Crash in the Andes in 1972 | The first night was “the most terrible”

(Canelones) The first night was “the most terrible”, recalls Roy Harley, one of the sixteen survivors of the crash that occurred 50 years ago in the Andes mountain range, recounting the fear, the biting cold and the moans of the wounded.

On the evening of October 13, 1972, a military plane chartered to bring to Santiago de Chile a university rugby team from Montevideo, with their leaders and some supporters, disappeared from radar.

It is only 72 days later that we will know that the pilot of the device, caught in the fog and air pockets, managed to land on a snowy platform at 3500 meters altitude.

Of the 45 passengers on board, most of whom were not yet 20 years old, about ten died in the shock, while others succumbed in the following days. This tragic story was adapted into the hit film “The Survivors”, released in 1993.

“That night, I went through hell,” recalls Roy Harley, a retired engineer now 70, to AFP. “At my feet was a boy who was missing part of his face and… choking on his blood. I didn’t have the courage to reach out to him, to hold his hand, to comfort him. I was scared. I was very scared,” he recalls. In the morning, four other people were dead.

“We were so cold, it was so hard,” also remembers Carlos Paez, a former Uruguayan rugby player. The 69-year-old claims to have believed several times that his last day had arrived.

frozen flesh

But what was perhaps even more difficult for the castaways to accept was to hear, on the tenth day on the radio, that the search had been interrupted.

“One of the most painful things was realizing that the world was going on without us,” says Carlos Paez, now a worldwide speaker and motivational specialist.

It nevertheless made them realize that they could only count on themselves to save themselves. And that they should be patient.

Before two of them found the strength to walk for ten days in the cold and snow to sound the alarm, the survivors sought to survive first and ended up resolving to eat the frozen flesh of their comrades. dead.

A majority of us voted “yes”, says Roy Harley, explaining that before this end they had tried to swallow everything that could have fed them: leather shoe soles, cigarettes or even toothpaste.

“We were dying. When you have the choice to die or to use the only thing that remains… we did what we did to live”, explains the septuagenarian.

“Miracle of the Andes”

They were not there at the end of their sentence and had to face another dramatic episode when an avalanche buried the fuselage of the plane which served as their shelter while they slept. Eight of them died. Of the 32 who had survived the crash, there were now only 19 survivors. Three others will die in the following days.

“The avalanche was as if God had stabbed us in the back”, says Carlos Paez, who along with the other survivors had to show incredible tenacity to survive, using the debris of the plane to make hats, mittens, snowshoes, comforters and even dark glasses against snow blindness.

And then help finally arrived thanks to the two members of the group, Roberto Canessa and Fernando Parrado, who went to seek help guided by their instincts alone. At the end of their strength, they reached a river and met a man on horseback who gave the alert.

At the time of taking the plane to Chile, Roy Harley weighed 84 kg. When he was rescued, he weighed only 37. On average, the survivors lost 29 kilos, according to the archives of the private museum of Montevideo which pays tribute to the 29 missing and the 16 survivors of the “Miracle of the Andes”. .

It’s “an extraordinary story that features ordinary people”, assures Carlos Paez modestly. “In the end, life triumphed,” he says, a philosopher.