Girl, 13, Kept Her 3 Younger Siblings Alive For 40 Days In Amazon Jungle With Her Wilderness Skills

Jun 13, 2023

A courageous 13-year-old girl has been credited with keeping her younger siblings alive when they were stranded in the perilous jungles of the Amazon for 40 days by using knowledge of the wilderness she learned from being raised in her indigenous community.

The girl, Lesly Jacobo Bonbaire, was the oldest of four siblings, including Soleiny Ranoque Mucutuy, 9, Tien Noriel Ronoque Mucutuy, 4, and, Cristian Neryman Ranoque Mucutuy, who turned 1 while in the jungle, when the airplane they were traveling in with their mother crashed in the dense forests of southern Colombia. The pilot and one another adult also perished in the crash, while their mother passed four days later, leaving the children to fend for themselves in the treacherous wilderness abound with jaguars, snakes and other threatening predators.

The crash set off an extensive search operation. When the plane’s wreckage was found two weeks later with no sign of the children, a manhunt comprising 150 soldiers and 200 volunteers from indigenous communities set off. The teams of Operation Hope covered an area of 125 sq miles in their search. But as days turned to weeks and the weeks to a month, they began to struggle with the possibility that they may either never find the children or be too late. 

However, clues that the children were still alive were found along the search, including hair ties, a pair of scissors, a footprint, a baby bottle and partially eaten fruit. This gave rescuers hope and pushed them to continue their search, which led to the children’s eventual discovery 40 days after the crash.

On June 9, 2023, the words “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle,” crackled onto the search teams’ radios, an army code used to signal the discovery of a missing child, repeated four times to represent all four of the missing children.

Although the children were found hungry, malnourished, covered in scratches and insect bites, with rags wrapped around their feet, none were in serious condition. The children were then winched up to helicopters overhead and taken to safety.

The children were all members of the Huitoto people, who learn to live off the land by hunting and fishing from an early age. According to the children’s grandfather, the eldest two had intimate knowledge of the jungle, while an aunt said they grew up playing “survival games” that taught Bonbaire “what fruits she can't eat, because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest. And she knew how to take care of a baby.” 

The children also employed lessons learned from their grandmother, Fatima Valencia, a respected elder in the Araracuara indigenous territory, as “they would have needed to draw on ancestral knowledge, in order to survive,” according to an indigenous leader from nearby Vaupés.

After the rescue, it was learned Bonbaire had used hair ties to engineer a makeshift shelter. She also retrieved cassava flour from the plane, which the children ate until it ran out. After that, they consumed fruits and seeds Bonbaire knew to be safe due to the teachings of her mother, grandmother and members of her indigenous community. 

Valencia told the media Bonbaire was also used to looking after her three younger siblings when their mother was at work, and this helped her fend for them in the jungle.

“She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume,” Valencia said.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro hailed the children as an “example of survival” and said their story would “remain in history.” He added:

“They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”

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