Hopes four kids alive in Amazonian jungle

The three adults onboard, including the pilot and the children’s mother, Magdalena Mucutuy, died in the crash in the state of Caqueta on May 1.

Only traces of the indigenous children have been found in the surrounding forests: a baby bottle, a makeshift shelter, a dirty diaper and even what appeared to be small footprints.

These discoveries have fuelled hopes that 13-year-old Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 9, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, 4, and infant Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy survived.

The Colombian armed forces are leading the exhaustive search, and have deployed hundreds of soldiers and indigenous scouts in the Colombian Amazon.

The rescue team leader said on Monday he believed the children remained alive, reports the AFP news agency.

“Based on the evidence, we concluded that the children are alive,” General Pedro Sanchez told W Radio.

“If they were dead, it would be easy to find them because they would be still” and the sniffer dogs would find them, he added.

Military aircraft have dropped thousands of leaflets into the jungle with instructions in Spanish and their own Indigenous language telling them to stay put.

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They also dumped food parcels and bottled water for the children.

The skies over the Amazon have seen many accidents. Of 641 accidents registered by Colombia’s civil aviation authority since 1996, 56, or 8.74 per cent of the total, took place in the Amazon region, even though less than 2 per cent of the Colombian population lives there.

Pilots working in the area must contend with aging planes and a wild terrain, experts say.

While in most of the world it’s always possible to find a clear, flat strip to land a damaged aircraft such as a highway or a rural field, the Amazonian rainforest is often so thick that pilots performing emergency landings in the area must attempt a sort of controlled crash on the top of the tree cover.

The same plane that carried the four children had previously crashed two years prior, in 2021, due to an engine malfunction. It performed a controlled crash landing, causing considerable damage to the propeller, engine and one wing.

After being repaired, the plane crashed again on May 1 under similar circumstances, on a route with no good options for emergency landing.