The tragedy of the accident in the Andes that combined cannibalism and love is still alive

Today, at sunset in the recently begun southern summer, the 15 survivors - the sixteenth, Javier Methol, died in 2015 - of the tragic aviation accident on a glacier in the depths of the Andes and their relatives, including Methol's descendants , they will meet like every December 22.

One of them, Roberto Canessa, who together with Nando Parrado managed to leave the mountains to find help, built an immense room in his house in Montevideo as a meeting place for the group.

There will be about 150 people, and this December they will not celebrate just any anniversary: ​​it has been 50 years, half a century, since they were rescued from the Sierra de San Hilario.

The reissue of the book

(Editorial Alrevés), by Pablo Vierci, and the end of the shooting of the film of the same name that Juan Antonio Bayona is preparing for Netflix underscore that happy event, in which a group of people survived against a myriad of misfortunes and imponderables.

Without food, in sub-zero temperatures, left for dead.

Still, they accomplished the impossible.

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The voices of the miracle of the tragedy of the Andes

On Friday, October 13, 1972, the co-pilot of the Fairchild FH-227D of the Uruguayan Air Force, used for a charter flight, thought that it was near Curicó (Chile), from where it would turn and face the Santiago airport.

The clouds confused him, and he was actually flying 70 kilometers behind, so the plane crashed in the Andes mountain range.

On board were five crew and 40 passengers: 19 members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, and family, supporters and friends.

Three crew members and 10 passengers died in the accident.

The first night, due to the 30 degrees below zero and the injuries, four more died.

On the tenth day, due to an avalanche that buried the remains of the fuselage, eight more died, suffocated.

Filming in Borreguiles, at 3,000 meters above sea level, in Sierra Nevada, of 'The Snow Society'.

In the brutal collision with the peaks, the plane broke in two and the tail, with its passengers (all died), ended up hundreds of meters away.

As it fell, the rest of the fuselage bounced into the Valley of Tears at an inclination suitable for it not to disintegrate.

That was one of the few lucky moments enjoyed by the injured.

The 16 who managed to leave the Andes suffered all kinds of tribulations, they even had to resort to necrophagy, feeding on the remains of their deceased friends and companions.

Several books and four films have been born from that terrible experience, including one from Hollywood,

(1993) by Frank Marshall.

But only the writer Pablo Vierci managed to speak with the 16 survivors to form

(2008): the author had gone to school with several of the victims, his best friend died in the accident.

The prodigious book embeds the first-person confessions of the 16 in the even chapters, while in the odd ones it recounts the events chronologically.

In this 2022 edition, the new edition adds other conversations, and a letter, which Juan Antonio Bayona sent in May 2011 to victims and relatives, explaining that while documenting himself for

his film about the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, he had read

Furthermore, the title of

It comes out of Vierci's book.

In that text, Bayona explained his intention to make a film, because "when I closed the book I had the feeling that I didn't really know the story [...], that what I had read or seen before was the tip of the iceberg [...] ] and that his journey should be told on the big screen [...].

There is no better motivation to make the film than to talk about the dignity that Roberto Canessa refers to when he talks about 'the

to live the life of those who didn't have the opportunity to do so'.

According to the filmmaker and Vierci, “if they

tells what happened,

talks about what happened to them”.

The nuance is essential.

The survivors salute the helicopters that come for them on December 21, 1972, the first day of the rescue. Courtesy of editorial Alrevés (photograph of 'El País', Uruguay)

On January 10, filming of

which ended in early December at the Netflix studios in Tres Cantos (Madrid), where the moment of the accident was meticulously filmed.

In between, 140 working days also marked by the anticovid protocols.

Months ago, in October 2021, before the Uruguayan and Argentine actors traveled to Barcelona for rehearsals, they met with the survivors on the outskirts of Montevideo.

Vierci recalls that encounter: "Everywhere you looked, there were overwhelming scenes, with survivors calling the actors who played them by their own names."

If 'They live!'

tells what happened, 'The Snow Society' talks about what happened to them”

Three fuselages were assembled in Granada, which were later transferred to Madrid, with which Bayona has come to command three units simultaneously from its control post.

Netflix trusts

and it will be one of its bets for the 2023 awards season, in whose second semester the film will be released, a meticulous material and human reconstruction of what happened.

Not only has it also been filmed in the Andes (August 2021) and Montevideo, but Bayona has climbed the Valley of Tears twice.

Photo taken the first night of the rescue, in the plane's fuselage on December 21, 1972. Courtesy of Editorial Alrevés (photograph of 'El País', Uruguay)

Last Monday, by video call from Montevideo, Vierci explained: “Jota [Bayona] achieved trust with that letter, because he is the last link in a choral story.

On Instagram yesterday he wrote a phrase from Spielberg: "If someone connects with the depths of one, he is connecting with the whole world."

It gives the survivors peace of mind that it will reach layers and layers of depth of the human being.

And yes, it will be a complex film, because there are many characters and each one lived their own process”.

We must embrace the living and the dead.

“It is a work on the ledge, not only of the Andes, but of life and death, of reality and unreality, what we are and what we want to be.

Jota brings emotional honesty.”

The writer, who has written alone or with Canessa several times about the accident and its consequences, also ascended the Andes and reached 3,500 meters up to the Valley of Tears, between the Tinguiririca and Sosneado volcanoes.

“Jota asked me in Granada if I felt loneliness, abandonment on that shoot.

It's impossible to feel like them, who found out when they repaired a small radio that they were no longer looking for them because they were left for dead, and they didn't know if any of them could make it out alive.

They were alone in the cosmos, abandoned by the universe.

In his desire to give credibility to the pain, Bayona has recruited a batch of young Uruguayan and Argentine actors, who lost weight for some moments of reconstruction of the events, when the victims lost up to 35 kilos of weight.

mutual delivery agreement

For Vierci, that pact of the snow society was not only made up of the 16 who left, but also the deceased who were "part of that countdown."

“Remember there are three letters from them.

Or think of Numa Turcatti, who emptied himself into helping and who died on December 11, the day before the final expedition set out.

Surviving at any cost means knowing how much you're going to pay, or as Canessa says, 'How much do I have to humble myself?'

They made a mutual surrender pact.

But the posthumous letters are essential to understand them, since they are not rationalized, raw.

With a mixture of reality and unreality, as Gustavo Nicolich's text confirms: 'We are very well.

Nando's sister has just died."

In January 1973, Uruguayan soldiers and members of the Chilean Andean Relief Corps went up to the Valley of Tears to bury the bodies and burn the fuselage.

Before, they took some photos like this one. Courtesy of Editorial Alrevés (Photo: Uruguayan Air Force)

That reaches necrophagy.

“At that time, the concept of organ donation was in its infancy.

Today Uruguayans, by default, are universal donors.

What they do is disruptive.

They say that when they understood that necrophagy was the only solution, it became something natural”.

At the time, it was not understood.

The first confessions and the initial photos in which legs and remains of bones were seen next to the accident caused rejection in part of the world.

“I was 22 years old, and it seemed normal to me,” recalls Vierci.

“It was a way of buying time for death.

The mutual delivery pact is even reflected in writing in Nicolich's letter to his girlfriend and his family: "If one day I were to give up my body, I would gladly do so."

They become a wheel in which they are both fuel and survivors.

The muleteer Sergio Catalán, together with Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa in Los Maitenes (Chile), in his first photo. Courtesy of Editorial Alrevés (Photograph 'El País' Uruguay).

According to Vierci, the pandemic has induced a rereading of that tragedy.

“Covid has caused a global accident;

the shock of the Andes suffered only 45 people.

But both are excessive, they force new pacts, to be counter-intuitive about what they have learned, to understand that compassion and concord are at the center of the universe.

The pandemic has sensitized us to stories like this.”

For this reason, he emphasizes, “in both cases, mercy is in the heart, where the wounded is the priority.

And it's not for goodness, but, as the survivors say, when you get to the bottom, to the naked man, there is that good being.

For this reason, they always assure: 'We were never better people than in the Andes'.

And they even feel nostalgic.

Because in the middle of the tragedy, with their friends dying, they talk, strategize,

they decide the course and always take care of the wounded”.

Didn't they have a roof?

"No, out of sheer unconsciousness, because when you're young you feel immortal, because as Uruguayans they didn't know the magnitude of the Andes."

Against everything, 16 left. When Álvaro Mangino's father, who is flying to Santiago without knowing if he is alive, hears the list at the airport, he yells: "He's alive, damn it!"

Vierci goes further: “We must never and cannot forget them.

Neither to them nor to a story that does not have conclusive truths.