Global Courant
The indigenous children rescued in the Amazon jungle after spending 40 days lost after a plane crash waited for four days for help near the plane, but when they saw that it did not arrive, they began to walk to try to get out of there, one of their grandparents revealed on Monday. .
“They stayed around the plane for four days waiting to see if someone could come pick them up,” said Narciso Mucutuy, the children’s grandfather, who added that since no one found them, they began to walk along “trails toward the mountains.”
In statements released by the Ministry of Defense, Mucutuy assured that this was told to him by Lesly, the eldest of the four children, who also told him that after leaving the plane they walked aimlessly and every night they left clues in the places where they slept, in case someone was looking for them.
The 13-year-old girl Lesly has been praised as the heroine of this story of human improvement because it was she who, with her knowledge of the jungle, was in charge of taking care of her brothers Soleiny Mucutuy, 9, for 40 days; Tien Noriel Ranoque Mucutuy, five years old, and Cristin Neruman Ranoque, a one-year-old baby.
The minor also told her grandfather that they survived the first days in the jungle eating “fariña”, a flour made with cassava that is a traditional food of the indigenous people of the Amazon.
survival lesson
After the accident, and seeing that the rescue had not arrived, Lesly took the fariña out of the suitcase, one of the three adults who were traveling with them on the Cessna 206 plane and who perished in the incident that occurred on May 1 in the jungle between the departments of Caquetá and Guaviare, recounted the grandfather at the Central Military Hospital (HMC) in Bogotá, where the children are recovering.
The three adults who died in the accident were the mother of the children, the pilot and an indigenous leader from the area.
According to what Manuel Ranoque, father of the two minor children, said yesterday, Lesly told him that her mother “was alive for four days” and before she died she told them to “go away” in search of help.
Soldiers and indigenous people attend to children rescued after 40 days in the jungle, in Guaviare (Colombia). Photo EFE
The four minors were found on Friday in a remote part of the jungle where some 200 soldiers searched for them tirelessly for weeks, including commandos from the Army Special Forces, and indigenous people from the area, all of whom were part of “Operation Hope.”
After the rescue, they were transferred by helicopter of the Colombian Air Force (FAC) to San José del Guaviare, the capital of Guaviare, where a C-295 plane configured as an ambulance picked them up and took them to Bogotá.
The grandfather recounted that Lesly made the one-year-old baby give up the bottle, because “she gave her a little until it ran out”, after which she began to give her only water.
“By the time they were found, (Lesly) says she couldn’t walk anymore. She was already very tired, very tired. So they huddled in one place and sat down. She had the little girl between her legs when they found them,” she said. Mucutuy.
While details about how the children survived 40 days in the jungle continue to be revealed, the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) will maintain their custody until they resolve the family problems between the maternal grandparents and Manuel Ranoque, father of two of them, who requested on Sunday they let him live with the four minors in Bogotá.
Special commands, keys
A successful duo. Indigenous volunteers and seasoned special commandos from the Colombian Army played a key role in the amazing rescue of four children lost in the Amazon jungle for 40 days.
The moment they found the 4 children lost in the jungle in Colombia.
“It was a spectacular amalgamation of indigenous knowledge and military art,” Brigadier General Pedro Sánchez, who led the search operations, praised Sunday.
With sun-tanned skin, a frank look and direct speech, General Sánchez is also the head of the Joint Command of Special Operations (CCOES) of the Colombian Armed Forces.
It was his men from the special forces who participated in the exhausting daily searches in the hostile jungle of Caquetá, where on May 1 the plane crashed in which three adults, including their mother, died in the accident.
For them “it was a different mission” from the usual combats against the numerous armed groups that operate in the country.
Rescue children? “We always save and protect lives, even during our combat missions,” stressed General Sánchez as if to defend an institution often accused of summary executions during the long internal conflict that has bled the country dry, its collusion with extreme right-wing paramilitaries or the complicity of officers with drug traffickers.
Here, “failing or giving up was not an option,” he said. And it was his men, “the most trained soldiers in the Colombian army” but that “nobody in the media knows about,” who achieved “the impossible.”
Created in 2007, the CCOES brings together elite elements from the Army, the Air Force and the Navy.
In his videos for the public, he claims to be “Colombia’s honor guard” and his motto is “Union, Integrity, Victory.”
According to articles in the specialized press, it has some 3,000 men, with three components -land, urban and maritime- and a fourth air support component.
Its main mission is “the planning and execution of special operations inside and outside the national territory against terrorist groups, high-value targets and organized crime,” a Colombian military source told AFP.
In October 2021, the CCOES participated in the capture of “Otoniel”, the leader of the Clan del Golfo, the largest cartel in the country.
Trained in nursing, as well as in search and rescue, “they were entrusted with this mission in the Amazon not only because of the difficult geographical conditions of the terrain and the difficulty of access, but also because dissidents of the FARC guerrilla operate in this region.” the source added.
There are other special forces units within the Colombian Armed Forces, such as the Marine Commandos, the Special Operations and Anti-Terrorism Command (COPES) and the fearsome Police Jungle Commandos. In Colombia, the Police depends on the Ministry of Defense.
Source: EFE and AFP
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