A small Cessna T206 aircraft carrying four Colombian health professionals and their pilot went down in the mountainous Chocó region on Sunday, September 13, killing everyone on board. The plane, registered HK-4985, lost contact near Cerro Tatamá around 9:23 a.m. while flying from the town of Condoto to Guaymaral Airport near Bogotá, roughly 320 miles (515 km) away. An emergency radio beacon triggered a three-day search across difficult terrain before rescue teams located the wreckage on Wednesday, September 16, and confirmed there were no survivors.
The victims—Perla Constanza Álvarez, Sandy García, María Victoria Guzmán and Julissa Figueredo—along with pilot Mehmet Cankaya, were returning from a weekend medical brigade organized by the Colombian Civil Air Patrol, a nonprofit that flies volunteer doctors and specialists to remote communities lacking hospital access. During their two-day mission in Condoto, the team treated more than 120 patients on the first day alone, ultimately providing care to nearly 600 people with support from the Colmédica health insurer and Bogotá’s Clínica del Country.
The four women were longtime volunteers with the organization, familiar with the needs of Colombia’s isolated rural areas after years of similar trips. Their deaths have cast a shadow over a mission built on delivering pediatric care, nutrition services and eye exams to places where such help rarely reaches. Colleagues and family members are now mourning not just a tragic accident, but the loss of dedicated caregivers who spent their weekends serving others.
To read the full story and learn more about their work, visit El Tiempo’s original report.
Source: La tragedia aérea que enlutó a misión humanitaria: el legado que Perla, Sandy, Victoria y Julissa dejaron en Chocó (eltiempo.com). English version produced with AI assistance.
Image: Ken Lund, BY-SA 2.0 (via Openverse).