Surviving Children Found After Colombian Rainforest Plane Crash

The children have finally been found. More than a month after a small plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest, the four surviving children have been rescued from the jungle.

This was announced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Friday. The children were alone when they were found, Petro said after returning from Cuba, where he had signed a ceasefire agreement with representatives of the rebel group National Liberation Army (ELN).

A rescue dog led the helpers to the children. You will now receive medical care. Petro predicted their survival would “go down in history.”

The children, who belong to the indigenous Uitoto community, are siblings aged 13, nine, four and one year old. After the crash, government officials said the older children knew how to survive in the rainforest.

While looking for the children, the soldiers found shoes, diapers, scissors and a makeshift shelter made of leaves and branches. The military released images on Twitter on Friday that showed some soldiers and volunteers posing with the children. The siblings were wrapped in thermal blankets. One of the soldiers held a bottle to the smallest child’s lips.

The intensive search for the three girls and the boy in the jungle had kept the Colombians in suspense for weeks. 150 soldiers and more than 70 indigenous people from the region took part in the search in the untouched Amazon region known as “Operation Hope”. “It’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s like looking for a tiny flea in a giant carpet moving in unpredictable directions,” General Pedro Sánchez, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, told the AP said.

Visibility was severely limited due to dense wafts of fog. Airplanes circling over the jungle fired flares to aid search parties on the ground at night.

The helpers had also broadcast the area with recordings of the children’s grandmother’s voice to draw their attention to the helpers. They should stay in one place, the audio message said. However, heavy rain drowned out the recording, said Sánchez.

The crash happened in the early hours of May 1st. The four children were traveling with their mother from the village of Araracuara in the Amazon to San Jose del Guaviare, a small town on the edge of the rainforest. The single-engine Cessna propeller plane with six passengers and one pilot on board had declared an emergency due to engine failure.

A short time later, the small plane disappeared from the radar. Three adults died in the crash: The bodies of the pilot, an indigenous leader and the children’s mother were found almost two weeks later near the scene of the accident.

According to media reports, the children in Colombia were with their mother on the way to their father, who had fled the region after constant threats from a splinter group of the guerrilla organization FARC. Although the security situation has improved after the 2016 peace agreement between the government and 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.