Tragedy of the Andes turns 50 and will be retold in new film

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It has been 50 years since Chilean drover Sérgio Catalán was crossing an inhospitable stretch of the Andes mountain range with his animals when he heard the cry that came from the weakened lungs of a young Uruguayan. On the other side of a river, Fernando Parrado threw a handwritten note, already wet with snow: “I come from a plane that crashed in the mountains. We have been walking for ten days. I have an injured friend. to get out of there quickly. We don’t have food, we’re weak”.

Catalán soon realized that he was a survivor of the Uruguayan Air Force flight that had crashed 72 days earlier — rescue teams had already given up their search operations, calculating that they were all dead. The drover rode for ten hours to Puente Alto to get help. A helicopter was sent to rescue Parrado and his friend Roberto Canessa, and then teams flew to where the other survivors were sheltering.

Fifty years later, what became known as the Tragedy of the Andes is the subject of the production of at least the third film about the episode — not to mention the dozens of documentaries and books. The case had an impact because of the way 16 people were able to cross that period, at an altitude of 3,570 meters, in the cold of up to -30°C at night, with little food and medicine, watching the death, day by day, of colleagues who could not resist.

When supplies ran out, the survivors appealed to the desperate decision to eat parts of the corpses, after days of arguing. The obvious hesitation was also due to the fact that most of the passengers belonged to a Uruguayan rugby team, the Old Christians Club, which was traveling to Santiago to play against an English team; that is, almost everyone knew each other.

“At the time, there was sensationalism about this decision. But today I ask those who listen to our story, in lectures and interviews: what would you do? If we didn’t eat human flesh, we wouldn’t have survived,” he tells Sheet Carlos Páez Rodríguez, who was 18 at the time.

Son of Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró (1923-2014), he collaborated with the production of “La Sociedad de la Nieve”, produced by Netflix and directed by Spaniard Juan Antonio Bayona. Filming concluded in April, and the premiere will be this year. The film follows “Survivors of the Andes” (1976), based on the book by journalist Clay Blair Jr., and “Alive” (1993), by Frank Marshall, with Ethan Hawke and John Malkovich.

“It’s a human story, about how to be human in extreme conditions, and it teaches you to value life. That’s why it attracts people’s attention so much”, says Páez Rodríguez.

Investigations into the crash of the plane concluded that it was due to an error by the co-pilot, Dante Lagurara, who was in training; the pilot, Julio César Ferradas, was an experienced aeronautical officer. The flight took off from Montevideo on October 12, 1972, and bad weather led to an overnight layover in Mendoza, Argentina, to wait for better conditions.

The next day, on the flight to Santiago, Lagurara mistakenly thought he was closer to Pudahuel airport than he actually was and started landing much earlier. When they realized they were going to crash into the icy peaks, the pilots tried to lift the aircraft again, but it was too late. First, they flapped one of their wings; then the back, which separated from the plane’s body, throwing passengers to their deaths. Those who survived were in a segment that fell in snow, which cushioned the shock.

There were, initially, 45 passengers, of which only 16 arrived alive to the last day of the saga. The pilots died.

“The great heroes were Parrado and Canessa, who realized that if they stayed at the accident site, they would keep dying until the last one. That’s why they decided to walk until they found help”, he tells Sheet Chilean reporter Alipio Vera, the first TV journalist to arrive at the scene.

After checking the flight information, the two thought they were much closer to the green Chilean fields than they actually were and figured the walk wouldn’t be that long. They bundled up as much as possible, wearing the clothes of the other passengers—Parrado was wearing three pairs of jeans that were overlapping. They took as much food as they could, but after walking for four days, they realized that what was on the horizon was more and more icy peaks, not the end of the range. With Canessa injured and weak, Parrado continued walking, until he came across the drover.

“I don’t know what would happen to them if they took a day longer — they would probably have died. Every year small planes are lost over the Andes, it would be an extra tragedy”, says Vera.

The journalist says that he also had to climb an inhospitable region with his team to reach where the drover set up a small camp for Parrado and Canessa while the search teams flew to rescue those who had remained among the remains of the aircraft.

“They looked hungry, their lips were chapped, they didn’t even have the strength to speak properly. They were finishing their first meal in more than 70 days, a plate of soup with noodles and beans,” he says. “For me, as a young journalist, it was very moving. I remember that every day.”

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