Magdalena carried the little girl sitting on her legs. The other three children were in the back seats, calm, without noticing that the plane was failing. When it crashed, Lesly noticed that her little sister Cristin, who was under her mother’s body, was moving a leg. As soon as he could, he pulled her out of the wrecked device.
The head of the cockpit was embedded in the earth, Magdalena was on top of the pilot. If she had survived four days, as Manuel Ranoque, father of the two minors, recounted, the first rescue teams would not have found her body in that position. The children’s grandfather, Narciso Mucutuy, also does not believe that his daughter would not have died at the moment of impact.
But we will have to wait for the children to recover, as well as the Legal Medicine report, to be certain about what happened. Although Lesly is advancing by leaps and bounds in her recovery at the Bogotá Military Hospital, she continues to be traumatized by what she suffered and her family prefers that she go through her experiences little by little.
What we know up to now, through Mucutuy’s mouth, is that they remained for four days at the foot of the wrecked aircraft and then began to walk in search of a large river. At first they ate some cold cuts and cassava powder that they had brought with them on the trip. “When they finished that, then they started looking for pepas, that is, wild fruits,” the grandfather recounted in an interview with the Colombian magazine ‘Semana’.
“My granddaughter said that at no time did they look at snakes, tigers, bears, nothing at all,” she continued. “She was not afraid of anything, she was, she was lost in thought because of the scare she got. She thought of arriving, of leaving.”
It helped him to learn how to make a shelter out of leaves in his community of Puerto Sábalo, in the department of Caquetá. They slept on them and covered themselves with a mosquito net that they rescued from the plane.
Although Lesly showed an amazing ability to resist all adversities, her brothers “were crying from hunger, exhaustion, cold. Without any drugs (medicine), without pastes (pills), the only thing that the older sister tore was the fabric of her clothes of the mother, which she took on the trip. She tore cloth and wrapped them. It was a very sad life,” she told Semana.
They listened to their grandmother’s voice, broadcast over powerful loudspeakers by military helicopters in countless overflights, and spent a few days with Wilson, the rescue-trained Belgian shepherd, who is missing. The animal stayed with them for a few hours, then left, reappeared by surprise, until they no longer saw it.
The grandfather considers that it was “a miracle that my God did, that he delivered the children to the people who were looking for him” because his grandchildren were already faint. Lesly was so weak that he was seeing visions.
Although “Operation Hope” has fulfilled its main objective, the Special Forces do not consider it over. They put new units into the jungle with the mission of finding Wilson. They consider the animal one more command and nothing in this case seems impossible anymore.
Regardless of the health status of the children, in the coming weeks both Manuel Ranoque and his wife’s family will have to resolve their differences over their custody. He himself acknowledged that he had mistreated the deceased. And he cannot return to his native land because the FARC-EP threatened to kill him and they continue to be the highest authority in a very remote jungle region, with abundant coca fields and illegal gold mining. Hence, he has asked the government to provide him with a house in Bogotá so that the children can study and live in peace.
Of the Amazonian indigenous people who participated in the search, seven continue in San José del Guaviare since three of them fell ill with dengue. On Sunday they were hospitalized, but this Monday there was only one left admitted to the medical center. “We had been in the jungle from the beginning and in Araracuara we don’t have dengue, that’s why we neglected ourselves,” they told EL MUNDO.
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