BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The weary Indigenous men gathered at their base camp, nestled among towering trees and dense vegetation that form a disorienting sea of green. They sensed that their ancestral land — Selva Madre, or Mother Jungle — was unwilling to let them find the four children who’d been missing since their charter plane crashed weeks earlier in a remote area in southern Colombia.
Indigenous volunteers and military crews had found signs of hope: a baby bottle, half-eaten fruit, dirty diapers strewn across a wide swath of rainforest. The men were convinced the children had survived. But punishing rains, harsh terrain and the passing of time had diminished their spirits and drained their stamina.
The weak of body, of mind, of faith do not make it out of this jungle. Day 39 was do or die — for the children and the search teams.
That night at camp, Manuel Ranoque, father of the two youngest children, reached for one of the most sacred rituals of Indigenous groups of the Amazon — yagé, a bitter tea made of plants native to the rainforest, more widely known as ayahuasca. For centuries, the hallucinogenic cocktail has been used as a cure for all ailments by people in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.
Henry Guerrero, a volunteer who joined the search from the children’s home village near Araracuara, told The Associated Press his aunt prepared the yagé for the group. They believed it would induce visions that could lead them to the children.