Andes tragedy was solidarity pact, says author – 03/25/2023 – Science

Fifty years ago, a group of 16 young Uruguayans starred in a story of survival that still seems to border on the unbelievable. After the military plane chartered by their rugby team crashed into the slopes of the Andes, on the border between Argentina and Chile, the boys and their colleagues and family members were presumed dead, spending 72 days trapped in the snow of the mountains , until they were rescued by the Chilean military. A new edition of the only book that gathers testimonials from all the survivors of the disaster has just arrived in Brazil, portraying from the inside the months they spent on the mountain.

The “internal” aspect of the narrative is highlighted by the author of “A Sociedade da Neve”, the Uruguayan writer and journalist Pablo Vierci. In a sense, he spent most of his life preparing to write the work. He is from the same generation of students at the Stella Maris-Christian Brothers College, in Montevideo, who participated in the rugby team and survived the tragedy.

Among the members of the group was Nando Parrado, a friend with whom he had spent ten years in elementary and high school. “Our desks were next to each other in the classroom this whole time,” Vierci told Sheet. As he was one of the few former students at the school who wanted to become a writer, Nando approached him so that they could try to tell that story together.

“But I realized that was too big for a 20-something who hadn’t published a book yet,” he explains. In addition, many of the survivors still did not want to touch the wounds left by the accident, because the 16 who came down from the mountains alive were less than half of the 45 passengers and crew who were on the aircraft at the time of impact. Many of the dead were also close friends and even neighbors of Parrado and Vierci, which made it difficult to address the issue.

Decades later, and with the experience gained from writing several reports on the subject, these barriers have diminished, and Vierci was able to sit down to talk to each of the survivors. The chapters of “A Sociedade da Neve” interweave a general narrative of the accident, the time spent at almost 4,000 m altitude in the Andes and the rescue with first-person testimonies by Nando Parrado and his companions.

“We spent years talking and recording. Each one of the statements would make up a 200-page book”, explains Vierci. “My job was to transform this into small chapters. And the most interesting thing is that, when I show them the text, they immediately recognize themselves there, although the text is a condensation of mine. It’s almost as if we were one.”

Of the 45 people on board at the time of impact (caused by a route error crossing the Andes), 33 survived the first impact and five more died on the first night. Eight more were killed by an avalanche that covered the entire fuselage of the plane, where they had improvised shelter, days later.

With practically no food, trapped in an environment of perpetually negative temperatures where there was only snow and rock, the group was forced, not without much initial reluctance, to feed on the flesh of the dead, preserved by the cold. “Survival cannibalism” was the aspect most explored by sensationalist reports, but Vierci points out that the “pact of solidarity” between the group’s members was much deeper.

“You can think of it as an experiment”, compares the writer. “What happens if you throw dozens of people, many of them seriously injured, into one of the most inhospitable environments in the world? Will something like many post-apocalyptic stories, like ‘Mad Max’, emerge? the answer was ‘no’ — it was just the opposite”, he sums up.

Discovering that physical contact was one of the few things capable of maintaining some warmth in that extreme environment, the flight survivors even spent hours massaging the hands and feet of injured friends so that they would not gangrene. Or, during walks to try to find a way out, when they didn’t have the shelter of the plane to spend the night, they spent the morning slapping each other on the back to get the blood circulating.

Young men in their first or second year of medical school would go to great lengths to try to heal fractures or even simple operations on the wounded. Others managed to improvise goggles and snowshoes, sewed waterproof sleeping bags from the plane’s ventilation ducts, learned how to use reflected sunlight to melt snow and produce water. Prior to that, many of them had never even seen snow in their lives.

Rather than a do-it-all, it was cooperation and compassion that allowed them to survive this long, says Vierci. Learning from the disasters of two previous expeditions, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa managed to cross a 4,600 m mountain (named Mount Seler by Parrado himself, in honor of the boy’s father) and, after about ten days of walking, managed to ask for help to a Chilean drover.

Despite the horrors of the disaster, several of the survivors recall the transformative aspect of the experience. Many mention the spiritual transformation they underwent in the Andes, largely linked to the ability to give themselves to others in an absolute way. “Some speak of the ‘God of the mountain’, which is completely different from any religious experience they could have on the plain”, says the writer.

For Vierci, the story of the disaster must not be forgotten anytime soon. “What happened is so exorbitant, so out of the ordinary, and at the same time has such great potential to be applied to the lives of people who learn about it, that the story will continue to be told.”

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