Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends JOHN 15:13

At 3.30 he reported his height as 15,000 feet, but when Santiago control tower spoke to the Fairchild a minute later there was no reply. For eight days the Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans searched for the plane.

It was early spring in the southern hemisphere, and the Andes had suffered exceptionally heavy falls of snow. The roof of the plane was white. There was little chance that it would ever be found, and less chance still that any of the forty-five passengers and crew could have survived the crash.

There were sixteen survivors. This is the story of what they suffered and of how they remained alive.

By the day when the money had to be delivered to the Air Force, they had sold enough tickets to cover the cost.

The parents, too, all seemed to know one another. With fifty or sixty people talking and laughing together, it was almost as if someone had chosen the foyer of the airport to throw a party.

Three of the boys were medical students, two of whom played on the team.

At 8.05 a.m. the Fairchild, No. 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, took off from Carrasco airport for Santiago de Chile, loaded with forty passengers, five crewmen, and their luggage. The pilot and commander of the plane was Colonel Julio César Ferradas.

If there was any doubt in the pilots’ minds, it did not concern the qualities of the plane but rather the notoriously treacherous currents of air in the Andes. Only twelve or thirteen weeks before, a four-engined cargo plane with a crew of six, half of whom were Uruguayans, had disappeared in the mountains.

Susana Parrado sat next to her mother, who handed out sweets to the boys around her. Behind them sat Nando Parrado with his greatest friend, Panchito Abal. These two boys were famous as inseparable friends.

Nando Parrado bought a little pair of red shoes for his older sister’s baby, and his mother bought small bottles of rum and liqueur for friends in Chile. She gave them to Nando to carry, and he stuffed them into an airline bag among his rugby clothes.

‘Do you want your parents to read in the papers that forty-five Uruguayans are lost in the cordillera?’ he asked.

The boys fooled around while they waited, taking photographs, weighing themselves, frightening one another with the thought that it was Friday the thirteenth, and teasing Señora Parrado for taking a travelling rug to Chile in the spring.

‘Now we know the kind of planes they have in Argentina.’ ‘At least it got over the Andes,’ one of the girls replied tartly, ‘which is more than yours will.’

There were no trees, no scrub, no grass. Nothing broke the monotonous ascent of these brittle mountains except the snow.

His audience was not amused, because just at that moment the plane hit an air pocket and plummeted several hundred feet.

Eugenia Parrado looked up from her book. There was nothing to be seen from the window but the white mist of cloud. She turned the other way and looked at Susana’s face and took hold of her hand.

Several passengers started to pray. Others braced themselves against the seats in front of them, waiting for the impact of the crash.

Inside what remained of the fuselage there were screams of terror and cries for help. Without either wings or tail, the plane hurtled towards the jagged mountain, but instead of being smashed to pieces against a wall of rock it landed on its belly in a steep valley and slid like a toboggan on the sloping surface of deep snow.

Realizing this, some of the boys tried to undo their safety belts and stand up in the aisle, but only Gustavo Zerbino succeeded. He stood with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his hands pressed against the ceiling, shouting, ‘Jesus, Jesus, little Jesus, help us, help us!’

Carlitos Páez, was saying a Hail Mary, begun when the wing of the plane had first touched the mountain. As he mouthed the last words of this prayer, the plane came to a stop. There was a moment of stillness and silence. Then, slowly, from all over the tangled mess within the passenger cabin came the sounds of life – groans and prayers and cries for help.

Valeta seemed unable to see or hear them. At each step he sank up to his thighs in the snow, and only the steepness of the hill enabled him to make any progress at all. The boys could see that his course would not lead him to the plane, so they shouted yet more frantically to attract his attention. Two, Páez and Storm, even tried to go out to meet him, but it was impossible to walk in the snow, particularly uphill. They were trapped and could only watch helplessly as Valeta stumbled down into the valley. For a moment it seemed as if he might have heard them and was changing direction towards the plane, but then he slipped. His wide stride became a tumble, and his body slithered helplessly down the side of the mountain until he finally disappeared in the snow.

Near her was Abal. He too was severely injured, with an open wound in his scalp. He was semiconscious and, as Canessa knelt to treat him as best he could, Abal took hold of his hand, saying, ‘Please don’t leave me, old man, please don’t leave me.’ There were so many others crying for help that Canessa could not stay with him.

Parrado was still alive, but it seemed impossible that he could live for long, and since nothing could be done to help him he was given up for dead.

Besides Eugenia Parrado, only two other passengers in the fuselage had died instantly. These were Dr and Señora Nicola. Both had been flung forward into the luggage compartment side by side and had died at once.

One boy, Pedro Algorta, had total amnesia. He was physically well enough to work hard at moving the seats, but he had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Another had also been hit on the head and made repeated efforts to leave the plane and walk down the mountain.

As they struggled in this futile attempt to free him, Lagurara said over and over again, ‘We passed Curicó, we passed Curicó.’ Then, seeing that nothing could be done, he asked the two boys to fetch the revolver which he kept in his bag.

The two ‘doctors’ made their way back over the seat cushions to the rear of the plane and returned to the dark, narrow tunnel of moaning, screaming humanity.

It was clear that rescue would not come that day, and so the wounded were brought back into the plane and the thirty-two survivors prepared for the night.

Worse than the cold that night was the atmosphere of panic and hysteria in the cramped cabin of the Fairchild. Everyone thought that his injury was the worst and complained out loud to the others.

All the time there came from the dark the moans, screams, and delirious raving of the wounded. In the luggage compartment they could still hear cries and groans from Lagurara; ‘We passed Curicó,’ he would say, ‘we passed Curicó.’ He would moan for water and beg for his gun.

In another part of the plane a second figure, Pancho Delgado, stood up and made for the door. ‘I’m just going to the shops to get some Coca-Cola,’ he announced to his friends. ‘Then get me some mineral water while you’re there,’ replied Carlitos Páez.

The cries of pain continued as one boy stumbled over broken limbs to scoop up snow at the entrance or another awoke, not knowing where he was, and tried to leave the plane.

Abal begged for help which no one could give him – ‘Oh, help me, please help me. It’s so cold, it’s so cold …’ – and Susana cried continuously for her dead mother – ‘Mama, Mama, Mama, let’s go away from here. Let’s go home.’ Then her mind wandered and she sang a nursery rhyme.

When he came to Señora Mariani, he thought that she too was dead. He crouched down beside her and made another attempt to move the seats which still pinned her to the floor, whereupon she started to scream once again, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me! You’ll kill me!’ So he decided to leave her alone. When he returned later in the morning to see how she was, she had taken on a lost look and was silent. And then, just as he looked into her eyes, they rolled around into her skull and she ceased to breathe.

Roque, the only surviving crew member, was of little use. Since the crash he had wept continuously and lost all control of his bodily functions, being conscious of soiling his trousers only because of the complaints of those around him and the actions of the boys who helped to change them.

They had cleared more space in the plane, they had built a better wall against the wind and snow, and there were fewer of them.

At midday Marcelo was to give out the ration of food. For each there was to be a deodorant cap filled with wine and a taste of jam. A square of chocolate would be kept for the evening meal. There were some complaints that there should have been a little bit more for their Sunday lunch, but the majority agreed that it was better to be careful.

Parrado, once left for dead, had regained consciousness that day, and when the blood was washed from his face it was found that most of it had come from the blow on his head. His skull was intact, but he was weak and somewhat confused. His first thought had been for his mother and sister.

When he was able to look into Susana’s large eyes he saw all the sorrow, pain and confusion that she could not express in words.

‘Then I’ll cut meat from one of the pilots,’ said Parrado. ‘After all, they got us into this mess.’

‘Do you know what Nando said to me?’ Carlitos said to Fito. ‘He said that if we weren’t rescued, he’d eat one of the pilots to get out of here.’ There was a pause; then Carlitos added, ‘That hit on the head must have made him slightly mad.’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Fito, his honest, serious features quite composed. ‘It might be the only way to survive.’ Carlitos said nothing, and they turned to go back down the mountain.

They piled into the plane each night and lay in the freezing darkness with their thoughts of home and family.

For the mother of Carlos Valeta – the boy who had disappeared in the snow right after the crash – hope was impossible. On Friday afternoon she had had a vision, first of a falling plane, then of her son’s wounded face, then of him sleeping, and by five thirty she had known he was dead.

Marcelo did what he could to set an example. He was optimistic and he was fair. He talked confidently of rescue and tried to get his team to sing songs. There was one desultory rendering of ‘Clementine’, but no one had the spirit to sing.

For some days several of the boys had realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died.

‘Every time you move,’ he said, ‘you use up part of your own body. Soon we shall be so weak that we won’t have the strength even to cut the meat that is lying there before our eyes.’

A meeting was called inside the Fairchild, and for the first time all twenty-seven survivors discussed the issue which faced them – whether or not they should eat the bodies of the dead to survive.

There and then they made a pact that if any more of them were to die, their bodies were to be used as food.

No one came, and again Canessa took it upon himself to prove his resolution. He prayed to God to help him do what he knew to be right and then took a piece of meat in his hand. He hesitated. Even with his mind so firmly made up, the horror of the act paralysed him. His hand would neither rise to his mouth nor fall to his side while the revulsion which possessed him struggled with his stubborn will. The will prevailed. The hand rose and pushed the meat into his mouth. He swallowed it.