«Lesly is 13 years old, she is the oldest, the strongest, she is the one who is leading the group: she is as intelligent as her 9-year-old brother Soleiny, but there are spirits of the forest who hold them captive,” Uncle Fidencio Valencia had said a couple of days ago, after the “miracle” announced by the President of Colombia Gustavo Pedro on Wednesday (“we found them, they’re fine”) had turned out to be a hoax.
The one hundred soldiers who, together with dozens of locals, helicopters and molecular dogs, have been looking for four children who have been missing since May 1st in the immensity of the Caqueta forest said they had found fresh tracks in the mud on Thursday: “Footprints of small bare feet, a sign of hope”. I four Tom Thumbs from the Amazon (they left pieces of fabric and a pair of purple scissors on a giant leaf, perhaps to attract the attention of rescuers) know the pitfalls of the jungle (jaguars and poisonous snakes) because they grew up there: I am among the thousand survivors of the Huitoto ethnic group, indeed Muinane (a subgroup that has 547 inhabitants) whose name means “People of the mouth”.
And maybe they had arrived where some river ends, so that finding them would have been easier: instead they were in the sky above the green tide when the odyssey began, at dawn twenty days ago. They were flying with their mother Magdalena from Araracuara to San José del Guaviare to reunite with the woman’s husband, Manuel, father of the two youngest children: Tien Noriel, 4 years old, and little Cristin, just 11 months old. The family plan was to settle in the city, perhaps in the capital Bogotá, away from that forest that cruelly grabbed them. The engine of the small Cessna 206 failed, the pilot who has time to raise the alarm before the aircraft dives down.
200 kilometers from the destination, they found the wreckage fifteen days later, Tuesday the 16th. And three lifeless bodies, in the front part of the plane: the pilot, Hernando; Herman, the director of the Yetara Indigenous Foundation; the mom. But there is no trace of Lesly and the other children.
Perhaps they will have waited (unfortunately not long enough) before setting off. They must have remained for a while next to their mother, who, even when she was dead, must have given them a thread of comfort. Like the faint voice that the rescuers “launched” from a repeater placed on the belly of a helicopter, with a listening range of 1.5 kilometers. The voice of grandmother Fatima who, in the midst of 40-metre tall trees, repeats in the Huitoto language: «Stay where you are, we’ll come and get you».
The rescuers could know nothing about the physical conditions of the Tom Thumbs, who also left a few more pebbles in the forest: eaten fruit, a garment, “beds” of branches and a bottle that suggests Cristin’s fate, 11 months of which 20 days in the forest. “They know plants, they’ll have found something to eat,” Uncle Fidencio had said. Prohibitive weather conditions with torrential rains, armed groups that have never accepted the truce decided by the Farc in 2015. A place out of this world, from which the news leaked on Wednesday that the four had been rescued and were on a boat bound for Puerto Cachiporro, 500 km south of Bogotá. The boat arrived, but no children were there. The President of the Republic had to withdraw the message of jubilation on Twitter. The immensity of the forest, time passing, an entire country that hoped to get up this morning with a wish fulfilled: spirits of the forest, make them come back.