La Paz- Five people survived a plane accident at the Amazon of Bolivia and remained 36 hours stranded in a swamp before being rescued this Friday, authorities reported.
All passengers on board – three women, a child and the pilot – were unharmed and were found on top of the overturned vehicle, in the Amazon department of Beni, northeast of the country.
“The five were uploaded on the plane in excellent condition,” said Wilson Ávila, director of the Emergency Operations Center for that region.
The rescued are in a local hospital under medical evaluation.
“Disappeared”
The aircraft departed on Wednesday from the town of Baures towards the city of Trinidad, both in Beni, 180 kilometers away. Since then the passengers were disappeared.
We were “surrounded by caimanes that came to us, three meters from us,” Andrés Velarde, a 29 -year -old pilot, told the press from the hospital bed.
They also saw a “sicurí”, a kind of boa several meters long.
The pilot explained that they made a domestic flight when the ship began to lose flight. He looked for a pampa to avoid a frontal clash with the mountains, but could only land in a swamp near a lagoon.
“We have been almost 36 hours without being able to sleep,” Velarde said.
They had to eat a local cassava flour that had one of the passengers.
“We couldn’t drink water and we couldn’t go elsewhere on the subject of the caimanes,” he recalls.
So far the causes of the incident are unknown.
In the department of Beni, on the scarce roads and vegetation, roads are usually in poor condition and people often use taxis-aéreos.
