There are words that have not stopped being repeated in the last 24 hours in Colombia: “Miracle” is the first, because it is still not fully understood how four children were able to survive 40 days in a thick jungle, and “heroin” is undoubtedly the second. , as the older sister, Lesly Mukutuy, is credited with this feat.
Lesly, 13, is the eldest of the four siblings who had been wandering the jungles of Guaviare for 40 days, where on May 1 the plane she was traveling in crashed and she survived with her siblings Soleiny Mukutuy, 9; Tien Noriel Ronoque Mukutuy, five years old, and Cristin Neruman Ranoque, a baby who turned one year old in the jungle.
Lesly “we also have to recognize not only her courage but her leadership because we could say that it was because of her that the three little brothers were able to survive by her side, with her care, with her knowledge of the jungle as well,” he said today at the Military Hospital Defense Minister Iván Velásquez.
“It was the girl, the eldest, our heroine, the one who with her wisdom cared for and protected her siblings,” explains the director of the Land Restitution Unit, Giovanny Yule, one of those who led the search from the institutional level to EFE. .
After being taken out of the jungle yesterday by joint military and indigenous patrols, the children are admitted to this hospital in Bogotá, where they are “in acceptable clinical conditions, despite the crisis and the situation experienced in the last 40 days”, according to the medical report.
A “miracle” after more than a month in a dense, virgin jungle, where it rains almost all day and dangerous animals abound. His great-uncle, Fidencio Valencia, says they got some cassava flour (fariña) that they took with them on the plane, where his mother and an indigenous leader were also traveling, who along with the pilot died in the accident.
And surely the knowledge of nature, of the fruits that can be eaten, that Lesly and her siblings as indigenous Uitoto have allowed them to eat and stay alive, even though they look stunted, a state that they are trying to reverse in the hospital.
“As our elders say, someone oriented them and someone guided them, they had the wisdom of how to eat, get water, and of course how to endure hunger,” explains Yule, who as a Nasa indigenous person was placed at the center of the search.
The story of how they survived so long a plane that crashed vertically into the ground and then forty days is still unknown, but according to the indigenous “elders” “when someone is welcomed or gets lost, they say that usually they always there are people who guide and guide them,” says Yule.
In that jungle, which includes the Chiribiquete National Park, there are uncontacted indigenous people, whom some like Yule consider key to the survival of the minors, who came from the community of Araracuara, on the border between Caquetá and Amazonas.
The institutions, after several weeks searching for them with a hundred soldiers, understood that the so-called Operation Hope needed ancestral knowledge and that members of the indigenous guard from four jungle departments were added to the search.
They also included another type of knowledge, that of the elders: “There was a spiritual conversation with the spirits of the mother jungle and in that conversation an exercise was made to open the way to be able to be in the territory and to be able to harmonize the jungle, to be able to establish an agreement so that the mother jungle can deliver the children,” explains Yule.
In the jungle, each entity -river, tree, animal, mountain- has its spirit and therefore this “pact” with the mother jungle, they explain from indigenous knowledge, is fundamental. The mother jungle welcomed them and in a certain sense did not let them leave.
But finally he has “released” them and, according to Yule, also to send a message: “indigenous children must be protected because they are being hit badly.”
Many of these cultures are lost, with the extinction of peoples, and children are the ones who suffer the most from violence as they are exposed to the violence of armed groups.
These four children have managed to survive forty days in the jungle but many others do not manage to do so in their own communities, where armed groups enter to kill indiscriminately or recruit them, as happened with the other four minors that FARC dissidents murdered after who tried to flee from their ranks a few weeks ago.
