By Monica Showalter
Following the news of a dramatic rescue of four children lost in the Amazon jungle, Colombia’s far-left president, Gustavo Petro, praised the children who survived in that fearsome wilderness for 40 days as “children of the jungle.”
“The jungle saved them” Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.
“Children of the jungle”?
That’s like calling children who survived a nuclear meltdown “children of the reactor” or kids who survived under earthquake rubble “children of the temblor.” Does anyone call champion surfer Bethany Hamilton, who was injured in a shark attack as a young girl a “child of the shark”?
They’re disaster survivors, and yes, it was they, not the jungle, whose survival actions brought forth their heroism.
That was the whole problem with the lefty “narratives” surrounding this jungle rescue.
According to CNN, Petro babbled on and on in the same way, using the dreamy language of Euro-intellectuals still ensconced with the Rousseauvian romance of the jungle and all its noble savages:
He called the children’s survival a “gift to life” and an indication that they were “cared for by the jungle.”
Actually, the jungle tried to kill them.
If the children are like many people, they may not want to see the inside of a jungle ever again.
The Colombian jungle is full of incredible horrors — from jaguars, to black panthers, to anaconda snakes, to poison frogs, to giant bats, to mosquitos, to spikes, spiney vines, and thorns, to pits, mud, rocks, falls, quicksand, and slime, to poisonous plants and fruit, with every giant crawling, biting, thing imaginable. It’s a vector for countless tropical diseases — look up the horrible details of one of the common ones, leishmanosis, which has afflicted past victims of the Colombian jungle — plus drug dealers, pirates, criminals, narcoterrorists, and raging primates with big teeth. The photos from the rescue suggest that it was the real thing as jungles go.
Imagine what that place sounded like at night in pitch darkness as wild animals screamed. Imagine trying to change a baby’s diaper on the muddy jungle floor, bugs and mosquitos all around, listening warily for sounds of jaguars and the footsteps of other predators. Reportedly the predator they did have to fight off was a vicious dog.
The care didn’t come from the jungle.
It came from the resourceful 13-year-old indigenous girl named Lesly, who used her babysitter skills to keep the other three children, including the infant named Cristian, alive and together throughout the ordeal. Apparently it was what she did anyway during her life while her mother worked.
It had to have been a hard life.
But it didn’t stop Petro from waxing romantic about indigenous people’s lives, and the fact that the children came from an indigenous background, attributing the survival of the kids to their indigenous heritage as if Indians are just born with knowing how to navigate the jungle:
“Their learning from indigenous families and their learning of living in the jungle has saved them,” Petro told reporters on Friday, after announcing on Twitter that they had been found 40 days after they went missing following a plane crash that killed their mother.
Which sounds a lot like Rousseavian noble savage claptrap. The kids may have known some things from their elders, reportedly of the Huitoto people (they dress like this), or possibly the Guanano people (news reports conflict) about where the poisonous foods were in the jungle, and yes, any survival skills they did have from their forebears were a lot more constructive for kids (of any nationality) to have than pronoun usage, but they didn’t seem entirely indigenous in the way they lived. They didn’t live every day like these people.
According to CNN, the children’s family members lived in Villavicencio, a good-sized city of 500,000 in central Colombia, which was last in the news in 2007, when Oliver Stone joined hands with Hugo Chavez in a failed effort to free hostages held by Marxist narcoterrorists in the jungle. Photos show they were rescued wearing western clothes, such as blue jeans. Subsequent photos show that their grandfather, and father, who greeted them at the airport, had western clothes on, too. Their last names — Mucutuy — were indigenous but they had first names like Lesly and Cristian, and their mother’s name was Magdalena, suggesting a citified Christian heritage, augmented by the fact that their family members thanked God Almighty, and not an indigenous god, for their rescue.
“For us this situation was like being in the dark, we walked for the sake of walking. Living for the sake of living because the hope of finding them kept us alive. When we found the children we felt joy, we don’t know what to do, but we are grateful to God,” he said.
That was their grandfather speaking, according to CNN. Before their plane went down, killing their mother and two other adults, it’s noteworthy also that they were traveling by Cessna, which is commonly done as a means of getting around the region for city people, but as a means of travel is far rarer for very indigenous people to do.
Spare us the romance about indigenous people. The rescued children had an indigenous background, but they were pretty much like other Colombians.
As for the children being “saved” by the jungle, as Petro waxed, well, baloney there, too.
They were saved by the Colombian army which rescued the kids with a helicopter hovering over the jungle canopy and then transported them to care in the faraway big city of Bogota where they will be recovering for weeks. The kids survived just barely after their ordeal, they didn’t have any kinds of superior native American knowledge about how to survive for 40 days in the jungle, as if any self-respecting indigenous person would do that anyway. The army conducted the search, they knew enough to make leaflet drops over the jungle floor, they dropped food caches, and they brought the children’s grandmother onboard the effort by having her make recordings to be broadcast over the jungle canopy from above, assuring the kids they were looking for them, encouraging the kids to carry on, and asking them to stay in one place so they could be found by rescuers.
That’s practical stuff, the product of planning and experience. It’s not some magical romantically viewed jungle that somehow saved the kids.
It was the army.
Even the indigenous people who know the jungle pretty well hold no romantic views of it:
Members of the indigenous community held traditional ceremonies ‘speaking to the jungle’ and asking it to give up the children.
Translation: The damn thing was holding the kids hostage and the Indians were engaging in hostage negotiations the best way they knew how.
Here’s the rest of the wittingly or unwittingly obnoxious thing he said:
“They are children of the jungle and now they are children of Colombia,” he added.
Is Petro saying they weren’t children of Colombia before that? And indigenous kids need to pass some kind of hellish survival test to get that Colombian passport? Last I heard, they were always Colombian. I suspect he meant well, trying to reference that the whole country was proud of the childrens and the rescue effort. But that contained the residue of statements in the past made by leftist intellectuals, that indigenous people were never quite Colombian, which is nonsense.
The children who knew just enough to survive were heroes, the local people who helped with the search and rescue were heroes, and the Colombian army which rescued the children were heroes.
The jungle and all lefty romance surrounding it was not the hero. To say they were is to minimize the heroism that did happen and should be celebrated.
The kids can do without that, and so can the rest of us.