As the search progressed, soldiers found small clues in the jungle that led them to believe the children were still living, including a pair of footprints, a baby bottle, diapers, and pieces of fruit that looked like it had been bitten by humans.
Four children who disappeared 40 days after surviving a plane crash in the Amazon jungle have been found alive
The Four Indigenous children were found alive Friday, as announced by Colombian authorities, bringing an ending to an intense search that gripped the nation.
The siblings, aged 13, 9, 4 and 1, are expected to remain for at least two weeks in a hospital receiving treatment after their rescue, but some are already speaking and wanting to do more than lie in bed, relatives said.
Details of what happened to the youngsters, and what they did, have been emerging gradually and in small pieces, so it could take some time to have a better picture of their ordeal, during which the youngest, Cristin, turned 1 year old.
Henry Guerrero, an Indigenous man who was part of the search group, told reporters that the children were found with two small bags containing some clothes, a towel, a flashlight, two cellphones, a music box and a soda bottle.
He said they used the bottle to collect water in the jungle, and he added that after they were rescued the youngsters complained of being hungry. “They wanted to eat rice pudding, they wanted to eat bread,” he said.
Fidencio Valencia, a child’s uncle, told the media outlet Noticias Caracol that the children were starting to talk and one of them said they hid in tree trunks to protect themselves in a jungle area filled with snakes, animals and mosquitoes. He said they were exhausted.
Later, Valencia provided new details of the children’s recovery two days after the rescue: “They have been drawing. Sometimes they need to let off steam.” He said family members are not talking a lot with them to give them space and time to recover from the shock.
The crash happened in the early hours of May 1, when the Cessna single-engine propeller plane with six passengers and a pilot declared an emergency due to an engine failure.
The small aircraft 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 thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board, but the small children were nowhere to be found.
Sensing that they could be alive, Colombia’s army stepped up the hunt for the children and flew 150 soldiers with dogs into the area to track the group of four siblings, with dozens of volunteers from Indigenous tribes also helping in the search.
During the search, in an area where visibility is greatly limited by mist and thick folliage, soldiers on helicopters dropped boxes of food into the jungle, hoping that it would help sustain the children. Planes flying over the jungle fired flares to help search crews on the ground at night, while rescuers used megaphones that blasted a message recorded by the siblings’ grandmother, telling them to stay in one place.
The children 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.
As the search progressed, soldiers found small clues in the jungle that led them to believe the children were still living, including a pair of footprints, a baby bottle, diapers, and pieces of fruit that looked like it had been bitten by humans.
Rumors initially emerged about the children’s whereabouts and on May 18, President Gustavo Petro tweeted that the children had been found. He then deleted the message, claiming a government agency had misinformed him.
The group of four children had been traveling with their mother from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare, a small city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest when the plane went down.
On Friday, after confirming the children had been rescued, the president said that for a while he had believed the children were rescued by one of the nomadic tribes that still roam the remote swath of the jungle where the plane fell and have little contact with authorities.
But President Petro added that the children were first found by one of the rescue dogs that soldiers took into the jungle.
After being rescued on Friday, the children were transported in a helicopter to Bogota and then to the military hospital, where President Petro, government and military officials, as well as family members, met with the children on Saturday.
An air force video released Friday showed a helicopter using lines to pull the youngsters up because it couldn’t land in the dense rainforest where they were found. The military on Friday tweeted pictures showing 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.
Gen. Pedro Sanchez, who was in charge of the rescue efforts, said that the children were found 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from the crash site in a small forest clearing. He said rescue teams had passed within 20 to 50 meters (66 to 164 feet) of where the children were found on a couple of occasions but had missed them.
The Colombian government, which is trying to end internal conflicts in the country, has highlighted the joint work of the military and Indigenous communities to find the children.
The air force later shared a video on Twitter showing soldiers using a line to load the children onto a helicopter that then flew off in the dark. The tweet said the aircraft was headed to the town of San Jose del Guaviare, but gave no further details.
“The union of our efforts made this possible” Colombia’s military command wrote on its Twitter account.
President Petro told reporters upon his return to Bogota from Cuba, where he signed a cease-fire agreement with representatives of the National Liberation Army rebel group, that the youngsters are an “example of survival” and predicted their saga “will remain in history.”
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