In the early hours of 1 May, the pilot of a Cessna 206 aircraft flying from the village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare in Colombia’s Guaviare province made an emergency Mayday call, saying the plane had suffered engine failure, before ditching in the country’s thick Amazonian rainforest. The small plane was carrying a mother and her four children, plus another adult and the pilot, but, given the remote area in which it crashed, the authorities did not hold out muchan announcement on Twitter saying: “After arduous searching by our military, we have found alive the four children who went missing after a plane crash in Guaviare. A joy for the country”. However, this was not the case; while there was evidence they had survived, the search teams had not actually found the children. Once this was realised, the President withdrew his tweet and a major search began to locate the missing children, Lesly Mukutuy, 13, and her siblings Soleiny, nine, Tien, four, and Christin, one, members of the Huitoto indigenous community.
