Colombian police reported Friday that four Indigenous children who went missing 40 days ago after surviving a minor plane crash in the Amazon jungle had been discovered alive, bringing an end to a nationwide search.
President Gustavo Petro informed reporters upon his return to Bogota from Cuba, where he signed a cease-fire agreement with leaders of the National Liberation Army rebel group, that the youngsters were found alone and are now receiving medical attention.
The president called the kids an “example of survival” and predicted their story would “remain in history.”
There was no quick word on how the kids managed to exist on their own for so long.
In the early hours of May 1, a Cessna single-engine propeller plane carrying six passengers and a pilot reported an emergency due to engine failure.
After the little plane vanished from the radar, a desperate search for survivors began. On May 16, two weeks after the disaster, a search party discovered the plane in a dense section of rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults aboard, but the tiny children were nowhere to be found.
Colombia’s army increased its search for the youngsters, flying 150 soldiers with dogs into the area to trace the group of four siblings, aged 13, 9, 4, and 11 months. Dozens of Indigenous tribes volunteers also assisted in the search.
The military tweeted photographs of soldiers and volunteers posing with the children, who were wrapped in thermal blankets, on Friday. One of the soldiers placed a bottle in the youngest child’s mouth.
The air force later tweeted a video of soldiers utilising a queue to load the youngsters aboard a helicopter, which then flew away in the dark. The aeroplane was heading to the hamlet of San Jose del Guaviare, according to the tweet, but no additional information was provided.
“The combination of our efforts made this possible,” Colombia’s military command said on Twitter.
During the hunt, soldiers on helicopters dropped cartons of food into the bush, hoping that it would help feed the youngsters in an area where vision is considerably limited by mist and heavy foliage. Planes flying over the bush lit flares to assist ground personnel searching at night, while rescuers used megaphones to broadcast a message recorded by the siblings’ grandmother imploring them to remain put.
Rumours concerning the children’s whereabouts circulated, and on May 18, President Petro tweeted that the children had been found. He subsequently removed the communication, saying that a government agency had misled him.
The four children were travelling with their mother from Araracuara, an Amazonian village, to San Jose del Guaviare, a small city on the outskirts of the Amazon rainforest.
They are Huitoto people, and the elder children in the tribe, according to officials, know how to survive in the rainforest.
After verifying the children’s rescue on Friday, the president stated that he had previously believed the children were saved by one of the nomadic tribes that still wander the vast expanse of the jungle where the plane crashed and have no interaction with authorities.
However, Petro stated that the children were discovered by one of the rescue dogs that soldiers brought into the woods.
Officials did not specify how far the children had travelled from the crash site when they were discovered. However, the crews were searching within a 4.5-kilometre (almost 3-mile) radius of where the little plane crashed into the forest floor.
Soldiers discovered little signs in the jungle that led them to assume the children were still alive, such as a pair of footprints, a baby bottle, diapers, and pieces of fruit that appeared to have been nibbled by people as the search advanced.
“The jungle saved them,” Petro remarked. “They are children of the jungle, and they are now also children of Colombia.”
