2024-01-17 10:25:04
Members of the injured rugby team.
The Old Christians Club school rugby team from Montevideo chartered a Uruguayan Air Force plane to travel on October 13, 1972 to Santiago, Chile.
They were going to play a match against Old Boys in that city.
But when the FH-227D plane, with 45 passengers, was crossing the Andes Mountains, it crashed and caused the instant death of 12 people.
Another 17 died in the following days, due to injuries, lack of food and the harsh conditions they faced.
The accident went down in history as “the Miracle of the Andes” and is portrayed in the Netflix film “The Snow Society.”
It was one of the most shocking episodes in aviation history because one of the reasons 16 survived was because they ate their dead comrades.
The group that resisted was rescued 72 days after the accident.
One of those rescued, Roberto Canessais now a cardiologist specializing in pediatric cardiology.
The BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire program interviewed him in March 2016, when he presented the book ”I had to survive: how the plane crash in the Andes inspired my calling to save lives”.
This is his testimony.
Image of Roberto Canessa in 1974.
We were flying over the Andes and it was very cloudy.
At one point, one of the flight attendants told the passengers “fasten your seatbelts, we are going to go through some clouds and the plane is going to shake.”
Sure enough, the plane began to shake.
Someone told me to look out the window, we were flying very close to the mountains.
Some people said “I don’t want to die.”
The plane attempted to gain altitude, but crashed.
I held on to my seat very, very tightly. The plane lost both wings and began to slide down the mountains.
When it finally stopped, I flew with incredible force towards a “wall” ahead.
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I hit my head hard and felt like I was going to faint. I couldn’t believe the plane had stopped.
I saw that my legs were still there, my arms were still there, I had survived.
Image of the remains of the plane after the rescue.
I could not believe it. I looked around and everything was a disaster. Some friends were dead, others were injured, bleeding, some had pieces of metal embedded in them.
I told myself that I had to get out of there, that the police were going to arrive, that the ambulances were going to arrive, the firefighters, so I went to the tail of the plane.
The plane was broken and when I went out into the snow, I felt very sad because we were in the middle of the mountains, surrounded by immense silence.
Image of the wreckage of the plane.
There were no firefighters, there was no help, there was nothing.
The pilot was alive, but had been trapped in the cockpit. They couldn’t get him out and he said “I have a gun in my briefcase.” He wanted to commit suicide. He agonized all night. We couldn’t get it out.
We were freezing because of the temperature. The next day, the most seriously injured had died. It seemed good to me, because his suffering and pain were unbearable.
For those who remained, there was only rocks and snow. There was nothing to eat and we felt very, very hungry.
There is an instinct inside you that tells you that you have to eat something. So we think about the leather of the shoes or the straps.
We began to chew the leather, but we felt that it was poisoning us, because it had many chemicals. So we had nothing left.
human experiment
Someone at one point said, “I think I’m going crazy, because I’m thinking about eating our friends’ bodies.”
They responded that it was crazy, that we were not going to do it, that we were not going to become cannibals.
Canessa and the other 15 survivors had to walk 11 days through the Andes to be rescued.
At that time, I was a medical student and I saw meat, fat, protein, carbohydrates.
It was very difficult for me to invade my friends’ privacy and cut off a part of their bodies. He felt that in some way he was violating his privacy.
someone said “Well, if Jesus Christ said at the Last Supper ‘take my body and my blood’, that’s fine.”.
But for me it wasn’t the Last Supper. Although then I wondered what I would “think” if I were one of the corpses.
I would be proud that my body was used by my friends for a living. Today I feel like I have a part of my friends inside me and I have to be grateful for their memory.
Eating the bodies—to live long enough to be rescued—was harder for some than others.
I often think it was like a human experiment. Then it became common to do so, to share the meat among the survivors.
The story of the accident and the 16 survivors – who appear in the photo at an event for the 40th anniversary of the tragedy – inspired 16 books and several films.
Solidarity
The families (of the deceased) supported us, they didn’t care what had happened to the bodies, they cared about what had happened while they were alive.
It’s funny because in this story I think there are two versions. The way we lived, eating corpses, wasn’t the hardest thing.
People say “ah, you survived because you ate the corpses”, as if it had been a magic formula.
In September 2010, a group of survivors of the plane crash visited the relatives of the 33 Chilean miners trapped in a mine in northern Chile. They raised a Uruguayan flag next to the 33 flags that represented the workers.
But eating the bodies was just buying time. We survived because we were a team, we worked together, we helped each other.
We survived because we left the mountains, walking, for 11 days.
One of the things that helped us interact was that we were a group, we had grown up together.
The only thing we had was life and you said “I’m going to stick with this and see what happens, against all the odds.”
When I was in the mountains and saw my friends dead, I knew I could be next and I realized how fragile the line was between life and death.
So since then I enjoy living more.
*This article was originally published in 2017 and was updated following the release of “The Snow Society.”
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