After 40 days in the Colombian rainforest, all four children who had been missing since the plane they were travelling in crashed on May 1 have been found alive, according to Colombia’s President.
“They achieved an example of total survival that will go down in history,” President Gustavo Petro said at a news conference on Friday night.
When rescuers reached the site of the plane’s wreckage last month, the bodies of the three adults on board were found, but there was no sign of the four children known to have been on the plane.
In a case that captivated the nation, local Indigenous communities from the remote region, along with the Colombian military, began scouring the jungle for the children, aged 13, 9, 4 and 1.
The children are “weak” and are receiving medical attention, Petro said.
The children were initially treated by combat medics from the special operations forces that had been deployed in the search, and later transferred to the military base in the city of San José del Guaviare, where they were in stable condition, the defence ministry said in a statement.
Early on Saturday morning, some of the children were photographed being carried on stretchers off a plane that had landed at a military airport in Bogotá, the capital. The domestic news media reported that all four were later taken to a military hospital.
“We want to share the happiness of all the Colombian people with this true miracle that we have known tonight,” the defence minister, Iván Velásquez, said in a video posted to social media. It was unclear as of Saturday morning who found the children or how they managed to survive for so long in a thick jungle.
“It’s a real miracle. It’s going to be news for years to come,” said Pedro Arenas, a human-rights activist in San José del Guaviare. “After 40 days, it is quite incredible news.”
The children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, had been travelling with their mother and an Indigenous leader from the tiny Amazon community of Araracuara, Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, a small city in central Colombia.
