“Lesly is 13 years old, she is the eldest, the strongest, she is the one who leads the group: she is as intelligent as her 9-year-old brother Soleiny, but there are forest spirits who hold her captive,” he had his Uncle Fidencio Valencia said a few days ago after the “miracle” (“we found them, they’re fine”) announced by Colombian President Gustavo Pedro on Wednesday turned out to be a hoax.
The one hundred soldiers who, along with dozens of locals, helicopters and molecular dogs, are searching in the vastness of the Caqueta forest for four children missing since May 1 said they found new tracks in the mud on Thursday: “Small steps.” barefoot, a sign of hope”. The four Tom Thumbs of the Amazon (they left bits of cloth and a pair of purple scissors on a giant leaf, perhaps to draw rescuers’ attention) know the pitfalls of the jungle (jaguars and venomous snakes) because that’s where they grew up: they belong to the thousand surviving of the Huitoto or Muinane ethnic group (a sub-group with a population of 547), whose name means ‘people of the mouth’.
And perhaps they had arrived where a river ends, so finding them would have been easier: instead they were in the sky above the green tide when the Odyssey began, twenty days before dawn. They flew from Araracuara to San José del Guaviare with their mother, Magdalena, to meet Manuel, the woman’s husband, father of the two youngest children: Tien Noriel, 4 years old, and little Cristin, just 11 months old . The family’s plan was to settle in the city, perhaps in the capital Bogotá, away from the forest that ravaged them cruelly. The engine of the small Cessna 206 has failed, the pilot has time to sound the alarm before the plane crashes.
Fifteen days later, Tuesday the 16th, they found the wreck 200 kilometers from their destination. And three lifeless bodies in the front of the plane: the pilot Hernando; Herman, the director of the Yetara Indigenous Foundation; the mother. But there is no trace of Lesly and the other children.
Maybe they waited before leaving (unfortunately not long enough). They must have stayed with their mother for a time, who, even after she was dead, had to give them some comfort. Like the faint voice that rescuers “fired” from a repeater attached to the belly of a helicopter with a listening range of 1.5 kilometers. Grandmother Fatima’s voice repeating in the Huitoto language amid 40-meter-tall trees: “Stay where you are, we’ll come and get you.”
The rescuers could not know about the physical condition of the Tom Thumbs, which also left some pebbles in the forest: gnawed fruit, a piece of clothing, “beds” made of twigs and a bottle, foreshadowing Cristin’s fate, 11 months, 20 of them days in the forest. “You know about plants, you will have found something to eat,” Uncle Fidencio had said. Forbidden weather conditions with torrential rains, armed groups that never accepted the ceasefire agreed by FARC in 2015. A place out of this world where news leaked on Wednesday that the four had been rescued and were on a boat bound for Puerto Cachiporro, 500km south of Bogotá. The boat arrived but there were no children. The President of the Republic had to retract the jubilant message on Twitter. The immensity of the forest, the time that passes, a whole country that wanted to get up this morning with a wish fulfilled: spirits of the forest, let them come back.