BY REGINA GARCIA CANO
https://apnews.com/article/colombia-plane-crash-children-survive-amazon-jungle-ayahuasca-7bf79704dcd2ab361b62cf7bfff6857b
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) – The weary indigenous men gathered at their base camp, nestled between towering trees and dense vegetation forming a bewildering sea of green. They sensed that their ancestral homeland – Selva Madre or Mother Jungle – was not willing to allow them to search for the four children who have been missing in a remote area of southern Colombia since their chartered plane crashed weeks earlier.
Indigenous volunteers and military crews had found signs of hope: a baby bottle, half-eaten fruit and dirty diapers scattered across a vast swath of rainforest. The men were convinced that the children had survived. But torrential rains, rough terrain, and the passage of time had sapped their spirits and drained their stamina.
The weak in body, mind and faith cannot get out of this jungle. Day 39 was a matter of life or death for the children and the search teams.
That night at the camp, Manuel Ranoque, father of the two youngest children, reached for one of the most sacred rituals of Amazonian indigenous groups – yagé, a bitter tea made from plants native to the rainforest, better known as ayahuasca. For centuries, the hallucinogenic cocktail has been used by people in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil as a remedy for all ailments.
Henry Guerrero, a volunteer who joined the search from the children’s home village near Araracuara, told The Associated Press his aunt prepared the yagé for the group. They believed it would produce visions that could lead them to the children.
“I told them, ‘There’s nothing to do here.’ We won’t find them with the naked eye. “The last option is to take Yagé,” said the 56-year-old Guerrero. “The journey really takes place in very special moments. It’s something very spiritual.”
Ranoque sipped and the men stood guard for a couple of hours. When the psychotropic effects wore off, he told them it hadn’t worked.
Some seekers were ready to go. But the next morning, 40 days after the crash, an elder grabbed the rest of the yagé and drank it. Some people take it to connect with themselves, to heal illnesses, or to mend a broken heart. Elder José Rubio was confident it would eventually help locate the children, Guerrero said.
Rubio dreamed for a while. He vomited, a common side effect.
This time, he said, it worked. In his visions he saw her. He said to Guerrero, “‘We’re going to find the kids today.”
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The four children – Lesly, Soleiny, Tien and Cristin – grew up near Araracuara, a small Amazonian village in the department of Caquetá, which can only be reached by boat or light aircraft. Ranoque said the siblings lived happy but independent lives because he and his wife Magdalena Mucutuy were often away from home.
Lesly, 13, was the mature, quiet type. Soleiny, 9, was playful and Tien, almost 5 years old before the accident, restless. Cristin was 11 months old at the time and just learning to walk.
At home, Mucutuy grew onions and cassava and used them to produce fariña, a type of flour that the family could eat and sell. Lesly learned to cook at the age of 8; In the absence of the adults, she often looked after her siblings.
On the morning of May 1st, the children, their mother and an uncle boarded a light aircraft. They were on their way to the city of San José del Guaviare. Weeks earlier, Ranoque had fled his home village, an area where illegal drug cultivation, mining and logging have thrived for decades. He told the AP he feared pressure from people associated with his industry, but declined to give details about the nature of his job or business relationships.
“It’s not safe to work there,” Ranoque said. “And it’s illegal. It has to do with other people… in an area I can’t mention because I’m putting myself at greater risk.”
He said he left Mucutuy for 9 million Colombian pesos, about $2,695, before leaving to pay for groceries, other necessities and the charter flight. He wanted to drive the children out of the village because he feared they might be recruited by one of the rebel groups in the area.
They were en route to Ranoque when the pilot of the Cessna, a single-engine propeller aircraft, declared an emergency due to an engine failure. The plane disappeared from radar a short time later.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday… The engine has failed me again… I’ll look for a river… I’ve got a river on my right here,” pilot Hernando Murcia reported to air traffic control at 7:43 a.m., according to a preliminary report from the aviation authorities.
“103 miles from San Jose… I’m going to land.”
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The Colombian military launched a search for the plane when it failed to reach its destination. About ten days later, when no plane and no sign of life was found, the indigenous volunteers joined the action. They knew the terrain and the families in the area much better. A man told them the plane made a strange noise as it flew over his house. This helped them devise a search plan that followed the Apaporis River.
As they trek through the unforgiving terrain, pausing in groups, ants crawled on them and mosquitoes ate their blood. One searcher nearly lost an eye to a tree branch, and others developed allergy and flu-like symptoms.
They kept looking.
There have been clashes between the military and tribal groups in the past, but deep in the jungle they shared water, meals, GPS devices and satellite phones after food supplies and optimism dwindled.
Sixteen days after the crash, when the morale of all search parties was low, searchers found the wreckage. The plane appeared to have gone into a dive – it was found in a vertical, nose-down position.
The group assumed the worst. The men had found the wreck and seen human remains. Guerrero said he and others had started setting up their camp.
But one of the men who had gone to the plane spoke up.
“Hey,” he said, according to Guerrero. “I didn’t see the children.” The man slowly realized that when they found the wreckage, they hadn’t seen any children’s bodies. He approached the plane and saw the children’s bags outside. He noticed that some things looked like someone had moved them after the crash.
He was right. The bodies of three adults were recovered on the plane. However, according to the preliminary report, there were no signs of the children, nor any indication that they were seriously injured.
The military’s special forces changed their strategy based on evidence that the children might still be alive. They no longer moved quietly through the jungle.
“We have moved to a second phase,” said 1st Vice Sgt. Juan Carlos Rojas Sisa. “We went from the stealth part to the noise part so they could hear us.”
They called Lesly’s name and played a recorded message from the children’s maternal grandmother, urging them in Spanish and in the language of the Huitoto people to stay put. Helicopters dropped boxes of food and leaflets with messages. The forces also brought their trained dogs, including a Belgian shepherd named Wilson, who failed to return to his handler and is missing.
On site, nearly 120 military personnel and more than 70 indigenous people searched day and night for the children. They left whistles for the children to use if they found them and marked about 7 miles (11 km) with crime scene-style tape, hoping the children would take the markings as a sign to stay put.
They began finding clues to the children’s whereabouts, including a footprint they believed to be Lesly. But nobody could find the children.
Some seekers had already traveled more than 1,500 kilometers – the distance between Lisbon and Paris or Dallas and Chicago. Exhaustion set in and the military implemented a plan to rotate soldiers.
Guerrero called and asked for the yagé. It arrived two days later.
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On the 40th day after Elder Rubio took the yagé, the searchers combed the rainforest again, beginning at the spot where they found the diapers. His vision had sparked new hopes, but did not provide specifics as to where the children might be. The groups spread out in different directions. However, later in the day they returned to base camp with no news.
Sadness spread through the camp. Guerrero told Ranoque as the teams returned, “Nothing. We couldn’t… there’s nothing.”
Then the news came. A soldier heard over the radio that the four children had been found in a small clearing five kilometers from the crash site. Rescue teams came within 20 to 50 meters (66 to 164 ft) several times but missed.
The soldier told Guerrero, who ran to Ranoque. “They found the four,” he said through tears and hugs.
A helicopter lifted the children out of the dense forest. They were flown first to San José del Guaviare and then to the capital, Bogotá, each with a team of medical professionals. Because of the dehydration, they were covered with foil blankets and attached to IV lines. Her hands and feet showed scratches and insect bites.
Ranoque said Lesly reported that her mother died about four days after the crash. The children survived by collecting water in a soda bottle and eating cassava flour, fruit and seeds. They were found with two small bags of clothing, a towel, a flashlight, two phones and a music box.
Tien and Cristin celebrated their birthdays while the seekers were looking for them.
All four remain in the hospital. A custody battle ensued, with some relatives claiming that Ranoque had been violent towards the children’s mother. He has admitted to verbal and occasional physical altercations, which he described as a “private family matter”. He also said he couldn’t see the two oldest children.
Officials, medical professionals, special forces and others have praised Lesly’s leadership. She and her siblings have become symbols of resilience and survival around the world. The Colombian government, meanwhile, has boasted of cooperation between indigenous communities and the military in an attempt to end national conflicts.
“The jungle saved them,” said President Gustavo Petro. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are children of Colombia too.”
That’s true, Ranoque told the AP, but indigenous culture and rituals also saved her. He attributes the Yagé and the Elder’s vision to their group.
“This is a spiritual world,” he said, and the Yagé “is treated with the utmost respect.” It is the maximum concentration achieved in our spiritual world as an indigenous people.”
That’s why they drank the tea in the jungle, he said, “It was so that the goblin, that cursed devil, would release my children.”