“Fruits, seeds and water” were key to keeping four children alive in the Amazon jungle

() — When four indigenous children were found last week after 40 days in the Colombian Amazon jungle, their rescuers realized that the eldest, 13-year-old Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, had something hidden between her teeth.

“We discovered that he had a couple of slowly chewed seeds between his cheeks and his jaw,” explained Eliecer Muñoz, one of the four indigenous guards who made the first contact with the children.

Muñoz told the seeds were from a native Amazonian palm called Oenocarpus Bataua, colloquially known as “milpesos” in Colombia.

Its fruits are rich in fat and are used by Amazonian tribes to make a vegetable oil, but Leslie’s seeds were not yet ripe when they found them, Munoz said.

Eliecer Muñoz (center), one of the indigenous guards who found the four children, speaks during a press conference in Bogotá, on June 15, 2023. (Credit: Daniel Munoz/AFP/Getty Images)

“He kept them so that the heat from his mouth would open the seeds and he could feed the pulp to his little brothers,” says Muñoz. “That’s how they stayed alive.”

Since the children were brought home, journalists and survival experts have tried to answer this question: how did four children – the youngest of them a baby – survive for so long in the heart of the Amazon jungle?

It took a team of more than 130 special forces commandos and some of the most experienced indigenous guides in the country to find them.

The stretch of jungle in which they were found is one of the most remote and inhospitable in Colombia, where wild animals such as jaguars, anacondas or poisonous bugs abound, the rains can fall for more than 15 hours a day and visibility is sometimes limited to 10 meters due to the thick vegetation.

Lesly and her siblings were dangerously emaciated when they were finally found. In more than a month without adults, they appear to have survived on wild fruits and a kilo of cassava flour, a traditional staple of the protein-rich Amazonian diet, which they salvaged from the wreckage of the plane crash that left them stranded on the jungle.

Part of the children’s survival was due to their knowledge of the native palm, the Oenocarpus Bataua. (Credit: BrazilPhotos/Alamy Stock Photo)

They also found one of the hundreds of survival kits left in the jungle by the search and rescue operation, which included small food rations, electrolytes and lighters.

“We understand that they only used one of the Army kits, for the rest only fruit, seeds and water,” says Henry Guerrero, an indigenous elder who was also part of the team that found them.

indigenous pride

Only someone with a deep knowledge of the jungle and remarkable personal stamina could survive there for more than a month, let alone keep three other people alive as well.

Weeks ago, the majority of the Colombian public that followed her story could not know to what extent Lesly and her brothers possessed those abilities. But his great-uncle, Fidencio Valencia, did not despair: “They already know the jungle…they are children, but we hope they are alive and have access to water,” he told reporters on May 19.

His words were confirmed.

The children still do not speak publicly and are recovering in Colombia’s central military hospital in Bogotá. On Thursday, a hospital statement said the children are out of immediate danger but are still considered high risk due to the infectious diseases they contracted and severe malnutrition.

The traces of their survival show impressive botanical knowledge and foresight.

During the search, the rescuers found discarded fruits such as avichure, a wild plant similar to passion fruit (also known as Juan soco) that the children ate while alone in the forest. Milpeso seeds were also found next to her footprints, and Colombian authorities believe Lesly took formula from the discarded plane to feed 11-month-old Cristin for a few days.

The remains of the Cessna 206 plane that crashed in the jungle of Caquetá, in Colombia, leaving the mother of the four children dead. (Credit: Colombian Military Forces/Reuters)

When they found them, the children had bottles that they used to collect water, either from streams or from the rain, which was abundant during the month that the search lasted.

The achievement feels like a proud moment for the indigenous community of the Colombian Amazon. “Thanks to these children, we beat technology,” Guerrero said at a recent press conference in Bogotá. “Thanks to the children we realized that we, the indigenous people, are important.”

Although their survival is still a wonder, it was undoubtedly facilitated by the traditional knowledge of the jungle that they adopted from an extraordinarily early age, and although Colombia deployed its Army, it was four local indigenous guides who first sighted the pequeños.

Lesly, in particular, is acclaimed for not only surviving herself, but also for making sure her little brothers survived after the loss of their mother in the plane crash.

When they found her, one of the first phrases four-year-old Tien Ranoque Mucutuy whispered to the rescuers was “my mother died,” Muñoz told .

“One of the traditional tasks of indigenous women is to take care of their brothers as if they were their own children. An older sister is basically a second mother, and I think that’s exactly how Lesly was brought up,” says Nelly Kuiru, an indigenous activist with the Murui settlement of La Chorrera.

But Kuiru believes that this skill goes far beyond botanical knowledge: “Ancestral, traditional knowledge, it’s not just that Lesly learned to pick fruits or something like that, but there is something much deeper, a spiritual connection with the forest that surrounds”.

When the father of two of the children, Manuel Ranoque, learned that the plane carrying his wife and four children had crashed on the way to San José del Guaviare, he asked for help from the elders and traditional wise men of his community, such as Guerrero and Muñoz, who joined forces with the Colombian Army to locate the children.

The military provided GPS technology, advanced radio communications, and performed more than four hundred hours of flight over the jungle.

The Murui indigenous searchers taught the soldiers to read the tracks and to navigate through the jungle. Traditional elders like Guerrero attempted to establish a spiritual bond with the children using traditional plants such as tobacco, coca, and yagé, the hallucinogenic sacred plant also known as ayahuasca.

In the end, it was a mixture of the two worlds that saved the children: Muñoz and his team found them, almost starving, in an area cleared of trees that they had inspected in previous days. Within a few hours, they were taken out of the jungle in a Blackhawk military helicopter.

taught by his mother

Magdalena Mucutuy was a woman from the chagra – a sacred space that acts as both a gathering orchard and a community school for traditional knowledge – who often took her children to the jungle, according to her husband.

There he probably learned the techniques that allowed them to survive until rescuers arrived.

“Traditionally, (indigenous) children are raised in the natural environment, in the forest, especially when they are very young,” says Kuiru. But he warns that the intimate familiarity with nature that allowed Leslie and her siblings to survive is under threat.

“Our traditions are being contaminated by deforestation, by the presence of external actors [como los grupos criminales] and, in a way, by assimilation. It’s not just a physical colonization, like the clothes we wear now, but a colonization of knowledge, and our knowledge is being lost,” Kuiru told .

In recent years, indigenous populations have abandoned the jungle, pushed toward urban areas by the presence of criminal groups in the countryside and the lack of job and educational opportunities, according to a 2010 study by the Colombian Amazon Institute for Scientific Research.

Ranoque himself claims that he was forced to abandon his native settlement in Araracuara, Amazonas, due to threats from guerrilla groups. He says that his wife and his children were also fleeing the invasion of armed groups when his plane crashed on May 1, killing Magdalena, the pilot, and an indigenous leader.

Kuiru would like the Colombian state to support and protect indigenous ways of life and knowledge, while offering opportunities to be incorporated into the mainstream economy. In education, that could mean allowing children to spend only half the day in public schools and then go to the chagras for traditional education, she says. Or it could mean supporting local entrepreneurship to create jobs in the region and encourage young people to stay in the Amazon.

In a way, just like the four children were saved thanks to a mixture of tradition and modernity, only the two parts together can bring true development to the region.

“We must not fear modernization, but we must return to our roots, to what defines us and sets us apart as indigenous people of the Amazon. Otherwise, we will end up empty, like eggshells without filling,” he said.