Manuel Ranoque arrives at the Military Hospital to visit children in Bogotá, on June 11, 2023.RAUL ARBOLEDA (AFP)
The Colombian police have arrested this Friday Manuel Ranoque, the father of the indigenous children who in June surprised the whole world by surviving a plane crash and 40 days in the jungle. This has been confirmed by the Attorney General's Office, which has added that the arrest for the crime of sexual abuse, requested by a prosecutor and approved by a judge, was carried out in Bogotá. The Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) has custody of the four minors: Lesly Mucutuy (13 years old), Soleiny Mucutuy (9 years old), Tien Noriel Ronoque Mucutuy (4 years old) and Cristin Neriman Ranoque Mucutuy (11 months old). Ranoque is the stepfather of the two older girls and the father of the younger ones.
The mother of the four, Magdalena Mucutuy, died in the plane crash they survived. On May 1, she and her children boarded an aircraft that covered the Araracuara (Caquetá) – San José del Guaviare route, a jungle area of the Amazon with limited transportation options and where trips in this type of precarious devices are common. They were going to Bogotá to meet Ranoque, who had moved from his shelter after denouncing threats from armed groups. After the plane crashed, they were forced to survive on fariña (a cassava flour) found in the luggage of one of the deceased, fruits from the jungle and a package of emergency supplies dropped by the military.
The rescue of the children brought up the complaints against Ranoque and the bad relationship he had with the children's maternal grandparents. There were rumors that the children were hiding from rescue teams because they feared that the father would beat them for getting lost in the jungle. When they left the Military Hospital in Bogotá, the ICBF decided to take charge of them while investigating allegations of ill-treatment against Ranoque. The father denied his guilt and demanded that the State hand over custody to him as soon as possible. "They are my children, not the president's. Just that," he told this newspaper in July.
The maternal grandparents, Narciso Mucutuy and María Fátima Valencia, said that Ranoque beat their daughter and mistreated the grandchildren. The grandparents have been fighting for weeks for custody of the four children. Not only against Ranoque, but also against Andrés, Magdalena's first husband and father of the two eldest daughters. "Now interested people appear. Since my daughter divorced him we didn't know anything about him. Now you can see it," the grandmother said in July. "They give them to me and I'll take them to the Amazon," he said of his intentions.
The ICBF, which was studying the allegations, did not let Ranoque see the two older girls during the weeks they spent in Bogotá's Military Hospital. The Institute was then evaluating various options for the future life of the brothers. "Guaranteeing the rights of the Mucutuy brothers requires a prudent time that allows us to protect their integrity, until the family environment is safe for their growth," the director of the entity, Astrid Cáceres, said in July.
The Government has set up a trust to manage the money children may receive for telling their story. Producers around the world, including several from Hollywood, have made offers to take over the rights, but for the moment they have remained in the air. Ranoque, for its part, filed a millionaire lawsuit a few weeks ago against the company Avianline Charters's, the owner of the plane.
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