Forty Days in the Jungle: Behind the Extraordinary Survival and Rescue of Four Children Lost in the Amazon

In June 2023, four children—Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Crispin—were found alive in the Colombian Amazon, forty days after the aircraft they were traveling in had crashed and killed the three adults on board (the pilot, the co-pilot, and the children’s mother). The eldest child, thirteen-year-old Lesly, took the decision to leave her dying mother, gather her siblings—aged nine, five, and eleven months—and head into the jungle. She kept herself and her siblings alive for forty days and nights, finally emerging when heavily armed soldiers closed in, yelling her name above the sound of barking dogs.

Forty Days in the Jungle follows the stories of those involved in the crash and what followed: Maria Fatima Valencia, the children’s grandmother, who had taught Lesly how to survive in the jungle; General Pedro Sánchez who led the rescue team; the shady figure of Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest children; and even the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

But there is much more to this than an extraordinary survival story. Interwoven chapters address key questions about Colombian and Latin American history, society, and political economy—the answers to which shed light on the socio-political state of much of the world today. Colombia’s problems mirror, in many ways, the rising Global South in its 21st-century struggles against colonial histories and a globalized world.