Four children aged 13 to one from the Chukiki indigenous community (Colombia) survived alone for forty days in the Amazon jungle after their plane crashed on May 1. They were finally found alive on June 9, just 5 km from the accident site, when 100 soldiers had been looking for them for a month. A surprising element that their 55-year-old grandmother explains to our colleagues from Parisian : the children would have been afraid of being found by their violent stepfather.
“The truth is that the children hid. Lesly (the eldest) was scared that Ranoque, her stepfather, would find her. He is an extremely violent man, he beat his mother in front of the children,” Fatima told the daily. In her testimony, she reports a violent episode that occurred shortly before the crash: the man allegedly threw himself on the mother of the children with a machete, and injured her in the neck. He also allegedly attempted to sexually abuse Lesly.
The fear of a trap
However, it is the little girl who took care of her siblings’ survival in the jungle, the mother having been killed in the plane crash. “On board, she found 5 kg of cassava flour. In the forest, she picked juicy fruits,” explained Fatima. The 13-year-old was “raised like a real native” by her grandmother and learned to recognize good fruit, or how to use palm fronds to build shelter.
During the research, the eldest would therefore have been very suspicious. “In the forest, the planes of the soldiers who were looking for them broadcast a message that I had recorded using a loudspeaker. (…) But Lesly thought it was a trap set by her stepfather,” said the grandmother. Finally, after forty days, the eldest agreed to introduce herself to the Murui, an indigenous community that was looking for the children. With the death of her daughter, Fatima wishes to obtain sole custody of the four children to protect them from the stepfather.