After rescuing four children from the Colombian rainforest who had been missing for weeks, the brothers spoke to family members for the first time about their time in the jungle. “They were scared. They hid behind tree trunks. That’s what they did. They ran away,” their grandfather Fidencio Valencia told Caracol TV today. Soldiers and indigenous people already feared this during the searches.
Criminal groups operate in the region, from where the children’s father had to flee. “We have to give them positive energy now. They saw their mother die,” said Valencia.
Search teams found the children on Friday after 40 days in the rainforest in the south of the country. They crashed on May 1 with a Cessna 206 prop plane in the department of Caquetá. The children’s mother, the pilot and an indigenous leader died in the accident.
For more than a month, the military and indigenous people searched the impassable area for the brothers. The children are being cared for at the military hospital in the capital Bogotá.