40 days in the Amazon jungle After their plane crashed, they were recovering on Sunday at a military hospital in Colombia, when new details of their harrowing story emerged in a country still enthralled by the story. their story.
The children, 13, 9 and 4 years and 11 months old, are expected to stay in hospital for at least two weeks for treatment after being rescued on Friday, but some have said and want more work done. is lying in bed. by family members.
Manuel Ranoque, the father of two youngest children, told reporters outside the hospital on Sunday that the oldest of the four surviving children – Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 13 – told him their mother was still alive. about 4 days after the plane crashed in May. 1 in the Colombian jungle.
Ranoque said that before she died, the mother may have told them: “go away”, apparently asking them to leave the ruins to survive. He did not provide further details.
Fidencio Valencia, one of the children’s uncles, told the Noticias Caracol media outlet that the children had started talking and one of them said they hid in a tree to protect themselves in a dense forest area full of snakes, animals, and other animals. animals and mosquitoes. He said they were exhausted.
“At least they ate, a little bit, but they are eating,” he said after visiting them at the military hospital in Bogota, Colombia. A day earlier, Defense Minister Iván Velásquez said the children were being rehydrated and could not eat or drink yet.
The children were traveling with their mother from the Amazon village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare when the plane crashed.
The Cessna single-engine propeller plane was carrying three adults and four children when the pilot declared an emergency due to engine failure. The small plane disappeared from radar a short time later and the search for survivors began.
Dairo Juvenal Mucutuy, another uncle, told local media that one of the children said he wanted to start walking.
“Uncle, I want to wear shoes, I want to walk, but my feet hurt,” Mucutuy told the boy.
“The only thing that I said to the kid was, ‘when you recover, we’ll play football,'” he said.
Children who survive on flour and cassava seeds
Authorities and family members say the children survived on cassava flour and seeds, and some familiarity with the fruit of the rainforest was also key to their survival. The children are members of the Huitoto Indigenous group.
After being rescued on Friday, the children were flown by helicopter to Bogota and then to the military hospital, where President Gustavo Petro, government and military officials, as well as family members met you on Saturday.
An air force video released Friday shows a helicopter using a rope to pull the children up because it was unable to land in the dense rainforest where they were found. The Army on Friday posted photos on Twitter showing a group of soldiers and volunteers posing with children wrapped in thermal blankets. One of the soldiers brought the bottle to the mouth of the youngest child.
General Pedro Sanchez, who is in charge of the rescue efforts, said the children were found 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the crash site in a clearing in the woods. He said rescue teams had passed within 20 to 50 meters (66 to 164 feet) of where the children were found on a few occasions but missed them.
Two weeks after the crash, on May 16, a search team found the plane in a dense rainforest and found the bodies of three adults on board, but no children were found. .
Soldiers on a helicopter dropped boxes of food into the forest, hoping that it would help feed the children. Planes flying over the area fired flares to assist search teams on the ground at night, and rescuers used loudspeakers to play a recorded message by the brothers’ grandmother asking them to stay. sit still.
The Colombian military has sent 150 soldiers and sniffer dogs to the area, where fog and thick foliage limit visibility. Dozens of volunteers from indigenous tribes also joined the search.
Ranoque, the father of the youngest children, said the rescue showed how “indigenous peoples, we are trained to search” in the middle of the jungle.
“We proved to the world that we found the plane…we found the children,” he added.
Colombian Governmenttrying to end domestic conflict, highlighted the joint work of the military and indigenous communities in the search for the children.
