After an Amazon plane crash, these children survived for 40 days — how?

The family were fleeing Puerto Sabalo, the indigenous reserve where they lived in the jungles of southern Colombia. According to her father, Lesly had been approached for recruitment by a dissident guerrilla group that operated in the area. That March, the leader of the Estado Mayor Central guerrillas had abducted four children from an indigenous community further upriver from Puerto Sabalo. Two months later they had been found dead — executed after they tried to escape.

Once Magdalena and her family reached San Jose del Guaviare they were due to take an overnight bus to Bogota, the capital in the Andes, where Magdalena’s partner, Manuel Ranoque — the father of Tien and Cristin — would be waiting for them.

Through the windshield the pilot could see the brown coils of the Apaporis River snaking through the jungle, but on the dashboard the temperature and oil gauges were flicking into the red. He never made it to the river. The plane lost altitude, hit the treetops and plunged into the forest floor.

When Lesly came to she felt the weight of her body hanging forward and the pinch of the seatbelt around her waist. She heard the sound of dripping — the back of the seat was slick with blood. She felt a gash along her hairline. Her mother was slumped forward in her seat, her hair draped over her face. Terrifyingly still.

The expanse of Amazon jungle in southern Colombia where the Cessna 206 light aircraft crashed with seven people on board

GETTY IMAGES

“Mama?” she cried, but something in Magdalena’s posture told Lesly she was dead. Then she heard the muffled cry of a baby. From the folds of Magdalena’s body, her half-sister Cristin’s plump leg emerged.

Lesly undid her seatbelt and fell forwards. Her left leg was pinned behind her between the frame of her seat and the floor. She pulled and twisted until her heel eased out of her trainer. A searing pain spread through her leg. Beneath her, the back of the pilot’s head protruded from the mud. Herman’s body was totally hidden by the wreckage.

Lesly reached out and pulled baby Cristin from her mother’s clutches. As she hugged her to her chest she saw two small faces staring back from the rear seats. It was her sister, Soleiny, and her half-brother, Tien. Soleiny was bruised on her head and chest but Tien was unscathed.

The children clambered out of the plane and retreated a few metres into the forest. The aircraft’s fuselage rose up vertically, its blue-tipped tail sticking out like a flag on a mast. Lesly sat with her siblings at the base of a tree. Tien asked why their mother wouldn’t wake up but Lesly didn’t know what to say. Soleiny stared at the blood running from the wound in Lesly’s forehead. Lesly knew from her mother that open wounds, in the heat and humidity of the jungle, needed to be treated quickly.

After retrieving a few items from the plane, including some fariña, a granola-like grain, from Herman’s backpack, a first-aid kit and two plastic bottles of water, Lesly made a plan. First she needed to stem the bleeding. She removed one of the nappies from Cristin’s bag and pressed it to her forehead, holding it in place with some gauze. Next she draped a towel over the branches of a tree to create shade and hung up a mosquito net she had found in the luggage. The children crawled inside. Lesly knew that someone would come looking for them. How long that might take, though, was a different matter.

They waited. The heat rose. From the nappy bag she removed Cristin’s bottle and one of the sachets of powdered milk that lay alongside it. She emptied half the sachet into the bottle and poured in some water. Cristin grasped the bottle and sucked greedily.

From left: the siblings Tien, 4, Cristin, 11 months, Lesly, 13, and Soleiny, 9, before the crash; Tien and Soleiny look emaciated after their time in the jungle

Day 2

In the early hours the relatives of the passengers on board the Cessna arrived at Villavicencio airport, where the base for the search and rescue operation was being set up. The previous day Magdalena’s estranged husband, Andrés Jacobombaire, the father of Lesly and Soleiny, had received a call from an air force representative who explained that his daughters, along with Magdalena and her two other children, had been on the plane. It was too early to say what had happened or if they were alive or dead. Andrés had begun to cry. He hadn’t seen his daughters for six years. He wondered if he would ever see them again.

From radar data, flight analysts had extrapolated the plane’s direction of travel to identify a wedge-shaped search area stretching to the Apaporis River. Within hours of the crash two pilots had made repeated flyovers but there was no sign of the plane, no glint of fuselage, no break in the tree canopy, just an endless carpet of green. Now a team of volunteers were being rounded up for a ground search.

Also at the briefing was Manuel Ranoque, Tien and Cristin’s father. Feeling that the search was moving too slowly he began knocking on the doors of people he knew in Villavicencio: human rights defenders, jungle experts and members of the Civil Guard. One man to answer the call was Edwin Paky, a Huitoto cartologist who had deep experience of the Amazon jungle.

Day 3

Lesly, long-limbed and strong, was the child who most took after her mother. She was quiet and diligent, an intelligent student at school and she took her responsibility as the eldest seriously. Soleiny, meanwhile, was talkative and full of smiles, but with a stubborn streak, insistent on wearing her hair the way she liked it, in bunches. Tien was a boisterous, mischievous child who delighted in teasing his older sisters.

Lesly thought of the canyon near her home and the afternoons she spent there with her friends. It was surrounded by fruit trees — the juan soco, the camu camu, the açai palm. The children would forage on the leafy floor to find the fruits. Sometimes the boys would climb the trees to knock them free from the branches.

The children waited two days, sleeping under the mosquito net and eating the copoazu fruits that her mother had packed for the flight. No help arrived. They couldn’t stay next to the plane with the smell of the dead growing stronger. Lesly resolved that they had to get to the river she had seen from the sky and try to find a village. In her backpack were the items she deemed vital for the journey: the baby’s bottle and powdered milk, nappies, a torch and scissors. There were also water bottles and rolls of gauze from the medical kit. And she carried the towel and mosquito net.

Over the course of the morning the pain in her left leg grew worse. Her ankle was swollen and bruises had spread up her calf. As she led Soleiny and Tien eastwards through the jungle she became dependent on the trees to support her weight. Where there was nothing to support her, she handed Cristin to Soleiny and crawled.

• The real story behind the Colombia miracle rescue

Hours later Lesly heard the sound of flowing water and caught a glimpse of the Apaporis River through the trees. They were about two miles from the crash site but it had taken the children most of the day. On either shore there was nothing but jungle. There was no cutaway in the tree line that might signify the entrance to a village. There was no sign, and no sound, of human life. She hobbled to the water and sat on a rock. She removed the bottles from her backpack and, as she filled them where the water ran clearest, a shimmer of silver caught her eye. A small sabaleta fish flickered through the water.

She thought of the men who hunted for catfish in the waters below the rapids at Araracuara. They would walk along bamboo platforms that jutted out from the boulders on the riverbank, wait patiently for a catfish to pass underneath them and then hurl their harpoons into the water.

Lesly found a broken branch and pulled away strips of bark at one end until the tip resembled a spear. She stabbed at the water several times, without luck. But she was patient and adjusted her aim to take into account the refraction of the water. After half an hour Soleiny and Tien saw her raise the stick out of the water to reveal on its tip a silver fish flapping in the light.

They dug their fingers into the fish and pulled out chunks of cold flesh. Lesly took a bite. It was slimy and sour and it made her stomach turn. Soleiny shook her head but Lesly insisted they eat. That evening she lay under the mosquito net with Cristin on her chest and Soleiny and Tien curled up next to her for warmth. Her plan hadn’t worked. She would have to find more food.

Discoveries on the forest floor that gave the search party hope: Cristin’s plastic milk bottle; scissors and a hairband; the eaten remains of a juan soco fruit

COLOMBIAN ARMY / GETTY IMAGES

Day 4

In the days since the plane had disappeared the military had been on standby. A costly deployment could be avoided if the air reconnaissance could find evidence of the crash site. General Pedro Sánchez, commander of the Colombian armed forces’ joint special operations command (CCOES), had suspected that his troops would be called into action. The remoteness and the fact that the area had a history of guerrilla activity meant it was too dangerous for regular soldiers, never mind civilian rescue teams. That left the CCOES, one of the most elite forces in Latin America.

That day the men of the CCOES’s Dragon 4 unit abseiled from a Black Hawk helicopter into the jungle. The vegetation at ground level was thick. The soldiers didn’t carry machetes, as breaking a path would have made them easy to track by the guerrillas. So they had to move carefully, pushing through the thickets. Visibility rarely extended beyond ten metres. Underfoot there was thick leaf cover, meaning footprints would be nearly impossible to find. The soldiers were hunting to the south, so the volunteers, joined by Ranoque, would push on north, along the banks of the Apaporis.

Day 5

Lesly spotted the white bark of a familiar tree, the milpeso palm. In among the fibres she could see the tree’s dark-purple fruits. She knew that if you kept the fruit in your mouth long enough the hard flesh would eventually break down. The juice was full of energy and protein; some mothers gave it to their babies as a substitute for milk. She gave a piece of fruit to Soleiny and Tien to suck on, put two in her own mouth and stashed the rest in her backpack. When she felt the first fruit begin to soften she added some water, squashed it in the palm of her hand and fed it to Cristin. The baby sucked it happily from her fingers.

Lesly noticed that the children’s limbs were covered in insect bites. On Soleiny’s left wrist were red nodules that she recognised as an early sign of leishmaniasis, a skin-eating disease. She knew they would soon form ulcers and the open wound would grow. She wrapped a strap of gauze around her sister’s wrist.

Cristin was also sick. She had a blocked nose and her forehead was hot. She had the flu, Lesly thought, and she prayed that the baby did not develop a fever. Lesly poured water into the baby’s bottle, mixed in a small handful of fariña and coaxed the teat between Cristin’s lips. Lesly sensed that time was running out. She needed to find a place where her sisters could get treatment. The only option seemed to be to head west.

In the past week the children had grown disorientated and were losing things. One night, as she prepared to mix the last of the fariña with water for Cristin, Soleiny confessed that she had left the baby’s bottle somewhere in the forest. For the first time since the accident Lesly lost her temper.

How was she to feed Cristin? She looked around and picked up a wide, round leaf. She bent it at the edges to form a crucible, into which she mixed some fariña and water. Carefully she poured it into Cristin’s mouth.

The rescued children with soldiers and members of the indigenous search team

AP

Day 15

Morale was low among the soldiers of Dragon 4. Each man had walked more than 90 miles and now the unit were bumping up against areas that had already been cleared by other teams. No trace of the children had been found. At 6am they packed up their kit and began to march. Four hundred metres from their camp they noticed something: a number of branches were bent back and others lay snapped on the leafy floor. Twenty metres on they saw a small, bright pink object on the ground. It was a baby’s bottle. The bottle was half-full of murky water and there was sediment at the bottom. It had been filled from a stream. Captain Edwin Montiel, the leader of Dragon 4, knew in his gut that it belonged to the children. Two hundred metres on were the remains of a juan soco fruit. In its yellow husk were the indentations of small teeth.

“The day we found the baby bottle was a great day that filled us with hope,” Montiel recalls. “The majority of my team, we’re fathers, we’re husbands. In one way or another that motivated us in the search.”

At 5pm that same day the volunteers heard a shout from one of their group — Edwin Paky, the cartologist. “It’s the plane!” It was vertical, its blue belly facing them. Paky moved swiftly to check the numbers on the tail: HK-2803. “I felt as if my body was lifted from the ground,” he remembers. “There had been days of expectation, doubt and worry, but at last we had completed our mission.”

As he got closer he felt a knot in his stomach. Vultures spread their wings and flew away. The nose of the plane was buried so deeply that the cockpit was barely visible. “The moment I saw that, I thought no one could have survived,” he says. “For me they were all dead.”

He saw a woman’s decomposed body slumped forward. Beneath her he could make out the pilot’s white shirt. Herman’s body would not be discovered until the next day. But the men had a growing realisation that the debris around the crash site had an order to it. A white shirt was hanging from a branch. A nappy bag was open, its contents removed. The children had survived.

• Colombia plane crash: ‘miracle’ children found after 40 days in Amazon jungle

Day 18

A more intense stage of the search had now begun. Three more commando teams were dropped into the jungle. At the suggestion of the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, a new wave of indigenous volunteers would be integrated into the military’s search team. Hundreds of men and women from Colombia’s Amazon tribes and beyond answered the call.

The search area was widened. The soldiers were patrolling after dusk, using night-vision goggles, shouting Lesly’s name. The air force dropped food kits from the sky and 10,000 flyers telling the children to stay where they were. A helicopter with a loudspeaker broadcast an appeal from the children’s grandmother addressed to Lesly, telling her to stay put, that the soldiers were looking for her.

Day 28

Sánchez, the CCOES commander, was back at the headquarters in Bogota. Reports from the troops on the ground suggested that the integration of the volunteers was progressing well. There were now close to 200 men traversing the search area but they were no closer to finding the children. To make matters worse, a Belgian shepherd sniffer dog named Wilson had broken free of his leash during a violent storm and disappeared into the jungle.

On the nightly news the children’s grandmother told reporters that she believed they had been captured by a duende, a malicious spirit that lured lost travellers deeper into the jungle.

Day 30

Lesly brought the children to a small clearing. On the ground she saw a bright red piece of paper. She read the words, written in Spanish and in her native tongue: “We are looking for you. Don’t move any more, stay close to a river or a stream. Make noise. Make smoke. We are going to save you. We are close. Your grandmother Fatima and the family are looking for you.”

Lesly took the mosquito net from her backpack and strung it from a tree. The children got inside. They waited.

Army medical officers check the children’s condition before they are airlifted out of the jungle

JAM PRESS

Day 40

By June 9 only 16 indigenous volunteers remained in the jungle with the search team. They had earmarked June 10 as the final day of their efforts. A shaman known as Don Rubio imbibed a hallucinogenic potion made from a jungle vine called yage or ayahuasca. He had a vision of the children held captive by a jealous duende that he recounted to Eliécer Muñoz, one of the indigenous searchers.

At midday the search team stopped for a drink. They had been out since dawn. Some of them turned back, leaving just Muñoz and three companions. They knew there were still four hours of light left in the day — four hours to find the missing children. Finally, with one hour to go, they heard the sound of a baby crying.

For nine days the children had remained in the clearing. Lesly had watched her siblings grow gaunter by the day. Tien could no longer stand up but Soleiny still had the strength to hold Cristin. As she did so, she picked at her wrist where the leishmaniasis had spread. Lesly gently pressed her sister’s hand to stop her scratching.

A few days earlier, as they were sitting in the clearing, a dog had come through the undergrowth. It had a black snout and brown fur. It had approached the children inquisitively and sat with them. Later, as darkness was setting in, they had heard a low growling that seemed to surround them. Lesly had recognised the sound. It was a pack of perros del monte, the short-eared wild dogs that prowl the Amazon. The Belgian shepherd’s ears had pricked up and he had disappeared, snarling, into the undergrowth.

Afterwards Lesly had lain down in the shelter and hadn’t moved since. Now she heard a sound in the undergrowth and tried to imagine which jungle predator might be stalking them. She gathered her last strength and got to her feet. She heard a man call out and the sound of branches snapping. Around the children dark forms flickered behind the vegetation. Then they heard voices. “Lesly, we’re family,” they said.

The men came closer, moving slowly. They crouched before the children, smiled and spoke softly. Tien looked up and said, “My mom died.”

One of the men took Cristin in his arms and sang a lullaby. The others each picked up a child and together they ran through the jungle, in the direction they had come from. A while later, when Lesly was set down on a green plastic sheet, she saw men in uniform. One spoke into a radio transmitter in a trembling, excited voice: “Miracle! Miracle! Miracle! Miracle!” A miracle for each surviving child.

• How the four children really survived in the Colombian jungle

An unhappy aftermath

The children were flown out of the jungle in a Black Hawk. They would spend a month at a military hospital in Bogota before being transferred to a children’s home on the outskirts of the city. In Colombia it was the biggest news story of the year. The children were heralded for their resilience and resourcefulness and it was noted that their knowledge of the jungle, taught to them by their grandmother and mother, was both fundamental to their survival and yet at threat in the modern world. The indigenous volunteers, who spent weeks in the claustrophobic, rainswept depths of the remotest Amazon, became national heroes. General Pedro Sánchez was named Colombia’s minister of defence last month.

For the children, however, the past two years have been painful. On August 11, 2023, Manuel Ranoque was arrested and accused of sexual assault and rape, which he denies.

A battle began for custody of the children between Andrés Jacobombaire, the father of Lesly and Soleiny, Ranoque’s sister and the children’s maternal grandparents. Nearly two years after their rescue the children remain in state custody. They want nothing more than to return to the jungle they grew up in.

© Mat Youkee 2025. Extracted from Forty Days in the Jungle: Behind the Extraordinary Survival and Rescue of Four Children Lost in the Amazon (Scribe £18.99), published on April 10. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members