Buenos Aires Herald 
The four children who had gone missing on May 1 after the airplane they were traveling in crashed in the Amazon rainforest were found alive on Friday by Colombia’s armed forces.
Three adults, including the pilot and the children’s mother, died in the crash and their bodies were found inside the plane. The third deceased was an indigenous leader of the Witoto community, a group located mainly in southern Colombia to which the four children and their belonged to.
The siblings, aged 13, 9, 4, as well as a now 12-month-old baby, were found on Friday in Colombia’s Caqueta province and were initially treated by military medics who had been among the search teams looking for them.
They arrived in the capital Bogota early on Saturday, where four ambulances were waiting to collect them and take them to a military hospital for specialist medical care. They were welcomed at the airport by military personnel, indigenous leaders, and paramedics, who all erupted into applause once they saw them.
Narcizo Mucutuy, the grandfather of the three girls and one boy, told reporters he was delighted at the news of their rescue.
“As the grandfather to my grandchildren who disappeared in the jungles of the Yari, at this moment I am very happy,” he said.
President Gustavo Petro also expressed his joy with the discovery. “The country is happy! They were found alive,” he tweeted.
Petro had an unfortunate mistake two weeks after the plane disappeared when he misunderstood a briefing connected to the search and mistakenly tweeted the children had been found. He later apologized and deleted the tweet.
Talking to the press in Bogota, the president said the children were weak, and that the doctors would treat them and make an assessment of their condition.
In photos shared by Colombia’s military, the four children – three girls and a boy – appeared gaunt as they were being cared for by rescuers.
The mission to find the four siblings, called Operation Hope, captured the imagination of Colombians as reports of clues to their whereabouts fueled longing they would be found safely despite spending more than a month in the inhospitable jungle.
“We did everything necessary to make the impossible possible, using satellites, using aircraft that launched messages, that launched food, that launched flyers, that launched hope,” General Pedro Sanchez, commander of the military’s joint command for special operations said at an air base in Bogota.
The crash and search
The children had been missing in the jungle since a Cessna 206 carrying seven people on a route between Araracuara, in Caqueta, and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in Guaviare province, issued a mayday alert due to engine failure in the early hours of May 1.
Over 100 soldiers and locals from indigenous groups participated in the search. They combed the jungle area between the Guaviare and Caquetá departments where they suspected the plane had gone down using search dogs.
The task was especially difficult due to the conditions on the ground. They had to deal with thick vegetation and 40-meter tall trees, in an environment with constant rain filled with jaguars and snakes, which made it very hard to hear any call for help.
The military carried loudspeakers that played a message in the children’s mother tongue, asking them to stand still so they could track them down. During the weeks the search parties roamed the jungle, they came upon fingerprints, shoes, clothing and improvised shelters.
General Sánchez had insisted in the last few weeks that the children were alive and close by, although admitted their journey through the jungle sounded “improbable.” The children were eventually found 5 kilometers away from the crash site.
According to Sanchez, the children were found by members of the indigenous community. “We found them, it’s a miracle, a miracle”! was the message he got.
-with information from Reuters and Télam
