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Missing Colombian children’s jungle survival has backdrop of violence towards Indigenous communities [1]
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Date: 2023-07
“My life as a hero is nothing special,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez in ‘The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’, his famous account of a sailor who spent ten days floating in the Caribbean after a naval accident caused by the Colombian Navy’s negligence.
The story was based on a true event that was denied by the military authorities, who had blamed a non-existent storm for the disaster. It caused a great scandal when it was serialised in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador in 1955 – forcing the Nobel Prize-winning author into exile.
Almost 70 years later, 13-year-old Lesly, the eldest of four siblings from the Indigenous Muinane community, who survived 40 days lost in the Colombian jungle after their plane crashed, could easily claim that her life as a heroine is ‘nothing special’.
Lesly’s story is just another tale of extraordinary resilience, which connects with the history of more than 500 years of Indigenous survival in the Amazon, a violent and merciless environment where the first victims are often the children.
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The children’s survival has all the ingredients to become a successful Netflix series – but it also has dark undercurrents and illustrates the stark sociopolitical reality of Colombia, a country permeated by violence that continues unabated despite the efforts of successive governments, civil society and international cooperation.
In their long search to find crash survivors, who were known to be somewhere between the departments of Guaviare and Caquetá in the Amazonian region, the Colombian army came within ten metres of the four children. But the children apparently hid every time they heard helicopters and the voices of the military. They were afraid of them.
On 1 May, Lesly Mucutuy and her siblings – Soleiny (nine), Tien Noriel (four), and 11-month-old Cristin – set off in a single-engine plane with their mother, Magdalena Mucutuy, and Indigenous leader Hermán Mendoza Hernández, a family friend.
Magdalena, Hermán and the pilot were killed when the plane, an old US Cessna recycled for the precarious flights connecting communities in the Amazon, crashed. The family were on their way to meet Manuel Ranoque, Magdalena’s husband and the biological father of the youngest two children.
Ranoque, who was governor of his Indigenous community in Puerto Sábalo, in Caquetá, claims that threats from the Carolina Ramírez Front, a dissident faction with roots in former guerrilla group FARC, had forced him to abandon his position as a social leader, his community and even his family, overnight earlier this year.
He says that after almost a month on the run, he found a way to communicate with his wife to tell her they would meet again in San José del Guaviare, in the Colombian Amazon, from where they would go to Villavicencio, in the Eastern Plains, or to Bogotá, the capital, to start a new life.
Ranoque said he thought he had escaped the alleged threats, but the media attention about the disappearance and subsequent discovery of his children put his life at risk again.
“The Carolina Ramirez Front is looking for me to kill me,” he said in an interview. “I have threats, because I am a target for them.” In another interview, picked up by The New York Times, Ranoque clarified: “I was very afraid that [the Front] would recruit children,” adding that the country’s armed groups “do not respect – they are capable of recruiting a child as young as two years old”.
But then the group issued a statement denying such threats and the recruitment of children, and asked Ranoque to retract his claims in order “not to harm this attempt at a peace process that we have already begun with the national government”. The children’s maternal grandfather asked the same thing of Ranoque.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/indigenous-missing-children-colombian-amazon-jungle-survival-violence-instabilty-plane-crash/
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