Colombia suffers hours of fear for the fate of four children who disappeared into the jungle for 17 days. The plane that crashed them on May 1st in a hard-to-reach place was found on Tuesday with the bodies of the pilot, co-pilot and the minor’s mother, but no trace of them remained. The whereabouts of the children, aged 11 months, 4, 9 and 13 years, remain a mystery. The search was stressful due to the adverse conditions in the Amazon, where it is not easy to survive. Authorities and surrounding communities combed the area. According to President Gustavo Petro on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, they managed to locate them. He brought the news of a miracle.
However, as the hours went by, the information became confusing and contradictory. Neither Aerocivil nor the armed forces, the institutions in charge of the search, have confirmed this. Versions circulated that it was all a big misunderstanding and that the children had not been found. Someone from Family Welfare (ICBF), the body responsible for protecting minors, would have informed the President, who immediately broke the news on the networks. The institution confirmed that the information about them had reached the President.
“Intelligence has been obtained from the area ensuring contact with the four boys and girls who were among those transported on the plane. That report states that they were found alive and that they are also in good health,” an ICBF statement said. “However, the armed forces have not yet been able to establish official contact due to the difficult weather conditions and terrain,” they add. Therefore, the authorities failed to “confirm the information that the ICBF received from various sources”.
The company behind the crashed plane launched their own version. He assured that they had not yet been found and that the search would continue. But the most interesting thing is what he says in a statement and that he would speak of a viable hypothesis about what happened. This version states that the captain of a light aircraft that landed today in Cachiporro, the Caquetá municipality closest to the accident, learned at 3:30 p.m. from the neighbors that the children had been found and that they traveled down the river. The captain radioed a colonel who was responsible for locating the ship. If this version is true, they may have been caught in a thunderstorm en route, preventing them from continuing their journey, and they would be somewhere incommunicado waiting for it to clear. The point is that no official authority has yet seen them or come into contact with them.
After an arduous search effort by our armed forces, we have found alive the four children who had disappeared in the Guaviare plane crash. A joy for the country.
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) May 17, 2023
Some locals have taken the find as good. An independent radio station affiliated with OPIAC (National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon) announced almost simultaneously with the President that the children had been found by a civilian, according to sources in the area. The organization was active throughout the search process and one of its members shared on networks that they found the children and not the army. However, their official spokesmen have not confirmed the news either.
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Petro, who is very active on social media, said nothing more about the matter. Those around them claim that the information is true and that the armed forces are only hours away from meeting the minors, who survived very harsh conditions in the jungle for more than two weeks. Local media were divided between those who gave the president’s information the truth and those who were completely suspicious. It wouldn’t be the first time the President has been wrong when making an announcement. In early January, he took for granted a ceasefire with the ELN, which was later denied by the guerrillas. On other occasions, he has shared messages from fake accounts on Twitter. This error would be of a different nature.
The news that they had survived filled the country with great joy for a brief moment. It is reminiscent of other cases such as the story of a shipwrecked person that García Márquez tells in serials for a magazine, or that of Juliane Koepcke, the sole survivor of a plane crash, who was lost in the Peruvian jungle for 11 days until she was found. Lesly Mucutuy (13 years old), Soleiny Mucutuy (9 years old), Tien Noriel Ronoque Mucutuy (4 years old) and Cristin Neriman Ranoque Mucutuy (11 months old) would have done a similar feat.
The children live in Araracuara and belong to the Huitoto community. According to the President’s version, it was the residents of Cachiporro, in the department of Vaupés, who found them. The authorities tried with all their might. Helicopters with speakers playing Grandmother’s voice flew over the area. At the scene of the accident, the military found a bottle, a pair of scissors and a bitten apple on some bushes, evidence that some had survived the accident. Some dogs searched the entire perimeter.
The plane they were traveling in with the three adults made the route between Araracuara and San José del Guaviare. At the wheel: the pilot Hernando Murcia Morales; as co-pilot, the indigenous leader Hermán Mendoza Hernández; and as co-driver Mucutuy Valencia, the children’s mother. Shortly after 7:30 a.m. on May 1, the pilot reported an engine failure. According to official information, the same plane had an accident on July 12, 2021 in Los Llanos Orientales. This time the last recorded location was about 175 km from the target, on the Apaporis River, in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
Since then, their whereabouts have been unknown until this Tuesday, more than two weeks later, authorities found the remains of the plane and the bodies of the three adults, whose bodies could not be recovered due to bad weather.
The children’s father, Manuel Ranoque, has not lost hope in these 17 days. “I’ve experienced that many times. I had a sister who was lost for almost a month and I struggled to find her because she is a mute special sister and in the same way she returned. That’s why I think that at this stage the effort will not be in vain,” he said in Noticias Caracol. This information explains that Ranoque fled Araracuara, Caquetá, due to threats from FARC dissidents. From his exile he sent money to get his wife and four children out of there and bring them to Bogotá. It is not yet confirmed if he will be able to meet her again soon or not.
Diana López Zuleta contributed to this information.
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