Forty days after the plane crash: the secret to the survival of children in the jungle

The children are dehydrated but generally fine, officials say, and the rescue chief says his teams repeatedly passed within meters of the children but missed them.

According to the children’s uncle, cassava flour and some familiarity with rainforest fruits were the keys to the extraordinary 40-day survival of four children in the Amazon jungle after the plane they were in crashed.

“When the plane crashed, they got a farinha out of the wreckage, and thanks to that they survived,” the children’s uncle Fidencio Valencia told reporters outside a hospital in Bogota, where they are expected to stay for at least two weeks. Farinha is a cassava flour eaten in the Amazon region.

“After the farinha ran out, they started eating the seeds,” says Valencia.

Damaris Mukutui, the children’s aunt, told the radio station that “the children are fine” despite dehydration and insect bites. She added that children were offered mental health services.

The time of their difficult test fell in favor of the children, the Associated Press notes. Astrid Caceres, head of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, says children could also eat fruit because “there was a harvest in the jungle” during this period.

General Pedro Sanchez, who led the rescue effort, said rescue teams passed within 20-50 meters of where the children were found a couple of times, but did not see them.

“The juveniles were already very weak,” General Sanchez said. “And, of course, their strength was only enough to breathe or reach for a small fruit to feed themselves, or drink a drop of water in the jungle.”

The Huitoto Indian children, aged 13, nine and four, plus an 11-month-old baby, were traveling with their mother from the Amazonian village of Araraquara in San José del Guaviare when the light plane crashed in the early morning of May 1. The kids were found alive by a military sniffer dog on Friday after spending weeks in an area where snakes, mosquitoes and other wildlife abound.

The children told officials that they spent some time with the dog, but then it went missing. As of Saturday, the military is still looking for the dog, a Belgian Shepherd named Wilson.

President Gustavo Petro, who gleefully announced the discovery of the children on Friday, met with them on Saturday at a hospital in Bogotá. Defense Minister Ivan Velazquez told reporters that the children were undergoing rehydration and could not yet eat.

“But in general the condition of the children is acceptable,” says Velasquez.

Officials praised the courage of the eldest of the children, a girl who they say had some knowledge of how to survive in the rainforest and led the children through the ordeal.

Four children were in a Cessna single-engine propeller plane with three adults on board when the pilot declared an emergency due to engine failure. The small aircraft soon disappeared from radar, and a weeks-long search for survivors began.

Air Force video released on Friday shows a helicopter using tethers to lift children up because the rotorcraft couldn’t land in the dense rainforest. The military tweeted photos on Friday of a group of soldiers and volunteers posing with children wrapped in thermal blankets. One of the soldiers brought the bottle to the lips of the smallest child.

President Petro called the miraculously saved children “a model of survival” and predicted that their saga would “remain in history.”

Two weeks after the crash, on May 16, a search party located the plane in dense rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board, but the small children were nowhere to be found.

Sensing that they might be alive, the Colombian Army stepped up the hunt and dispatched 150 soldiers with dogs to the area, where fog and heavy foliage severely limited visibility. Dozens of volunteers from indigenous tribes also joined the search.

Soldiers in helicopters dropped boxes of food into the jungle, hoping it would help feed the children. Planes flying over the area fired flares to help search teams on the ground at night, and rescuers used loudspeakers that played a message recorded by the siblings’ grandmother telling them to stay in one place.

The announcement of their rescue came shortly after Petro signed a ceasefire agreement with representatives of the National Liberation Army rebel group. In line with his government’s message highlighting his efforts to end internal conflicts, he emphasized the military and indigenous communities working together to find the children.

“Knowledge meeting: Indigenous and military,” he tweeted. “Here’s another path for Colombia: I believe this is the true path to peace.”