Colombian children rescued in the jungle were on the run for their lives

The four children who survived an almost unfathomable 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their small plane crashed in the Amazon rainforest had boarded the plane fleeing for their lives.

Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest survivors, explained in an interview that an armed group that forcibly recruited children by threatening violence had taken control of their home region in southern Colombia.

Fearing that their family was next, relatives had tried to fly the children out of the area to a town where they could live safely.

Then the children’s escape plane crashed, killing their mother and two other adults and sending the quartet on a traumatic week-long survival trek in the Amazon jungle. The eldest of the children, Lesly, 13, played the role of guide and mother to her siblings, helping them navigate the forest.

“I was very afraid that the children would be recruited,” said Mr Ranoque, speaking by phone like others. He added that the country’s armed groups “have no respect – they are capable of recruiting a child as young as 2 years old.”

The rescue of the children last week provided a rare moment of united celebration in a deeply divided nation, with broad sections of society, from left to right, praising the search team’s work. Gustavo Petro, the country’s leftist president, called the rescue “magical”, and Iván Duque, his conservative predecessor, called it “a miracle.”

But the story of the children — Lesly, Soleiny, 9, Tien, 5, and Cristin, 1 — all from the Huitoto Indigenous group, is also a stark reminder of the dangers thousands of rural Colombian children face every day.

For decades, the country has been terrorized by armed groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In 2016, the FARC agreed to lay down its arms. But the state never took control of many places where the rebels once thrived.

Caught in the middle of these warring factions are Colombia’s rural citizens, and children are the youngest victims, suffering displacement, recruitment, and the death and disappearance of family members and community leaders.

The indigenous reservation where the children live, next to the town of Araracuara in the Amazonas department, is extremely remote, according to their great-uncle Fidencio Valencia. “There is no sewage system; there is no electricity,” he said. “There is nothing. We have been abandoned, all of us, by the state.”

Residents in and around Araracuara have been the target of violence in recent months, according to Colombia’s ombudsman, which is investigating human rights violations and has blamed killings and recruitment of children in the area on a group of FARC dissidents calling themselves the Carolina Ramírez Front.

“People live in fear and are very afraid to speak out because you have to protect your family,” said an Araracuara resident, a Huitoto woman who asked not to use her name, out of concern for her safety.

At least two other armed groups operate in the region, she said.

The Carolina Ramírez Front occasionally issues statements via social media, but has not commented on the matter.

The head of the Colombian army, Major General Helder Giraldo, said in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday that officials were aware of Mr Ranoque’s statements about the armed group and were monitoring the situation.

In the jungle, the effort to find the children after their plane crashed, dubbed Operation Hope by the government, was led by the Colombian military and members of the Indigenous Guard, an unarmed civilian defense force made up of tens of thousands of people from various tribes. About 300 people took part in the search, according to the military.

Lesly helped her siblings by building shelter, finding food and cheering them up, said Luis Acosta, the National Coordinator for the Indigenous Guard, who was part of the search team and spoke to the group that eventually found the children.

Indigenous children in the region are taught from an early age at home and school how to understand the jungle both practically and spiritually, Mr Acosta, who is from another tribe, told Nasa. Lesly would most likely have been willing to take care of her younger siblings.

“From the age of 13, we’re already taking on adult roles,” he said, “because we have to be on the territory. In life, we’ve had to do it this way.”

Wild animals, poisonous snakes and poisonous plants are all present in the Colombian Amazon. Officials have said the children survived by eating wild fruits and cassava flour that came from the plane’s wreckage and survival kits dropped by helicopters.

Mr Acosta said the search team spent 20 nights sleeping in hammocks near the crash site and would travel in groups during the day to look for the children.

For subsistence, members of the search team ate a cracker-like bread known as casabe, as well as canned food, river fish, and mojojoy, a type of larvae found in palm trees.

Whenever they found a trace of the kids — a footprint, a diaper — that suggested a sign of life, they were encouraged, he said. Whenever it rained too hard to search, they were discouraged.

Brig. General Pedro Sánchez, who led Operation Hope, said trees in the jungle can grow 100 feet or more, blocking light and making it difficult to see anyone just a few feet away.

The search team dropped fliers from helicopters and played messages from the children’s grandmother in the Huitoto language telling them to stay put and wait for help.

General Sánchez said the children heard the messages and saw the leaflets, but kept moving, making them difficult to find.

“Why did they move?” he said. “Only they know.”

On June 9, four indigenous members of the search team found the children less than four miles west of the crash site, General Sánchez said. They found Lesly with the 1-year-old in her arms. The 5-year-old boy was under a mosquito net, he said, and the children explained that they were hungry. (The two youngest had birthdays in the jungle.)

Then they reunited with the commandos, who gave the children first aid and fluids. A helicopter soon arrived to air them out of the jungle. As of Tuesday, they stayed in a military hospital in Bogotá.

“When the boy saw the indigenous people, he said: ‘My mother is dead,'” General Sánchez said. The rescuers tried to shift the conversation by saying, “Your grandmother is waiting for you and she is looking for you.”