Rescue of 4 Colombian Children

Wilson, the sniffer dog, finally picked up the scent on the night of June 9. The team of four indigenous rescuers were exhausted. Along with a team of crack Colombian commandos, they had been combing the jungle for six weeks. They had used every trick in the book, even taking ayahuasca as part of the ritual. But their quarry eluded them still. This is one of the most hostile environments on Earth, a land of snakes, jaguars, mosquitos, sweltering heat and 100 per cent humidity.

But the six-year old Belgian shepherd led his handlers on, through thick Amazonian rainforest, deep in impenetrable and rain-soaked undergrowth. At last, the group came to a small clearing in the jungle. There they found who they were looking for: four children from the Huitoto indigenous group: Lesly, 13, Soleiny, 9, Tien, 4, and Cristin, 1. The plane the children had been travelling in, on a flight from Araracuara Airport to San José del Guaviare, had crashed in the jungle in Caqueta province on May 1, an unthinkable 40 days earlier. And yet although the four were dehydrated, malnourished and suffering from insect bites, all four were very much alive. It was, as the rescuers shouted into their short-wave radios to transmit the news, “Miracle! Miracle! Miracle!”

The good news brought the country to a halt. Nobody had expected the children to be alive.

The four had been with their mother, a family friend, and the pilot in a Cessna 206 light aircraft. They were flying to meet Manuel Ranoque, the father of two of the children, an indigenous mayor in the remote Amazonas region in southern Colombia. He had decided to move his family away from their home on an indigenous reserve, near a town called Araracuara, after receiving threats from local guerilla groups, who were recruiting children under the threat of violence.

For decades, Colombia has been riven by violence relating to the drugs trade. Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the most prominent of these groups, agreed to lay down its arms in 2016, but the areas where they were most active, particularly more faraway parts of the country, remain lawless. Locals near Araracuara have been targeted by a group called the Carolina Ramirez Front, led by former Farc members.

“I was very scared the children would be recruited,” Ranoque told the New York Times earlier this week, adding that the groups “have no respect – they are capable of recruiting a child as young as two”.

What Ranoque could not have anticipated was the alternative. Early on May 1, an hour or so after they had taken off, the single engine of the Cessna failed, and the plane crashed into the undergrowth.

The family friend and the pilot are believed to have been killed instantly. The children’s mother, Magdalena Mucutuy, 33, was badly injured but it seems – although reports vary – that she was, initially, still alive. Speaking outside the hospital earlier this week, Ranoque said Lesly, his eldest daughter, had told him that her mother had urged her children to leave her behind so that they might live.

“If it weren’t for our ancestral understanding of the forest – its medicinal properties, its life and its spirits – we would not have found the kids when we did,” Acosta said.

Meanwhile the army used a loudspeaker to blast out recordings by the children’s grandmother, urging the children to stay put, in their native tongue. They dropped parcels of food.

Despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation, the rescuers believed the children to be alive. Throughout May, they had found clues that indicated the children had survived the crash: a half-eaten passion fruit, water bottles, nappies. A hair tie and a makeshift shelter. Footprints, too.

But then, these were not the pampered offspring of the West, but indigenous children. As Luis Acosta, the national co-ordinator of the Indigenous Guard explained, their remarkable resilience was innate. “From the age of 13 we assume adult roles,” he told reporters. “We have to, in the territory. In life, we have to do it this way.”

“My granddaughter is brave and intelligent,” Narciso Mucutuy told the Telegraph. “She knows the jungle – we, as indigenous people, know the jungle. She knew she had to get her siblings to safety.”

Led by Lesly, the children salvaged what they could from the wreckage of the aircraft: a bag of cassava flour and some canned food.

Eventually, they decided to leave the crash site, to look for more food. “They survived on berries, on fruit,” said Mucutuy. “Lesly knew what was safe to eat and what was poisonous. It’s in our blood. But we teach them this from a very young age. She rationed the milk for the little one. When the milk ran out, she replaced it with water.

“The children cried. They were cold, they were hungry and they were in shock. The eldest tore some of the fabric from the clothes of their mum. They used it to wrap themselves up… and I think to be close to her.”

Eventually, however, the children stopped trekking. “They were exhausted. The eldest was weak. She was concerned. She was losing her memory and seeing things. They just couldn’t walk any more. They thought they were going to die. They prepared to die. But thankfully, that’s when they were found.”

Lesly had her one-year-old sister in her arms. The five-year-old was huddled under a mosquito net. “I’m hungry,” said Lesly as she ran towards Nicolas Ordonez Gomes, one of the rescue workers.

“My mother is dead,” said one of the boys. The rescuers tried to change the subject, saying that their grandmother was waiting for them. The boy asked for some bread and sausage. They were tired, hungry, and had lost their mother, but they were alive.

“I felt an overwhelming peace – peace we had found them, and peace that we hadn’t failed them,” says Sanchez. “But I also felt such happiness – it consumed me. I haven’t stopped smiling since.”

The children are now in hospital in Bogotá, flown there by helicopter having been picked up by army commandos using drop-lines. They are weak, but reported to be on the mend. But the national euphoria – as if Colombia had scored a goal at the World Cup – was short-lived.

At the time, the joyful news united Left and Right in Colombia’s often a fractious political environment. The President, Gustavo Petro, said the rescue was “magical”, while Ivan Duque, the conservative who was president before him, called it a “miracle”. Even the Carolina Ramirez Front issued a statement expressing their happiness.

“Like all Colombians, we rejoice that the four surviving children of the plane crash [in] May have been found alive,” it said.

After a few days of blanket coverage of the rescue, however, the news has returned to the usual political strife. And the Mucurtys, mourning their daughter, are seeking custody of the children.

For the rescuers, meanwhile, there remains one vital missing thread. Amid the chaos of the discovery, Wilson, the dog who helped find the children, vanished into the Amazonian undergrowth. Having spent six weeks searching for the children, the rescue team must now locate their canine team member, who himself was emaciated from the weeks of pawing his way through the jungle.

“Wilson [the dog] is part of our family,” says Sanchez. “Some of my men owe him his life as a result of previous operations, we won’t turn our backs on him. We never leave a man behind so we are still looking for him.”

It seems like a lost cause. Luckily, Operation Hope, with its team of dedicated commandos and indigenous searchers, specialises in those.

The plane suffers engine failure just before 7.30am and disappears off the radar, crashing deep in the jungle. Magdalena is severely injured

May 5

Magdalena dies and Lesly, 13, and her brothers Soleiny, 9, Tien, 4, and baby Cristin set off into the jungle. The siblings survive by eating cassava flour from the plane and using their knowledge of forest fruits

May 15

Rescuers find the plane with the body of the pilot and two other adults

May 16

A massive search begins, dubbed Operación Esperanza – Operation Hope. More than 100 soldiers are deployed with sniffer dogs

May 17

Search efforts intensify after rescuers discover a shelter built with sticks, leading them to believe there are survivors

May 18