How Four Children Survived 40 Days in the Jungle

The mother of four children rescued after 40 days in the Amazon jungle was alive for four days after their plane crashed.

Magdalena Mucutuy told her children to leave and find help as she lay dying.

Manuel Ranoque, father of the two youngest children, told reporters outside the hospital Sunday that the oldest of the four siblings — 13-year-old Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy — had described to him how their mother was alive for about four days after the plane crashed on May 1 in the Colombian jungle.

Ranoque said before she died, the mother likely would have told them: “Go away,” apparently asking them to leave the wreckage site to survive. He provided no more details. Authorities have not said anything about this version.

➡️ Se conoce uno de los primeros videos de los niños que sobrevivieron a un accidente aéreo y 40 días en las selvas del Guaviare.

Se puede apreciar el lugar donde dormían y las dificultades que estaban vivienda para poder alimentarse. #Colombia pic.twitter.com/9G6zAzB5JQ

— 𝐑𝐄𝐆𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐒 (@Regional_col) June 11, 2023

The siblings, aged 13, nine, five, and one, were rescued and airlifted out of the jungle on Friday. They were moved to a military hospital in the nation’s capital Bogota.

Details of what happened to the youngsters, and what they did, have been emerging gradually and in small pieces, so it could take some time to have a better picture of their ordeal, during which the youngest, Cristin, turned 1 year old.

How the children survived in the jungle

Henry Guerrero, an Indigenous man who was part of the search group, told reporters that the children were found with two small bags containing some clothes, a towel, a flashlight, two cell phones, a music box and a soda bottle.

He said they used the bottle to collect water in the jungle, and he added that after they were rescued the youngsters complained of being hungry. “They wanted to eat rice pudding, they wanted to eat bread,” he said.

Another rescue worker Nicolas Ordonez Gomes recalled the moment they discovered the children.

“The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: ‘I’m hungry,'” he told public broadcast channel RTVC.

“One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: ‘My mum is dead.'” He said rescuers responded with “positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family”.

Gomes said the boy replied: “I want some bread and sausage.”

The children are from the Huitoto people, an indigenous group in south-eastern Colombia and northern Peru.

Huitoto people learn hunting, fishing and gathering from an early age, and their grandfather Fidencio Valencia told reporters that the eldest children, Lesly and Soleiny, were well acquainted with the jungle.

Speaking to Colombian media the children’s aunt, Damarys Mucutuy, said the family would regularly play a “survival game” together growing up.

“When we played, we set up like little camps,” she recalled. Thirteen-year-old Lesly, she added, “knew what fruits she can’t eat because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest. And she knew how to take care of a baby”.

The plane – a Cessna 206 – was carrying seven people on a route between Araracuara, in Amazonas province, and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in Guaviare province, when it issued a Mayday alert due to engine failure in the early hours of May 1.