Nearly six weeks after plane crash – Four missing children found alive!: The miracle in the Colombian rainforest

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Exhausted and emaciated, but very much alive! A month and a half after a small plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest, four surviving children have been rescued from the jungle. After a week-long search in the Amazon region, emergency services found the siblings aged 13, 9 and 4 and one year old in the south of the country, Colombian President Gustavo Petro (63) announced on Friday.

“A joy for the whole country. The four children who have been missing for 40 days in the Colombian rainforest have been found alive,” the head of state wrote on Twitter. He also published a photo of soldiers and indigenous people in the jungle feeding and watering the children. The Colombian Armed Forces also posted a series of photos of the successful rescue on Twitter – saying, “Joining forces has made this joy possible for Colombia. Honor to the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Colombia and to the indigenous communities and groups that took part in Operation Hope.”

The siblings crashed on May 1 in a Cessna 206 propeller plane in the Caquetá department in the south of the country. Small private planes are often the only way to cover longer distances in the impassable area. The children’s mother, the pilot and an indigenous leader were killed in the accident. While searching for the children, the soldiers found shoes, diapers, hair bows, purple scissors, a baby bottle, a shelter made of leaves and branches, and half-eaten fruit.

never given up hope

With the help of the found objects and traces, the soldiers were able to reconstruct the path the children had traveled so far. Accordingly, they initially removed four kilometers to the west of the crash site. Then they apparently ran into an obstacle and turned north. The rainforest in the region is very dense, which made searching for the missing people much more difficult. Moreover, it rains almost non-stop.

The children – three girls and a boy – are part of an indigenous community themselves, and their knowledge of the region may have helped them survive in the jungle after the crash. Her grandmother Fátima Valencia relied mainly on her eldest sister. “She was always like her mother, she took the others into the woods,” she said recently on the La FM radio station. “She knows the plants and fruits. We indigenous people learn from an early age which are edible and which are not.”

Miraculous survival

The case is reminiscent of the German-Peruvian Juliane Koepcke, who survived a plane crash in the Peruvian rainforest in 1971 and was rescued ten days later. Because her parents were biologists who did research in the Amazon, the then 17-year-old knew the area and was able to make her way to a river, where she was eventually found by forest workers.

According to media reports, the children in Colombia were on their way with their mother to their father, who had fled the region after continued threats from a splinter group of the FARC guerrilla organization. Although the security situation has improved following the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC, parts of the South American country are still controlled by illegal groups. Indigenous peoples, social activists and environmentalists in particular are repeatedly targeted by criminal gangs. (SDA/kes)

Source: Blick