For more than two weeks, search-and-rescue teams in Colombia have been scouring the Amazon rainforest for four children who were aboard a plane that crashed on May 1. On Wednesday night, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, announced that the country’s armed forces had found the four children alive. However, the nation’s child-welfare agency, the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, later confirmed that the military forces had not yet been able to establish official contact due to adverse weather conditions and difficult terrain.
Adding to the confusion, the director of the child-welfare agency said in an interview with local news media that the children were, in fact, “fine” and under the care of an Indigenous community that had helped with the search. A spokesperson for the child-welfare agency told The New York Times that the director and the head of the civil aviation authority were traveling to the remote area to investigate.
The discovery of the four children alive would raise a number of questions, including how children so young managed to drink, eat and take care of themselves alone for so many days. The Colombian air force and military, as well as Indigenous communities in the region, have been tirelessly searching for the children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, who had been traveling with their mother and an Indigenous leader from the tiny Amazon community of Araracuara, Colombia.