Fifty years since the plane tragedy in the Andes made into a movie – Roy Harley remembers… (video)

50 years ago, a plane carrying Uruguay’s university rugby team crashed in the Andes Mountains. The survivors will spend 72 days cut off from the world and resort to cannibalism to survive.

The military aircraft chartered to take the Montevideo Old Christians team to Santiago, Chile disappears from radar on the night of October 13, 1972 with 45 people on board.

Contact with the twin-engine aircraft was lost shortly after Curico, 200 kilometers south of Santiago.

The next day, a resident of Curico reports that he had seen a plane crash in the Cordigera of the Andes. But aerial searches of the snow-covered area are fruitless.

“We are Uruguayans. Our plane crashed into the mountain”

Two months would pass and finally, on December 22, the plane would be located, thanks to the information of two 19-year-old survivors who had left to seek help.

The two had managed to reach a San Fernando river and drop a message wrapped around a stone to a passerby on horseback, according to AFP cables from the time. “We are Uruguayans. Our plane crashed into the mountain. We have been walking for ten days. We can’t walk anymore. Fourteen people are injured. Help us”.

Their comrades, sick, some with frostbite, are being airlifted out over the next 48 hours.

The 16 rescued begin to narrate their odyssey.

The pilot of the plane in the fog and large air gaps directed the aircraft towards a snowy plateau of the Andes. When the aircraft finally came to rest, ten passengers were dead. The rest of the wounded will succumb in the coming days.

At an altitude of 3,500 meters, the survivors are trying to organize themselves. They sleep inside the fuselage and strictly manage the scarce food: chocolate and cheese.

A few days before Christmas, the joy at their rescue is indescribable: “We are witnessing a miracle unique in the world,” says the Uruguayan chargé d’affaires in Santiago. “Their survival is scientifically inexplicable,” declare the treating doctors.

Rumors quickly begin to circulate about cannibalism and disseminated by the Chilean press. On December 26, a rescue operations official confirms that the rescued had fed on the flesh of their dead comrades.

A first anonymous testimony of one of the young men is published in the newspaper La Segunda of Santiago. “After four days (…) we had already exhausted the supplies of the plane, the plants we hardly managed to uproot under the snow were very small.”

“Then we made the terrible decision: in order to survive, we would have to overcome all obstacles, whether religious or biological.”

In a joint statement read at a press conference in Montevideo a few days later, the survivors explain: “We said: if Jesus, during the Last Supper, had distributed his body and blood to the disciples, we should not understand that were we called to do the same?’

The survivors were excommunicated by the Church of Uruguay and by Pope Paul XVI.

“That night I lived through hell”

Of the 45 on board, 10 were killed in the crash, while others succumbed to their injuries in succession over the following days.

The first night was the most terrible, Roy Harley recalls, talking about cold and the groans of the wounded.

“That night I lived through hell,” says the retired engineer who is now 70 years old.

“At my feet was a child whose face had been cut off and was drowning in his own blood. I didn’t have the courage to reach out to him, to comfort him. I was very afraid.”

“We were so cold, it was so painful,” recalls Carlos Paes, a member of the rugby team, now 69, who believed many times that his last day had come.

But the worst was when on the tenth day they heard over the radio that the searches had been stopped.

“One of the hardest things was realizing that the world was going on without us,” he says.

This made them realize that they could only count on themselves for their rescue. And that they had to be patient.

Before their two companions found the courage to walk for ten days in the cold and snow in search of help, the group tried to survive and eventually agreed to feed on the frozen flesh of their dead comrades.

Most voted yes, says Roy Harley, explaining that before that they had tried to swallow anything that could serve as food: leather shoe soles, cigarettes, toothpaste.

“We were dying. When you have the choice to die or use what’s left…we did everything we could to survive.”

Meanwhile, they were forced to face another disaster when an avalanche fell on the plane’s fuselage while they slept. Eight people died on the spot. Of the 32 who had survived the crash, only 19 were left. Three more were to die in the coming days.

“The avalanche was like God had stabbed us in the back,” says Carlos Paes, who used the wreckage to make makeshift hats, gloves, snowshoes, cover-ups and even dark glasses to prevent blindness from the snow.

When he boarded the plane bound for Chile, Roy Hurley weighed 84 kilograms. When he was rescued he now weighed 37.

On average, the survivors lost 29 kgaccording to the archives of the private Montevideo museum in honor of the 29 dead and 16 survivors of the “Miracle of the Andes”.

“It’s a supernatural story involving ordinary people,” Carlos Paes says today. “In the end, life triumphs.”

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