“My life as a hero is nothing special,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez in ‘The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’, his famous account of a sailor who spent ten days floating in the Caribbean after a naval accident caused by the Colombian Navy’s negligence.
The story was based on a true event that was denied by the military authorities, who had blamed a non-existent storm for the disaster. It caused a great scandal when it was serialised in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador in 1955 – forcing the Nobel Prize-winning author into exile.
Almost 70 years later, 13-year-old Lesly, the eldest of four siblings from the Indigenous Muinane community, who survived 40 days lost in the Colombian jungle after their plane crashed, could easily claim that her life as a heroine is ‘nothing special’.
