![]() ![]() When found, one of the first sentences four-year-old Tien Ranoque Mucutuy whispered to the rescuers was “my mother is dead,” Muñoz told CNN. Lesly, in particular, is hailed for not only staying alive herself, but also making sure her younger siblings would survive following the loss of their mother in the plane crash. While their survival remains a marvel, it was no doubt facilitated by traditional knowledge of the forest they embraced from a remarkably young age, and while Colombia deployed its army, it was four local indigenous guides who first spotted the little ones. “Thanks to the kids we realized that we, the indigenous, we are important.” “Thanks to these kids we won over technology,” Guerrero gleamed at a recent press conference in Bogota. The accomplishment feels like a moment of pride for the indigenous community of the Colombian Amazon. When found, the children had bottles they used to collect water, either from streams or from the rain, which was plentiful during the month of the search. The Cessna 206 plane wreckage that killed the four children's mother after it crashed in the jungles of Caqueta in Colombia. Seeds of milpesos were also found along their footprints, and Colombian authorities believe Lesly took some baby’s formula from the discarded plane to feed Cristin, 11 months old, for a few days. The traces of their survival show impressive botanical knowledge and foresight.ĭuring the search, rescuers found discarded fruits like avichure, a wild plant similar to the passion fruit that the children ate while alone in the forest. On Thursday, a statement from the hospital said the children are out of immediate danger but still considered at high risk due to infectious diseases they contracted and serious malnourishment. The children have not yet spoken publicly and are recovering in Colombia’s central military hospital in Bogota. But their great-uncle, Fidencio Valencia, did not despair: “They already know the jungle… they are children, but we hope they are alive and that they have access to water,” he told reporters on May 19. Weeks ago, most of the Colombian public following their story could not have known the extent to which Lesly and her siblings possessed those skills. Only someone with deep knowledge of the forest and remarkable personal resilience could survive there for over a month – much less keep three other people alive too. ![]() “We understand they only used one of the kits of the Army, for the rest just fruits, seeds and water,” says Henry Guerrero, an indigenous elder who was also part of the team that found them. They had also found one of the hundreds of survival kits left in the jungle by the search and rescue operation, which included small rations of food, electrolytes, and lighters. Part of the children's survival was down to knowledge of the native palm tree, the Oenocarpus Bataua. In more than a month without adults, they appear to have survived on wild fruits and three pounds of cassava flour, a high-protein traditional staple of the Amazon diet, that they retrieved from the wreckage of the plane crash that stranded them in the forest. Lesly and her siblings were dangerously emaciated when they were finally found. The stretch of the jungle they were found in is one of the most remote and inhospitable in Colombia, where wild animals like jaguars, anacondas or poisonous bugs abound, rains can pour for over 15 hours a day and visibility is sometimes limited to 10 meters due to the thick vegetation. It took a team of over 130 special force commandos and some of the most skilled indigenous guides in the country to find them. “That’s how they stayed alive.”Įver since the children were brought home, reporters and survival experts have been trying to answer this question: How did four children – the youngest just an infant – survive in the heart of the Amazon rainforest for so long? “She was keeping them so that the warmth of her mouth would open up the seeds and she could feed the pulp to her younger siblings,” Muñoz says. Eliecer Munoz (C), who was one of the indigenous guards who found the four children, talks during a press conference in Bogota, on June 15, 2023. ![]()
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