Global Courant
Bogotá Colombia — Four indigenous children who disappeared 40 days ago after surviving a minor plane crash in the Amazon jungle were found alive on Friday, Colombian authorities announced, ending an intense search that has gripped the country.
The children were alone when searchers found them and are now receiving medical attention, President Gustavo Petro told reporters on his return to Bogota from Cuba, where he signed a ceasefire agreement with representatives of the National Liberation Army rebel group.
The president said the youths are an “example of survival” and predicted their story “will remain in history”.
The crash happened in the early hours of May 1, when the Cessna single-engine propeller plane carrying six passengers and a pilot declared an emergency due to engine failure.
The small plane 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 dense patch of rainforest and found the bodies of the three adults on board, but the small children were nowhere to be seen.
Sensing they could still be alive, the Colombian army stepped up the hunt for the children and flew 150 soldiers with dogs into the area to round up the group of four siblings, ages 13, 9, 4 and 11 months old. tracks. Dozens of volunteers from indigenous tribes also assisted in the search.
On Friday, the military tweeted photos of 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 pooling of our efforts has made this possible,” Colombia’s military command wrote on its Twitter account.
During the search, in an area where visibility is severely limited by fog and thick foliage, soldiers on helicopters dropped boxes of food into the jungle, hoping it would help support the children. Planes flying over the jungle fired flares to aid search crews on the ground at night, and rescuers used megaphones to broadcast a message recorded by the siblings’ grandmother, saying that they were on one place to stay.
Rumors also circulated about the whereabouts of the children and on May 18, President Petro tweeted that the children had been found. He subsequently deleted the post, claiming he had been misinformed by a government agency.
The group of four children had been traveling with their mother from the Amazon village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare, a small town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.
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.
On Friday, after confirming the children had been rescued, the president said he had for a while believed the children had been rescued by one of the nomad tribes who still roam the remote strip of jungle where the plane crashed and have little contact with the authorities. .
But Petro added that the children were first found by one of the rescue dogs soldiers took into the jungle.
“The jungle saved them,” Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”
