More than half a century has passed since an old camera recorded the impossible. A group of unrecognizable individuals, with a black silhouette against the snowy background, made waves at a helicopter. Neither those watching from above nor those looking back, shouting, could believe that this was happening. But it was. They weren’t dead. The story that Juan Antonio Bayona has rescued from the echoes that still reverberate in the Valley of Tears of the Andes It is, in addition to being a strong candidate for the Oscar for best international film, the memory of some photographs that were dusted by the snow.
Thursday, October 12, 1972 was a happy day. Amateur rugby team members Old Christians Club de Montevideo undertake a trip to Chile to face the Old Boys Club of Santiago. The Chilean beaches extended in the imagination of young Uruguayans like a coast of freedom and pleasure that had no end and that began as soon as they crossed Argentina. The president of the club, Daniel Juancontract a double turbohlice Fairchild FH-227D of the Uruguayan Air Force to make the dreams of his players come true. Between reality and desire, a mountain range. The Andes.
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There were 40 passengers and 5 crew members on the flight. At the controls, the experienced colonel Julio Csar Ferradas and his second, Lieutenant Colonel Dante Hector Lagurara. There were 19 players who boarded, mixed between family and friends. The plane took off and, as soon as it kissed the sky, the route had to be changed: A storm front over the Andean peaks forced them to stop in Mendoza and spend the night. The next day, without the weather conditions having changed much, they took flight again.
The plan was to ascend very quickly to avoid the height of the mountain range and, once this movement is completed, descend quickly to land. Not even the 29 times that Colonel Ferradas had crossed the Andes did he avoid that. The pilots, who were flying instrumentally, made a mistake in reading their position: They thought they had reached Curic and could begin the descent. But not. They were still almost 70 kilometers from the Chilean city. When they left the clouds above them and regained visibility, they were flying just a few meters from the summits. In front of them, the mountain; the situation, irreversible. And the crash, imminent. The afternoon was nearing its end when it crashed.
First one wing burst, then the other broke. The plane broke in two. The tail was thrown hundreds of meters away and so was the fuselage: those in the first part died from the impact, those in the second part slid down a slope at high speed until they stopped. For those who survived, a true frozen hell began that lasted 72 days.
Survival as a common task
The impact doesn’t matter. The mountain hits harder. The extreme cold was mixed with horror and hunger in a severe scenario that they could not locate and from which it was impossible to escape. That was beautiful and horrible, an inhospitable place that was not designed for life. The story of those who opened their eyes there, as confessed by some of the survivors many years later, It was about saying yes when the world tells you no.
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In effect, that resulted in a partnership. Food was scarce and thirst was quenched with melted snow. The group, which saw with its frozen bloodshot eyes how little by little the hope of getting out of there was falling, organized itself and began to work together. Everyone did their part, each one with a specific function that made it possible to dream of a future. But those were not the Chilean beaches, but a white wasteland, a snow desert at 3,500 meters above sea level surrounded by unattainable peaks. When they turned on a radio and heard that their search efforts were suspended and that they would not resume the mission to find the remains until February, then everything changed. They were the remains. They were left for dead.
The question of anthropophagy arrived on the tenth day. Little by little, there began to be more voices proposing to obtain the proteins that their bodies demanded from the flesh of the dead with the sole purpose of surviving. And so it was. Without killing anyone, and aware of the Catholic dilemma that they were escalating transversally, they made the bodies their food. A pact blessed by the entire group supported that decision: whoever became a corpse put themselves at the service of others. Friendship knows many ways to shine and this one, which was harshly criticized at that time, He saved 16 people from dying of starvation in the unbearable cold.
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The avalanche still remained. On the seventeenth day, while they were sleeping inside the fuselage, an avalanche fell on the plane, killing eight others. Among them, Marcelo Pérez del Castillo, the captain of the team and who had injected hope into the survivors. A meter of snow covered the remains of the airplane and they remained under that layer for three long days. Then they started talking about something crazy: escaping from there on foot. After all, before the tragedy broke out, the pilot said that they had already passed Curic and Chile had to be behind those mountains.
But what a miracle
The beginning of the end of the Andean nightmare began on December 12. Fernando Nando Parrilla, Roberto Canessa and Antonio José Tintín went out to look for a salvation that was never going to come there. The third returned three days after leaving, but the other two continued, tirelessly, with the march. Not even ascend peaks more than 4,500 kilometers high, not even realizing that behind those mountains there were only others just as high, stopped them. Ten days after leaving the plane, having left the snow behind and next to a river, they saw a Chilean mule driver. They gave him a message and the mule driver rode 80 kilometers without rest until Black Bridge to inform a group of police officers of what had happened.
Help arrived in the form of helicopters. They approached, breaking the silence of the mountain, to the endless moor, with Nando and Canessa inside the cabins. And there they saw them. A group of unrecognizable individuals, with black silhouettes against the snowy background, were making a fuss. They rescued everyone. The world echoed the feat of those survivors; of the prodigious walk of the two Uruguayans and the biblical resistance of the 16. And from the voices of the dead, may they now live in the words of the living. That had been an ascent to hell. Miracle, headlined many headlines the next day. But what a miracle.
