The tragic first words four Colombian children spoke after surviving for 40 days in the Amazon jungle have been revealed by their rescuers, as the youngsters recover at a military hospital in Bogotá.
When a search party found the emaciated children on Friday, the first thing Tien Noriel Ranoque Mucutuy, four, said was: “My mother is dead.”
Hundreds of soldiers and an alliance of Indigenous communities had searched for the missing children for more than a month after their Cessna plane crashed into the jungle canopy on 1 May, leaving the children alone in the rainforest.
The four “miracle children” were found in a forest clearing without shoes, thin from malnourishment and too tired to walk, their family said.
The first words from Lesly Mucutuy, the eldest child – who is credited with keeping the group alive during their ordeal – were: “I’m hungry.”
More details emerged on Monday of how Lesly used the knowledge passed on to her by her Huitoto elders to bravely guide her younger brothers and sisters to survival – despite the torrential downpours, lack of food and dangerous animals in the virgin forest.
It also emerged that Lesly pulled the youngest child, Cristin, from the plane after the crash, according to grandfather Narciso Mucutuy. “She saw the feet of her littlest sister where the three dead were and she pulled her out,” Mucutuy said in videos posted by the defence ministry at the Bogotá military hospital where the children are being treated.
However, Manuel Ranoque, the father of the youngest two children, said that Lesly had told her family from her hospital room that her mother, Magdalena Mucutuy, had fought to survive for four days after the plane crash but eventually told her children to leave her behind, asking the oldest child to care for her younger siblings.
Lesly’s Indigenous heritage as a member of the Huitoto people helped the 13-year-old make shelter out of the forest and discern the safe, nutritious fruits from poisonous ones.
The children picked Couma macrocarpa, a creamy white Amazonian fruit, and Oenocarpus bacaba, tiny purple fruits resembling plums, family said.
The children also reportedly found one of the 100 aid kits that were dropped by the military, and ate cassava flour from the crash.
An alliance of Indigenous communities well-acquainted with the remote forests helped guide the search, alongside military forces and rescue dogs.
The children – sleep-deprived and terrified of the myriad threats in the rebel-dominated jungle – ran away from the voices of the search party and the barking of search dogs, a grandfather of the four children told local reporters.
“They were scared. They hid in the trees,” Fidencio Valencia said.
Manuel Ranoque, told Bogotá-based W radio that the children survived thanks to the knowledge passed on to them by their parents, who always had the children alongside them while working on their farm and teaching them to eat wild animals.
“Also, you have to say that they are strong. They have Indigenous blood,” Ranoque, who served as governor of a Huitoto community, said, breaking into tears during the radio interview.
The father said that the family had been uprooted by armed drug traffickers who threatened them, forcing them to take the tiny airplane from the village of Araracuara deep in the Amazon, to the town of San Jose del Guaviare.
“They’re killing a lot of innocent people and none of them will ever be jailed. You know it: he who reports them has death coming for them,” he told W.
The miraculous recovery of the four children has been a cause for national celebration.
The country’s president, Gustavo Petro, who came under fire last month when he wrongly tweeted that the children had been found, lauded the recovery and labeled the kids Colombia’s “Children of Peace”.
But the children’s father claimed the president visited them in hospital for a public relations opportunity without the Ranoques’ permission.
The children are reported to be recovering well and drawings made by the children were shared on Monday.
Among the colorful illustrations made by the children in hospital was one showing Wilson, one of several search dogs who helped track down the children but was himself lost in the jungle and remains missing.
• This article was amended to clarify that Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest children, said Lesly had told the family her mother had survived for four days after the plane crash. They were not Lesly’s own words.
