All stories have heroes and villains. The case of the four Colombian brothers who survived a plane crash in the Amazon and 40 days lost in the jungle, feeding on seeds and wild fruits, was too beautiful to end just as an example of courage and resistance. There was something else and it has emerged with the arrest of the father of the little ones for alleged abuse.
The Mucutuy brothers are two girls, the older ones, and two boys, children of another father. They are 9 and 13 years old; they, 1 and 5. Illegal miners, among others, use precarious planes in this immense green lung, both in the Colombian part and in that of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guyana. This is also a common transport for the inhabitants of remote Amazonian communities.
This is what Magdalena Mucutuy did, accompanied by her four children. She flew over the department of Caquetá to meet in Bogotá with her partner, Manuel Ranoque, the girls’ stepfather and the children’s biological father. Halfway there, the plane crashed and all the adults died, including the mother, after four days of agony. As long as she was alive, the children stayed by her side, never leaving her side.
When the woman sensed that her end was near, she told them to leave. And here the versions do not match. According to some, she told them: “Go away.” According to others: “Go with her father.” Lesly, the eldest, showed a maturity beyond her years and took it upon herself to keep her siblings alive in one of the most beautiful and dangerous corners of the planet, where poisonous plants, snakes, and jaguars abound, among other threats.
They were 40 days of absolute solitude, broken only by the arrival of Wilson, a Belgian shepherd from the Colombian Army, who located the little ones and stayed with them until he got lost again. Another of the heroes of the story. When the brothers appeared, it was said that the search would continue until they found him too. Today he is already considered lost in the line of duty and no one seems to remember him anymore.
Wilson’s uncertain fate is not the only enigma in the case. The rescue of the children was very complicated because they came to hide when they felt the presence of the rescue teams nearby. Why did they do it? Maybe what their mother told them was just to go, not to go with their father. Maybe they were afraid. Because? The prosecution might have the answer. Last week he requested his arrest.
Manuel Ranoque, 47, is an indigenous Huitoto or Murui-Muinane people, one of the few who knows how to remove the poison from bitter yucca (which could explain Lesly’s unusual survival knowledge). Colombian justice is investigating him as the alleged perpetrator of the rape of the eldest of his stepdaughters, whom he allegedly began abusing when he was 10 years old, according to his maternal grandparents.
When the brothers arrived in Bogotá, they were hospitalized. They had to recover from the odyssey. They didn’t even have shoes: the humidity of the jungle destroyed them as if they were made of paper. During the weeks that they were in the Military Hospital in the Colombian capital, Manuel Ranoque was able to visit his two sons, but not the girls. The maternal grandparents, who are claiming custody, began accusing their son-in-law. And not just him…
The maternal grandparents, Narciso Mucutuy and María Fátima Valencia, said of the first of their sons-in-law that they had neglected their daughters all their lives. And of the second… Of the second they said real atrocities. Abusive, bad father, alleged rapist of Lesly… Time will tell if Manuel Ranoque is guilty or innocent, a condition that must be granted until justice says otherwise, as the prosecution has recalled.
However this story ends, one thing is already certain: the researcher has squandered the image he created when he appeared on the news, participating with soldiers and Amazonian guides in the search for his family. Once the children were rescued, they were asked why they hid. “Out of fear,” they said. “For fear of what?” they asked. Perhaps the correct question was: “Whose?” .
