Hernando Murcia was the kind of pilot who flew routes others wouldn’t dare. He worked for Avianline Charters, one of the air taxi companies that shuttle people across Colombia’s Amazon region, an expanse of rainforest roughly the size of California. The forest is dark, dense and often treacherous. There are no roads, much less commercial airports, and the meandering rivers teem with predators, including piranhas and anacondas. Violent rebel groups and drug smugglers hide out in the region.
On 1 May 2023, Murcia agreed to pilot a flight from the southern Amazon town of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare, a population centre connected to Colombia’s road network. He was supposed to be carrying representatives of Yauto, a company brokering carbon credits between Indigenous populations and multinational firms, but sometime before takeoff, members of the Colombian military stationed in Araracuara approached Murcia. They told him that there was a change of plans: he needed to evacuate an Indigenous family.
As the family hurried to the rear of the plane, a blue and white Cessna, a local Indigenous leader named Hermán Mendoza clambered up front next to Murcia; he said that he was there to ensure the other passengers arrived at their destination safely. Murcia added everyone’s names to the flight manifest, radioed the information with the plane’s registration number, HK2803, to Colombian air traffic control, then took off.
About 30 minutes into the flight, as the Cessna approached the Colombian department of Caquetá, one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, its engine failed. Over his radio, Murcia sent a mayday alert. To land, Murcia needed an opening in the landscape below him, but these are exceedingly rare in the Amazon. Air traffic control asked him to confirm his location.
“One hundred and three miles outside San José,” Murcia responded. “I am going to hit water.”
These were the last words air traffic control heard from Murcia. Moments later, radar recorded the Cessna taking a sharp right turn. Then, about 7.50am, it disappeared.
Word of the Cessna’s disappearance spread quickly. By 8.15am, authorities had picked up a distress signal from the plane’s emergency locator transmitter, a device triggered by impact from a crash. The Cessna appeared to be somewhere in an area of about 4 sq km, near a small community called Cachiporro along the Apaporis River.
When a plane crashes in Colombia, the responsibility for finding it normally lies with the Civil Aviation Authority, which will arrange for the military and the air force to dispatch recovery teams. But the vast wilderness and unique dangers of the Amazon meant that it was initially deemed too risky to send anyone on foot. Only the air force was deployed, and it sent surveillance planes over the jungle near Cachiporro, hoping to spot the wreckage or possibly survivors.
Meanwhile, Freddy Ladino, the founder of Avianline Charters, sent up several of his other planes to look for HK2803. But neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest’s canopy.
By 10.30am, the crash was making headlines. The last-minute change to the HK2803 manifest supercharged the media’s interest. The Indigenous family on the flight included a woman named Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia (34) and her four young children: daughters Lesly (13), Soleiny (9) and Cristin (11 months), and son Tien (4).
Within hours of the Cessna vanishing, the fate of Magdalena and her children became an obsession in Colombia. In the weeks to come there would be breathless news segments, finger-pointing and dashed hopes. It would be 40 days until the world had answers.
* * *
For Magdalena, the jungle had always been home. A member of the Indigenous Witoto tribe – sometimes spelled Huitoto or Uitoto – she was the third of 10 siblings born to Fátima Valencia and Narciso Mucutuy. They grew up on the fringes of Araracuara, a place so remote that electricity must come from petrol generators or solar panels, and mobile phone service is only available at the small landing strip. Cocaine cartels operating nearby sometimes forcibly recruited local children to participate in illicit drug production. A rebel group calling itself the Carolina Ramírez Front was believed to be using Araracuara as a transfer point for cocaine shipments bound for Brazil.
Valencia, Magdalena’s mother, was a village elder, and she instilled in her children a deep reverence for the forest. According to Witoto belief, everything in the Amazon, from the rivers to the plants to the animals, is imbued with a powerful spirit. Some spirits are good, others malevolent. The latter category includes duendes, which lurk in the jungle’s shadows, looking to lead children astray. “They take out your voice,” Valencia said, “and you cannot scream.” The Witoto claim to commune with jungle spirits through shamanic rituals and ceremonies.
In 2005, Magdalena fell in love with Andrés Jacobombaire, and in 2010 they welcomed a daughter, Lesly, who inherited her mother’s long brown hair and brown eyes. Lesly proved to be a natural athlete and was good at fishing. Her paternal grandfather, an Indigenous chief, taught her to hunt for monkeys. Lesly spent hours studying the sounds of birds and learning the names of trees and fruit. “She knew how to defend herself in the jungle,” Jacobombaire said. “We prepared her from a very young age.”
For 12 years, Magdalena and Jacobombaire had a good relationship. They had another child, Soleiny, in 2014. But in early 2017, Magdalena left with Lesly and Soleiny, and found work at an illegal mine in Araracuara, which is where she met Manuel Ranoque. A short, strong man, 26-year-old Ranoque didn’t have a good reputation: some people considered him a bully who drank too much. But Magdalena fell for him, and they moved in together in the Indigenous reserve of Puerto Sábalo, Ranoque’s home. Magdalena gave birth to two more children, Tien and Cristin. Her mother didn’t approve of Magdalena’s new relationship.
In April 2023, Ranoque suddenly left the reserve. He said the Carolina Ramírez Front had threatened his life. From Bogotá, he contacted Magdalena and asked her and the children to join him. He said that they were in danger, too.
Magdalena’s parents told her not to follow Ranoque; they didn’t trust him. So without telling her parents, Magdalena gathered her belongings and her children and moved into a little house next to the Araracuara air strip. Each day she begged Colombian soldiers to get her on a flight. The soldiers eventually agreed to secure the family seats aboard a plane leaving for San José del Guaviare, where they would be met by Ranoque, and together the family would travel by road to Bogotá.
On 1 May, after Magdalena settled on board the plane, she messaged Ranoque: “We are leaving now.” As she typed, she cradled baby Cristin in her lap.
* * *
After the crash, Magdalena’s parents were shocked to learn that their daughter and grandchildren had been on the flight. As for Ranoque, when he got word about the downed Cessna, he immediately packed his bags and headed to Cachiporro. He planned to go on foot into the jungle to find his family, dead or alive.
He wasn’t alone – other family members and friends of the missing passengers were anxious to start looking for them. In Araracuara, Hermán Mendoza’s sister and one of his cousins began rounding up volunteers for a search party. Meanwhile, Avianline organised two ground searches of its own, but one of the groups quickly became lost. They lit a fire to alert aircraft to their position and eventually stumbled on the jungle home of a man called Dumar – he didn’t give his full name to the volunteers because he ran a clandestine cocaine operation.
Dumar’s home, a wooden hut with a corrugated metal roof, became something of an informal headquarters for the civilian-led search teams. Ranoque arrived, as did Edwin Paky, another cousin of Mendoza, and the volunteers from Araracuara. The various searchers agreed to work together, and Dumar told them that on the morning of the crash, he had seen HK2083 flying over his hut, heading east at an altitude he estimated to be a few hundred feet. The next day, as the first rays of sunlight illuminated the jungle, Ranoque, Paky and other Indigenous volunteers began swinging their machetes, hacking a path through the vegetation in the direction Dumar had seen the plane go.
The military also decided to put together its own ground mission. Tasked to lead it was Pedro Sánchez, the head of Colombia’s special operations joint command (CCOES), a group of highly trained soldiers who undertake the country’s most dangerous and sensitive operations. Sánchez got to work drafting a search plan. The air force had spotted a plume of smoke near Cachiporro; assuming it came from a fire set by crash survivors, pilots dropped food rations nearby. Using this location as the starting point, Sánchez and his team mapped a search area of roughly 4 sq km. Only later would CCOES learn that the fire was the one set by the Avianline search team.
On the morning of 6 May, five days after the crash, two commando groups, designated Dragon4 and Destructor1, rappelled into the jungle in the northern section of the search area. A third group dubbed Ares3 was dispatched to the banks of the Apaporis. They were accompanied by a search and rescue dog, a Belgian malinois named Wilson. Quadrant by quadrant, the CCOES soldiers did their painstaking work. They could only work from 6am until dusk, because night in the Amazon meant total darkness – the kind where a person can take a few wrong steps and find themselves lost, possibly for ever. Each man was required to walk as much as six miles a day through near-constant rain. In case there were rebels holed up nearby, the soldiers used hand signals to communicate.
Family members of the missing passengers put pressure on Sánchez to include Indigenous searchers in his operation. “We as Indigenous people know how to navigate the jungle and understand the unique spirits of each territory,” Valencia said. But Sánchez resisted; he was concerned that Indigenous volunteers lacked military training and might not follow orders. Distrust ran in the other direction, too. Much of the violence between state forces and armed groups in Colombia has occurred in poor, rural areas, with Indigenous people disproportionately affected – many have been forced to flee their homes.
After nine days and hundreds of miles of walking, the only thing the CCOES commandos had found was an abandoned camp that once belonged to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, the notorious rebel group. Privately, Capt Ender Montiel, the leader of Dragon4, wondered whether HK2803 had sunk in the river. “Every day we would ask ourselves a lot of questions,” he said.
Then, early on the morning of 15 May, Dragon4 was searching its latest quadrant when Sgt Wilmar Miranda, Montiel’s deputy, spotted something pink amid the foliage. It was a baby bottle. The soldiers took a photograph and sent it to Sánchez, who forwarded it to Valencia. She recognised the bottle right away. It belonged to Cristin.
A few hours later, Miranda spotted some wild fruit with fresh bite marks on it, human ones. “It was happiness and joy to see that,” Miranda said. “There was life.” He looked around for signs of trails, spots where human feet might have left prints in the soil. But the forest’s unrelenting rain meant that everything was washed clean.
* * *
Several miles south of where the CCOES was working, civilian rescuers weren’t having any luck. Edwin Paky, whose navigation skills had made him the unofficial leader of the Indigenous volunteers, was growing anxious. He had injured his leg, and the group was running low on supplies.
Then, on the afternoon of 15 May, one of the searchers spotted something blue through a cluster of trees: it was the plane. HK2803 was in a vertical, nose-down position on the forest floor. The Cessna’s broken fuselage stuck out of the ground like a flagpole and the propeller had snapped off. Paky saw that the canopy, 45 metres above the wreckage, was somehow unbroken. No wonder aircraft had failed to spot the crash site.
As he approached the plane, Paky felt an ache in his stomach. “At first I thought nobody could have survived that crash,” Paky said. He jotted down the coordinates of the site and went in search of help. He soon encountered some of the CCOES soldiers. They radioed the discovery through to Sánchez, who ordered Montiel’s men in Dragon4 to the wreckage. En route the following morning, Montiel’s team came across a crude shelter made of leaves freshly cut with scissors, which were lying nearby on the ground.
At the crash site, Montiel and his men lifted HK2803 up with a winch and found three bodies. Though Magdalena’s remains were mostly bones, Montiel identified her by her long hair and body shape. He recognised Murcia because of his pilot’s jacket. Mendoza was in the crushed nose of the plane.
The searchers noted that the cabin door was open; bags, clothes, and diapers were strewn about on the ground. Montiel realised it was possible that all the children had survived.
When Ranoque arrived at the scene he wept. “The only thing I thought was that that accident was my fault,” he said. He was also convinced that the children were alive. But they could have been injured in the crash, and if they had wounds, infection was a real threat.
There were many others dangers. When she got word that her grandchildren might have survived the crash, Valencia thought of all the things that could have harmed or killed them in the days since: jaguars, snakes and duendes. “That jungle doesn’t belong to us,” she said.
Sánchez estimated that if the children were alive, they had another three days, maybe four. It was time for a new search and rescue strategy. The military called the effort Operation Hope. More troops and dogs were brought to the search area. Aircraft flew low, dropping food, lighters and thousands of leaflets printed with survival tips. Pilots scanned the landscape with binoculars, searching for signs of life.
Sánchez thought it was possible that the children had heard or even seen his soldiers, but were so scared of armed strangers that they hid. He suggested that someone in the family record a message telling them that it was safe to come out. Valencia made a recording on her phone. The military then attached a loudspeaker to a helicopter and flew over the jungle playing the message. “I beg you, stay calm,” Valencia’s voice boomed over the trees. “The army is looking for you.”
On 17 May, two soldiers from Destructor1 spotted a group of men in the jungle. The soldiers readied their weapons. If these were rebels or drug smugglers, violence was likely. But the men were the Indigenous searchers from Araracuara, Ranoque among them. He asked to use the soldiers’ satellite phone and called a fortune-teller, who told him that if he headed west from his location for 245 metres, he would find a trail that would lead to the children. Capt Juan Felipe Montoya, the leader of Destructor1, was sceptical, but as Ranoque and the Indigenous searchers headed out of the military camp, he decided it couldn’t hurt to send a few of his own men along. A short time later, the group returned with news: they had found footprints.
Montoya decided to continue working with the Indigenous volunteers. Another development soon followed: Montiel’s Dragon4 team found prints, too – fresh ones. The children had to be close.
* * *
It wasn’t all good news on 17 May, however. That evening Wilson, the Belgian malinois dog accompanying the Ares3 soldiers, chewed through his collar and ran into the jungle. He was declared missing, and all units were asked to be on the lookout for him.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Family Welfare, Colombia’s child-protection agency, released a statement on X, formerly Twitter, announcing that it had received information “confirming contact” with the children. President Gustavo Petro tweeted that the children had been rescued – he described it as a “joy for the country”. None of this was true. It isn’t clear where the rumours began; perhaps it was inevitable that, amid the frantic, disjointed rescue efforts, misinformation would sprout somewhere.
Petro retracted his tweet later that day, but his announcement had caught the global media’s attention. Journalists from CNN, the New York Times and other outlets descended on Colombia to document the rescue mission in real time.
By then, Sánchez was getting frustrated. There were numerous signs that the children were alive, but his men still hadn’t found them. On 19 May, he readied more troops and revised the required search patterns – each soldier would have to walk much farther each day.
Sánchez also found himself wondering if native customs were the missing ingredients after all. Valencia was telling reporters that a duende must have captured the children, and Sánchez decided to consult an Indigenous woman he knew about the matter. He asked what might a person do about a duende. The woman gave Sanchez instructions for a ritual involving bottles of alcohol arranged beside the river at night. Sánchez dispatched the order to Montiel. “I’m a Catholic, so I don’t believe in those things,” Montiel said. Still, he did as he was told.
The ritual didn’t yield results, but it marked the start of closer collaboration between the military and Indigenous searchers. On Montoya’s team, the soldiers initially slept with their guns by their sides at night, fearing Ranoque and the other civilians who had joined their camp might turn on them. But soon they were learning things from their Indigenous counterparts: how to drink water from tree roots, for instance, and build makeshift shelters from palm leaves. The volunteers’ ability to spot things out of place in the jungle – human tracks, say, or the remnants of food packaging – was remarkable. They chewed mambé, or crushed coca leaves, to sharpen their minds and give them energy, and some of the soldiers started using it, too.
On 21 May, Sánchez received a visit from Giovani Yule, a nationally respected Indigenous figure. The men hugged, and Yule told Sánchez that it was surely the first time in history that an Indigenous leader had embraced a Colombian general. President Petro had requested Yule’s help in rounding up additional volunteers to help with the search, and Yule summoned members of various tribes: the Nukak, the Siona, the Nasa and the Witoto. Sánchez agreed to dispatch military aircraft to pick up the new volunteers and bring them to the search zone.
One of the new recruits was Eliecer Muñoz, a 49-year-old farmer and a member of the Indigenous Guard, a network of volunteers who protect tribal territory from violence and environmental destruction. José Rubio, a 55-year-old shaman, also joined the search. Tall and handsome, with a steely demeanor, Rubio was often consulted when Indigenous people were lost in the jungle.
By 24 May, a total of 92 Indigenous volunteers had joined the 113 soldiers assigned to the search mission. Sánchez divided them into a dozen combined units. He ordered some of his soldiers to allow the volunteers to lead search efforts according to their beliefs.
Muñoz and Rubio were both placed with Montoya’s men in the Destructor1 group. Muñoz headed to the crash site and conducted a cleansing ritual, burning sweet grass, cedar and sage to assure Mother Earth that the volunteers were only there to claim what was rightfully theirs. He also asked for better weather, to make the search easier. For the next three days there was no rain; the sky was a beautiful, rich blue.
Rubio consumed mambé and ambil, a thick tobacco paste used in Indigenous medicine – he hoped doing so would help him connect with the jungle’s spirits. “I asked them if it was OK for me to search for the kids, explaining that they were my family,” he said. Rubio soon came to the same conclusion as Valencia: the children were being held captive by a duende.
Over the next few days, the men turned up new clues: diapers, a pair of running shoes, more footprints. But no one found the children. On 26 May, the day Cristin turned one, the searchers sang Happy Birthday to her, wherever she was.
* * *
May turned to June. The children had been missing for a month. Many Indigenous volunteers were injured or severely ill, and some abandoned the search. By now some of Sánchez’s commandos had walked more than 1,000 miles, and they too were exhausted.
On 4 June, Montoya and his men were preparing for an eight-day break. Moments before they boarded a helicopter, Rubio asked them to get him some yagé, a powerful psychoactive brew commonly known as ayahuasca. According to Witoto belief, consuming yagé allows access to ancient wisdom that can solve complex problems. Rubio suspected that this was the only way the searchers could secure the children’s release from the duende.
It was an unusual request. “But in this mission,” Montoya said, “everything was a possibility.” He agreed to have yagé delivered to the searchers.
On 9 June, Rubio drank the yagé and hallucinated for about 45 minutes. In his visions, he met the children and the duende who was with them. Rubio told the duende that he was there to take the children, and it agreed to return them on the condition that a spell be cast on the searchers. As Rubio sobered up, several of the Indigenous volunteers reported feeling flu-like symptoms, including body aches and high temperatures. He was sure that the ritual had worked, and he told the remaining searchers that they would find the children that day.
As the sun rose, Muñoz set out with renewed conviction. He was joined by three other volunteers: Dairo Kumariteke, Edwin Manchola and Nicolás Ordóñez. The men searched all day. They considered turning back at dusk, but they trusted Rubio’s words. Ten minutes later they reached a clearing, and Kumariteke heard something nearby. He stopped and told the group to be still. Moments later he heard it again: the faint but unmistakable whimper of a baby.
Exactly 40 days after the children disappeared in the wilderness, the first person to set eyes on them was Ordóñez. He ran toward Lesly and Soleiny, shouting that he and the other volunteers knew their family. When the men finally managed to corral the girls, one of them was clutching Cristin. “Where is your little brother?” Muñoz asked. Lesly pointed at a makeshift shelter nearby. Inside, five-year-old Tien was lying on the ground, too frail to stand. “My mom is dead,” he said with tears in his eyes.
The children were painfully thin and covered with scratches and insect bites. They sobbed and tried to pull away from the men. “We are family. We were sent by your father, your grandmother,” Ordóñez said. Finally, Lesly hugged him. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and told her not to be afraid.
Night was falling quickly, and it would take a few hours to get back to camp. Each man put a child on his back and moved as fast as he could through the jungle. Muñoz found reserves of energy he didn’t know he had. “The excitement was so overwhelming that I completely forgot about everything else,” he said.
Finally, the group reached their destination. “I’ve found the children!” Muñoz shouted.
Yeison Bonilla, a military sergeant, heard him, and his troops hurried to wrap the children in thermal blankets and checked them over. Bonilla didn’t think they would have survived another day on their own.
Some of the troops took photos of the children to send to their superiors, and a volunteer ran to find Ranoque. He rushed to the children. “I felt like life was giving me a second chance to see my children alive,” he said. He worried that they were too fragile to touch, so he stood nearby as Rubio blew tobacco smoke over them, to cleanse away any lingering jungle spirits.
Meanwhile, Bonilla grabbed his radio and repeated the code word for a successful operation, the one everyone had waited so long to hear: “Miracle, miracle, miracle.”
* * *
Sánchez cried when he heard Bonilla’s words. He checked the coordinates of where the children were found – it was a little over three miles from the crash site. Rescue teams had almost certainly passed within yards of them, likely more than once.
By 8pm on 9 June, a Black Hawk helicopter was hovering over the children and their rescuers, its rotors spinning just feet above the treetops in the pouring rain. The vegetation was too dense to land, so the pilot, Julián Novoa, held the chopper steady for nearly an hour as soldiers rappelled down to the jungle floor and hoisted up the children and Ranoque one by one.
On board, doctors monitored the children as Novoa flew to the military base in San José del Guaviare, the town where the Cessna had been headed when it crashed. There the children were hooked up to IVs and then loaded on to a military plane bound for Bogotá. On the plane, Ranoque was finally able to give his children a hug. Sánchez was there, too, and Ranoque asked him to be Cristin’s godfather. Sánchez accepted.
In a hastily convened press conference, President Petro lauded the children’s “total survival”. He credited the unlikely collaboration of the military and Indigenous communities for the rescue. “Here a different path is shown for Colombia,” he wrote later on X.
The day after their arrival in the capital, the children were allowed to receive visitors at the hospital where they were recovering. When Sánchez came by, they were all sleeping, except Lesly. “You are brave,” he told her. The children were pale, and Lesly wasn’t talking, but at least they were alive.
Valencia said she was so overwhelmed when she visited the children in the hospital that she fainted. “Seeing them in that state, suffering, without eating, exhausted, malnourished, covered in lice and thorns – it broke my heart,” she said.
When Lesly and Soleiny’s biological father, Andrés Jacobombaire, came to visit, his daughters didn’t recognise him – it was the first time they’d seen him since their parents split up six years prior. Jacobombaire explained who he was, and Lesly burst into tears. “I gave her a hug and started crying with her,” he said.
Media weren’t allowed to see or talk to the children, and as of this writing, that remains the case. But to family and friends interviewed for this story, the children relayed the details of their survival.
* * *
As they waited to board HK2083 on the morning of 1 May, the children were nervous – they had never flown before. But they were also happy. Lesly and Soleiny had told friends how excited they were to go to Bogotá. Magdalena had told her children that rebels were looking for the family, but soon, she assured them, they would all be safe.
An hour later, as the engine sputtered and the plane began to go down, Magdalena told her crying children to hold on tight. When the Cessna hit the canopy, Lesly banged her head and lost consciousness. When she came to, she could hear Cristin screaming. She saw that Magdalena was still holding the baby. “Mama! Mama!” Lesly yelled over and over. Magdalena was motionless, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.
Lesly unbuckled her seatbelt and wrenched Cristin from her mother’s arms. She used one of the baby’s diapers to stem the flow of blood coming from her head. The smell of fuel filled her nostrils. Debris was scattered everywhere. Lesly saw that Hermán Mendoza and Hernando Murcia were dead, but that Soleiny and Tien were unharmed.
With Cristin in her arms, Lesly led Soleiny and Tien out of the plane. A few yards away, she built a makeshift camp, stringing up a towel and a mosquito net. Tien kept asking when their mother would wake up. Lesly worried that her brother was too young to grasp the concept of death, so she said she didn’t know.
Lesly knew it wouldn’t be long before predators arrived, attracted by the bodies. So she gathered some of Magdalena’s clothes, some farina she found in Mendoza’s bag, and juice, soda and candy from elsewhere on the plane. She salvaged a few other items that seemed useful: scissors, a first aid kit, nappies, a baby bottle. Then she led her siblings west, using the sun as their guide.
The fact that it was the wet season in Colombia was a blessing. As they walked, Lesly collected rainwater in an empty bottle. The moisture also meant that the jungle was in full bloom, with fruit heavy and ripe on the trees. The children consumed juan soco, similar to passion fruit, as well as seeds from a palm tree called milpeso. Lesly chewed the hard seeds in her mouth, then fed the pulp to Tien and Cristin. She also gave Cristin water mixed with the farina from the plane.
The children moved locations every few days and hid in tree trunks to get out of the punishing rain. Lesly and Soleiny took turns carrying Cristin. Once, a poisonous snake came close to Lesly, and she killed it with a stick. She was desperate to find help, but she never saw a trail that might lead to civilisation, and eventually became disoriented.
When they needed rest, Lesly sometimes made a shelter from branches bound together with hair ties. She used the scissors to cut the branches; after she lost the scissors, she used her teeth. At some point, the children found one of the emergency supply packages the military had airdropped, but most of the time they were hungry. At night they were also cold. When her siblings cried in pain, Lesly could only forage for food or wrap them in a piece of dirty fabric.
Despite the hardship, Lesly said that she wasn’t scared – not until she heard her grandmother’s voice. It was loud, and she didn’t understand where it was coming from. After that she sometimes heard soldiers in the jungle. But Lesly didn’t trust men with guns. Her mother had warned her that rebels were threatening the family. When rescuers came near, the children ran away or hid. If she was holding Cristin, Lesly put a hand over the baby’s mouth to muffle her cries.
The children kept moving for a few weeks, hoping to find help from locals who didn’t carry guns, but by the middle of May their strength had waned. Then, as the children later told Valencia, a dog showed up. It stayed with them for several days; the children felt like it was protecting them. Then it vanished into the jungle again.
In the hospital, using crayons, Lesly drew a picture of the dog sitting under a tree next to a river, waving its paw as a yellow bird flies overhead. Soleiny drew a picture of the dog, too. In both images the animal is black and brown, with pointy ears. To the military it looked like Wilson, the missing search and rescue dog. Wilson became a hero overnight, figuring prominently in news stories about the rescue.
It’s possible the children imagined the dog. Malnourishment and fatigue can play tricks on the mind. Lesly said that she started to lose her mental faculties and felt her memories evaporating.
Eventually, exhaustion prevented them from travelling any further. They huddled in one of the shelters Lesly built and prepared to die. When Lesly heard footsteps nearby, she was so depleted it was a struggle to breathe. Still, she was afraid and remained silent. Soleiny and Tien did, too. If Cristin hadn’t whimpered, the children might never have been found.
* * *
Few things in recent memory have brought Colombia’s population together like the success of Operation Hope. President Petro, who is a leftist, and Iván Duque, his conservative predecessor, both tweeted in celebration. Even the Carolina Ramírez Front issued a rare statement: “Like all Colombians, we rejoice that the four surviving children of the plane crash [in] May have been found alive.”
Petro invited military and Indigenous members of the rescue operation to the presidential palace to receive awards for their exceptional service. The government’s highest honour went to Sánchez for his leadership. Wilson the dog was given a medal in absentia. Despite a month-long search effort by the military, he was never found.
At his home in Bogotá, Montoya keeps a bag of mambé from Eliecer Muñoz and other Indigenous volunteers. “We figured out that we have a lot of things in common,” Montoya said.
Muñoz is now close friends with Montoya’s deputy, Sgt Juan Carlos Rojas; they talk on the phone and meet for dinner when they’re both in Bogotá. “Our traditions, thoughts, experiences, religions may be different,” Rojas told me, “but in the end we united.”
Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Cristin were discharged from the hospital on 14 July, just over a month after the rescue. By then the world was clamouring to hear their story. Film producers and agents were flocking to Colombia seeking access. The government created a trust for the children to manage any money generated by the attention.
* * *
A version of this story scripted for Hollywood might end here. But as the kids recovered from their ordeal, a legal battle erupted over their future. Ranoque announced that he wanted custody of Tien and Cristin, his biological children, but Magdalena’s parents insisted that all four kids should be placed in their care because they considered Ranoque dangerous. “My daughter died because of him,” Valencia told me. Narciso Mucutuy, Valencia’s husband, accused Ranoque of beating his family, telling reporters that the children sometimes fled into the jungle when the violence got particularly bad.
Journalists from the Colombian television network Caracol travelled to Puerto Sábalo to investigate the allegations, and they discovered a story about the events leading up to the crash that was different from the one Ranoque had told. Locals said that in April, Ranoque had flown to Bogotá, where he met up with his ex-wife and brought her back to the Amazon with him. Magdalena was devastated, and locals were appalled – by Ranoque’s behaviour in Bogotá and by his treatment of his family.
One evening, according to community leader William Castro, who has known Ranoque for years, Magdalena confronted Ranoque about the situation with his ex, and he responded by attacking her with a machete. “She had many scars from the fight,” Castro told me. Elders came up with a punishment for Ranoque: he would consume a large amount of ambil, which in high doses can cause dizziness, nausea and even death. If he survived, it was because the ambil had cleansed him of evil; if he died, it would be just punishment.
According to this account, rather than test his luck, Ranoque fled Puerto Sábalo, claiming that the Carolina Ramírez Front was after him. The rebel group eventually denied threatening Ranoque and insisted that he retract his claim, lest it disrupt peace negotiations with the government. Castro told me that the idea that Ranoque or his family were being targeted by rebels was “totally false”.
Over the summer, Colombian authorities investigated Ranoque and uncovered more information related to potential domestic violence. In August, Ranoque was arrested on suspicion of sexual abuse. Legal documents also detail the alleged machete attack, during which Magdalena reportedly had Cristin in her arms.
Ranoque remains incarcerated and is awaiting trial. Writing to me from prison, he reiterated that rebels were after him, and he denied the machete attack and the allegations of sexual abuse. “A father who rapes his family does not do what I did,” he said. “If I had something to hide, I would have let them rot in the jungle, but I was the first person who tried to look for them.”
As a result of the custody dispute, which also came to include Jacobombaire, who wants to take his two daughters home with him, the Institute of Family Welfare decided to keep the children in its care for the time being. A decision on their future is expected in spring.
According to family members and rescuers who’ve seen the children, they’re getting stronger every day. Cristin has started walking. Tien enjoys playing with Lego. Soleiny and Lesly are being homeschooled.
Still, their sense of loss and dislocation is palpable. Sánchez and his family visited the children in December to bring them Christmas gifts. Afterwards, Sánchez told me that the kids are in good hands but miss the Amazon. “They would prefer to be eating farina and living in Araracuara,” Sánchez told me.
Valencia believes that when Magdalena died, nature filled the void she had left in her children’s lives, sustaining and protecting them until the moment they were set free by the spirit that had captured them. No matter who wins custody of the children, they will probably return to the Amazon. As it was for Magdalena, the jungle is for ever their home.
• Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
