The area is also home to armed drug smuggling groups. It was in part the local knowledge of the children and Indigenous adults involved in the search with Colombian soldiers that the survivors were found alive despite the threats of jaguars and snakes and relentless downpours that may have prevented them from hearing calls from search parties. Indigenous knowledge systems vital in saving children

The youngest two children spent their birthdays in the jungle with Lesly guiding them through the ordeal. In a video released on Sunday showing the children soon after they were found, they appear emaciated from their time spent in the wilderness. He got up and said to me: ‘My mom is dead.'” Colombian soldiers give medical attention inside a plane to the children who survived a Cessna 206 plane crash in the thick Amazon jungle at the beginning of May “The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me,” said Nicolas Ordonez Gomes, one of the search and rescue crew. Members of the group who found the survivors, who are themselves Indigenous, recounted the first moments after meeting the children. “I’m hungry” and “My mom is dead” were the first words uttered by the children upon being discovered, members of the rescue group said in a televised interview on Sunday. The children had been missing for 40 days in the Amazon before they were rescued and airlifted out of the jungle on Friday.

Any recent plane crashes