The Pulgarcito family has staged the miracle. The four brothers lost in the Colombian jungle, thirteen, nine, four and one year old, left different traces that allowed the search teams to never give up knowing that the children had survived. Like the crumbs in a children's story, the children left evidence of life in their wanderings through the jungle.
The teams were abandoning survival packages through the jungle, which after a few days appeared open and with the supplies consumed. The brothers who had an entire country in suspense had done it. At different times, footprints were found in the mud.
In addition, pieces of clothing, hair bands, small scissors and even the remains of improvised huts with branches were found, which, without a doubt, were intended to shelter from that persistent Amazonian rain that in the area drops its curtains of water for an average of 16 hours daily.
An aunt of the girl, Damaris Mucutuy, explained to Noticias Caracol that it was she herself who taught the eldest of the four minors, Lesly, to build "ranchitos" (sheds or huts) in the jungle and that she thought she recognized in the photos of such shelters that the search teams transferred the skills of his niece.
“The fact that the brothers are from an indigenous community and that they know the jungle environment has given them a certain advantage within the miracle that we have witnessed; Some urban minors would have had practically no options”, comments Dr. Valentín Río, an emergency doctor with international experience in catastrophes and conflict situations.
Among those skills, "which seem to be engraved in their DNA," says Dr. Río, was knowing how to select edible wild plants and fruits and discard poisonous ones. Damaris Mucutuy, the children's aunt, confirmed that her niece Lesly had this knowledge and was confident at the time of affirming that she has been the one who has brought her siblings forward. “She knew what they could eat and what not,” the aunt pointed out. Information like this, which little by little is emerging about how four minors survived 40 days in the jungle, is what little by little is profiling the older sister as the leader of the group of lost children and one of the great heroines of this A story that seems to have given all Colombians a pretext to celebrate something completely together.
“One of the fundamental issues for survival in any environment is having water available,” says Dr. Río, who has extensive experience working in the Amazon jungle. Unlike other environments, the jungle offers many options for water supply, despite this, according to the first reports on the health of the children, certain symptoms of slight dehydration were detected in them. In fact, upon their arrival in Bogotá by plane, at dawn this Saturday, they were taken to a hospital where they were administered serum.
Another of the key elements for locating the little ones alive has been the perseverance of the rescue teams, despite the fact that at times, from high positions in the administration, it was suggested that the search work could be suspended. However, on the ground, rescue teams insisted that the children were alive.
These teams, the spearhead of the so-called Operation Esperanza, were made up of army commandos and three voluntary expeditions of indigenous people, who were very knowledgeable about the jungle. In fact, according to various sources, it was one of these guides from the jungle who was the first to spot the brothers and quickly reported it to the children's grandfather.
The Guaviare jungle is a practically virgin area and it is suspected that it houses communities of the so-called "uncontacted", that is, those that have never had relations outside their clan nucleus. One of the hopes that were harbored before the children appeared was that one of these tribes had located the little ones and that they would have taken them in temporarily.
The little ones had been lost since last May 1 when the plane in which they were traveling with their mother crashed in the middle of the thicket after alerting air traffic control that they had suffered a major breakdown and that they were going to try to ditch in a river, something that finally could not be carried out. After the accident, in addition to the mother, the pilot and co-pilot of the plane died. The children made the decision, surprising for some, to leave the area of the accident and start walking through the jungle. The device was located by an indigenous person 16 days after the incident.
