Four Indigenous children who survived a small plane crash in the Amazon jungle have been found alive after disappearing for 40 days, Colombian authorities announced. The intense search for them has come to an end.
The children, who were alone when they were found, are currently receiving medical attention. President Gustavo Petro, upon his return to Bogota from Cuba, where he signed a cease-fire agreement, shared the news with reporters.
President Petro praised the children as an "example of survival" and predicted that their incredible story would be remembered in history. No immediate details were provided on how the children managed to survive on their own for such an extended period of time.
The plane crash occurred on May 1 when a Cessna single-engine propeller plane, carrying six passengers and a pilot, declared an emergency due to an engine failure. Shortly after, the aircraft disappeared from radar, sparking a frantic search for survivors.
Two weeks later, on May 16, a search team located the crash site in a dense area of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board. However, the children were not found at that time.
Recognizing the possibility that the children were still alive, Colombia's army intensified their search efforts. They deployed 150 soldiers with dogs to track down the group of four siblings, aged 13, 9, 4, and 11 months. Numerous volunteers from Indigenous tribes also joined the search.
On Friday, the military shared photos showing soldiers and volunteers posing with the rescued children, who were wrapped in thermal blankets. A video was later posted on Twitter, revealing the children being loaded onto a helicopter to be transported to the town of San Jose del Guaviare.
Colombia's military command expressed gratitude for the successful rescue and attributed it to the combined efforts of everyone involved. Throughout the search, soldiers dropped food supplies into the jungle, planes fired flares to aid nighttime search crews, and rescuers used megaphones playing a message recorded by the children's grandmother, urging them to stay in one place.
Rumors regarding the children's whereabouts circulated, and on May 18, President Petro prematurely announced on Twitter that they had been found. He later deleted the tweet, explaining that he had received incorrect information from a government agency.
The four children were traveling with their mother from the village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare when the plane crashed. They belong to the Huitoto people, and authorities noted that the older children had some knowledge of survival in the rainforest.
President Petro initially believed that one of the nomadic tribes in the area, who have limited contact with authorities, had rescued the children. However, he later clarified that they were first discovered by one of the rescue dogs accompanying the soldiers.
The exact distance between the crash site and the location where the children were found was not disclosed, but search teams had been operating within a radius of approximately 4.5 kilometers (nearly 3 miles) from the crash site.