The race to find four children who survived a plane crash deep in the Amazon.

By William Ralston

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Hernando Murcia was the kind of pilot who flew routes others wouldn’t dare. Murcia worked for Avianline Charters, one of the air taxi companies that shuttle people across Colombia’s Amazon region, a pristine expanse of rainforest roughly the size of California. The forest is dark, dense, and often treacherous. There are no roads, much less commercial airports. The meandering rivers have strong currents and teem with predators, including piranhas and anacondas. Jaguars prowl the banks.

Violent rebel groups and drug smugglers are known to hide out in the region. Otherwise it’s sparsely populated. The people who do call the Amazon home are mostly members of indigenous tribes, and they rely on privately chartered flights to reach the outside world.

To take these flights is often to risk death. Landing strips used by Avianline and other companies are no more than makeshift clearings of dirt and gravel amid thick vegetation; many of the sites fail to meet the safety standards of Colombia’s Civil Aviation Authority. Thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, and strong winds are frequent. Because Colombia does not set an age limit for aircraft, the small propeller planes that fly the Amazon’s routes are often so old that they don’t have autopilot or other modern safety features. Pilots must be alert to rattles and to odors that don’t seem right. To navigate, they must rely on instinct shaped by experience. The skies over the rainforest are plagued with radio blind spots, requiring pilots to travel long distances without any contact with the ground.

None of this bothered Murcia. The 55-year-old had been piloting small airplanes in Colombia for more than 30 years, working for Avianline since 2021. He was willing to fly through torrential rain, even though it could crash a prop plane in a heartbeat. Once, in 2017, the aircraft he was flying experienced engine failure, and he managed to make an emergency landing on an unfinished road, saving the lives of his passengers.

On April 30, 2023, Murcia agreed to pilot a flight from the southern Amazon town of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare, a population center more than 200 miles to the north that is connected to Colombia’s road network. His aircraft would be a blue and white Cessna 206 with the registration number HK2803. The plane was manufactured in 1982, but it had only been operating in Colombia since 2019. Before that it accumulated thousands of flight hours in the United States. In 2021, prior to being purchased by Avianline, HK2803 had crashed. No one on board was seriously injured, but damage to the propeller, engine, and a wing required extensive repairs before the plane could be put back in service.

Murcia was late to arrive in Araracuara because a storm delayed his incoming flight, so the HK2803 trip was moved to the next morning, and Murcia stayed in town overnight. Before going to bed he called his wife, Olga Vizcaino, to tell her that he loved her. He asked her to give their daughters a hug for him. Early the following day, Murcia sucked down some coffee, scrambled eggs, and plantains, then made his way to the Cessna to carry out his usual preflight inspection.

HK2803 was supposed to be carrying representatives from a company called Yauto, a broker of carbon credits between indigenous populations and multinational firms. But sometime before takeoff, members of the Colombian military stationed in Araracuara approached Murcia. They told him that there was a change of plans: He needed to evacuate an indigenous family who feared that a local rebel group wanted them dead.

As the family hurried into the rear of the Cessna’s cabin, a local indigenous leader named Hermán Mendoza clambered up front next to Murcia; he said that he was there to ensure the other passengers arrived at their destination safely. Murcia added everyone’s names to the flight manifest, radioed the information to Colombian air traffic control, then revved the plane’s engine.

At first the Cessna wouldn’t budge. The recent downpour had turned Araracuara’s landing strip into mud, and the plane’s wheels were mired. As Murcia fought to free the aircraft, one of its wheels hit a divot, tilting the plane so much that the propeller bumped the ground. Finally, just before 7 a.m. on May 1, he managed to take off.

The skies were blue that day, and there was a light wind. For around half an hour all was well. But as the Cessna approached Caquetá, a Colombian department that contains one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, something went wrong. Over his radio, Murcia declared engine failure.

“Mayday, mayday, 2803,” he said. “My engine is idling. I’m going to look for a field.”

Air traffic control pointed him toward nearby landing strips and reported the emergency to the Colombian Air Force, but then the Cessna’s radio signal cut out. Fifteen minutes later it returned, and Murcia reported that the engine was working again. But not for long: Eight minutes later, Murcia was back on the radio.

“Mayday, mayday, 2803, 2803, my engine failed again,” he said.

The Cessna was no longer flying—it was gliding. Murcia needed an opening in the landscape below him, somewhere he could set the plane down and search and rescue could find it. But in the Amazon, such openings are exceedingly rare. In emergencies some pilots aim for a bushy tree; if an aircraft’s velocity is sufficiently reduced and its nose remains lifted on impact, the foliage can sometimes cradle a plane until help arrives.

Instead, Murcia decided to shoot for water. “I’m going to look for a river,” he said. “Here I have a river on the right.” Air traffic control asked him to confirm his location. “One hundred and three miles outside of San José,” Murcia responded. “I am going to hit water.”

These were the last words air traffic control heard from Murcia. Moments later, radar recorded the Cessna taking a sharp right turn. Then, around 7:50 a.m., it disappeared.

Neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest’s canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green.

Word of the Cessna’s disappearance spread quickly. In Bogotá, the Search and Rescue Service of the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority reviewed the plane’s last known coordinates and calculated the maximum distance it could have glided before crashing. This provided a broad area of interest for a recovery mission.

By 8:15 a.m., authorities had picked up a distress signal from the plane’s emergency locator transmitter, a device triggered by impact from a crash. The ELT would also broadcast approximate GPS data every 12 hours until its battery died, which would happen after two days. The Cessna appeared to be somewhere in an area of around 1.5 square miles, near a small community called Cachiporro along the Apaporis River. Maybe that was where Murcia had attempted his water landing.

When a plane crashes in Colombia, the responsibility for finding it normally lies with the Civil Aviation Authority, which will arrange for both the military and the air force to dispatch recovery teams. But the vast wilderness and unique dangers of the Amazon meant that it was initially deemed too risky to send anyone on foot. Only the air force was deployed, and it sent surveillance planes over the jungle near Cachiporro, hoping to spot the wreckage or possibly survivors.

There was reason for hope. People had survived crashes in the Amazon before, in Colombia and elsewhere. Most famously, in 1971, a 17-year-old named Juliane Koepcke fell from an altitude of more than 10,000 feet after lightning struck LANSA flight 508. She walked alone for 11 days in the Peruvian jungle before being rescued.

As the Colombian air force got to work, Freddy Ladino began organizing his own search for HK2803. Ladino, 40, with a shaved head and pearly white teeth, is the founder of Avianline. By 10:30 a.m. the day of the crash, the company had sent up several of its other planes to look for HK2803. But neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest’s canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green. Searchers would have to take another approach, and fast.

As Colombian authorities and Avianline regrouped, the families of the passengers aboard HK2803 received word that their loved ones were missing. Murcia’s wife was at home with her daughters when she got the call. She prayed that her husband was alive and decided to keep the television turned off. The crash was already making headlines, and she didn’t want to get caught up in speculation.

The last-minute change to the HK2803 manifest supercharged the media’s interest in the crash. The indigenous family on the flight included a woman named Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia (34) and her four young children: daughters Lesly (13), Soleiny (9), and Cristin (11 months), and son Tien (4). Within hours of the Cessna vanishing, the fate of Magdalena and her children became an obsession in Colombia. International interest followed. In the weeks to come there would be breathless news segments, finger-pointing, misinformation, and dashed hopes. It would be 40 days until the world had answers.

For Magdalena the jungle had always been home. A member of the indigenous Witoto tribe—sometimes spelled Uitoto—she grew up on the fringes of Araracuara, a place so remote that electricity must come from gas generators or solar panels, and cell service is only available at the small landing strip. The closest road is several days away through the rainforest. Araracuara sits on the northern rim of a canyon through which the Caquetá River thunders; the rapids are almost impossible to navigate by boat. Between 1938 and 1971, the government ran a penal colony in Araracuara for Colombia’s worst criminals. Prisoners lived outdoors, because escape—whether by river or through the jungle—would have been suicide.

Magdalena was the third of ten siblings born to Fátima Valencia and Narciso Mucutuy. Valencia was a village elder, and she instilled in her children a deep reverence for the forest. According to indigenous belief, everything in the Amazon, from the rivers to the plants to the animals, is imbued with a powerful spirit. Some spirits are good, others malevolent. The latter category includes duendes, which lurk in the jungle’s shadows, looking to lead children astray. “They take out your voice,” Valencia said, “and you cannot scream.” The Witoto claim to commune with jungle spirits through shamanic rituals and ceremonies.

In addition to spiritual knowledge, Valencia taught her children about the forest’s practical uses. It was a place of sustenance, good for growing certain crops and scavenging for wild fruit. Valencia showed Magdalena and her siblings which of the jungle’s offerings were for animals and which were safe for humans to eat.

As a girl, Magdalena enjoyed tending her community’s chagra, a traditional shared garden. She also liked playing soccer. In 2005, when she was still a teenager, Magdalena competed in a tournament in La Chorrera, 60 miles southwest of Araracuara. Afterward, she had coffee with Andrés Jacobombaire, a forest ranger who played on a rival team. Jacobombaire asked her out on a date; they spent an evening dancing to merengue and shared a first kiss.

According to Jacobombaire, it was “love at first sight.” When he proposed, Magdalena accepted. They soon had two children, Angie and John.

In 2010, Magdalena gave birth to their third child, Lesly, who inherited her mother’s long brown hair and brown eyes. As a kid, Lesly proved to be a natural athlete, and she was enthusiastic about fishing. Jacobombaire’s father, the indigenous chief in La Chorrera, taught her to hunt for monkeys in the jungle. Lesly spent hours studying the sounds of birds and learning the names of trees and fruit. “She knew how to defend herself in the jungle,” Jacobombaire said. “We prepared her from a very young age.”

For 12 years, Magdalena and Jacobombaire had a good relationship. They welcomed their fourth child, Soleiny, in 2014. Then, in June 2016, Jacobombaire fell at work. He thought he might have broken his back. His condition worsened, and for a time he lost the ability to speak and move. His injuries took a toll on the marriage. One day in early 2017, Magdalena packed her bags and returned home to live with her parents in Araracuara. She took Lesly and Soleiny with her. “They closed the door on me,” Jacobombaire said.

Araracuara was a place in flux. Cocaine cartels were operating in the jungle, and they sometimes forcibly recruited local children to participate in illicit drug production. A rebel group calling itself the Carolina Ramírez Front was believed to be using Araracuara as a transfer point for cocaine shipments bound for Brazil. The area also attracted wildcat miners eager to exploit the Amazon’s gold deposits.

Magdalena found work at an illegal mine, which is where she met Manuel Ranoque. A short, strong man, 26-year-old Ranoque didn’t have the best reputation: Some people considered him a bully who drank too much. But Magdalena fell for him, and they moved in together in the indigenous reserve of Puerto Sábalo, Ranoque’s home. Magdalena gave birth to Tien in 2018 and Cristin in 2022. Ranoque eventually became Puerto Sábalo’s governor.

Valencia didn’t approve of Magdalena’s new relationship. She had heard that Ranoque abused his previous wife. Valencia also claimed to have seen Ranoque kissing his ex in Bogotá.

In April 2023, Ranoque suddenly left Puerto Sábalo. He said that he had no choice, because the Carolina Ramírez Front had threatened his life. He made his way to Bogotá, where he contacted Magdalena and asked her and the children to join him. He said that they were in danger, too.

Magdalena’s parents told her not to follow Ranoque; they didn’t trust him. “Mile is lying,” Valencia insisted, using Ranoque’s nickname. Valencia could hear her daughter sobbing when she spoke to Ranoque on the phone.

Without telling her parents, Magdalena gathered her belongings and her children and moved into a little house next to the Araracuara air strip. Each day she begged Colombian soldiers to get her on a flight. Ranoque called them to ask for their help, too. The soldiers eventually agreed to secure the family seats aboard HK2803, with Hermán Mendoza as their escort. Ranoque would meet Magdalena and the children in San José del Guaviare, and together they would travel by road to Bogotá.

On May 1, after Magdalena settled on board the plane, she messaged Ranoque: “We are leaving now.” As she typed, she cradled baby Cristin in her lap.

After the crash, Magdalena’s parents were shocked to learn that their daughter and grandchildren had been on the flight. “I felt terrible, like I had a fever,” Valencia said. Jacobombaire was devastated by the news. He’d recently lost his father and couldn’t believe that God would take his daughters too. “It hurts my soul,” he said.

As for Ranoque, when he got word about the downed Cessna, he immediately packed his bags and headed to Cachiporro. “What I thought about most was getting my family back,” he said. He planned to go on foot into the jungle to find them, dead or alive.

Ranoque wasn’t alone—other family members and friends of the missing passengers were anxious to start looking for them. In Araracuara, Mendoza’s sister, Diana, and his cousin Natalya Rodríguez began rounding up volunteers for a search party. “When someone you love goes missing, you desperately want to find them,” Rodríguez said. “It’s the hope that keeps you going.” The first person they called was Henry Guerrero, 56, a Witoto leader with disheveled black hair and a graying mustache. He agreed to lead a team of five men.

Avianline organized two ground searches of its own. Shortly after setting off from Cachiporro into the jungle, the first group became lost. They lit a fire to alert aircraft to their position but eventually found their way back to civilization, of a sort, when they stumbled on the jungle home of a man called Dumar. He didn’t give his full name to the volunteers because he ran a clandestine cocaine operation. Dumar’s home, little more than a wooden hut with a corrugated metal roof, became something of an informal headquarters for civilian-led search teams.

Ranoque eventually arrived at Dumar’s, as did Edwin Paky, a 36-year-old expert in rainforest navigation and a representative of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), who happened to be another cousin of Mendoza. Delio, Mendoza’s brother, came too, as did other volunteers from Araracuara. The new arrivals agreed to work together, and over a cigarette on the riverbank one day, Dumar told them information he’d been hesitant to share for fear of attracting unwanted attention to his business: On the morning of the crash, he had seen HK2083 flying over his hut, heading east at an altitude he estimated to be a few hundred feet.

The next day, as the first rays of sunlight illuminated the jungle, Ranoque, Paky, Guerrero, and other indigenous volunteers began swinging their machetes, hacking a path through the vegetation in the direction Dumar had seen the plane go.

A person, especially a child, walking away from such a crash would be a small miracle; surviving in the Amazon for more than a week without supplies was almost too much to hope for.

The best hope for finding the Cessna was using the coordinates broadcast by the ELT. But the first three sets were several miles apart. Colombian officials wondered if one of the passengers had survived the crash and detached the ELT from the Cessna, and was now moving on foot with it through the jungle. If so, they were likely doing so without food or water, in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

The military decided to put together its own ground mission. Tasked to lead it was Pedro Sánchez, the head of Colombia’s Special Operations Joint Command (CCOES), a group of highly trained soldiers who undertake the country’s most dangerous and sensitive operations. Historically, the CCOES’s activities had mostly involved capturing—and in some cases executing—high-value terrorists, rebels, and narco-criminals. The commandoes weren’t in the habit of running rescue missions, but theirs was the only military unit capable of handling the Amazon’s terrain and its dangers.

Sánchez got to work drafting a search plan. The air force had spotted a plume of smoke near Cachiporro; assuming it came from a fire set by crash survivors, pilots dropped food rations nearby. Using this location as the starting point, Sánchez and his team mapped a search area of roughly four square miles, split into 100 quadrants. CCOES commandoes would comb each section by walking over it in a pattern of triangles and zigzags.

On the morning of May 6, three Black Hawk helicopters roared across the Cachiporro skyline. Inside were soldiers armed with M4 rifles, hand grenades, night-vision goggles, thermal optics, and satellite phones. Two groups, designated Dragon4 and Destructor1, rappelled into the jungle a couple of miles apart from each other in the northern section of the search area. They planned to work their way south, hoping to meet any survivors along the way. A third group of 11 commandoes—a team dubbed Ares3—were dispatched to the banks of the Apaporis River. They were accompanied by a search and rescue dog, a Belgian Malinois named Wilson.

Quadrant by quadrant, the CCOES soldiers did their painstaking work. Captain Ender Montiel, the leader of Dragon4, described the search area as “virgin jungle, a jungle that one way or another had not been stepped on by a human being.” The commandos could only work from 6 a.m. until dusk, because night in the Amazon meant total darkness—the kind where a person can take a few wrong steps and find himself lost, possibly forever. There was near constant rain, and monkeys in the canopy threw food at the soldiers.

The teams moved slowly, in single file, to make sure they covered their targeted areas. They divided each quadrant in two, searching one section in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Each man was required to walk as much as six miles per day. In case there were rebels holed up nearby, the soldiers used hand signals to communicate.

Destructor1 found the source of the smoke first spotted by the air force, but there was no one at the site. The food rations dropped from above lay on the ground untouched. Only later would the CCOES learn that the fire was the one set by the first Avianline search party before it found Dumar’s hut.

The error was a consequence of poor coordination between the military and civilian rescue efforts. As soon as the CCOES began its work, Valencia and other family members of the missing passengers pressured Sánchez to include indigenous searchers in his operation. “We as indigenous people know how to navigate the jungle and understand the unique spirits of each territory,” Valencia said. But Sánchez resisted; he was concerned that indigenous volunteers lacked military training and might not follow orders.  

Distrust ran in the other direction too, a result of recent history. Much of Colombia’s ongoing violence between state forces and armed groups has occurred in poor, rural areas, with indigenous people disproportionately affected—many have been forced to flee their homes, and some have been caught in the crossfire. “There has been a sense on behalf of these communities that the military was absolutely not there to protect them, in fact it was the opposite,” said Elizabeth Dickinson of the International Crisis Group. “They viewed them as a risk.” The military has also become infamous for killing innocent people and then declaring them enemy combatants, a practice known as false positives. A 2021 inquiry found that, between 2002 and 2008, Colombia’s armed forces committed more than 6,400 such killings.

So in the search for HK2803 the military largely kept its distance from indigenous searchers, and vice versa. Days passed. Then a week. After nine days and hundreds of miles of walking, the CCOES commandoes had grown weary. The only thing they’d found was an abandoned camp that once belonged to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the notorious rebel group.

Privately, Captain Montiel began to wonder whether HK2803 had sunk in the river. And even if it hadn’t, would it make any difference? A person, especially a child, walking away from such a crash would be a small miracle; surviving in the Amazon for more than a week without supplies was almost too much to hope for. “Every day we would ask ourselves a lot of questions,” Montiel said.

Still, the CCOES teams kept going. Early on the morning of May 15, Dragon4 was on its latest search when Sergeant Wilmar Miranda, Montiel’s deputy, spotted something pink amid the foliage. It was a baby bottle.

The soldiers took a photograph and sent it to Sánchez, who forwarded it to Valencia. By then the families of the people aboard HK2803 had gathered in Villavicencio, a city near the western edge of the Amazon. Valencia recognized the bottle right away. It belonged to Cristin.

The military searchers might have considered the bottle little more than crash debris except for one thing: There was cloudy water inside it—water that hadn’t come from a tap, but from the jungle. And because Cristin couldn’t walk yet, much less draw water from a stream, someone must have filled the bottle for her. That meant at least two people had survived the crash.

A few hours after finding the bottle, Miranda spotted some wild fruit with fresh bite marks on it, human ones. “It was happiness and joy to see that,” Miranda said. “There was life.” He looked around for signs of trails, spots where human feet might have left prints in the soil. But the forest’s unrelenting rain meant that everything was washed clean.

Several miles south of where the CCOES was working, civilian rescuers weren’t having any luck. Given his skills as a navigator, Edwin Paky was the de facto leader of the indigenous volunteers, and he was growing anxious. He’d tripped over a branch and twisted his ankle one day, and now the group was running low on supplies. Ranoque and Delio, Mendoza’s brother, had gone to Cachiporro to restock but had yet to return. Paky thought that it might be time for everyone to turn back.

Then, on the afternoon of May 15, one of the searchers spotted something blue through a cluster of trees. At first the volunteers thought it was a house, but as they got closer they realized it was a plane. The plane.

HK2803 was in a vertical, nose-down position on the forest floor, indicating that Murcia had likely failed to slow down and pull up before crashing. The Cessna’s broken fuselage stuck out of the ground like a flagpole, and the propeller was snapped off. Paky saw that the canopy, some 150 feet above the wreckage, was somehow unbroken. No wonder aircraft had failed to spot the crash site.

As he approached the plane, Paky inhaled the pungent odor of decay. Looking inside he saw bodies, which the rainforest had made quick work of. Though her remains were mostly bones, he identified Magdalena by her long hair and body shape. He recognized Murcia because of his pilot’s jacket.

Paky didn’t see Mendoza, but he felt an ache in his stomach. “At first I thought nobody could have survived that crash,” Paky said. He jotted down the coordinates of the site and went in search of help. He soon encountered some of the CCOES soldiers. They radioed the discovery through to Sánchez, who ordered Montiel’s men in Dragon4 to the wreckage to identify the bodies. En route the following morning, Montiel’s team came across a crude shelter made of leaves cut with scissors, which were lying nearby on the ground. The leaves hadn’t withered; whoever cut them had done so recently.

At the crash site, Montiel and his men lifted HK2803 up with a winch and found three bodies: Mendoza was in the crushed nose of the plane, and he’d been decapitated on impact. Delio, who by then had returned to the jungle from the supply run to Cachiporro, put his head in his hands and fell to the forest floor. “My little brother!” he screamed.

The searchers noted that the cabin door was open; bags, clothes, and diapers were strewn about on the ground. Montiel, once skeptical that there would be any survivors, now realized that all the children had likely made it through the crash. “It was a real miracle,” he said. Still, the children had likely seen their mother dead or dying, then walked into the jungle to fend for themselves. Montiel thought of his own kids in that situation and choked back tears.

When Ranoque arrived at the scene he wept. “The only thing I thought was that that accident was my fault,” he said. “I just tried to imagine the degree of fear, anguish, and dread my children must have felt when the plane went into a nosedive.” He was also convinced that the children were alive. One of his own sisters had become lost in the jungle and was found safe a month later. In 2020, a mother and her three young children survived for 34 days after losing their way on a forest walk. Magdalena’s children knew better than most how to fend for themselves in that kind of terrain.

But the children could have been injured in the crash. If they had wounds, infection was a real threat. There were many others. When she got word that her grandchildren had likely survived the crash, Valencia thought of jaguars, snakes, duendes—all the things that could have harmed or killed the kids in the days since the plane went down. “That jungle doesn’t belong to us,” Valencia said.

From his position leading the CCOES teams, Sánchez estimated that if the children were alive, they had another three days, maybe four. It was time for a new search and rescue strategy, the likes of which Colombia had never seen.

The military called the new effort Operation Hope. More troops and dogs were brought to the search area. Aircraft flew low, dropping food, lighters, and thousands of leaflets printed with survival tips. Pilots scanned the landscape with binoculars, searching for signs of life.

Sánchez thought it was possible that the children had heard or even seen his soldiers, but were so scared of armed strangers that they hid. He suggested that someone in the family record a message telling them that it was safe to come out and to let his men help them. Valencia made the recording on her phone in her hotel room in Villavicencio. “I felt like crying,” she said, “but it strengthened my heart.” The military then attached a loudspeaker to a helicopter and flew over the jungle playing the message. “I beg you, stay calm,” Valencia’s voice boomed over the trees. “The army is looking for you.”

On May 17, two soldiers from Destructor1 spotted a group of men in the jungle. The soldiers readied their weapons. If these were rebels or drug smugglers, violence was likely. But the men were the indigenous searchers from Araracuara, Ranoque among them. He asked to use the soldiers’ satellite phone. Captain Juan Felipe Montoya, the leader of Destructor1, brought the group back to camp, where they were given food and water. Montoya was struck by Ranoque’s dedication. “I was thinking that as a father I would do the same thing,” Montoya said.

He was surprised, however, by the person Ranoque called on the satellite phone: a fortune-teller in Villavicencio. In Colombia, psychics sometimes appear on television and are popular on social media. They predict the outcomes of everything from presidential elections to sporting events. Ranoque, it turned out, had been consulting one about where to search.

The fortune-teller explained to Ranoque that if he headed west from his location for 270 yards, he would find a trail that would lead to the children. “I didn’t pay much attention to the fortune-teller’s guidance, fearing others might think we’re crazy,” said Sergeant Juan Carlos Rojas, Montoya’s deputy. Montoya was skeptical, too, but as Ranoque and the indigenous searchers headed out of the military camp, he decided it couldn’t hurt to send a few of his own men along. A short time later, the group returned with news: They had found footprints.

Montoya could hardly believe it, and he decided to continue working with the volunteers. Another development soon followed: Montiel’s Dragon4 team found prints, too—fresh ones. The children had to be close.

It wasn’t all good news on May 17, however. That evening Wilson, the Belgian Malinois accompanying the Ares3 soldiers, chewed through his collar and ran into the jungle. He was declared missing, and all units were asked to be on the lookout for him. Meanwhile, the Institute of Family Welfare, Colombia’s child-protection agency, released a statement on Twitter announcing that it had received information “confirming contact” with the children. Avianline tweeted that one of its pilots had been told that the children were alive and on a boat headed to safety. Most prominently, President Gustavo Petro tweeted that the children had been rescued—he described it as a “joy for the country.” None of this was true. It isn’t clear where the rumors began; perhaps it was inevitable that, amid the frantic, disjointed rescue efforts, misinformation would sprout somewhere.

Petro retracted his tweet later that day, and his flip-flop caught the global media’s attention. Journalists descended on Colombia to document the rescue mission in real time. “Clues suggest children survived Colombian jungle plane crash as officials race to find them,” declared CNN. “A Plane Crashed in the Amazon. Did Four Children Survive?” wrote The New York Times.

By then, Sánchez was frustrated. There were numerous signs that the children were alive, but his men still hadn’t found them. He went to a chapel to pray for help. The next day, May 19, he readied more troops and revised the required search patterns—each soldier would have to walk much farther each day.

Sánchez also found himself wondering if native customs were the missing ingredients after all. If he listened to indigenous guidance, however contrary to his training, perhaps the children would finally be located. “I thought there was different energy in the jungle that wasn’t allowing the children to be rescued,” he said.

Valencia was telling reporters that a duende must have captured the children, and Sánchez decided to consult an indigenous woman he knew about the matter. What might a person do about a duende? he asked. The woman told Sánchez to take four bottles of aguardiente, an alcoholic spirit, to the banks of the Apaporis at midnight and arrange them in the shape of a cross. This would attract the duende, who would get drunk and release the children. Sánchez dispatched the order to Montiel, who was baffled. “I’m a Catholic, so I don’t believe in those things,” he said. Still, Montiel did as he was told.

The ritual didn’t yield results, but it marked the start of closer collaboration between the military and indigenous searchers. On Montoya’s team, the soldiers initially slept with their guns by their sides at night, fearing Ranoque and the other civilians who had joined their camp might turn on them. But soon, according to Montoya’s deputy, Sergeant Rojas, the soldiers began to learn “a lot of things about the jungle” from their indigenous counterparts, who showed CCOES team members how to drink water from tree roots and build makeshift shelters from palm leaves. The volunteers’ ability to spot things out of place in the jungle—human tracks, say, or the remnants of food packaging—was remarkable. They chewed mambé, or crushed coca leaves, to sharpen their minds and give them energy, and some of the soldiers started using it, too.

On May 21, Sánchez received a visit from Giovani Yule, a nationally respected indigenous figure. The men hugged, and Yule told Sánchez that it was surely the first time in history that an indigenous leader had embraced a Colombian general. President Petro had requested Yule’s help in rounding up additional volunteers to help with the search, and Yule summoned members of various tribes: the Nukak, the Siona, the Nasa, the Witoto. Sánchez agreed to dispatch military aircraft to pick up the new volunteers and bring them to the search zone.

One of the new recruits was Eliecer Muñoz, a 49-year-old farmer and a member of the Indigenous Guard, a network of volunteers who protect tribal territory from violence and environmental destruction. In 2001, his brother and father had mysteriously vanished; he assumed that they’d been taken by an armed group and spent years searching for them. “I know what it is to look for your loved ones,” he said. Muñoz was eager to help but skeptical of collaborating with soldiers. “Right from the start, I made it clear to the government that no matter how many soldiers they sent, be it a thousand or even two thousand, they could never truly understand or see the jungle’s spirits,” he said.

Another volunteer was José Rubio, a 55-year-old shaman who went by El Tigre. Tall and handsome, with a steely demeanor, Rubio was often consulted when indigenous people were lost in the jungle. He had even helped find Ranoque’s sister when she went missing. He was terrified of weapons, though, and steered clear of the soldiers. It was a sentiment Muñoz understood. “Seeing a weapon made us wary. It reminded us of past experiences,” he said.

By May 24, a total of 92 indigenous volunteers had joined the 113 soldiers assigned to the search mission. Sánchez divided them into a dozen combined units. Extraordinarily, he ordered some of his soldiers to allow the volunteers to lead search efforts according to their beliefs. Military strategies for finding the children weren’t working; why not try spiritual ones?

Muñoz and Rubio were both placed with Montoya’s men in Destructor1. Muñoz immediately headed to the crash site and conducted a cleansing ritual, burning sweet grass, cedar, and sage, to assure Mother Earth that the volunteers were only there to claim what was rightfully theirs. He asked that the searchers be protected from dangerous animals. He also asked for better weather, to make the search easier. For the next three days there was no rain; the sky was a beautiful, rich blue.

Meanwhile, Rubio consumed mambé and ambil, a thick tobacco paste—he hoped doing so would help him connect with the jungle’s spirits. “I asked them if it was OK for me to search for the kids, explaining that they were my family,” he said. Rubio soon came to the same conclusion as Valencia: The children were being held captive by a duende.

Over the next few days, the men turned up new clues: diapers, a pair of running shoes, children’s footprints with what appeared to be a dog’s beside them, though there was no way of knowing if they had been made by Wilson, who was still missing, or by a wild animal. But no one found the children. On May 26, the day Cristin turned one, searchers sang “Happy Birthday” to her, wherever she was.

May turned to June. The children had been missing for a month. Many indigenous volunteers were injured or severely ill, and some gave up hope and abandoned the search. “The jungle seemed to turn against us,” said Henry Guerrero, who’d come from Araracuara.  

By now some of Sánchez’s commandoes had walked more than 1,000 miles, nearly the distance from Seattle to Los Angeles. They began trying new tactics: They marked search areas with bright yellow tape, hoping that the children would see it and stay put. They hung whistles from the tape so the children could make noise. They placed a loudspeaker in the jungle and again played the recording of Valencia’s voice.

Meanwhile, Sánchez tried to manage the expectations of the growing global audience, who were eager to learn of the children’s fate. “It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s like finding a tiny flea in a huge rug that moves in unpredictable directions.”

On June 4, Montoya and his men were preparing for an eight-day break; other soldiers would take their place. Moments before they boarded a helicopter, they took a photo with the indigenous searchers, and Rubio asked the soldiers to secure him yage, a powerful psychoactive brew commonly known as ayahuasca. According to Witoto belief, consuming yage allows access to ancient wisdom that can cure ailments and solve complex problems. Rubio suspected that this was the only way the searchers could secure the children’s release from the duende holding them captive.

It was an unusual request. “To the Special Forces, this normally didn’t make sense,” Montoya said. “But in this mission everything was a possibility.” While on leave, Montoya sought out a woman in Araracuara, who agreed to prepare the brew. When she said that she had no way of getting it to the volunteers in the jungle, Natalya Rodríguez, the cousin of crash victim Hermán Mendoza, stepped in: She agreed to charter a plane and deliver it personally. “There’s joy in knowing that you were meant to do something to help those children,” Rodríguez said.

On June 7, Rubio prepared a small shelter where he could conduct a yage ceremony. Ranoque was selected to consume the drink—Rubio hoped his personal connection to the children might facilitate a conversation with the duende. Rubio blessed the space and, as midnight approached, quieted the men who had come to witness the ritual. Ranoque sipped some of the yage and lay down. The men watched him closely, but the effects never came. He stood up and said that it hadn’t worked.

The following day, only 16 indigenous volunteers remained with the search effort. Muñoz was among them, but he, like Rubio, was battling pneumonia. “I couldn’t eat,” he said. “I went without food for days.” He knew that he wouldn’t last much longer; he and the other volunteers would need to go home to recover.

As a last resort, Rubio himself drank yage in the early morning hours of June 9. He vomited, a common side effect when the brew works, and then hallucinated for around 45 minutes. In his visions, Rubio later explained, he met the children and the duende who was with them. Rubio told the duende that he was there to take the children, and it agreed to return them on the condition that a spell be cast on the searchers.

As Rubio sobered up, several of the indigenous volunteers reported feeling flu-like symptoms, including body aches, high temperatures, and a dry cough. Rubio suffered from convulsions. He was sure that the ritual had worked, and he told the remaining searchers that they would find the children that day.

As the sun rose, Muñoz set out with renewed conviction. He was joined by three other volunteers: Dairo Kumariteke, Edwin Manchola, and Nicolás Ordóñez. The CCOES soldiers they’d been working with were so exhausted that they didn’t join. The four men wandered for several hours, and around midday they stopped to talk and chew some mambé. Muñoz was anxious. “Faith still remains,” Ordóñez told him. “I’m sure we’ll find them.”

In the early afternoon, the group stumbled upon a red-footed tortoise, a sign of good fortune in Witoto culture. Folklore says that if a person finds this kind of tortoise while hunting, they’ll be granted a wish, provided that the creature is released afterward. Muñoz picked up the 20-inch-long tortoise. “Alright, turtle, you’re going to help me find the kids,” he said, laughing. “You either help me, or I’ll eat your liver!” Ordóñez added his own threat: “I’ll drink your blood!”

Muñoz strapped the tortoise to his back, and the men continued their search for a few hours, walking side by side up a steep hill. They considered turning back at dusk, but they trusted Rubio’s words: They would find the children today.

Ten minutes later they reached a clearing, and Kumariteke heard something nearby. He stopped and told the group to be still. Moments later he heard it again: the faint but unmistakable whimper of a baby.

Exactly 40 days after the children disappeared in the wilderness, the first person to set eyes on them was Ordóñez. Twenty-seven years old, with wavy brown hair and a muscular frame, Ordóñez had had a harrowing childhood experience of his own. He was recruited by FARC, making him one of thousands of minors the rebel group lured into its ranks as it fought the Colombian military. At 15, he entered a government-run program for the reintegration of child soldiers. Now he was working alongside the very armed forces he’d once sworn to fight, and he was soon to become a national hero.

When Ordóñez spied Lesly and Soleiny in the forest, he ran toward them, shouting that he and the other volunteers knew their family. When the men finally managed to corral the girls, one of them was clutching Cristin. Now the searchers just needed to account for Tien. “Where is your little brother?” Muñoz asked. Lesly pointed at a makeshift shelter nearby. Inside, five-year-old Tien was lying on the ground, too frail to stand. “My mom is dead,” he said with tears in his eyes.

The children were painfully thin and covered with scratches and insect bites. They sobbed and tried to pull away from the men. Muñoz attempted to calm them, speaking in Witoto. “We are family. We were sent by your father, your grandmother,” Ordóñez said. Finally, Lesly hugged him. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and told her not to be afraid. “I’m hungry,” Lesly said. “I’m very hungry.” Muñoz had some sausage and farina, a coarse cassava flour, in his backpack. But he feared that the children’s stomachs might be so sensitive from malnutrition that the food would make them ill, so he gave them water instead.

Night was falling quickly, and it would take a few hours to get back to camp. Muñoz set the tortoise free—it had done its job—and then each man put a child on his back and moved as quickly as he could through the jungle. Muñoz found a well of energy he didn’t know he had. “The excitement was so overwhelming that I completely forgot about everything else,” he said.

After an hour, he began to worry that the children wouldn’t be alive by the time they reached camp unless they ate something. He stopped and gave them food, praying that it wouldn’t hurt them. After another hour, the group reached their destination. “I’ve found the children!” Muñoz shouted to Yeison Bonilla, a military sergeant.

Bonilla’s troops hurried to wrap the children in thermal blankets and checked them over. They showed signs of severe exhaustion and dehydration. Bonilla didn’t think they would have survived another day on their own.

Some of the troops took photos of the children to send to their superiors, and a volunteer ran to find Ranoque. He rushed to the children and began to cry. “I felt like life was giving me a second chance to see my children alive,” he said. He worried that they were too fragile to touch, so he stood nearby as Rubio blew tobacco smoke over them, to cleanse away any lingering jungle spirits.

Bonilla grabbed his radio and repeated the code word for a successful operation, the one everyone had waited so long to hear: “Miracle, miracle, miracle.”

Sánchez cried when he heard Bonilla’s words. “I felt incredibly happy and peaceful in my heart,” he said. He checked the coordinates of where the children were found—it was a little over three miles from the crash site. Rescue teams had almost certainly passed within yards of them, likely more than once.

By 8 p.m. on June 9, a Black Hawk helicopter was hovering over the children and their rescuers, its rotors spinning just feet above the treetops in the pouring rain. The vegetation was too dense to land, so the pilot, Julián Novoa, held the chopper steady for nearly an hour as soldiers rappelled down to the jungle floor and hoisted up the children and Ranoque one by one.

On board, doctors monitored the children as Novoa flew to the military base in San José del Guaviare, the town where the Cessna had been headed when it crashed. There the children were hooked up to IVs and then loaded onto a military plane bound for Bogotá. On the plane, Ranoque was finally able to give his children a hug. Sánchez was on board, too, and Ranoque asked him to be Cristin’s godfather. Sánchez accepted. When the plane landed, four ambulances—one for each child—whisked them to a hospital.

In a hastily convened press conference, President Petro lauded the children’s “total survival.” He credited the unlikely collaboration of the military and indigenous communities for the rescue. “Here a different path is shown for Colombia,” he wrote later on Twitter. “I believe that this is the true path of Peace.”

The day after their arrival in the capital, the children were allowed to receive visitors. When Sánchez came to the hospital that morning, they were all sleeping except Lesly. “You are brave,” he told her. He hugged her and thanked God for keeping the children safe. They were pale, and Lesly wasn’t talking, but at least they were alive.

Valencia said she was so overwhelmed when she visited the children in the hospital that she fainted. “Seeing them in that state, suffering, without eating, exhausted, malnourished, covered in lice and thorns—it broke my heart,” she said. When Andrés Jacobombaire, Lesly and Soleiny’s biological father, came to visit, his daughters didn’t recognize him—it was the first time they’d seen him since their parents split up six years prior. Jacobombaire explained who he was, and Lesly burst into tears. “I gave her a hug and started crying with her,” Jacobombaire said.

Media weren’t allowed to see or talk to the children, and as of this writing, that remains the case. But to family and friends interviewed for this story the children relayed the details of their survival.

Lesly salvaged a few other items that seemed useful: scissors, a first aid kit, diapers, a baby bottle. Then she led her siblings west, using the sun as their guide.

As they waited to board HK2083 on the morning of May 1, the children were nervous—they’d never flown before. But they were also happy. Lesly and Soleiny had told friends how excited they were to go to Bogotá, to begin a new life in a new place. Magdalena had told her children that rebels were looking for the family, but soon, she assured them, they’d all be safe.  

An hour later, as the engine sputtered and the plane began to go down, Magdalena told her crying children to hold on tight. When the Cessna hit the canopy, Lesly banged her head and lost consciousness. When she came to, she could hear Cristin screaming. She saw that Magdalena was still holding the baby. “Mama! Mama!” Lesly yelled over and over. Magdalena was motionless, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

Disoriented, Lesly unbuckled her seat belt and wrenched Cristin from her mother’s arms. She used one of the baby’s diapers to stem the flow of blood coming from her head. The smell of fuel filled her nostrils. Debris was scattered everywhere. Lesly saw that Hermán Mendoza and Hernando Murcia were dead, but that Soleiny and Tien were unharmed.

With Cristin in her arms, Lesly led Soleiny and Tien out of the plane. A few yards away, she built a makeshift camp, stringing up a towel and a mosquito net to keep the constant rain and bugs at bay. Then the four children waited to be rescued. Tien kept asking when their mother would wake up. Lesly worried that her brother was too young to grasp the concept of death, so she said she didn’t know.

No one came for them, and Lesly knew it wouldn’t be long before predators arrived, attracted by the bodies. So she gathered a few of Magdalena’s clothes, some farina she found in Mendoza’s bag, and juice, soda, and candy from elsewhere on the plane. She salvaged a few other items that seemed useful: scissors, a first aid kit, diapers, a baby bottle. Then she led her siblings west, using the sun as their guide.

The fact that it was the wet season in Colombia was a blessing. As they walked, Lesly collected rainwater in an empty soda bottle. The moisture also meant that the jungle was in full bloom, with fruit heavy and ripe on the trees. The children consumed juan soco, similar to passion fruit, as well as seeds from a palm tree called milpeso. Lesly chewed the hard seeds in her mouth, then fed the pulp to Tien and Cristin. She also gave Cristin water mixed with the farina from the plane.

The children moved locations every few days and hid in tree trunks to get out of the punishing rain. Making progress was exhausting. Lesly and Soleiny took turns carrying Cristin. Once, a poisonous snake came close to Lesly, and she killed it with a stick. She was desperate to find a way out, to find help, but she never saw a trail and eventually became disoriented. Sánchez estimated that the children walked about 15 miles, but not in a single direction.

When they needed rest, Lesly sometimes made a shelter from branches bound together with hair ties. She used the scissors to cut the branches; after she lost the scissors, she used her teeth. At some point, the children found one of the emergency supply packages the military had air-dropped, but most of the time they were hungry. At night they were also cold. When her siblings cried in pain, Lesly could only forage for food or wrap them in a piece of dirty fabric. It was never enough.

Despite the hardship, Lesly said that she wasn’t scared—not until she heard her grandmother’s voice. It was loud, and she didn’t understand where it was coming from. After that she sometimes heard soldiers in the jungle. But she didn’t run to them—despite what her grandmother’s message said, Lesly didn’t trust men with guns. After all, her mother had warned her that rebels were threatening the family. When rescuers came near, the children ran away or hid, fearing that it was the Carolina Ramírez Front. If she was holding Cristin, Lesly put a hand over the baby’s mouth to muffle her cries.

The children kept moving for a few weeks, hoping to find help from locals who didn’t carry guns, but by the middle of May their strength had waned substantially. Then, as the children later told Valencia, a dog showed up. It stayed with them for several days before vanishing into the jungle again; the children felt like it was protecting them. In the hospital, using crayons, Lesly drew a picture of the dog sitting under a tree next to a river, waving its paw as a yellow bird flies overhead. Soleiny drew a picture of the dog, too. In both images the animal is black and brown, with pointy ears. To the military it looked like Wilson, the missing search and rescue dog. Given the story the children told, Wilson became a hero overnight, figuring prominently in news stories about the rescue.

It’s possible the children imagined the dog. Malnourishment and fatigue can play tricks on the mind. Lesly said that she started to lose her mental faculties and felt her memories evaporating. Eventually, exhaustion prevented them from traveling at all. They huddled in one of Lesly’s shelters and prepared to die. When Lesly heard footsteps near their last shelter, she was so depleted it was a struggle to breathe.

Still, Lesly was afraid and remained silent. Soleiny and Tien did, too. If Cristin hadn’t whimpered, the children might never have been found.

Few things in recent memory have brought Colombia’s population together like the success of Operation Hope. President Petro, who is a leftist, and Iván Duque, his conservative predecessor, both tweeted in celebration. Even the Carolina Ramírez Front issued a rare statement: “Like all Colombians, we rejoice that the four surviving children of the plane crash [in] May have been found alive.”

Petro invited military and indigenous members of the rescue operation to the presidential palace to receive awards for their exceptional service. Wilson was given a medal in absentia. The dog, who despite a monthlong search effort by the military was never found, was also immortalized in a mural at CCOES headquarters.

The government’s highest honor went to Sánchez for his leadership. When I met with him a few weeks after the ceremony, he said that the experience in the jungle taught him “that when we unite and work toward a common good, we can achieve anything.” He then paused to take a breath, fighting back tears. “Our differences should not divide us,” he said.

Captain Juan Felipe Montoya said much the same thing when I met with him at his home in Bogotá. On the same shelf where he keeps the plaque Petro presented to him is something he values even more: a bag of mambé from Eliecer Muñoz and other indigenous volunteers. “We figured out that we have a lot of things in common,” Montoya said.

Muñoz is now close friends with Sergeant Juan Carlos Rojas; they talk on the phone several times a week and meet for dinner when they’re both in Bogotá. “Our traditions, thoughts, experiences, religions may be different,” Rojas told me one day, “but in the end we united.”

Along with celebrations and new friendships came inevitable demands for accountability: Someone had to answer for the crash of HK2803. Indigenous leaders called on the Colombian government to take steps to improve air safety for people living in the Amazon. In July, Ranoque filed a suit against Avianline, seeking compensation for Magdalena’s death and the suffering of the children, plus a public apology. News reports suggested that after the plane crashed in 2021, it was repaired using off-brand parts to save money. According to Ranoque’s lawyer, it wasn’t fit to fly. Ranoque told me that if he wins money from the lawsuit, it will “go directly to my children.”

Fredy Ladino, Avianline’s CEO, has informed Ranoque’s attorney that he doesn’t intend to settle out of court, and he told me that the plane wasn’t to blame for the accident. Instead, Ladino said that Murcia, the pilot, should have aborted the trip when the plane’s propeller hit the ground during takeoff. “Totally irresponsible,” Ladino said of the decision to fly. He then told me that he couldn’t deal with the emotion and stress of the story anymore and ended our conversation.

Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Cristin were discharged from the hospital on July 14, a month and five days after the rescue. By then the world was clamoring to hear their story. Film producers and agents were flocking to Colombia seeking access. The government created a trust for the children to manage any money generated by the attention.

A version of this story scripted for Hollywood might end here. But reality isn’t always rosy. As the kids recovered from their ordeal, an ugly legal battle erupted over their future.

Ranoque announced that he wanted custody of Tien and Cristin, his biological children, but Magdalena’s parents insisted that all four kids should be placed in their care because Ranoque was dangerous. “My daughter died because of him,” Valencia told me. Narciso Mucutuy, Valencia’s husband, accused Ranoque of beating his family, telling reporters that the children sometimes fled into the jungle when the violence got particularly bad. Once, Mucutuy said, Lesly and her siblings hid for three days to protect themselves from Ranoque, who had “arrived home with alcohol breath and started hitting them without mercy.”

Journalists from Colombian television network Caracol traveled to Puerto Sábalo to investigate the allegations, and they discovered a very different story about the events leading up to the crash than the one Ranoque had told. Locals interviewed by Caracol said that in April, Ranoque had flown to Bogotá on business as Puerto Sábalo’s governor and blew his travel budget on alcohol and marijuana. According to William Castro, who has known Ranoque since they were children, Ranoque had also met up with his ex-wife in the capital and brought her back to the Amazon with him. Magdalena was devastated, and locals were appalled—by Ranoque’s behavior in Bogotá and by his treatment of his family.

One evening, Castro told me, Magdalena confronted Ranoque about the situation with his ex, and he responded by attacking her with a machete. “She had many scars from the fight,” Castro said. The community removed Ranoque from his position as governor, and Castro was elected in his place. Elders came up with a punishment for Ranoque’s misdeeds: He would consume a large amount of ambil, which in high doses can cause dizziness, nausea, and even death. If he survived, it was because the ambil had cleansed him of evil; if he died, it would be just punishment.

Rather than test his luck, Ranoque fled Puerto Sábalo in a speedboat, claiming that the Carolina Ramírez Front was after him. The rebel group eventually denied threatening Ranoque and insisted that he retract his claim, lest it disrupt peace negotiations with the government. Castro said the idea that Ranoque or his family were being targeted by rebels was “totally false.”

Over the summer, Colombian authorities investigated Ranoque and uncovered more information related to potential domestic violence. In August, Ranoque was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing Lesly. Legal documents also detail the alleged machete attack, during which Magdalena reportedly had Cristin in her arms, as well as a previous incident when Ranoque threw Magdalena from the second floor of a building. She was pregnant with Cristin at the time, and the other three children witnessed her fall. On another occasion, Ranoque allegedly hit Soleiny with a jungle vine.

As of this writing, Ranoque remains incarcerated and is awaiting trial. He has threatened to sue Caracol for its reporting. In response to questions submitted to him for this story through his lawyer, Ranoque reiterated his version of events preceding his departure from Puerto Sábalo. “We had violent episodes,” Ranoque wrote, referring to himself and Magdalena, “but the stories of the machete and the spending of money on parties is not true.” He vehemently denied abusing Lesly. “A father who rapes his family does not do what I did,” he wrote. “I looked for my family because I love them; if I had something to hide, I would have let them rot in the jungle, but I was the first person who tried to look for them.”

Ranoque blames Valencia and Mucutuy for spreading rumors about him—he says they want to care for the children so they can capitalize on their fame. “I know that in the hands of the mother’s family my children would not be well,” he wrote.

As a result of the custody dispute, which also came to include Jacobombaire, who wants to take his two daughters home with him, the Institute of Family Welfare decided to keep the children in its care for the time being. A decision on their future is expected this spring. The institute is tight-lipped about its most famous wards, but according to family members and rescuers who’ve seen the children, they’re getting stronger every day. Cristin has started walking. Tien enjoys playing with Legos. Soleiny and Lesly are being homeschooled.

Still, their sense of loss and dislocation is palpable. Sánchez, his wife, and their son visited the children in December to bring them Christmas gifts. Afterward, Sánchez told me that the kids are in good hands but miss the Amazon. Accustomed to the humidity of the jungle, they complained that the weather in Bogotá was too cool. Lesly appeared to be depressed. “They would prefer to be eating farina and live in Araracuara,” Sánchez told me.

Valencia believes that after the crash, the duende was the children’s enemy, not the rainforest. In fact, when their mother died, nature filled the void she’d left behind, sustaining and protecting them until the moment they were set free by the spirit that had captured them. No matter who wins custody of the children, they will likely return to the Amazon. As it was for Magdalena, the jungle is forever their home.

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