HANDOUT / AFP
Wilson (pictured here) disappeared into the Colombian jungle while taking part in the search that made it possible to find four children after a plane crash.
COLOMBIA – Without him, the four children who disappeared in the Colombian jungle might never have been found. The sniffer dog Wilson, for his part missing in the Amazon rainforest, has been the subject of a campaign of support on social networks and an active investigation in recent days by the army, which assures that it will “never give up a comrade on the battlefield”.
#Vamos porWilson, #FaltaUno, #WilsonHeroeNacional are some of the keywords that are flooding Colombian social networks to support this 6-year-old Belgian Shepherd Dog Malinois, who will be actively involved in the incredible living discovery of Lesly (13 years old) on Friday, March 9th June, participated. , Soleiny, (9 years old), Tien Noriel (5 years old) and Cristin (1 year old). The four indigenous children hiked through the Colombian jungle for 40 days after the May Day plane crash of which they were the only survivors.
“You should do everything you can to find the dog Wilson,” who got lost in the jungle for several days, Nora Villa, a 55-year-old housewife, told AFP, summing up widespread sentiment in Colombia.
“We’ll get Wilson, we’ll bring him back”
The military says “the search is not over” because it “never leaves a comrade on the battlefield,” explaining on Twitter that “in his pursuit and eagerness to find the children, Wilson escaped the troops and they caught ‘lost’. “Operation Hope will continue according to the instructions of the President (Gustavo Petro) (…) until we manage to recover the dog Wilson,” said General Helder Giraldo, commander of the Colombian Armed Forces, on Tuesday. 70 commandos of the armed forces are mobilized to find him.
“We’ll get Wilson, we’ll get him back,” said General Pedro Sanchez, head of the child rescue operation, on Tuesday. The dog’s owner, Cristian David Lara, stayed in the forest. “He didn’t want to leave the area until he found his dog,” the soldier told El Espectador newspaper.
Wilson was present from the start of the search operation when, in mid-May, the Army located the Cessna 206, its nose stuck vertically in a dense jungle and the three adults on board, the children’s mother, a relative and… the pilot, deceased. It was he who found Cristin’s bottle almost four kilometers from the crash site and maintained hope of finding the children alive. The search also found chewed fruit, diapers, makeshift shelters, scissors and footprints.
But two weeks ago (Wilson) was “disoriented due to the complexity of the terrain, the humidity and the unfavorable weather conditions,” the Army said.
Probably the first to find the children
Several clues, such as the dog’s footprints next to those of the children, indicate that Wilson “was the first to find the children,” General Sanchez said. Remarkably, Lesly and Soleiny, who were recovering with their little brother and sister in a hospital in Bogotá, drew a dog in the middle of the trees near a river.
Astrid Caceres, director of the Colombian Institute for the Protection of the Family (ICBF), said on Saturday that Lesly “told us (…) about the little dog that was lost, that she doesn’t know where he is and .” that he accompanied her for a while”. In Colombia, which has been locked in an internal war with guerrillas and drug traffickers for half a century, more than 17,000 dogs have been trained by the army for explosives detection or rescue.
According to General Sanchez, Wilson did not carry a GPS, as is usual in this type of operation, since there are dissidents of the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in this region of southern Colombia, who have rejected the 2016 peace agreement: this is supposed to be the case prevent the “enemy” from finding him.
Paola Romero, a teacher who owns a dog, told AFP that the army “did not take the necessary precautions to be able to geolocate Wilson.” Luis Prado, freelancer, “thinks that it is necessary to strive to a certain point, as far as media pressure allows, because it requires human sacrifices and more resources”.
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