On Sunday they did the last ritual. The indigenous leaders of the Amazon, with Don Rubio at their head, the eldest who, according to their beliefs, managed to get the elves of the jungle to deliver the children, made their ancestral prayers so that the brothers would soon overcome the loss of their mother and children. fears that left them 40 days of uncertainty and suffering.
He believes that the military should leave the jungle area before Monday. Evil spirits, he said. they would no longer have any consideration for anyone.
“It was very dangerous, very hard,” Don Rubio confessed about taking the yajé (ayahuasca) in which he obtained information on the whereabouts of the little ones. A man of few words, he agreed to speak before boarding a Colombian Air Force plane in San José del Guaviare bound for Bogotá. He put his life at risk, he says, because extracting confessions from the owners of the forest entails enormous risks. With the information from him, he began the last leg of the search.
“We left at eight in the morning. At about three in the afternoon we found the children. They had a small cambuche (makeshift house), an awning. It was a joy, like one loses the word,” he tells this newspaper one of the four indigenous people who found the brothers following the guidance of Don Rubio. “They were weak from eating. Only they found a ration that the military threw at them, no more,” he added.
At that time, the little ones only had “a few seeds (bones of a wild fruit), with which they fed. We did what the eldest recommended: we blew tobacco on it, we poured holy water on it, and from there we mambeam (the use of the coca leaf that is used for the ritual)”, he recalls. “They were happy. They asked for food, they were very hungry. And the little boy remembered his mother when he had an accident, that his mother was dead. (It was) what the boy asked us first. He would start crying and we told him that No. We change talk.”
Just this Sunday it was known that the mother of the four indigenous children remained alive four days after the accident of the plane in which they were traveling on May 1, revealed her husband. “The only thing that clarifies for her (Lesly) is that her mother was alive for four days,” Manuel Ranoque told the press next to the military hospital.
The indigenous people also remember being told that they were “people from Putumayo who were looking for them with their grandfather who is from Araracuara. We hugged them.” Minutes later they joined a nearby Special Forces unit. “We told them to help us carry” the children.
Both he and the rest of his companions know other jungles in depth. “But this is very different, very hard for one to walk. Because you are walking and you feel that another person is following you, sometimes you feel that a person is talking to you and you go and find nothing. That cannot be explained because one with normal eyesight cannot see it”.
In the Military Hospital of Bogotá, where the children will still remain for two weeks, Don Rubio was able to conclude the story of his Amazonian group, according to his spirituality, of the long and difficult rescue of Lesly and her three brothers.
Although the children are in good health, they arrived with a high degree of malnutrition and severe dehydration. Despite everything, they feel good with their father, Manuel, and want to resume their lives.
The boy already wanted to get out of bed and start playing and running. “I want to walk, but my feet hurt,” Tien Noriel, 5, told one of his uncles when he visited. But nothing will be the same for them anymore. Everyone wants them to leave behind the difficult conditions that indigenous peoples often live in, that they do not have to suffer another forced exodus from the FARC or any other criminal gang, and that they can fulfill the dreams that each child yearns for.
General Pedro Arnulfo Sánchez, responsible for Operation Esperanza, decided to sponsor Cristin, the youngest. And the members of the Special Forces, with whom El MUNDO spoke, will always carry the four brothers in their hearts. It was a mission they never suspected they would do and they will never forget it.
On the other hand, the search continues for Wilson, the Belgian Malinois shepherd who on May 18, from one moment to the next, left his guiding soldier and went into the jungle. Units of the Special Forces saw him on two occasions, but he was seen from afar and ignored his calls. The children were with him for several days and told that there was hardly any food for him in the jungle, he was very thin.
“We never leave a commando behind. The missions are different and our teams have already adapted other tactics in the face of a possible threat in the area,” the general said. “The threat is not only the jungle, but a drug-criminal threat that commits crimes in that area.”
This newspaper learned that on the banks of the mighty Apaporis, about six kilometers from the crashed plane, they found remains of old guerrilla camps. But they located a pier used by communities that live on the banks of the river or in more distant areas, and they cannot rule out that guerrillas also pass through it.
The Apaporis has always been, and continues to be, a highway for criminals of all stripes. And now that a mission that united all of Colombia has ended and it was not the time to carry out an attack, the situation changes. The Special Forces cannot lower their guard.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
