After being missing for 40 days in the Colombian rainforest, all four children that were in a plane crash on May 1st have been found alive. President Gustavo Petro was in attendance at the news conference on Friday night and commended the “example of total survival that will go down in history.” Three of the adults on board were found dead within the wreckage but the four children were missing.
Indigenous communities collaborated with the Colombian military and began searching for the children who were aged 13, 9, 4 and 1.
The children were weak but receiving medical attention. They were initially treated by combat medics from the special operations forces before being transferred to the military base in the city of San José del Guaviare. The Ministry of Defense said the children were in stable condition and will be transferred to a military hospital in Bogotá tomorrow to recover.
The defense minister, Iván Velásquez, shared the joy with the public in a video posted on social media. However, the details of who found the children and how they managed to survive in the jungle remain unclear. The jungle is prone to storms as well as being home to jaguars and poisonous snakes.
Pedro Arenas, a human-rights activist in San José del Guaviare, said, “It’s a real miracle. It’s going to be news for years to come, after 40 days, it is quite incredible news. So there is a lot of joy, there is really happiness.”
The children were members of the Huitoto Indigenous group and had been traveling with their mother and an Indigenous leader from the Amazon community of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare when the plane crashed. The pilot had reported engine trouble before the crash.
The Colombian air force and other branches of the military were immediately deployed to search for the missing individuals. Indigenous teams also joined in on the search. They played a recording made by the children’s grandmother in Huitoto, their native language, that told the children to stay in one place, and that people were looking for them. Conflicting details about the case had confused and angered many Colombians after President Gustavo Petro initially claimed they had been found before retracting the statement the following day.
Over the past few weeks, the authorities stated they had reason to believe the children could still be alive, due to footprints, shoes, and diapers found in the area. President Gustavo Petro commended the children on their survival skills, stating, “They fended for themselves. It is their knowledge from the Indigenous families, their knowledge on how to live in the jungle, that have saved them. They are children of the jungle. And now they are children of Colombia.”
Federico Rios contributed reporting from Madrid.
