The tragedy of the Andes, the true story behind 'The Snow Society', the Spanish film nominated for the 2024 Oscars

Never before has hell been so close to heaven as when, on October 13, 1972, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 occurred, in which 40 passengers were traveling: 19 players from the Old Christians Club rugby team and their friends and family. When they were rescued, 72 days had passed, and for the sixteen survivors, life would never be the same.

The clouds that covered the Andes: a door to hell

It was Friday the 13th. The young people were euphoric, because for many, that was probably one of their first airplane flights, “I was in the cockpit, taking photos of that impressive mountain range, all white, it was extremely snowy.”. It had been one of the years with the most snowfall in Chile. And suddenly you see a storm front coming toward where the plane was heading,” says one of the survivors in the documentary Castaway of the Andes.

In effect, those concentrated clouds were the door to hell for the Fairchild FH-227D, the four-year-old plane piloted by Julio César Ferradas, of the Air Force, and Dante Héctor Lagurara, lieutenant colonel, who by the time they were able to realize After what had happened, they were already lost: confused by the clouds, they had turned towards what they thought were the surroundings of Curicó (Chile), to land in Santiago, and which in reality was the Andes mountain range, against which they crashed. .

Extreme cold, an avalanche and cannibalism

From tragedy, the greatest of sanity was born. There was no other, we had to survive. Therefore, despite having lost everything, and many of them having fractures and pieces of metal stuck in their bodies, the young survivors organized themselves and created a community of solidarity to help each other. “The first rule, which was never written, but could not be broken, was that it was forbidden to complain. “You didn't talk to the one who complained, you didn't give him water, you didn't feed him, you didn't massage his feet… We were all cold, we were all hungry, we were all afraid, we were all waiting for our mother.”

To protect themselves from the cold and snow blindness, the young people had to use their ingenuity: they used luggage, seats and snow to build a shelter in the wreckage of the plane, and devised a way to obtain water by melting the snow.. Additionally, using the cockpit sunshades, they constructed sunglasses to protect themselves from the white light and used the seat cushions as snowshoes.

The food thing was more complex. The little food they had, they rationed, and even took food from where there was none: they made a 'tobacco tea' with cigarettes and “We opened the seat cushions in the hope of finding straw, but we only found non-upholstery foam.” edible,” said Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, in his memoir, Miracle in the Andes, but soon, it was not enough.

The situation was only getting worse.. Ten days after the accident, they heard on the radio that they were considered dead, they were no longer looking for them.. And shortly after, at midnight on October 29, when it seemed like hell couldn't get any worse, a snow avalanche rocked the plane where the survivors were sleeping, killing eight of them.

Locked for three days inside the plane, with the corpses of their dead companions, and after a long debate, the survivors decided to eat the flesh of the corpses and put their own bodies at the service of others if any of them died.

Ten days of walking to seek help

The world had given them up for lost and there, among the mountains, hope was scarce. Two months had passed since the accident and the only way out was to find it themselves, so on December 12, 1972, the young survivors Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio José undertook the hardest route of their lives.

They prepared to survive the cold that would await them – which always exceeded their expectations, despite the beginning of summer – and made sleeping bags with the insulation from the plane's fuselage.

Vizintin soon returned to the shelter, but Nando and Canessa continued the route in search of help, convinced at times that, in reality, they were walking towards death, “We may be walking towards death, but I would prefer to walk to meet my death.” “I have to wait for it to get to me,” Parrado told Canessa.

After traveling 38 kilometers, climbing a 4,650-meter peak and walking for ten days, on December 20, encouraged by signs of human presence, they met Sergio Catalán, a Chilean muleteer, on the other side of the river, who sent them a note with a pencil tied to a stone to be able to communicate in the distance. Thanks to him, the first survivors were rescued a day later.. The day before Christmas, the rescue of the remaining eight was completed. In total, sixteen men survived the worst air tragedy in history.