Carlos Villegas has been working with Civil Defense for 10 years, for the past three years he has been working with Tellius, a Belgian Malinois dog trained at 40 days of age to search and rescue live humans. They were one of the key duos working in “Operation Hope”, which paid off yesterday with the location and rescue of 4 indigenous children missing in the jungle for more than 40 days.
(They are malnourished, very weak’: speaking from the grandparents of the surviving children)
A total of 200 people, including more than 120 members of the military and 72 members from various indigenous communities, put their efforts together, never gave up and traveled thousands of miles through the Amazon jungle to find Lesly, Soleiny, Tien and Cristin alive. . performs this miracle.
Villegas spent about 8 days in the field with Tellius, getting up at 5 a.m. each day to check the 1 square kilometer area to look for footprints or signs of the presence of minors.
He assures that the conditions are one of the most difficult he has ever faced: a dense forest, extreme heat, many plants or animals that can be poisonous, and dozens of other dangers.
“Everything was a risk. Since we didn’t know if there was opposition, if there were mines, everything was poisoned since you came here. The climate was humid tropical, so you were wet all day, the night was cold and you were still wet. There was no food there, it was nothing more than rations that you ate. The forest was too dense, you couldn’t walk, you had to make room with the machete,” Villegas recalls.
Having previously conducted search and rescue operations with Tellius in jungles elsewhere in Colombia (such as Antioquia or Chocó), the rescuer is assigned to the Cobra 2 team, which consists of 6 Special Forces commandos and a group of indigenous people. from different communities supporting the work.
“The commandos are very prepared, very expert. The locals also knew what to catch, what to eat, where to march,” Villegas emphasizes.
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The rescuer, who left the field the day before he found the little ones today, happily explains that the first thing he did when he heard the news was to cry with emotion and happiness.
“We always wondered: If it was difficult for us to be there with all the circumstances, with all our equipment, we imagined the children as very small and without any equipment. That girl is very nervous. It took a lot of perseverance to find a way to survive all these days,” emphasizes the savior.
Another point underlined by the expert, who participated in the search efforts in the last days of the operation, is that the dog teams should arrive earlier. They just called Villegas 10 days ago. He says the first thing to do in such emergencies is to use all available search and rescue dog teams, which increases the likelihood of finding casualties more quickly.
“Most importantly, they always send the dogs first, not too late. Because there are so many footprints out there, and the faster the dogs send it first, the easier it is for them to find the trail. Then finding the lost one can be much faster. They almost always call the dogs last, when the dog has already been pressed too much and there is a lot of dirt, which makes it very difficult for dogs to trace,” Villegas says.
EDWIN CAICEDO | WEATHER EDITOR
Source: Exame
