Into the Mountains: The Extraordinary True Story of Survival in the Andes and its Aftermath 9781910649411

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PEDRO ALGORTA

THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE ANDES AND ITS AFTERMATH

On 22 December

1972, the world

discovered that sixteen of the fortytive passengers of the Uruguayan Air Force plane, that had crashed in the Andes seventy days earlier,

were still alive. Nobody could quite overcome their astonishment. Without tood, living in extreme temperatures, facing all kinds of adversity, and with no hope of a rescue, they did the unimaginable in order to survive. Pedro Algorta has never spoken of his experience in the Andes, because what happened on the mountain was, for him, a private matter. In this book Into The Mountains he breaks

his silence of more than 40 years

and gives a firsthand account of

one of the most incredible stories of human survival and team spirit. His testimony is invaluable for people and organizations who have their own challenges fo overcome.

For more information, please go to www.intothemountainsbook.com or scan the QR code below:

PEDRO ALGORTA

gatas NAO THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE ANDES AND ITS AFTERMATH

Published by LID Publishing Ltd

One Adam Street, London. WC2N 6LE 31 West 34th Street, Suite 7004, New York, NY 10001, US

[email protected] www.lidpublishing.com

BPR GS Business Publishers Roundtable

www.businesspublishersroundtable.com

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the publisher of this book.

© Pedro Algorta 2016 © LID Publishing Ltd. 2016 Translated from the Spanish by John Guiver Printed in Great Britain by TJ International ISBN: 978-1-910649-41-1 Cover and page design: Caroline Li

PEDRO ALGORTA

NTU TH JUN TAINS THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE ANDES AND ITS AFTERMATH

LONDON MADRID MEXICO CITY NEW YORK BARCELONA

MONTERREY SHANGHAI BOGOTA BUENOS AIRES SAN FRANCISCO

For Noelle, who has always been there,

jor my mother, who waited for me, and for my children and my grandchildren, who would not be in this world

uf I hadn’t escaped the Andes.

INDEX Prologue Part One |

From the heart of the mountains

15

2

Life on the mountain

44

3

Let’s go, let’s go!

73

4

We had given you up for dead

Of

5

A birthmark on my shoulder

120

Part Two 6

Reflections forty years on

159

¢ Memory

Lay

¢ My conversations with Read

lol

¢ Write a book, plant a tree, have a child

164

¢ Our daily work

168

¢ Leadership and strategy

171

¢e Some words about Shackleton

177

Epilogue

182

Acknowledgments

190

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Prologue ast summer I visited Nando at his home in Punta del Este to ask him to read my manuscript and write a few lines for the back cover of this book. Nando said that he would be happy to read it, and if he liked it he would gladly contribute some words. After a friendly and pleasant reunion he showed me to the front door to say goodbye. As he walked in front of me I saw his tired and skinny legs and I shuddered to imagine those same legs taking giant strides through the mountains. I was taken aback to see some ugly scars around his calves and heels. I didn’t know that Nando had injured his legs as he walked out of the Andes and I imagined that the wounds had been sustained some time later. “How did you get those injuries? Was it from your motorbike, or did you have a car accident?” I asked disconcertedly, looking at his injuries and seeking the confirmation that would put my mind at ease. “No, Pedro, I got them in the mountains,” he answered.

I was stunned. To find out about these wounds forty-two years after the fact moved me profoundly as I imagined him walking out of the mountains with Roberto, the two of them desperate and wounded, at the limits of their strength, searching for a way out for themselves and for us. I knew it had been a monumental feat, but to do it with bleeding wounds on his legs added even more

merit to something that was already beyond words. I have no scars from walking through the mountains for ten

days, but I did spend seventy days living quietly, struggling to survive. With the passage of time, as we gradually lift the protective veil that covers us, our wounds appear and, as with Nando, they

manifest and magnify what we experienced in the Andes. KOK OK

“You’re not going to write yet another book on the Andes story! Hasn’t everything already been said about the subject?” my brother Santiago asked me when he found out that I was working on this project.

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Yet another book? Yes, this is another book about what happened to us in the Andes. I am writing it because I believe that not everything has been said, and I feel that I have more to tell. What hasn’t been told is how I lived my seventy days in the cordillera and how, later, I carried my mountain into my personal life; but I

want to tell it as it makes sense to me. I want to leave my testimony and reflections written from the perspective of over forty years. It is important to me to give my personal view of those days, of the day-to-day struggle to survive, and how it was that, with difficulty and a lot of hard work, we

were able to build that survival machine, our collective body in the mountains. I am doing it because I enjoy telling it, because it does me good. In fact, writing it has allowed me to connect with the mountains again, and has evoked memories of the accident, of the important decisions, of the daily fight for survival and the small day-to-day routines, and of Nando and Roberto’s final trek while we waited in

the wreckage of the plane. of my father searching for our exit from the Andes, end, I've realized that the

I also get emotional about the thought me without hope, and the memory of ready to face other challenges. In the mountain still accompanies me, stays

with me, it moves and continues to stir me. But it happened in the

past, and I have learned to live with it; it doesn’t bother me, and I have been able to live my life normally even though I sometimes become emotional and it reminds me that it’s still there. | am also aware that our story impacts many people, and hearing it helps to put their own mountains into perspective, and gives them the strength to overcome their own adversity. In these sixty-two years of life and forty-something years of second life, I have pondered over many things related to this event that’s so meaningful to me. Everything is in this book, often in an explicit form but mostly floating between the lines, as is the case with a testimony narrated from the heart. My diminished and limited memory of what happened in the Andes is also the most difficult thing to resolve, what remains a 10

Prologue mystery. Why did I survive instead of some of my brothers from the mountain who were much better prepared, or who later in life could have made much more important contributions? What is the force that allowed us to live one day more and carried us to the end? How was it that we acted to form a real team when each person was ultimately focused on their own survival? Where is the mountain in my life today? Where are the scars from the decisions we made in order to live? Where is the unresolved grief for my friends who

didn’t return? How were we able to withstand so much stress?

Some of these questions have the beginnings of a response, and others don’t because I myself don’t know the answer. My experience in the Andes was an especially extreme and

difficult time; a time of much hardship, of pain and uncertainty, a subdued existence touching the most basic manifestations of life, living with death, and surviving instinctively, almost without noticing it. My life after the Andes was different, full of opportunities and achievements, with a beautiful family and good jobs, where I’ve not had to give up anything in order to grow and prosper. But

also a life with other mountains, where the life experienced in the

Andes served to teach me that in the presence of new mountains one has also has to just start walking. Because these are not two conflicting lives. They are part of the same one. ‘Today, with more perspective, I am trying to integrate them, to form a synthesis, to acknowledge that I have lived them and cannot separate them. The memories, from a distance of more than forty years, are fuzzy, confused, and basically, the images that remain are often mixed with things I’ve written or said later. ‘Time and our lifetime experiences have erased the boundaries and contours of our memories. ‘he wounds have healed, but we have had other experiences that have created new wounds over the ones we already had. Sometimes, the scars are so many that we cannot identify them. The good thing is that I am not haunted by the memories and the old ghosts don’t scare me. It’s already in the past. But now, when I look back and join the dots, from what we were to what we are, the story takes on new meaning.

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Obviously this book is not a novel or anything like that; it is my story, the story of my life, the one that allows me to make sense of things. It is the story of my survival in the Andes, and what I did later with the mountain on my back. It is my struggle to lead a normal life with the mountain moving around in my backpack. But it is not the only story of the Andes. In fact, each one of the sixteen survivors has their own story. This is mine. KK ok

A year has already passed since the first edition of this book was published in Argentina and Uruguay. The reactions roused by my book have exceeded all my expectations. I have received thousands of emails from readers who want to tell me about their experiences, their feelings, or what they were doing when they first heard about the accident. It has been an intense year. I have traveled widely in those two

countries, visiting schools,

communities,

rugby

clubs, and

other institutions in order to explain, among other things, why we still have mountains to climb, to stress the importance of being alive and present every day, and to tell our story without

too many adjectives but still consistent with one’s own memory, even if that sometimes conflicts with the interpretations and

memories of others. I have felt and lived some incredible experiences, from people who have stopped me on the street simply to give me a hug, to

relatives of some of those who remained in the Andes who have

thanked me for daring to tell the story as I lived it, without sweetening it, raw, and from the heart. ‘That has compensated me for all the effort, the public exposure, and the insomnia and anxiety brought about by the publication of the book. I think that it has

all been worth it.

What has changed this past year is that not all of the sixteen of us who escaped the Andes are still alive. Our dear Javier Methol has moved on and left us. His death, at the age of seventy-nine, IZ

Prologue speaks to us, leaves us with an enormous sadness, and an impos-

sible vacuum to fill. Javier has been present in all aspects of this book, he went to all the presentations he could, and he was one of my major supporters. It is to him, ultimately, that I express my appreciation, and dedicate this new edition of my book. kK

Dear reader, this book is organized into two parts. The first relates directly to the episode in the Andes. There you’ll find

an account of what happened to us, as I experienced it. It also covers what happened to me after the rescue which, as you will see, is quite mixed up with my normal life. The second part contains some of my thoughts, organized by theme and not just as a simple testimony of my life. At the end, allow me to draw

some conclusions, with the aim of summarizing what should not be summarized.

Of not a which to the

course, I appreciate your interest in this novel (which 1s novel) about my mountain, where I could have stayed but I stubbornly wanted to leave. I hope you’ll accompany me end.

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hy was I on that plane? Actually, it doesn’t matter why. was just there. I wasn’t a rugby player, I wasn’t going to play that game in Chile, nor was that my group of

friends. I had seen most of them at one time or another at my primary school, but I hadn’t had much interaction with them. In the group there were five boys whom I considered my companions, although at the time I only regularly spent time with Felipe and Arturo, with whom I studied Economic Sciences at the Universi-

dad de la Republica in Montevideo. I also knew Coche because he was a cousin of my cousins, but I didn’t have a very close relationship with him. He was a couple of years older than me, which at the time, aged twenty-one, seemed like a huge difference. It is true that before the trip I went to rugby training, but it was only to secure my seat on the plane, to pay my dues as it were, because, although I had played rugby in high school, I didn’t plan

to continue playing in the future. In the end, it hadn’t been neces-

sary to go to the training, as there was space enough on the plane and whoever wanted to was able to travel, even people who had nothing to do with the team, ranging from close relatives of the players to people who were just taking advantage of the flight to visit relatives in Chile. The group of passengers had formed around the Old Christians rugby team, which was the team made up of Stella Maris 15

INTO THE MOUNTAINS alumni. ‘That had been my school when I lived in Uruguay. Eight years before the accident when I was thirteen, my parents, for work reasons, had started relocating to various Latin American countries, and my five siblings and I followed along. We lived in Paraguay, Chile, and Argentina, but at a certain point I felt the need to return so as to not always be a stranger in my own land. In Chile, where I lived three intense years, I had studied with the Jesuits and had started university. I had had several stints in Argentina without integrating at all, and finally I had returned to Uruguay where life was not all easy for me.

The early 1970s were difficult times and besides, as those of

you who have lived outside your country know, it is never easy to return. At that time I used to go out running in mid-winter along the rambla, the wide avenue hugging the coastline of Montevideo. Sometimes I was able to get a friend to come along, but the image I retain of those days there is of jogging alone in the cold fog of the Uruguayan winter. By changing country and university so

often, I had had to repeat a range of subjects that didn’t have

much to do with what I liked most, which was economics, mathematics, and social sciences, and I was finishing up some boring courses on accounting and commercial law. I also had a brief look into politics without getting too committed. Today, I remember my days in Uruguay before the accident as something grey and confused. I was looking for a place in the

world, with doubts and fears, and all alone. On the other hand,

the slogans from the ‘French May’ and the student movements reverberated everywhere. I was attracted to the ideas of the time, although there were many things with which I didn’t agree. Emotionally, the return to my country and student life formed a complex combination that didn’t quite convince me. Jumping from one place to another was not easy — I was returning as a foreigner everywhere. At some point I would need to decide if this was my place, if that was what I liked to do, if this was my people, if that was the thing on which I would place my bet. 16

Part One

I might have stayed in Uruguay, returned to Chile, continued

running alone at night along the rambla... I don’t know; life had other plans for me. To go to Chile for a few days had a lot going for it. It was an attractive trip. | would meet up with Ana Luisa, who had been my girlfriend in Chile and with whom I was still in contact. I don’t know what would have happened or whether we would have further complicated our lives. Also I would meet up with my classmates from Colegio San Ignacio where I had finished my secondary education; I was particularly interested in what they had to

say. Moreover, the situation in Chile was in turmoil — the socialist experiment of Salvador Allende was not going very well and I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes. But above all, this was a moment of change for me, and whatever happened on that trip, I was hoping it would be important; I was prepared for something to happen with my life. The organizers had contracted an aeroplane from the Uruguayan Air Force. They had already gone the previous year and that trip had been a success. Finally, they got the requisite forty passengers, of whom less than half were involved with the rugby

team. The rest, like me, were going to spend a long weekend in

Chile. ‘The crew comprised five air-force personnel, adding up to a total of forty-five people on the plane. We left Montevideo on 12 October, 1972. We had to spend the night in the city of Mendoza due to bad weather over the cordillera. After a long wait, they asked us to come back the next day at noon, to attempt a crossing or to return to Montevideo. Although our stay in Chile would be shortened, we could at least take advantage of that afternoon and evening to visit Mendoza, where I had already been many times on some of my other trips to Chile. My companion on the trip was Felipe and although we were totally different and didn’t share the same interests, we did study together and were friends. I don’t remember whether I had to convince him to travel or not, but in the end he was also excited lz

INTO THE MOUNTAINS about the trip. I spent that time with him in Mendoza, and we planned to share our time together in Chile. In fact, I have not been able to reconstruct our plans about what we were going to do in Santiago, where we were going to sleep, and whether or not we were intending to watch the rugby matches. Curiously, until today I hadn’t realized that I have no idea precisely what I was going to do during those days in Santiago. The memory of those plans has completely escaped me. Neither do I remember how we spent those hours in Mendoza. I have returned several times to that city but haven’t been able to recognize the places we visited, nor identify the hotel at which we stayed. I don’t remember where we ate or with whom. I do remember going to an empty discotheque, with very few people, on that Thursday night in Mendoza. We wandered through the

sleeping city and came across small groups of our companions

walking through the streets; all on the prowl, aimlessly looking for some diversion or other that we never found. The next day, Felipe and I, following our intellectual spirit, went to the Universidad de Cuyo where we met up with a very courteous professor who explained the curriculum to us, showed us around the university campus, and then drove us to the airport. He always regretted being so punctual. With a bit of luck we might have missed the plane.

As it turned out, the take-off was delayed as the crew had

still not decided what to do. They had lingering doubts because the weather hadn’t improved enough and the usual route, over the Cristo Redentor pass, was closed. However, a rickety old twin-engine plane, arriving from Chile, was able to land. Its pilot exchanged information with ours, and we exerted an irresponsible pressure on them to depart. We wanted to fly to Chile at all cost and nothing would sway us — we didn’t want to accept the possibility that bad weather over the cordillera could end our trip. It didn’t occur to anyone that it could be really dangerous to go. We were willing our pilots to dare to fly.

Part One

Having lived in Chile for three years, I had made this crossing many times. Most of those times by plane, but sometimes by train, by car, or by bus. All of them were intense crossings through spectacular and striking scenery. At that time, there was a long mountain road and the tunnel that exists today was not in use, although there was a particularly scenic rail crossing.

On several occasions I felt that our bus was going much too fast and we were in danger of plunging into a ravine. In winter and spring, with or without snow, crossing the cordillera was something special. It was often with panic and fear that I crossed the

Andes between Argentina and Chile, but always with the thrill of adventure, without ever imagining that one day something bad might really happen to me. The Fairchild 227, no. 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, was at that time a relatively modern plane. It could fly at an altitude of approximately six thousand metres, sufficient to cross over the usual Andes passes without any problem. Flying from Montevideo to Santiago, the plane passes near Aconcagua which, at nearly seven thousand metres, is the highest mountain in South

America. At the time it was a visual crossing requiring good

weather and perfect visibility in order to ensure a safe flight. Finally, the pilots decided to go ahead with the flight and cross over the Planchon pass, some three hundred kilometres to the south of the city of Mendoza. The flight between Mendoza and Santiago in Chile was not without difficulty despite being a very short flight (no more than three hundred kilometres in a direct line). The difficulty lies in crossing the cordillera. Aircraft must climb rapidly to a sufficient height to allow them to fly across the mountains and must also descend rapidly for the approach into Santiago airport.

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Fairchild F-227 No. 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force prior to departure. * OK

At first, the flight proceeded normally. We flew south until we were over the city of Malargtie, and then we turned deep into the Andes towards Chile. ‘The plane was filled with the high spirits

and irresponsibility of a group of young people who were mostly

flying for the first time; we were going to experience Chile and to play a game of rugby. At the time, I was twenty-one, which was the average age of the passengers.

I don’t remember exactly which seat I was in. I know that Felipe

was sitting next to me, but not much else. The images I retain are confused. I’ve flown a thousand times over the Andes, I’ve had good and bad flights and I struggle to identify the memories of that particular flight. Also, I have flown that exact route on other occasions, from Mendoza to Santiago passing over Malargiie, the Planchon Pass, and Curico; various times with bad weather, also with the aeroplane moving around a lot. But I mix up and confuse those images with the flight of 1972. I remember a thick, dark cloud formation

over the Andes, and the plane veering to fly into it, insensitive to the

danger it might contain. Was that the time we tried to cross them in 1972 or was it one of the other times? There’s no way of knowing. 20

Part One

The plane flew over Malargiie and then veered to the nght,

entering into the clouds. Suddenly the navigator passed by indicating that we should sit down and fasten our seatbelts as we would be experiencing some turbulence. Until then it had been no more than a simple bumpy flight. How many bumpy flights are there over the Andes? Who would think when one is so young that

one is going crash in an aeroplane crossing the cordillera? But this time the situation worsened. ‘The plane advanced deep

into the cordillera over which there was a dense and thick cloud formation. Years later, I learned that it was just when we were above the Planchoén Pass that the plane turned and started flying parallel

to the Andes. We had not been flying for the fifteen minutes needed to reach Curico. On turning prematurely, the pilots started their descent in the middle of the cordillera, believing that they were over the central valley of Chile. The plane descended and drifted into the middle of the mountains. As the clouds became thicker, we

begin to shake more and more and eventually we encountered two very deep air-pockets in which the plane fell and lost more height.

General map of the area in the Andes where the accident occurred, and the route that the Fairchild should have followed. 21

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

At some point we came out of the clouds and I could see through the window, but what I saw did not make me happy. We were flying much too close to the mountains, the rocks on the slopes were almost within touching distance and were speeding by very quickly like when a plane coming in to land approaches the runway. But on this occasion it was in the middle of the Andes. What was going on? ‘Through the mountain fog, the snow and rocks grew closer and closer as if we were going to land. I remember feeling very scared and highly incredulous. I was still confident that the situation would pass, that our expe-

rienced pilots would get us out of it; even though in that place, and at the speed the plane was going, we would not be able to make anything close to a soft landing. The pilots gave the engines full throttle and raised the nose of the plane to try to regain altitude, and then we began to shake more violently. Inside the plane, the excitement and the festive spirit had given way to silence and incredulity; panic had overtaken the passengers. Was it normal to cross the Andes like this? We couldn’t believe what was happening. Suddenly the worst happened, what should not have hap-

pened. One of the wings touched a mountain slope and it broke off. ‘The out-of-control plane dropped down and hit the mountain

again, and then there was an explosion as the tail broke away. As it detached we came into contact with the cold air of the mountains at an altitude of more than five thousand metres. With the plane in two pieces we sped downhill. Everything loose, suitcases, coats, bags, got sucked out into the vacuum and ejected into the snow. Incredible as it seems, we avoided crashing head-on into the mountain, instead we slid down a snowy slope at tremendous speed, dodging rock formations and large pinnacles of ice and snow by millimetres. I remember the noise, the shaking of the plane, the thin air, and the cold. The paralysis caused by the panic. ‘The extreme uncertainty and the immediacy of the unknown. I felt the explosion from behind when the plane split. I couldn’t think about anything. I only let myself deal with what was happening, driven 22

Part One

forward by the tremendous forces of a plane that has crashed

in the mountains and is sliding down a gully at breakneck speed with its live passengers. I don’t remember having any concrete thoughts, being aware of the approaching end, or wondering whether or not I would die; I just remember the fear, the vertigo

of the moment, the panic of not knowing where the final impact

would come from; a dizzying uncertainty. I was distressed by the sudden change of temperature, by the vacuum, by the snow coming in through the cracks in the fuselage that opened up during the descent; and there we were, unable to do anything, without

much hope, paralyzed by fear.

Finally, the deep snow that had fallen on the mountain arrested the plane’s descent. When it stopped, the entire line of seats on the right-hand side detached from their brackets and embedded

themselves into the front of the passenger cabin. Almost everyone

there died. At the end of its run, what was left of the fuselage, without wings and without tail, lay motionless at the bottom of a snowy valley. I have returned to the site of the crash and I cannot visualize the path of the plane on its slide down the slope, how it didn’t crash head-on into the rocks and irregularities of the mountain. I don’t have any explanation. I’ve seen movies that recreate the accident. I don’t know exactly how it might have looked when viewed from the outside, but I don’t believe that it was as depicted. I don’t believe that the front part of the plane was flying for hundreds of metres before landing on the glacier. It was a situation where we failed by millimetres to clear the rocky ridge, and the plane lost sustainability. The fuselage slid down the steep slope with its passengers still alive, dodging rock formations that would have killed us all. OK

After the accident there was a great silence and a strange darkness. There was no noise, just the sound of things that had 23

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

broken free in the descent as they now settled. Maybe there was neither silence nor darkness and I simply lost consciousness and just remember it this way. But from the silence and the darkness, I returned to consciousness, in the half-light, with reduced vision. Snow, twisted metal, the wounded, all mixed up together. I have often seen people walking around in shock after other accidents, not understanding what’s happening. And that’s how I was, in total shock.

Gradually, moans and cries started to emerge. I tried to sit up

— I was feeling dazed and heavy. Without understanding what had happened, I realized I was intact. I had no pain, could move all my body, and I believed I was capable of standing up. Some people were already exiting the plane. I turned and looked at Felipe; he was still sitting beside me, but he was dead, his glasses broken and a thread of blood coming from his mouth. I remember this image on turning my head to the left, in other words with Felipe to my left and with the window of the plane to my night. So I was in one of the seats on the right-hand side of the plane which had all

been thrown towards the front, in which everyone had died. How could that be? Was that really the case? I managed to unfasten my seat belt and free myself. I over Felipe’s body and stumbled out of my seat. I went the back where the plane had split in two. It was snowing with some low clouds obscuring the horizon, and I found

stepped towards outside several

friends in the same situation as me. We were not prepared for the mountains; I was wearing street shoes, moccasins, and I was

in shirtsleeves. I was totally unprepared for temperatures many degrees below zero. The contact with the cold was like a violent slap in the face. I found a coat that was lying around, and I put it on. But it wasn’t enough, the cold was ferocious and chilled me to the bone, even

though others were still in their shirtsleeves in the middle of the snow. It was evident that the shock was affecting us in different ways. Some were smoking and took refuge in those cigarettes, seeking out muted conversations with anyone willing to share their feelings of 24

Part One

the moment. I was paralysed from the fear, and I didn’t ask myself difficult questions. I wasn’t looking for anyone to blame, and at that moment I didn’t ponder the significance of having fallen into the mountains or the fact that some of our companions had died, or were badly injured. I didn’t have any awareness of the magnitude of the disaster or that we should really all be dead. I wasn’t able to think much at all. Ino longer cared why I was travelling to Chile, the

reason for my trip. I just couldn’t think about my Chilean girlfriend who, in theory, was awaiting me in Santiago, nor of my parents or friends whom I had left behind in Uruguay and in Argentina. In those moments everything else was wiped out, all that remained was me, facing the mountains, surrounded by the wreckage of the

crashed plane and a bunch of unfortunate fellow passengers.

I jumped out of the plane, and sank up to my waist in the snow. With effort, I walked over to a suitcase and sat down. “What happened?” someone asked. “We fucked up with the plane and it looks like we’re lost in the Andes,” I answered, looking at the Danteesque scene that confronted us. Everywhere was covered with white snow, and black rocks were jutting out from the mountains that surrounded us. It was a totally alien place and I could just glimpse through the low clouds the vast snow-capped peaks all around. I smelt the permeating smell of the fuel which was mixing with the cold and the hostile silence of the mountains. There we were, surrounded by our dead, dying, or badly injured friends, without adequate clothing, without food, without really knowing what had happened, and with the wreckage of the plane as our only refuge. The most clear-headed among us started to tend to the most seriously injured. Marcelo, the captain of the team, was trying to impose some order and prioritize things. I couldn’t help much; I was scared and it was as much as I could do to just follow orders. Not knowing what to do, I watched some of the boys walking among us, trying to provide answers and to help the wounded. From high on the mountain, we saw a person descending. Surely this was one of our companions who had been ejected 25

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

from the plane at the moment of impact and who was striding and stumbling down the mountain. Might he have seen us? I don’t know; we saw him descend, and we signalled to him to direct him to where we were, but suddenly he disappeared into the snow. Many days later, I found his lifeless body on one of our excursions. I don’t particularly remember the faces and names of the wounded

and the dead. If I start to remember,

scenes from the

movies I’ve seen get mixed in. I retain an image of what took place that first night, but our memories and the accounts that we ve given over the years about the accident have been contam-

inated by the accounts that others have given. I know that there were several boys with open fractures, others with pieces of their muscles cut or their legs torn, and others dead or with extremely serious wounds. They said that, like his mother, Nando had been given up for dead and had been thrown out into the snow, but,

by some miracle, he had survived. Having no memories about Nando or others is part of my protection, it makes no sense to recreate them — what I do retain is enough. But I do have images and memories that I know are my own, that have never been filmed. ‘The face of Felipe, dead, was never filmed — that image is

mine, and I hold it very clearly.

KK 3K

When daylight faded, the temperature descended rapidly and

we had to get back into the fuselage of the plane in order to pass our first night on the mountain. A short while later, when the cold was already unbearable, and the wind was intensifying, we were all inside amid twisted metal, suitcases, the injured who had not

been able to go outside, the dying, and some of the dead whom we had not been able to take outside. The sound of the wind was deafening. The snow was beating against the fuselage and the cold air was penetrating through the thousands of gaps that had been left open. We snuggled up one with another in great disorder. Not thinking too much was my main defence; I couldn’t get 26

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the measure of the catastrophe, I wasn’t thinking that I might die very soon, I was only trying to connect with my most basic vital signs, to feel that I was still alive, to try to survive that first night, to be able to sleep, to rest, hoping that this was just a nightmare, praying to be able to wake up alive the next day. ‘That was without doubt one of the worst nights, only moderated by the lack of

accurate and precise memories.

But the sun rose. Incredibly, I had survived that night. I don’t know whether I had been able to sleep. Whether I slept or not. In reality, we were in a permanent dreamlike state where there was not much difference between being awake or not. Several of those who had been moaning had now stopped and appeared to be dead. But most of us had survived and we were still unexpectedly and stubbornly alive. We began that second day hoping that they

would come searching for us. When we stepped out of the plane, the day was clear, it had light and colour, the clouds had dispersed,

and I could see for the first time the incredible landscape of the Valley of Tears, not knowing what it was nor where we were. The mountain views were impressive from this new viewpoint, from the heart of the mountains. You could see only snow, rocks, ice,

and the sky. Not a single tree, not a single plant, only that incredible silence. There was a long, steep craggy slope behind us which seemed increasingly vertical, down which the plane had slid during its descent. In the background, was a long valley over which the sun was rising, overlooked by an incredible mountain that I later learned was the Sosneado volcano. To the left, an imposing glacier of ice and rocks was watching over us, threatening from above. I had never seen anything like this. We were truly in the heart of the mountains. The air was very chilly, and when a cloud occasionally hid the sun, you could feel the cold intensely. Although there was much to do, we were doing everything very slowly. The thin mountain air was exhausting me. I had hardly any energy and was lacking oxygen. I was looking towards the valley, to the east. Because the 2/

INTO THE MOUNTAINS sun had risen there, it was the only reference point I had. Also, the mountains were lower there and that’s where the waters from the glacier would run, so I felt that that should be our way out. * OK OK

The second day also passed slowly, like so many other interminable days, without much of anything new happening. The first big task was to remove the dead from the plane and prepare the fuselage for resting and sleeping. Removing the bodies proved

difficult. ‘They were literally dead weights, and many volunteers were needed to move each one outside, pulling on some straps which we tied to them. For me, they were just dead bodies by now, and my mental state didn’t allow me to connect them to my friends. ‘The lack of oxygen had wreaked havoc and after pulling on the straps a short while, we flopped down exhausted into the snow. Little by little, we proceeded to deposit the dead outside the plane, where the snow that occasionally fell was blurring our view. I don’t recall any special emotions. I wasn’t thinking much of anything, I was well protected emotionally, and I started to work almost like an automaton, following the most basic commands of my instincts and of the person who occasionally directed the work. I was a working soldier, I felt that I had to work in order to live. Because of the intense cold, we set about looking for suitcases and opening them. Already it didn’t matter to whom they had belonged, any coat was acceptable. As well as feeling cold, we started to grow thirsty. We had to drink water, but there was only

snow and ice. We tried to eat snow but it was burning our gums.

I remember squeezing the snow until it changed into ice and then putting it into my mouth until it melted. That water I could drink. Because it was so cold at night, we would wake up with our moustaches frozen, and our hands and feet numb; even inside the plane, bottles of water would freeze and, by morning, would be cracked from the ice. During the day, there were times when the 28

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sun would warm the air and it seemed as if it was returning us to

life; on other occasions the wind would pick up or it would snow and the weather would become grey and aggressive. Those grey

days frightened me, damp and cold days in which you couldn’t see much. The fog would engulf us — we would lose our points of reference and were lost in the mountains. My companions said that I would work like an automaton and not talk much, but I can’t

remember details. I try to remember more but I can’t. If it were not for the fact that I have a bad memory in general, I would say that I’m incredibly protected from these memories. At the moment of the accident eight people died but several

more sustained severe injuries. In the course of the following days ten more died from injuries received in the accident. ‘I'wenty-seven of us remained alive, of whom three or four were injured, but the

rest were basically healthy and intact. All the crew members had died except one, the navigator, who was very concussed, all huddled-up, not very conscious, not knowing what to do, overcome by the events, and babbling unintelligible words. ‘The pilots had died after some hours of agony and remained trapped in the cockpit. Also, all the older adults on the trip had died except Javier, who

was somewhat older than us, and his wife Liliana. But Javier was

not very active, he was quite debilitated by the shock and the altitude. Liliana was in a better condition and was taking care of her husband and participating more. Several of my friends say they turned to her for comfort and understanding. I couldn’t have done so as I didn’t connect with her at all on the mountain. I did get close to Coche, my cousins’ cousin and somewhat older than me, despite not having had any interaction with him before the accident. He says that it was up there in the mountains that he

became my relative. I remember that he spoke to me affection-

ately about our mutual aunt and uncle, and I immediately felt that I had a special relationship with him. I was also mixing with Arturo, Gustavo, Roberto, and others. But above all, I was listening attentively to everything that was being talked about, scared, trying to form my own picture of the situation. 29

INTO THE MOUNTAINS I recall the vitality of Roberto, of Gustavo, and of others whose faces are fading with time. They were working a lot, leaping to and fro, ever more irascible, short-tempered, generous with the injured, harsh with the rest of us, filled with an energy that I didn’t possess. As medical students, they applied their basic

knowledge of first aid, suturing wounds, setting broken bones,

stopping haemorrhages, and binding torn muscles with bits of fabric and handkerchiefs. ‘They also confirmed the deaths of those who hadn’t managed to survive the first day and they provided advice to those of us who were still alive. Marcelo, the captain

of the rugby team and one of the older boys, burdened by feeling responsible for the trip, was our authority figure and tried to impose order, encouraging us and getting us prepared for a rescue. I’hey were already on their way to pick us up, he said.

He never thought they would abandon us or that they wouldn’t find us. I still wasn’t understanding much, it was difficult for me to make sense of it all. Without putting too much faith in his words, I began to work, to feel the necessity to work in order to recuperate. Subconsciously, I was clinging on to the desire to survive, and

being active did me good. As the days went by we entered into a routine and started to adjust to the mountain. Without much deliberation, the group was functioning and it began to structure itself around the work. The activities of attending to the injured, of making water, of cre-

ating protection from the elements, and of preparing the fuselage as a nightly refuge, served to clarify roles and present organizational alternatives. There were some who were quite unimpaired and very energetic; I still wasn’t participating much — the impact, the altitude, and the emotional shock had affected me, but I was able to leave the plane and I was beginning to function. Others still could not connect with themselves or with others, the emo-

tional impact had isolated them and they were passing their days in the half-light of the fuselage. The altitude and the crash were

affecting us in different ways. I felt that those first days passed by without much 30

going on; rather, we were learning to survive, to

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connect with ourselves. I was living them in a very subdued state, barely surviving, with my vital signs at a minimum. When the weather permitted, we left the plane and tried to warm our bodies in the sun. We spent many hours simply looking at the mountains, sleeping, and not speaking much. We had some food, some tins of jam, chocolates, small cookies; also some liquor was

circulating in those days. But I remember that everyone did what

they could. There was a common store to which we contributed all the food and someone dealt with administering it, although it was not all quite so organized. In those first days, there was enough to eat, we ate what we could, what we found, without thinking too

much. But as time passed, our provisions started to dwindle.

We weren’t eating much: what we divided among us, what someone might accidentally find hidden away in a forgotten pocket, and what one had been able to save and hide. But there was nothing substantial. Every so often, a chocolate would appear,

a packet of cookies, or cigarettes, and these were distributed among those who were there, and to whomever had the strength to complain if it wasn’t reaching them. When we were eating inside the plane, it was a bit more equitable and organized. Everyone would receive a portion. One time I found a chocolate bar that I guarded zealously. While I had possession of it, it was like a hidden treasure in my pocket. Not only would the actual eating of it provide satisfaction, but also the act of holding it and caressing it in my pocket allowed me to dream of eating it and savouring it later. But it lasted a very short time once I opened it in front of the others and had to share it with them. I already felt at that point that survival was an individual matter, I had to take care of myself, to stay well. ‘To feed myself with what I could — I wasn’t certain that anybody else would take care

of me, just as I wasn’t able to take care of others. I was barely surviving, to get out, stay in the and make

I was alive but scared. If I stayed well, I might be able and also eventually to help the others. I felt that I had to best possible condition so I could be part of the group sense of things. 3]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS * ok

‘Those first days were days of acclimatisation, of beginning the daily fight for survival. Although some died in those days, others were recuperating. Nando, Enrique, and ‘Tintin who had sustained serious injuries or suffered concussion were among those getting better.

Others

like Pancho, Alvaro,

Rafael,

and Arturo

continued with their broken legs and exposed wounds, and would drag themselves out of the plane with difficulty. I had two cuts to my legs, and another to my head, but I was progressing well and

they didn’t hurt.

We continued organizing our home, the fuselage of the plane, removing the twisted metal, making it as comfortable as possible for spending the nights there, or the days when it was snowing. I was regaining my lucidity, and I began participating more actively in what was happening, neither questioning myself, nor blaming anyone, totally disconnected from my previous life, as though it were normal for me to crash in the Andes. That was what I had,

it was my now and my all.

In the group, we solved the problems that arose as best we could, as and when they appeared. Out of our inexperience, we

were experimenting with whatever we found in order to deal with what we were experiencing at the moment. We were digging deep into our lives, into our capacity to survive, into our ingenuity. We were questioning, without answer, where we were, we were looking for ways to relieve the hunger and the thirst, to heal the wounds, to try to sleep better, to feel less cold at night. Conversations arose outside the plane while we were warming ourselves in the sun, while we were smoking the cigarettes we still had. Little by little, with the work and the activity, the murmur of life was growing louder, the group was continuing to work, to probe. I was looking at what the others were doing and I was copying them. I learned how to quench my thirst, how to make better gloves to protect myself from the cold, how to make a chocolate last longer. I learned how to position myself better in oul

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the plane, and where I should not spend the night. And likewise I was experimenting and trying new things that others were also copying. Much of the time we stayed in the immediate area surrounding the plane, without being motivated to venture much further. Our living space was just a few metres around. There were twenty-seven of us living there all together in a very limited area, with-

out much to do, gathered together on the pillows and cushions, or comfortably seated on some of the seats which we’d been able to remove from the plane. The soft snow, the unknown, and respect for the mountain kept us together, in an area of a few square metres, where the trampled snow was looking increasingly dirty and everything was increasingly messy. Occasionally, I would look at the mountain to try to figure out where we had come down, since the track made by the fuselage was still visible. You would find me looking at the track along with others, without offering much insight, seeking an explanation without really searching for it. I no longer cared what had happened as it didn’t serve any useful purpose. But above all, the common feeling was that we were expecting to be rescued. Who would think that you could crash in the Andes and no one would come looking for you? The captain of the team insisted that they would rescue us. It didn’t occur to us to think otherwise. %Kk ok

With the passing days, we were adapting to the new scenario. We were no longer a delegation of rugby players. We were some poor unfortunates who had crashed in the Andes and who had

no idea how we were going to escape from there. We weren’t

thinking or planning for the long term, we were confronting the present, looking after our most basic and pressing needs. We fought the cold by opening the suitcases and distributing all the clothing we could find, and also by keeping closer to one another in order to give each other warmth with our bodies. We ripped a2

INTO THE MOUNTAINS open the seats, we used their linings to make blankets, and we

also improvised some gloves in order to protect our hands from

frostbite. But that was short-lived, the homemade gloves would disintegrate easily and were not that useful. The reflection of the sun in the snow affected our eyes, so we improvised sunglasses with some plastic from the plane and these turned out to be

very effective, although even more effective were the unfamiliar clothes and hats that we wore over our heads to protect ourselves from the cold, the sun, and the wind.

After a short while on the mountain we began to feel very

thirsty. At that altitude dehydration occurs very rapidly, so we removed some sheets of aluminium from the plane, filled them

with snow, and put them in the sun. This allowed us to melt the snow and turn it into water. At the beginning when it was overcast, we were only able to make one litre of water a day, and that

was not enough for the twenty-seven of us that were still alive.

Fortunately, when the weather improved we had a lot of sun, the snow melted faster, and the manufacture of water was not a problem. The thaw provided as much water as necessary. Some people have told me that melt-water shouldn’t be drunk because, lacking

minerals, it is like drinking distilled water. We did drink it, and we

survived, at least we were quenching our thirst and it prevented us from dying of dehydration. But not all our inventions were successful. Many of them failed, and we didn’t make things that we should have made or which simply didn’t occur to us. For example, later, when the search planes were passing overhead, we didn’t make a fire. We could have set fire to one of the tyres of the plane. I don’t know if it would have succeeded, but at least we could have tried. I don’t understand how we didn’t think of it. Perhaps a dense black smoke emanating from the cordillera would have been a good signal to help them spot us. With time, I started to participate in some more significant conversations and activities, I was beginning to feel better. We analyzed alternatives, and we wondered from where they would 34

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come looking for us, what we would do, and what would happen to the injured. But all our conversations were in a low voice, without much conviction, basically we were continuing to hope that they would come and rescue us. Our provisions were running out and if the rescue was delayed, we didn’t know what we were going to eat, how we were going to stay alive. I don’t know how many conversations we had, I don’t remember them all. As the days passed, we began to doubt that they were going to come and rescue us, but, no matter, we were continuing to be active,

working for our day-to-day survival, hoping that something would happen. During those days, some of my companions wrote incredible letters to their families. Gustavo Nicolich, as well as my friend Arturo who was injured and suffering, wrote very poignant fare-

well letters. I have read them carefully and I’m struck by their lucidity. I could not have written them, I didn’t have the capacity for complex thought. I remember that the nights were the most difficult time. We

tried to create the best space possible for sleeping and we organ-

ized ourselves in the most orderly way we could. The plane had been left crumpled by the impact, but once we removed the seats an open space was left, albeit sloping. The usable space was not very long, it occupied only four or five windows of the plane. The

rear of the fuselage was open towards the mountain that we had slid down, but one side continued a bit further, providing a kind of canopy, like a covered porch. On the right side of the plane,

half-buried in the snow, four windows were visible. On the other

side, facing the sky, more of the fuselage remained and you could see aS Many as six windows. The cold from the mountain entered from the rear. Every night, once we entered the plane, we had to block the opening with suitcases, bags, and pieces of screen as best we could. That was hard work and by the end of the task it was almost night-time, and the darkness, the wind and the cold made it very difficult. In addition, whoever’s turn it was to sleep there spent a terrible 35

INTO THE MOUNTAINS night, plagued by cold, since they were practically in contact with the ice and the snow. Because of this we agreed that whoever dealt with closing up the plane could choose one of the most comfortable places in the fuselage. So, after finishing his work, the “wallbuilder” would step over everyone and was able to sleep in one of the best places at the front of the fuselage. We devised some hammocks made from seats that Roberto hung from the ceiling of the plane, where those who were injured and weren’t able to sleep on the floor could lie. The result was

a very practical invention. They were much more comfortable places to sleep or rest; however they were also much colder as they

were isolated. Later, I slept a couple of nights in the hammocks with Arturo. One time, during a terrible storm, I felt a chill wind in my kidneys. In addition to the hammocks, we also used some netting for bunks in the area between the pilot’s cabin and the seats, where the entrance to the front of the plane had been before the accident. This netting was originally intended for stowing luggage and

although this space was now compressed by the impact, it had

become the best place to sleep; it was dark but it was sheltered from the cold and relatively warm. I remember spending several nights there, and Enrique and Tintin also often used this space. One night I was there with Gustavo. He told me about his social work and how he had entered a building destroyed by a bomb and had rescued several people from the rubble. But up there it did not matter much, and I listened in silence. Conversations like this

allowed me to get to know my fellow adventurers.

The majority of us slept lying on the floor of the plane with our feet crossing over and resting against the chest of the person opposite. We spent each night without any hope that it would be our last one there; always cold and wet, because the water from

the melting snow ran inside the plane or froze on very cold days.

It was very important to sleep, to be able to rest, but any attempts to rest were always interrupted by the complaints or screams of someone who was feeling bad, who was stepped on 36

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and had their wounds crushed. On entering the plane we would occupy different places and we would rotate our positions.

During the nights, one problem that arose was when someone needed to urinate or when some disoriented boy simply wanted to leave. Coche relates that I once tried to get up and leave the plane in order to find my suitcase and recover some custards that I had brought along. My bag would be full of the custards, eggbased desserts that would have been extremely useful right then and there. I don’t remember it and I cannot say if it actually happened. But it has become part of the story and Coche always mentions it whenever we meet. The reality is that these custards never appeared in the plane. When someone wanted to urinate, it caused a big disturbance as those of us on the ground objected to being trodden on. Not that you could go out of the plane at night; it was very cold, and you might be blown away by the wind. People would end up urinating against the screens and suitcases that covered up the opening at the back. At some point we invented a urinal. It was a rugby ball, in which we had made a hole, which would make its way at night from hand to hand until it reached whoever had asked for it. Later, it would return in the same way until it was back at the point where it could be emptied outside somehow. I remember seeing the ball passing from hand to hand, but I didn’t use it. For several days I wasn’t able to urinate, and even less able to defecate. I think it was after a week or more that I awoke one morning with a huge pressure on my bladder, rushed over my companions, unceremoniously stepping on them due to the urgency that I was feeling, went outside and, supported by the rear exit of the plane, was able to urinate for the first time watching the sunrise on the horizon behind the Sosneado volcano. The sensation that time was terrible, I lost my balance and almost lost consciousness as a dark brown urine relieved my bladder. I felt that my whole self was flowing out in the urine. Later it was not so difficult, and as we began to drink more water, we recovered ae

INTO THE MOUNTAINS our capacity to control our bladders, and later, when we began to eat better, we were also able to defecate more easily. ‘That was the only time I saw the very start of sunrise over the Sosneado. Kook 2K

Before the accident I didn’t smoke, although I had previously done so sporadically. But there, at almost four thousand metres, smoking integrated us into the group, it was a symbol of member-

ship. Everyone did it. Some who had smoked previously would

do anything to get a cigarette. That wasn’t the case for me, but I adopted it as a habit and I enjoyed it. What was better than a break with a quiet cigarette? What better feeling of belonging to the group than smoking with my companions? In the plane we found many packets of cigarettes that someone had been taking

to Chile, and in general we didn’t go short. We also had lighters. We passed the hours smoking, watching how the cigarettes burned away between our fingers, and at the intersecting patterns of our exhaled smoke which seemed to acquire a life of their own, separate from ours. We would also smoke inside the plane; in the darkness, I would always look at the glowing tip of each cigarette that anyone was quietly smoking. Among the things that we had found was a small transistor radio — I never knew to whom it belonged. It was very small, and we could barely tune in to any radio stations. At first we would connect up antennae in order to hear better, but it was only in the early mornings that could we hear the Uruguayan stations. ‘hey were relaying news about the state of our rescue effort, which we were able to listen to on occasion. We were conscious of the turmoil our disappearance had caused, but we also understood that we had been given up for lost. With time, the accident was losing importance in the news. Nevertheless, every so often we heard news of another aircraft that had joined the search. We also heard about the consultations that our families had had with some clairvoyant, and what they 38

Part One

had said about us. I didn’t understand it, I was listening to that news, but it seemed to me that they must be referring to others, I

couldn’t imagine how a clairvoyant in some distant country could give any relevant information. But it also made me realize that we were presumed dead, that they were searching for dead bodies and for the wreckage of the crashed plane. They had given us up

for dead, and we were hearing it! One afternoon, a plane flew over us. It passed very high and

we could barely see it. Obviously it hadn’t seen us, although there was always some hope that the impossible would happen. At the height it was flying, it would be very difficult to spot

us. But the next day, we heard the sound of an engine and a smaller plane flew much lower over us. I remember it clearly.

Shortly afterwards, it returned and passed right over us, cutting perpendicularly across the trail that it had previously made in the sky. The day was bright and clear, the visibility was perfect — we

must have been spotted. All of us went out of the plane and we

tried to reflect the rays of the sun with metal sheets so that they would see us. We ran around wildly, we jumped, we signalled, we shouted. I could make out clearly that it was not a passenger

plane, it was one of the planes that was searching for us. Amid much uproar, the plane moved its wings. We believed it was a signal, it implied that they had seen us and that soon they would come and rescue us. That afternoon I was in high spirits, the next day we would be rescued. We began to talk of our return, making plans again for resuming our lives. In our joy we relaxed, and we were more than generous to our tired and hungry bodies. ‘That night the rations were more abundant and we used up all our provisions. It wasn’t important, we had been seen, and the following day they would

come for us.

As soon as we got up the next day, we switched on the radio hoping to hear the news of an immediate rescue, while trying to predict how they would come to rescue us... in helicopters? With sleds? With dogs? But to our dismay what we in fact heard 39

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

was that the plane hadn’t seen us and that the search had been suspended. Due to the bad weather and the negligible possibility that we were still alive after so many days, they were postponing the search until well into summer when the weather and the thaw would allow them to locate our remains. It was terrible news, news that we didn’t want to hear. Several

were mentally devastated including the captain of the team who had put all his strength into maintaining the motivation of those hoping for a prompt rescue. But now it was clear that they were not going to come and rescue us, we had to start doing something

differently, we were going to have to survive and get out of there on our own. OK ok

The news did not affect me very much, I didn’t have the capacity to process it. It was news that came from a distant place. I had already grown used to the idea that on the mountain I would have to live day-to-day, and we had already survived ten days. We had to continue like that until it was no longer possible,

but in the meantime, we had to keep on doing things to stay alive. The main problem was that we had run out of supplies; the chocolates, the cookies, the bottles of spirits, the tinned tuna...

nothing was left. But if we wanted to live, we had to eat something. I listened to someone say that we would have to feed on

our dead companions. It seemed quite logical, it didn’t shock me. I was hungry, but it wasn’t the hunger of not having eaten for a whole day or two, nor the desire for a good lunch. Mine was the hunger of debilitation, a hunger that doesn’t let you think of anything else, a hunger that feels as if you are going to die in a short while if you don’t eat. An animal hunger, a hunger of the necessity of regaining strength. The most basic and vital hunger. A hunger that made us think compulsively about eating anything, no matter what, anything digestible, to return some of the energy that was dwindling hour on hour, transforming us into 40

Part One

increasingly weak and helpless beings. Some talked of eating the seats, the leather from the suitcases, the shoes, the toothpaste. We tried them all, but it was no use, and we gave up with disgust and disdain. There began to be talk in small groups about the possibility of using the dead as food, and we became convinced that there could be no other way out. There were a thousand rationales. Everything was said. Someone explained that we needed proteins and that our friends were, in reality, no longer our friends, they were gone and only their bodies remained. It was the only source of food that remained and they were offering it to us. Oth-

ers said that if they themselves died, they would want those who

remained to eat their bodies in order to stay alive. At some point I said that if Jesus Christ on the cross had given his life for us, and afterwards we ate his body in the sacrament of communion, we should take it that our friends had died so that we could continue living and we had an obligation to use their bodies as food in order to live. That it was an act of love, of giving their life for others. In dying, they were giving their lives for us. Ultimately, the Catholic sacrament of communion is just that, eating the body of Jesus Christ in order to welcome God and eternal life into our hearts. I don’t recall there being many objections. At least not voiced out loud. Neither do I remember how long the discussions lasted. I do remember the final discussion between everyone inside the plane. But we were not convinced by the rational arguments, we were convinced by our stomachs, by the hunger and weakness that we all felt. Finally, without reaching a consensus, a group of us, without formalities, went out to the front of the plane, just below the cockpit, where we had put the dead, and we took one

of the bodies that we had left there. I recognized the body, I knew who it was, but I felt nothing at that moment, he was gone, and I had to carry on. I was hungry and I wanted to live. With a piece of glass, we made a deep cut in one of the thighs, and we extracted some small strips. The meat was white from A]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

the cold. We placed it on top of the fuselage, and then started distributing it among everyone who was there. We ate with curiosity, with emotion, breaking a taboo, knowing that we were doing something significant, but that it was all we could and should do to continue living. Rational explanations only gave a framework for something that was born deep inside us. We had no need of further justification. We were hungry and we wanted to live. It was the only thing we could do. Afterwards Coche asked me: “Did you eat?” I said: “Certainly, it’s nothing strange, you have to do it.” He replied: “I find

it disgusting.” I didn’t understand how he could feel revulsion when it was the only thing we had to eat. I never felt disgust, I never asked myself if I was doing something wrong, I just wanted to live. Most of us started to celebrate and enjoy the food and the renewed act of eating. However, there was a small group, including Coche and Javier, for whom it was very difficult, and who initially wouldn’t eat. But little by little everyone began to do it. I don’t think anyone was convinced by a rational argument. ‘They were convinced by their own hunger, a hunger that screamed out

the question of what they were going to eat in order to overcome their exhaustion and weakness.

For me, it wasn’t at all difficult;

I immediately felt the energy flowing back into my body and was conscious of how necessary the food was in order to live.

Explanations were not necessary, I just wanted to live.

42

Fa Ca LAU CLOT XR (CA CTL each breath, and feeling the beat of my pulse, increasingly weak ~ that was about all I had left in me. Memories of my family in Argentina or those who were waiting for me in Uruguay were disappearing; also the purpose of the trip. [ didn’t remember clearly why I was going to Chile, what I was doing on the plane. ‘These TOGO ORCL RCL LOL LL LEK MOCO CLL was happening at that moment.

Where I was, what I felt, how

I was going to feed myself during those hours. If I hved through those hours, [ would be able to live through the ones that followed.

In the end, there was nothing left except oneself’ And when everything had fallen away, when I was left on my own, when L could no longer grasp anything external, I grasped the only thing that remained, the will to lve, the necessity to carry on lwing, my TOT

A

It 1s what remains, and it is the foundation to ensure that everything doesn’t just collapse and we give up the struggle. That istinct to survwe, that last rock to which we cling, our source of energy, which drwes us, which makes us lwe.

That rock, that breath of life, that Holy Spunt, wind and frre, vital energy, there it was, in the centre of my being, as the last thing LLG While I had life, it was worthwhile enduring what we were TORO

1

2.

Lite on the mountain

nce we began eating the bodies of our friends, we felt ()

that we

had

crossed

a line, the line between

life and

death. Although the decision to eat was not difficult for me, I initially did it with some unease and with much curiosity. But I never questioned it, I always felt that it was the logical thing to do in order to survive. | remember that we were initially eating small amounts. We were cutting only red meat in strips and we would leave them on top of the plane so that they’d dry in the air; later we’d divide them up among ourselves. After a while we became accustomed to it and we began to eat more and more at a time. We had nothing else, everything revolved around the food, it was what allowed us to continue living. Little by little we lost our sense of shame and our unease and we literally plunged into the bodies of what had once been our friends. I don’t believe that the decision we made to eat the dead had, in the end, been

a difficult one.

With the new food, we felt more alive, we had a little more optimism, we simply didn’t think we were going to die, we felt that we'd be able to go on living, and that we would eventually be able

to get out of there, and for that we had to stay alive and keep as

well as possible. We redoubled our efforts to escape from the mountains. Marcelo, the captain of the team, who had been so important 44

Part One

in the early days, had lost some of his influence. We no longer believed that anyone was coming to rescue us; just waiting would

get us nowhere. We saw new challenges — it was not just a few days that we would have to endure, perhaps we would have to wait until the arrival of summer when the search would be resumed. Or eventually a group of us would have to walk through the mountains, for several days, before being able to reach some place and ask for help. But that required us to continue to do what we had started doing; to feed ourselves as well as possible, to explore our surroundings, to prepare for an expedition, to be able to walk through the mountains. And now we were eating, and we felt that we would have food for a good few days to come. We organized some walks. One fresh and clear day, it was my turn to go. I don’t remember with whom, probably Gustavo and Fito, or also with Numa. I couldn’t pinpoint chronologically exactly when it was and, in fact, this walk doesn’t appear in the records of the accident, but I’m sure that I did it since I still retain

very clear images. Physically I was well, I had no injuries, but above all I was restless to explore, to know where we were, | felt an enormous curiosity and I wanted to live. I remember that we started off uphill quite fast. But after a short while, the mountain became steeper and the sun was mak-

ing the snow soft and it became increasingly difficult to make pro-

gress. I had brought along some cushions which I strapped to my feet in order to increase the contact surface with the snow. But it made it more difficult to walk, the cushions became

soaked and

were coming off me, and they only worked for a while. Finally I

got rid of them and continued the hike, my feet sinking into the

snow. It was an exhausting walk. We found pieces of the fuselage and some seats scattered around the area. We weren’t able to find much else. We sat on them and smoked, looking across to the horizon, vast and without life. From above, the valley looked majestic. ‘The silence was striking. We were in a horseshoe. To our left was an imposing glacier with its vertical walls always in shadow, threatening. The wall of ice, A5

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

rocks, and snow was irregular and multi-coloured, and projected intimidatingly over the valley. There was always a cloud that hung over it. It seemed frozen and fragile, on the verge of collapsing over us. If it fell, it would be the end of us. In truth, no-one dared to venture close to that wall of the glacier. The vertical part of the glacier was towards the west, to the left of where we were, in the direction of where Chile had to be. The north and the south were bounded by mountain slopes covered with snow. The horseshoe was closed to the north, where

a rock formation blocked the way, but we could see that there were more horseshoes with more glaciers that were feeding a valley which would turn into a river flowing down to the east. There to our right, the valley opened up, and an imposing mountain, which we later learned was the Sosneado volcano, rose up at the far end, blocking the way, suggesting that this was not the way

out. But that was east, Argentina was in that direction; we were

in a valley that opened towards Argentina, inviting us to follow it along, but the valley ended in a huge distant mountain that rose up and blocked the way.

Meietoaeie tein >

Neco Point

of

nee erarel

shine

Aerial view of the Valley of Tears where the fuselage lay after the accident. (Photo credit: Daniel Bello from Re Viven Group) 46

Part One

Before dying, the pilot, who had managed to live for a few

hours with the control panel embedded in his chest, had said that we had “passed Curico”. Curico is in Chile, so if we had

passed that town, we must be on the Chilean side. Chile was at the other side of the glacier that rose like a wall to the west. One of the hypotheses that we considered was that the valley turned

to the west, and that it would lead us out to Chile. I wasn’t very

convinced, but in our disorientation, anything was possible. From high above, the wreckage of the plane was barely visible. We saw the fuselage and my companions in misfortune as tiny beings moving around slowly, barely a speck in the vastness of the

mountain, invisible to a rescue plane. The fuselage was resting in

the middle of the valley. ‘Today we know that it was lying on the snow-covered bed of a glacier, an imposing mass of slowly-shifting ice that forms crevasses and keeps moving. We didn’t appreciate that at the time. We were only on the snow, we never saw the crevasses and the ice. In fact, a hundred meters below, the glacier collapses over the valley. Luckily, those who later walked in that direction did so along the side of mountain and not down the middle of the glacier; it would have been the end of them. On that particular walk we turned back after a while without finding anything significant to report. We smoked, we rested a short while, and we returned to the plane. We didn’t find much to say about our excursion except for the immensity of the moun-

tains and the relativity of the distances. We believed that we had

walked and climbed a long way, but we had barely moved away from the plane. Days later, another expedition set off. It comprised Gustavo Zerbino, Gustavo Nicolich, and Numa (my brothers of the mountain have corrected me and have persuaded me that it was Daniel Maspons and not Gustavo Nicolich who made this excursion with Gustavo Zerbino and Numa. In my memory, it had always been Gustavo Nicolich, but it is worth correcting in honour of his memory). [hey started to climb up the same wall that we had climbed a few days before. ‘They climbed to search for the same things, for 47

INTO THE MOUNTAINS aircraft debris, and for the missing bodies that we believed were still up above; but more than anything, they were searching for information about where we were, what we would be able to do, in what direction we could escape. That day was long, and when night came, they had not returned to the plane. We thought the worst, probably they had died, been injured, or got lost on the mountain; but we didn’t go out searching for them, that was impossible, and it was already night-time so we carried on with our routine. We entered the plane, we settled in, we

said our prayers, we ate, and we thought briefly about our friends who hadn’t returned. Where were they? Had they died? But it was night-time, and no one lost sleep thinking about them. We had grown used to not letting ourselves get carried away by emotions that didn’t help much, and to accept death as a possibility.

On the following day, the sun had barely risen when we heard some noises and some shouts. It was them. ‘They were alive. ‘They had slept outside, exposed to the elements. ‘They didn’t say much, they were shattered. ‘They returned with their eyes burnt by the sun, their hands stiff from the cold, the skin of their faces weather-beaten. Exhausted, but alive. They weren’t able to say much. They had passed the night enduring extreme temperatures but they had stayed alive by sharing body heat, lying one on top of another, hugging one another and pummelling one another to keep their circulations going.

What they had to tell didn’t amount to much, they hadn’t seen anything, only some more debris from the plane and the dead bod-

ies of those who had been thrown out onto the mountainside at the time of the accident. But the most valuable thing was that they had spent a night outside on the mountain; they had made it. Perhaps some time later, with warmer temperatures, with better protection from the cold, and when we were better nourished, we could spend more days, perhaps three or four, in a hike that, though improbable, it would perhaps be necessary to get out of there. Kk

A8

Part One

Not many days had gone by since our friends had spent the night out in the open and it became increasingly clear that we would have to walk out of there. The limited food, the knowledge that they were not coming to search, and the confirmation that we were able to spend a night outside, all served to reinforce the idea

that we had to organize an expedition to get off the mountain. The idea of holding on and hoping for a rescue had lost momentum, the news that the search had been suspended had had a tremendous effect, and even though the night out in the open had been difficult and the party said they wouldn’t have been able to bear more than one night like that, things were clear. Better prepared, we might be able to endure however many nights were necessary to get off the mountain. We had to choose who our expeditionaries would be. Clearly I

would not be one of them, the rugby players had greater physical

strength and some of them were mentally much stronger than others. But although I wasn’t going to go on the first expedition, I still felt I had to stay in the best possible condition. Nando, who had lost his sister and his mother in the accident, was recovering and looked at the mountain with a single fixed idea in mind. He wanted to go. Roberto, Gustavo, Fito, Nicolich, and ‘Tintin were also in good shape and they wanted to be in the group. I suppose there were others, but I don’t remember who else was considered. Several of my brothers of the mountain today say that we had a sort of selection process to see who would be part of the expedition. I don’t remember that. There was a natural selection process in which Nando and Roberto, due to their remarkable energy and attitude, would be part of the group. Numa wanted to go but he had become somewhat disoriented from the night spent out on the mountain, and he had also received a knock on one of

his legs, which was not improving, so in the end he ruled himself out from taking part. Carlitos was not up to that sort of activity. Neither was Fito. Gustavo had damaged his eye-sight in his previous outing, and Roy was growing increasingly weak. Tintin had recovered very well, and would be the third expedition member. 49

INTO THE MOUNTAINS % OK OK

One afternoon at the end of October it started snowing and we had to rush to get ourselves inside the plane. It continued snowing the following day, so we still didn’t leave the fuselage. It wasn’t so bad, there were twenty-seven of us in the plane and we had arranged things so that we could all sleep with some comfort. Arturo and Rafael were in the hammocks, others slept in the nets near the cockpit, the majority on the floor of the plane, talking

softly. Every so often the tips of cigarettes would light up, and we would indulge in quiet conversations. ‘There wasn’t much to do

during those days, just ponder how we were going to get out of there and what we were going to do to stay alive in the mountains. On the evening of the third day of not leaving the plane, after finishing our prayers and conversations, I was trying to sleep. I remember that I had my hand close to my face, when suddenly I heard a strange noise in the mountains, an explosion of the like we had never heard before; then I felt a tremor, a strange sound

that grew louder and within seconds tons of snow fell on us.

We had been hit by an avalanche. An avalanche like the ones we'd seen previously but which had never got close to us until then. The snow covered the whole plane, engulfed it completely, and entered through the back of plane that was open to the mountain, sweeping in the bags and suitcases that had covered the opening. Literally, the mountain had fallen on us, but it wasn’t the large serac overhanging the west end of the valley — that seemed very far away and was still there — we were engulfed by the mountain

down which the plane had slid, the one we had tried to climb on several occasions.

I was totally buried. The snow was soft and I could move but I couldn’t sit up because of the weight of it on top of me. Fortunately fresh snow is porous and allows air to get through, so I could inflate my lungs and my stomach and generate a space between the snow and my body that allowed me to keep breathing. Slowly, with great difficulty, but still breathing. 50

Part One

But the snow quickly froze, so that the air could no longer get through to my lungs. It became impossible to breathe. I made an attempt to get out, I tried to move, but it was increasingly difficult; I couldn’t get out of my tomb. In the end, I felt very tired and I began to surrender to sleep, nothing more was possible. Without

much thought, I started to drift off into a great peace, very tired,

closing my eyes. I felt that I was simply falling asleep, with a great peace of mind, I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t see my life flash before me, nor did I have hallucinations, I just felt that I was slipping away. And I relaxed. But when I was practically asleep,

when I was almost gone, someone removed the snow from my

face and suddenly the air returned to my lungs and, with that, the strength and the will to continue fighting to live. I tried to move, to get out, but I couldn’t, I could only breathe a little, and

so that’s how I stayed, tenuously breathing so as not to die. Above, those who were free were moving from side to side, trying to uncover their friends who were trapped by the snow. With all this moving around, I got covered up again, but this time, with the hand that had been close to my face, I was able to

keep the snow out of my mouth and to continue breathing. Not much, just a little, but enough to keep me alive. Finally, one of my friends, I’ve always thought it was Roy although he now denies it, uncovered my face, then my whole head, then they released me down to my shoulders, then my waist and finally I was able to get out from under the snow. Those were the worst days that I remember. Certainly the plane crash and the moments that followed must have been terrible. But I don’t have such clear memories of those, I can’t recon-

struct them as I can the time of the avalanche and what followed. Not only had the aircraft been completely buried by the avalanche, but the snow had also entered and now occupied at least two thirds of our living space. That had prevented the fuselage from being crushed or from rolling downhill since it had kept it firmly rooted to the ground — but it had taken eight of our friends. Nineteen people were left alive. 2]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Among the dead was Marcelo, the team captain, who had been so important in the early days, who had mobilized the group, who had organized us for an eventual rescue, and who

had battled hard to keep our spirits high. Roque had also died,

the only member of the crew who had survived, overwhelmed by events, lost and unable to contribute much. Sometimes he wanted to impose his authority as a member of the crew, but the group was on another frequency and he wasn’t able to do so, the group wouldn’t obey him. Also dead was Gustavo Nicolich, a great motivator of the group, who had written incredible letters to his girlfriend which are still preserved to this day, and which give a raw testimony to what we experienced. Liliana, Javier’s wife, also died — she had been the only woman still alive. I don’t

remember her in particular because I didn’t have any special contact with her, but I was told that she’d been very impor-

tant up to that point as she’d been like a mother to some of the younger boys. I'd like to be able to talk more about those who died that day.

To say more about Gustavo, Liliana, Marcelo and the others. But

that is my memory of those days, without faces or names, with little room for individualities, everything very dark, in slow motion, very subdued, trying to survive. The avalanche set us back at first. We were all soaked through by the snow, without shoes, without warm clothing, without light, in a restricted space, with the hammock-seats almost on top of us and tons of snow sealing our back exit, covering the windows and the rear opening of the plane. We had been completely buried

by the snow. We couldn’t get out, and we remained like that in

the gloom for almost three days. We tried to sleep, we squeezed ourselves into the space we had left, but we couldn’t move much. At night we saw nothing. By day, a faint light passed through the windows barely allowing us to see one another. We were imprisoned in a dark pit, afraid to fall asleep and not wake up, but also overwhelmed by a great weariness and a desire to sleep even if it might be final. o2

Part One

During those days I wanted to rest, to sleep, to recover some warmth, hugging my companions, and not thinking of much. We spent hours like that, not doing anything, just breathing softly. After some time we felt we were running out of oxygen. We had some lighters that allowed us to illuminate our living space, but they were beginning to dwindle, every time we lit them they had

a smaller flame. We didn’t know if it was because they were run-

ning out of fuel or because of lack of air. The same happened with matches. It became increasingly difficult to light them. It's amazing that we didn’t run out of oxygen completely during those three days that we were imprisoned under the snow. *K ok

Gradually, we began to mobilize ourselves. Following Roberto, we started digging a tunnel towards the front. We had to cross the

pilot’s cabin to reach the surface; the snow seemed to be thinner

there. When we got into the cockpit we saw the dead pilots still strapped in their seats surrounded by twisted metal; their trapped corpses made a big impression on me. They were older than us and had died from the injuries they had sustained in the accident. They had also spent several days longer exposed to the cold of the Andes. I remember that they still had on their glasses and grimaces of horror on their faces. We continued digging and moving through the snow until we were able to slide open one of the windows in the pilot’s cabin and finally reach the surface. Outside, I was confronted by a desolate landscape. Although it was a clear day, the wreckage of the plane had disappeared and you could see only ice, snow and rocks. ‘The avalanche had completely covered it and in addition we had lost all our equipment and technical advances under the snow. We had to start afresh. Our devices to make water, our tools, the radio, the axe, the warm clothing we had left outside, the seats where we had spent hours sitting and looking at the mountains, and also the bodies of our dead friends which we had started to eat, everything was lost. a3

INTO THE MOUNTAINS The weather improved after those days of confinement. It was cold but the sky was clear. Shortly afterwards, we started digging a tunnel to the rear so we could start to go out through our previous exit. But this time, instead of stepping down off the plane, we had to climb up and out, as the aircraft had been buried by the snow. The avalanche reinforced the belief that we would have to mount our own expedition to get off the mountain because it was clear that nobody was going to come looking for us. We had to continue doing what we had been doing to keep ourselves alive,

but now it was clear that we had to take charge of the situation and dedicate more effort to getting out by ourselves. We knew we could have a new avalanche at any time, but we also had another problem. All of the bodies we had used for food

had been lost in the snow and we didn’t know how many metres we of the the

would have to dig to recover them. This led us to eat the bodies those who had just died in the avalanche, which were inside plane. So we started cutting up and eating these bodies, inside plane, whenever we had need, immediately dropping any pre-

tence of modesty. The new bodies were thinner. They didn’t have the same meat and muscle quality as the original ones. We were

all thinner and our newly dead friends didn’t provide as much as the first bodies. The avalanche forced a reorganization of the group. We were

now just a bunch of boys with no formal authority. Javier was the oldest but suffered from altitude sickness and was self-absorbed in his own tragedy. He had lost Liliana in the avalanche, he was slow, and he was half-deaf, and blind in one eye. In the new situation we regrouped and others assumed new roles. The group began to revolve around the three Strauch cousins who, after Javier, were the oldest. Between the cousins and Nando and Roberto the important things began to be addressed. It was already confirmed that Roberto, Nando, Tintin and Numa would be our walkers. Nando wanted to go, he was in good physical condition, and although 54

ee

SSS Seeer

Part One

Spring in the Andes; the survivors enjoying the morning sun during the first days of December 1972, some weeks after the avalanche.

I didn’t have much contact with him, he appeared to be a person with a lot of courage and determination. He had lost his mother and sister in the accident, but he was showing great physical and mental strength. Roberto was different, he worked hard, with great energy, always moving, always active, dealing with details, bad-tempered, difficult and quarrelsome, unclear as to whether he wanted to go or not, although occasionally he was thoughtful 55

INTO THE MOUNTAINS and accommodating. He was always seeking an alternative plan to make things happen in other ways. Numa was the strongest at first but gradually deteriorated and could no longer be part of the expedition. For him, it was a terrible blow to accept that he was not in a condition to walk. It was clear that Tintin would be part of the expedition. He was the strongest, very reserved, silent and unsociable. I knew him from before, I was told that he was a bit of a bully and I was afraid of him. One night when it was his turn to sleep facing me, which involved putting his feet on my chest, he didn’t take off his shoes to sleep and he rammed them into my face. Even worse, at some point, he stretched out

his feet and kicked me on the lips, making them bleed. I screamed

and protested, but to no avail, he carried on sleeping as if nothing had happened. Today he’s my friend and we laugh together about the fear I had of him on the mountain. The Strauch cousins were taking a predominant role. They worked as a team and covered for each other. Daniel was the centre, Fito and Eduardo supported him well. They centralized the task of cutting the meat. That was the most important task of the day. And those who were near the meat-cutting got better portions. They cut one piece for the group, another piece for themselves. So a chain was formed, those who were near the beginning of the chain would secure more meat than those further down the chain. It was very difficult to be part of that group. To integrate, you had to get along with the cousins, and be in good shape to cut, to eat, and to be productive. This secondary group was made up of Gustavo, Carlitos, and me. And when Roberto appeared, Alvaro also appeared dragging his broken leg and doing his utmost to stay active. I competed with them to be in the inner circle of cutters, to do more cutting; it ensured that I would eat better. As Daniel didn’t pay me much attention, I tried to get close to Fito and Eduardo; it guaranteed that I would also be in the group and would find out what was happening, but as Eduardo paid more attention to Gustavo, I sought a connection with Fito. 56

Part One

In addition to the expeditionaries and the cousins, there were others who, with differing luck, tried to get a place in the group.

Some succeeded, others didn’t. Everyone, depending on their

relative strengths and weaknesses, did what they could. Obviously, those with some knowledge of medicine were our doctors. Gustavo and Roberto were the most notable, but had completed

only one and two years of medical school respectively. Others also played their part. Coche and Carlitos, who both had great spirituality, would begin the prayers and make us pray; they were our priests. Carlitos had a great sense of humour and made jokes and played pranks that made us laugh. He wasn’t the only one,

there were others involved in lifting the spirits of the group. We

laughed a lot, sometimes so much so that it hurt our ribs and we could hardly breathe. I would like to remember those jokes, they were surely the most incredible nonsense, plays on words and comic situations dramatizing what we were going through, but I can’t remember them, I've forgotten. What I do remember is the frank and spontaneous laughter which was so strong and intense that on some occasions I had to stifle it so as not to be left without air. Roy was our engineer. In reality, he was just a first-year engineering student but one day he said that he had repaired a stereo at his home. So we immediately appointed him to be our engineer and we bestowed on him a degree in air navigation and communications. Then there were those who were more rational and intellectual; most notably Arturo and me. Sometimes we tried to explain the inexplicable. Arturo spent many hours poring over the maps, trying to decipher them and locate the plane’s flight path in order to identify where we might be and in which direction we should head. I couldn’t look at the maps; in my mental and emotional state, I only managed to give some semi-philosophical explanation of what was happening, I recall one day, probably towards the beginning of November, when I explained with difficult words the relationship between the nirvana of of

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Teilhard de Chardin, an advanced Catholic thinker, and the utopian communism of the Marxist thinkers from the early part of the century. I also explained the similarity between the love of Jesus Christ giving his life, and the love of all who gave their lives for others. God was love, and that was all that mattered; | said it looking at the mountain in front of us, not really believing much of what I was saying, repeating it as something I had once learned but which was now fading away and not holding much significance in that context; surprised by what it was costing me to repeat it, and by the scant attention my friends on the

mountain were paying to me, given what I was saying with such confidence. I remember Fito and Gustavo listening to me. We

spoke in low voices, so that others wouldn’t get into the conversation, one that they wouldn’t understand, that wasn’t important to them. The only one who could have understood in that group was Arturo, but he had his own battle, he was not recovering well and was increasingly absent. Because of our previous friendship, I spent a lot of time with him, barely talking, sometimes bringing up a conversation topic, although he followed little of it. He was

deteriorating rapidly. Of course, everyone played his own role and had his place in the group. I was somewhat of a bohemian intellectual and later, when Arturo died, I in some way took his place. The difference 1s that while Arturo would speak and gain respect due to his injuries

and to his previous accomplishments, I had to work to keep my

place in the group because few of those who were still alive knew me from before. I worked hard for myself and to make a space for myself, always intuitively calculating energy expenditure, trying to keep myself intact, to stay alive, to take care in choosing what I should and should not do. I made water like everyone else, and I contrived to be near the cousins when we cut up a body, securing the proper nutrition for myself. I don’t think I ever closed up the back of the plane, that was an activity that demanded a lot,

and I wasn’t able to do it. And I also never had to sleep in the

place next to the back entrance, where it was colder. On other 58

Part One

occasions I dug in the snow looking for bodies that we’d lost in the avalanche knowing it had its reward, and at other times I

joined the small exploratory expeditions that we resumed after

the avalanche. There I was, trying to survive, trying to understand the group in which I moved, helping Arturo as long as I could and participating where I could, basically keeping active and focused on the tasks I could perform. I kept thinking that the way out would be to the east, towards Argentina, towards where the waters from the glacier would run. I felt I had to conserve and reserve myself in case I ever had to prove it. I think that, ultimately, all contributions were important. ‘The wounded and sick, those who didn’t participate much, also played their part. Everyone wanted to live, no one was left to die; even

those who died fought to the end. Bobby says in Pablo Vierci’s

book La sociedad de la meve that he did nothing relevant, that he got out because the others took him out; even Pancho says that his biggest contribution in the cordillera was talking to the press and to the families of those who did not return when we arrived back in Uruguay, a fact that obviously did not occur up there. Alvaro says he crawled around for seventy days because he had a broken leg and as he could not join in, he contributed little. It upsets me to hear him say that he lived seventy days at ground level. I disagree; In our own way and with our own style we all wanted to live and we all worked in order to live. And our contributions were like that, different in quality, intensity, and direction, incommensurable and incomparable with each other, but they were building the dynamic that allowed the group to remain organized and focused, although not necessarily united, because we all wanted to and worked to get out. Behind those philosophical and absurd conversations which, because of the context in which they took place, were a front for what was really going on, there were conversations that really mattered: What will we eat today? Who is well, who is ill? Who is deteriorating and has only a short time left? Who is going to set out on a hike and to where? 59

INTO THE MOUNTAINS I gave my opinion on the direction we should take. I thought that going towards where the waters from the glacier ran would lead us out of the mountains, even though at first it was to the east and it might seem that we’d be going deeper into the mountains. It didn’t make sense to start climbing up that daunting mountain to the west that merged with the glacier wall. I thought that by following downstream, the valley would eventually take us to Chile because the pilot had said before he died, “we passed Curic6”, and the water should find its way out of the mountains.

None of us dreamt that we were on the Argentinian side of the mountain and that the exit was in that direction. * KK

Finally, Roberto, Nando and Tintin, our three expeditionaries,

went eastward towards Argentina, towards where we thought the valley would turn to the left and so would lead them out to Chile. But to our surprise, they returned after a few days indicating that there was no way out. The mountain that confronted us was

becoming increasingly imposing, the valley did not turn eastward

and although they descended, they did not believe there was a way out. A big snowstorm had stopped them, but they had found the tail of the plane and they had taken refuge there for at least three nights. In the tail there were more bags with clothing, supplies, an enormous quantity of cigarettes, and the batteries from the plane's radio. Finding the batteries allowed Roberto, who was undecided as to whether to keep walking or not, to convince Nando that it made sense to try to connect them to the radio and so transmit a signal that would tell the outside world we were still alive. Nando was unconvinced but accepted Roberto’s reasoning. ‘There was no point venturing into an unknown and increasingly dangerous cordillera, which would only lead them closer to that dreaded mountain on the horizon. There might not be a way out, and finding the aircraft batteries gave us another possibility. 60

Part One

They tried to bring the batteries from the tail to the fuse-

lage but they were too heavy. They sank into the snow and they couldn’t make any progress. Instead, they decided it was best to return to the fuselage, dismantle the radio, take it to the tail, and

try to connect it there. That would entail bringing Roy “the engineer” along to the tail in order to connect up the thousands of

cables and make the radio work. If we could accomplish that, we would surely be able to transmit some sort of signal.

The proposed move to the tail of the plane to hook up all those cables was too much for poor Roy. He wasn’t at all convinced he was capable of doing it, but the pressure from Roberto and the cousins was very strong, and so he agreed, warning that he didn’t hold high hopes that it would work. He was getting thinner and his voice was growing shriller. He had lost a lot of his strength. I also wasn’t convinced, I was sure that the way out was to the east, that they should have kept walking; but the expeditionaries had already walked to the east and had failed and I had nothing more to say, so I accepted the majority thinking of the group. I was only praying that they would be proved right and that the radio experiment would work. Should I have insisted? Perhaps. But I had no way of winning that battle and so I didn’t say anything. Also, I was not among those who would be risking their lives, I wouldn’t be the one walking. Extracting the plane’s radio was not easy, I remember Roberto and others who I can no longer identify, submerged in the cockpit trying to remove it, by means of some rudimentary tools and some

well-aimed kicks. After the complex task of dismantling the radio was complete, after pulling out the control panel exposing millions

of loose wires, Roy joined the expeditionaries, and together they set off again towards the tail of the plane carrying the dismantled radio. Roy tells me that he felt an enormous responsibility because all hope seemed to rest on him. There was huge peer pressure and although he was very weak we didn’t leave him with any alternative. Roy was there with Roberto for ten days, while Nando and Tintin went back and forth between tail and plane to collect 61

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

supplies and bring news. For me it was a waste of time, but the group was taking action and needed to be supported. I didn’t know if they would succeed, I didn’t think so, but at least we were doing something, and something was better than nothing. Spending time at the tail wasn’t so bad. They had managed to hook up a light bulb and Roberto would read comics from a magazine they had found there, while Roy worked slowly to connect the cables. One day he received an electric shock and became convinced that it was an impossible task, that it could

never transmit a signal, even less connect to the outside world. In the book Alie there is a comment from a specialist indicating that it was technically impossible for the radio to work. I viewed the experiment with total disbelief, I am convinced that most of us thought the same, but it was what it was, it was a way to maintain

the illusion that we were doing something useful, that there was a plan for getting off the mountain. Finally, they returned one afternoon under a heavy snowfall, with Roy exhausted. They were sad at having failed, concerned

From left to right: Roy, Roberto and Nando at the tail of the aircraft where they stayed for ten days trying to connect the radio to the batteries. 62

Part One

because now there was no alternative other than to try walking again in a new attempt to get out, but this time not to the east

past the tail. That had already been tested, now we had to go into the unknown, to the west, to climb up the glacier wall, to go deep into the mountains and keep walking until we found something or someone, or died in the attempt. On seeing them return, I felt a mixture of joy and sadness.

Sadness for the failure; the expedition had failed. But the expedi-

tionaries had returned and cigarettes, and also ing to the west, directly Roy told me of the

with more supplies, warm clothing, food with an alternative plan; to set out walktowards Chile. great joy he felt when he returned to the

plane. He was returning to his home, to where his friends were, to his place. He found us all more emaciated, with prominent

cheekbones, with pronounced bones and with visibly white teeth. But no matter, it was his home, we were his friends, he felt safer

than at the tail of the plane where he had been working and carrying the weight of what was happening. He also returned much thinner, exhausted, with almost no strength, he had given

his all and he began a

rapid decline. This had been an extreme

situation for him, he almost didn’t return, but between him and

Nando they drew strength out of nowhere to make it back to the plane. ‘Today we know that the way out was indeed to the east and that if the expeditionaries had kept walking, it’s probable they

would have got out earlier and at least some more lives would

have been saved. But we don’t know that they would have been successful. Perhaps it was too soon, perhaps while walking they would have encountered rivers that they couldn’t cross and they would have been stranded there, maybe it was still too early and the quantity of snow would have caused them to fall off a precipice and it would all have come to nothing, What is clear is that we paid the price for our total ignorance of the mountain; with a little more experience, we would have known that we should go in the direction in which the water flowed down, but we would 63

INTO THE MOUNTAINS also have known that to walk out of there in those conditions was impossible. If we had known it with total certainty, we would all have died. It was the uncertainty that saved us. OK

I had lived in Chile, and knew that the climate changed on 15 November and summer would burst into life putting an end to the snowstorm season. I remembered a conversation with a taxi driver in Chile who had told me that this was the day that

summer truly began.

So we established 15 November as the day that Nando, Roberto and Tintin would set out walking. However, a tremendous storm struck that day which forced us to postpone our plans and confine ourselves to the plane for several days. I lost credibility

when I admitted that the origin of my weather knowledge was a casual conversation with a Chilean taxi driver. It makes me laugh that, to this day, Nando still refers to me as his meteorologist because of this.

We had to stay inside the plane as the storm unleashed itself. The days were long because we had little to do; it was like a permanent assembly, we were all together, lying in the fuselage, with our legs on the chest of the person opposite. We talked a lot but not everyone was awake and participating in the conversations. As always, the most important topic was food. Not only what we had eaten that day or were going to eat the next day, we

also made plans for our return. Very strange plans. We were all

going to be great restaurateurs when we returned to Uruguay. I felt that this was the forging of a true gastronomic brotherhood. We put together lists of the few restaurants that we knew of, and noted the places where we would go to eat and the great feasts we would have on our return. We discussed what we would eat in each place, in every house that we’d be visiting. Each person chose a specialty. I couldn’t cook and nor were my parents in Montevideo, they were in Buenos Aires, and that distressed me. 64

Part One

I had no way of giving my friends a good meal either at my home or at that of my parents who couldn’t help me now that they were living in Argentina. It drove me to despair that I remained outside this gastronomic brotherhood. Luckily, I remembered an aunt who used to make delicious gnocchi and I enrolled in the culinary group with that dish, which was a great relief to me

and allowed me to continue to feel part of the group that was

gathered on the mountain. Some of my friends wrote letters to their mothers and their girlfriends. I simply wasn’t able to do that. At the beginning I was in a great state of shock, I wasn’t able to write, and by the time I had recovered and could connect with others, no one was in a condition to write. In fact, the few letters that were written,

were done in the early stages, before the avalanche. I think it

was because we had lost the ability to have complex thoughts,

because writing needed an attention span that we no longer possessed, because we had already grown used to living in that environment. Little by little, we were disengaging from what we had experienced before. In my case, I could never connect with my loved ones, my family, whom I had left in Uruguay and in Argentina. What was I doing in this distinctly Uruguayan group with my family in Buenos Aires and, moreover, a girlfriend in Chile? I couldn’t connect with them. I tried to do it only once but a great sadness came over me and I felt that I’d start crying. At that moment, something in my brain blocked out the memories and I could no longer make a connection. Nor could I connect with my Chilean girlfriend, one of the reasons I was on that trip. Again, it was very complicated. How could I have a girlfriend in Chile if my companions spoke only of their girlfriends in Uruguay? Was it the case or wasn’t it? I remembered ending our relationship a thousand times by letter and a thousand times we had got back together again. What was the situation with us? I couldn’t figure it out precisely. So my imagination turned to Uruguay and I tried to remember the

girls I’d met at university, whom [’d simply seen and had seemed

65

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

attractive, but not the ones I already knew; I remembered girls with whom I’d never spoken or gone out. And I planned incredible encounters for when I returned. Of course, I didn’t talk to

any of them on my return, and to this day, those women, who are no longer young, whose names and faces I have forgotten, don’t know how important they were for me on the mountain. *,

The survivors relaxing on the sleeping bag that they had made for Roberto, Nando and ‘Tintin to take on their trek. From left to right: Zerbino, Adolfo, Eduardo, Nando, Carlos and Javier, Roberto standing at the back,

and Algorta sitting on top of the fuselage of the plane.

After the storm of 15 November, the weather improved and from then on, when the day was sunny, we would leave the plane

and sunbathe while preparing the food for the day. We would exchange views on some excursion we had taken, we ate all the time, and we started to make a large three-person sleeping bag using insulating material that the expeditionaries had brought back from the plane’s tail. I walked a lot around the fuselage, and every so often I ventured a little outside the radius of where we were living. Not much, no more than ten or fifteen meters. I made my regular 66

Part One

walks around the plane with difficulty, holding a stick in my hand and probing the snow with it in order to find the remains that we'd discarded in the early days when we weren’t inclined to eat everything. What you found you could eat without restriction, whereas the officially distributed daily food was rationed. In that

distribution, the boys who got less were the ones who were fur-

ther away from the cutters — the injured, the sick, those who were deteriorating, those who couldn’t walk as much. Some used their charm to make allies who would bring them food. In fact, my cousin Coche, who was already quite weak, offered me a very

specific barter: cigarettes for food. If I got more cigarettes for him, if I gave him part of the quota that I had, he would give me a corresponding portion of his food. I remember Coche’s pleading look when asking me for a cigarette in exchange for a piece of food although I don’t remember whether I agreed or not. I probably laughed and ignored him, although I remember that I felt great discomfort and avoided the question. But perhaps I accepted the barter. Do you remember, Coche? KK ok

During this period, three of our comrades died: Rafael, Arturo, and Numa, after which there were only sixteen of us left. The first was Rafael, who had a severed leg with an open wound. He suffered a lot but he always showed a great state of mind and fortitude. Until one day he ceased groaning and he died. Next was my friend Arturo. He was a highly respected guy, a great rugby player despite his small stature, and a very good student. Like me, Arturo did not live in a bubble and had social

and political concerns. He had an internal injury that prevented him from recovering, and he gradually fell into a deep depression. In the end, he had moments of great lucidity mixed with times during which he would confront everyone. A few days ago, I reread the letter he wrote to his girlfriend in Uruguay. I was impressed by its toughness, the harsh realism 67

INTO THE MOUNTAINS testifying to how badly things were going. After Rafael died, | moved up to the hammock seats with Arturo, and we spent long nights, embracing,

in which

I tried to reassure

him,

to enable

him to sleep and to endure the cold. It also did me good to help Arturo, I felt that he gave me his gratitude, I felt useful, and I received his recognition. Finally, one night, we came down from the seats. Arturo was quieter, but his gaze was empty and his thinness showed he was not well. He died that night in my arms. The truth is that I had neither the time nor the capacity to

mourn him. Once dead, I left him at peace, I hugged him, and I

took some of his clothing for myself. I put on his white jean jacket, which I loved. Arturo was not there anymore. It wasn’t him. I wasn’t able either to mourn him or to cry. I couldn’t, I had to think about myself, about the next step, about how I would have the

strength to stay alive for the next twenty-four hours. Numa, in the early days, had been one of the strongest and most courageous, and he had been part of the exploratory expedition that had spent the night in the open. He had also been one

of the original candidates to go on the final expedition. But at

some point he started deteriorating until his eventual death in the second week of December. Other than the deaths of our companions, it was a period in which very little happened and the silence of the mountains filled

our days. The same silence left a deep impression on me when I returned to that place a few months ago. It was not grabbing our attention, but I’m sure that it affected us. There was nothing, we

were looking every day at the same rocks, the same mountains,

the same ridges covered, at times, by the snow or by a wind that blurred the outlines. But the silence had an impact and was deafening. The sky was empty, no aircraft crossed it, occasionally we would see a bird, like an inquisitor, but overall it was devoid of life. In our daily routine, each of us, once fed, would return to our

own private musings, silently focusing on our own things. We tried to find personal ways forward, very much in touch with what was most vital to each of us, but without complex thought, focusing on 68

Part One

the most basic situations. I spent hours feeling my pulse, watching my ribs rise and fall with each breath, just aware that I was alive, thinking that I had to stay alive for one more day. We didn’t know

if we were going to be saved or not, we just knew we had to be alive at that moment so that we could make sense of what we were going through. We couldn’t die, even for an instant, because the trip would lose all meaning; we had to be at our best. Staying alive was always the main task, for which it was necessary to eat well, but not from a rational decision, rather from an instinctive imperative. I always had a hand or something in my pocket, and when I could, I would begin to eat, to put something in my mouth, to feel that I was getting nourished. I gath-

ered what others had discarded; afterwards I would throw it away, and another would pick up what I had discarded. ‘That was until

what was available began to disappear due to all the rounds we’d made, until a new body was opened up and, again, whatever we discarded initially ensured that there’d be stuff to find in the fol-

lowing days. A body of one of those who had died early on lasted

us three to four days, but those who had died in the avalanche didn’t last nearly as long. And the poor boys who died later were not good for much, because they were all skin and bones. A bluish material covered their bones and separated them from their atrophied muscles. KK

Having abandoned the way out to the east, towards the plane’s tail, towards Argentina, towards where the waters from the glacier flowed, we had no choice but to go west, and to begin a trek

by climbing the terrifying mountain that surrounded us to the north, west, and south. Again it was clear that Nando,

Roberto

and ‘Tintin would be our expeditionaries. Previous expeditions to the tail hadn’t affected them. The group worked to ensure that the expeditionaries could depart under the best possible conditions. We sewed, with copper wire, 69

INTO THE MOUNTAINS a large sleeping bag made of an insulating material they’d recovered from the plane’s tail. We cut large pieces of meat and put them in backpacks made out of socks and other pieces of clothing. ‘They chose the clothes they preferred. I had the feeling that if any of them were to choose something I was wearing, I would have to give it up. They could eat anything and at any time. While others had restrictions, they had none. They could even choose where to sleep. They clearly held a privileged status. In reality, we were working hard to give our walkers the best chance of reaching somewhere.

Nando wanted to leave as soon as possible but Roberto always found a reason to delay the trip. “Not right now, let’s wait for some sign, the weather will improve. Let’s try with the radio again, why don’t we head east?” But once Numa died, the expeditionaries realized that it was time to set off. Coche and Roy were also deteriorating rapidly, they had the unfocused eyes of the dying and would not last much longer. Finally, Nando, Roberto, and Tintin set out on 10 December. I remember a farewell without much ceremony, but I don’t remember the little red shoe' and the other anecdotes that are well-known from various accounts. I saw them set off and start to move away and climb the mountain. In the end they were just black dots on the mountainside, up to the point where I could no longer see them. I saw them leave in the same way they'd left on other occasions, feeling that it was what had to be done, saving any tears and feelings of emotion

which, at almost four thousand metres, didn’t contribute anything. Years later when I visited the accident site, I found it impossible to determine from where the wreckage had lain, precisely which path they took. Perhaps if I were to return with one of the walkers, they could trace it out on the mountain for me. Three

days

later,

in

the

afternoon,

we

saw

one

of

them

descending. It was Tintin who was returning, and incredibly he found a way down that returned him to the plane. He arrived broken, agitated, almost dead from exhaustion, barely able to speak. 70

Part One

We questioned him anxiously. He told us that Nando and Rob-

erto had reached the summit of the mountain. He had hauled almost all the luggage to the top but had not reached the sum-

mit. The climb had been terrible, he had had to kick the wall of

the mountain in order to make steps, and to climb, step by step, leaving terrifying precipices and dizzying slopes below. Tintin

had been on a break and Nando had climbed up to the summit

and down again to where Roberto had remained. Nando didn’t have good eyesight, and so couldn’t make out much. Roberto and Tintin did, but they hadn’t seen anything special, just more and more mountains. Tintin said that, from the top, Roberto had seen that the mountains in the distance towards Chile seemed to have less snow,

and that they would start walking in that direction. He also said that he could see a line on the Sosneado volcano that could be a road, but none of them was really sure. However it meant that if we had to set out walking again, we would have to walk to the east,

towards where the waters from the glacier flowed. Roberto and Nando were on the watershed, on the summit of the mountain, they had already tried to the east and had failed and there was nothing more to do except either return to the plane, defeated, and possibly die, or start an unimaginable and uncertain walk towards where the mountains seemed to have less snow. Tintin told us that Nando and Roberto had begun walking to the west, with provisions for three and with the sleeping bag. That marked the start of a new phase. We felt that this time we were doing something definite to save ourselves.

1 In Mendoza, Nando had bought a pair of tiny red shoes for his baby nephew. When setting off on the expedition he split up the pair, giving one shoe to Carlitos and taking the other with him, saying ‘when I come back for you we’ll have a pair again’. 7 |

kvery afternoon, once inside the plane, we tried to say the rosary. Ta LLL) LL KN LLL LS mantra would immerse me in my indwidual dreams and I would find myself there alone in the mountains, sharing life with my brothers in misfortune. All of us took part in the prayers, including those with less belief, those who professed a militant atheism, they would also

pray, in therr own way, for their own intentions, so as to be part of this suffering body. So as not to be left out. I didn't ask for much, I didn’t ask that we would suddenly and miraculously show up at home, that it would all have been just a

dream. I gave thanks to God that I was still alwe, I gave thanks that I still had the strength to fight. I prayed to Him for my family, Jor Roberto and Nando that they would walk safely, for anyone

who was unwell, but above all I asked that he would give me the strength to stay alive for one more day. The prayers composed us, allowed us to sleep, calmed our palpitations and anxieties. It was a moment of reconciliation, a moment of peace. But ut also gave us life, it replenished our energy,

|

ie)

it allowed us to rest and to see the sun rise the next day.

3.

Let’s go, let’s go!

ith Nando and Roberto’s departure, life became a

WW

ew:

bit

comfortable on the plane. The nights were no

longer so bad, I sensed that we were nearing the end of our trip, I felt that, for better or for worse, our odyssey was coming to an end, that it couldn’t last much longer. I ate reasonably, slept well, had comfortable places to rest and wasn’t so cold. In those early days of December, the weather had improved markedly; the days were warm and long; we had even seen birds flying in the vicinity of the plane. But the danger was ever present. We didn’t know if a new avalanche might fall on us, nor did we know how long our fragile bodies would endure their deterioration and cross the threshold to where our fatigue would be greater than our will to stay alive. At that point, perhaps one would surrender to death, faced with such a slim chance of survival. Some of my friends were growing increasingly weak; as was I, although I still felt relatively well. I was sure that working and eating as best I could would increase my chances of staying alive, and I wanted to be strong enough to walk out if I had to. Although we didn’t really know what we would do if our expeditionaries disappeared in the mountains, it was something that we didn’t talk about. As time went by, I was no longer disgusted or affected by anything. We’d spend the day eating or stripping clean some small 73

INTO THE MOUNTAINS bone, always with something in our mouths. We slept among the dead bodies and the dismembered remains of our companions.

With Nando and Roberto gone, there was more space in the fuselage. As we had taken down the hammocks, everyone could sleep lying on the ground. It didn’t especially affect me to see the deterioration of my friends who were wasting away day-by-day, as we

all were. Certainly I was also deteriorating, but I didn’t realize it

and my only thought was to keep eating and to keep exercising, I felt that it was what I had to do, so as to at least survive one

more day. This was not a conscious act, it was the instinct to live that compelled me to continue working and to do things to

stay alive.

We had become used to living on the boundary between life and death. There wasn’t much difference between one of our weakened friends and those who had died. It was natural that anyone starting off on this path to debilitation would at some

point leave us. ‘This had happened with Arturo, with Rafael, and

with Numa; they didn’t die when we crashed in the mountains, or in the avalanche. They died later from their weakness. In their final days, their vision would become blurred and they would develop a sad, faraway look in their eyes; they lost awareness, they hardly spoke and they stopped eating. In the end, they were just skin and bones. The sun and the grime had changed the tone of our skin. We . were a dark brown colour, lacklustre, with crusted lips, and our

eyes, sunken deep in their sockets, protruded lifelessly, as if ask-

ing what was happening, what was to follow. Skinny, black hands,

damaged by the cold, legs that were thin and pale from lack of sun. Sometimes when we were sunbathing we took off our shirts and exposed our bodies. How skinny I was. How noticeable my ribs were. We looked uncertainly, wondering how much more we would have to go through to reach the end of this ordeal. I had two cuts on my legs that were healing and were crusted with dried blood that I would scrape once in a while with my dirty fingernails and place in my mouth, unconsciously, trying to retain the 74

Part One

proteins in my body. Dried blood is tasty, salty, and I ate it with relish. But also my lips were chapped and blistered from the cold and the sun, and from eating snow. And that made it harder to put large pieces of meat in my mouth, and our role as carnivorous scavengers was hindered by exactly that, by our cracked lips and by the sores in our mouths. During that period it would start to get very hot when the sun

was shining at noon. Sometimes we would take off our shirts and allow our bodies to soak in the sun’s energy. It night, or when it was cloudy. I felt very scared clouded over. I had learned that it was a sign blizzards, cold and cloudy so that one couldn’t

was still very cold at when the Sosneado of bad weather, of see anything, If our

companions were walking, that type of weather wouldn’t be conducive to them making any sort of progress. Anyway, the summer weather in the cordillera is usually good, the days are generally sunny but the temperature at night drops to several degrees below zero. And summer had, in fact, already begun.

Some of the survivors taking advantage of the high midday temperatures to strip off and soak in the sun's energy. #5

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Kk okok

I had become used to living in the wreckage of the plane, in horrific conditions. It was our home. We had no more than eight metres of fuselage from which we’d removed everything that could be removed, and we had to stoop when standing, Inside the plane it was soaking wet due to the thaw, as from midday water would drip down from the walls and run along the ground. During that period I would wake up early and leave the plane at the first light of dawn looking at the sun rising above the huge volcano to the

front of us. We took advantage of those first moments, when the snow was still firm and we could walk on it without sinking in too

much. One by one, almost everyone left the plane, but there were always one or two who remained inside. Those were the ones who were weaker, who had started down the path of no return. Outside, we sat in the seats that had stayed out in the open all night. We would take the cushions that we’d used as sleeping mattresses, and place them on the seats, which we positioned facing the morning sun. ‘The days would start off cool, but the mountain air was very clear.

The first ones out would try to listen to the news on the little radio that we had recovered in the thaw. Incredibly, it still worked, and in the early morning several stations could be heard in addition to the Argentinean, Uruguayan and Chilean ones. Among others, we listened to Radio Cooperativa of Chile, Radio

Carve in Uruguay, and we could hear the Voice of America, Netherland Antilles Radio, the BBC, RAI, Radio France, and Radio Havana. They no longer spoke about us, but every now and again we would pay attention to some news. Life went on in the world, we heard that Vietnam was in turmoil, that there was a

transport strike in Chile, and that classes at the Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay were suspended and had not yet restarted. I also heard that San Lorenzo, the soccer team I supported in Argentina, had won the championship. Some of my brother survivors say I did a victory lap around the plane. I don’t remember 76

Part One

that; maybe I did it in my imagination or in theirs. Besides, we

were already too tired and weak to do victory laps. Yes, I remember hearing the news and feeling some joy. But it was like my dad

in his old age when receiving good news, he would smile and be happy for a while, and then he would look at me as if to say: “And

what do you want me to do with that news?” I felt the same way

there, it was good that San Lorenzo had become champions, but it wasn’t really important to me. In what way could it change my life? What could I do with that news? Nothing affected us, the news seemed more and more remote, the world was continuing its life and was collapsing. We didn’t care, but at the same time

we wanted to feel like we were part of that world, which had abandoned us and had continued its life without us. However, it

was becoming increasingly difficult for us to stay engaged with what was happening.

Occasionally, in the morning, a group of us would make an

excursion taking advantage of the firm snow. Around that time I set out on an expedition with Carlitos and Gustavo and we went down five hundred metres to where the body of our friend lay, the one whom we had seen descending the mountain on the day of the accident. The hike down on the firm snow was relatively easy. We arrived at the body which was face down and lightly covered by a layer of snow. He had ona light jacket and jeans. We turned him over to reveal a face burnt by the sun and the snow. It was black, dark and the eyes were missing. We wondered if his eyes had been eaten by some animal that we’d neither seen nor found traces of, or whether they had dissolved in the snow ahead of the rest of his body. We removed his clothes and we started to cut up the body. I had brought along an axe so as to make the task easier. This was good work and we did it eagerly, because when we carried out such activities we could feed ourselves without restriction. We did it with enthusiasm, and we made a thorough job of it. It didn’t matter who it had been, at that moment it was a lifeless body, it was not our friend, it was the food that we needed and that would allow us to survive. 77

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

After working for some time and having our fill, we cut pieces to carry back to the plane. Gustavo, as was his custom, removed

the documents, rings, watch and any personal identification that they had. He said that he would take them to the families of the

dead. I carried a whole leg over my right shoulder, I also filled my pockets with small pieces that I could eat later, I hung the axe in my belt which was fashioned from a tie, and we set off back to the plane. ‘The snow had begun to melt, the hike was much more difh-

cult and the uphill slope made it even tougher. We finally arrived back exhausted, lightened our loads and delivered what we had

brought to the cutters on duty. We fell exhausted onto the seats and cushions. I climbed up onto the fuselage of the plane where I spent long hours, staring at the horizon, my mind almost in a vac-

uum, without much thought, watching myself breathing, looking at my ribs increasingly protruding under my skin, with almost no

muscle, with no fat, progressively becoming just skin and bones, but still alive. After such an activity, on a normal day, our food was the main

focus. As always, the group of older boys cut the bigger parts, which the others then red meat with pieces Absolutely everything At first, early on, we

cut into smaller pieces. We mixed pieces of of soft organs and we made a type of stew. went into the stew, we would waste nothing. would cook it, but we had already stopped

that habit, now we ate everything raw. Someone said that in this

way that we would make better use of the proteins. The truth is that 1t was tastier and had more volume. Cooked meat lost water and was smaller. Nor were we very equitable with those who were further away from the kitchen, since cutters and cooks had the right to eat while they were working. A piece for the stew, another piece for each of the cutters. After the meal, we went back into the plane. We had to get through the worst hours of sunshine. Inside the plane, it was cool and we spent a good deal of time there, without saying much, with our empty looks returning, thinking little, discussing 78

Part One

nothing. Suddenly someone would say something or make some funny remark which would make us all laugh. The only thing I remember was when we put a severed hand on Coche’s shoulder. When he turned around he was so startled, it was as if he had seen a ghost. That gave rise to much amusement and we continued laughing for quite a while. I laughed so hard that I could scarcely breathe and I felt a terrible pain in my ribs. Daniel occupied a central spot. He was the one with the radio,

who listened to the news, and if you were at his side you could stay better informed. He also organized the cutting of the meat.

His cousins were always at his side. He consulted with them and much of what happened in the group was decided right there. Gustavo made an effort to get ever closer to the cousins and to

stay on good terms with them. He brought them information

about what was happening, about who was ill, about those who needed more help. I imagine that he would also invent some plot, some fantasy to provide material for gossip. I didn’t get on well with Daniel, we didn’t understand each other, we had no common interests, he seemed much older, and his pronouncements were terse. Nor was he receptive to my philosophical ravings. I didn’t understand his jokes and he didn’t have the patience to listen to me. But I got along well with his two cousins. I felt safer

with Fito there. I could talk with him and would have talked with

him earlier in the plane. I talked to him about philosophy, about the importance of love, about how God was love, I felt that he listened to me and was interested in what I was saying. At almost four thousand metres altitude, growing ever weaker, they were absurd conversations, but it was a way to connect with my intellect, it was a desperate attempt to find the anchors of what my mind had once been. It also bore no relation to what was the most important thing, which was to eat and to stay well; what we were doing today, what we were going to do tomorrow, our current day-to-day situation. We didn’t make many plans for when we got back, we weren’t concerned with what we had left behind,

what we had experienced before, my points of reference were 79

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

becoming increasingly blurred; we were living more and more in the present, everything else was from a world that was progressively distant, ever more unreal, that still existed, but wasn’t ours.

What remained was the immediacy of our vital needs, no one specifically thought about how we were going to get out, how the end of our experience would arrive, for better or for worse. We didn’t know, we couldn’t know.

One thing that bothered me was the way Pancho was treated. He was a bit marginal to the group and he felt it. Like Coche, he was older, but not a rugby player nor a classmate of the majority, nor could he earn respect by working harder than others because he had a broken leg and was limping. He did what he could to survive. He had been sidelined from the time someone had said that he had appropriated some food reserved for the weakest and had improperly taken a tube of toothpaste that we were eating. But we never specifically confronted him and I don’t think anyone asked whether it was true or not. Simply, in our conversations, I started to hear this suspicion. Someone had seen him, he had a suspicious attitude, but we never confronted him or explicitly accused him of anything, I don’t know if he did it or not. All I know is that his role as scapegoat was functional to the group. We needed someone on whom to unload our frustrations and tensions, and he was the recipient. But even if we didn’t give him the chance to defend himself, it was better that way, it was better that it remained as an irrefutable suspicion.

‘To this day, in a more or less veiled way, he bears the stigma of having “wheeled and dealed” more than necessary. An accusation that is totally unjust, since he was far away from the centre of power and therefore from the food. He did what he could. Pancho has a special character, I don’t know how much of it was forged

up there on the mountain and how much in

later life. I only know

that up there I felt a great pity for the injustice done, but also a certain relief because in taking it out on him, they hadn’t taken it out on me; it was someone else who was bearing the frustrations 80

Part One

of the group. I didn’t go out of my way to defend him, I didn’t dare, that was a battle I decided not to fight, or rather wasn’t able to fight. But now I am defending him. I think the group was unfair to him although we cannot really judge by today’s standards what any of us did or did not do at the time. KK

Once the worst hours of heat were over, we went to the area behind the plane, where we basked in the afternoon sun. At that time of day the snow was already very soft and we couldn’t venture far. I would again apply myself to the task of prodding around in the snow with a stick or a pole in search of discarded remains. On occasion, I would climb up onto the fuselage and spend long hours doing little, just eating a bone, removing the last traces of meat from a piece of skin or sucking pieces of fat dried in the sun. We called these “greasies”, and they were highly prized, although I was somewhat disgusted by the yellow ones that were pure fat. But the hands and feet were the most coveted. I always had one in my pocket, and every so often I would pull it out to suck on its bones and then save it again for later, until finally it disintegrated into thousands of small bones and we lost them in the snow. When evening came and the shadows of the mountain fell on us, we entered the plane and prepared to spend another night. We set out the cushions and we took our places, one by one. Once we were settled and it started to get dark, we began our prayers. Sometimes we would have to find a volunteer because no one

would take the initiative. I had no strength to start, but I listened

attentively to the prayers. I don’t remember if I ever led any, given that I would fall asleep very quickly. Gradually we would drift off, the rosary was our mantra. I silently thanked God for having allowed me to stay alive up to that point, and I asked for strength to stay alive until the next day. With everything that we had gone through, I asked Him not to leave me at that time. 81

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Between the prayers, those who weren’t yet asleep discussed what had happened that day, we thought about our friends who were walking, about how the rescue would come, how our return home would be, we reviewed our future gourmet life, the dishes we would serve, where we would eat them. And we puffed on our cigarettes, slowly, watching the smoke that connected us and made us drowsy. One person’s smoke, mingling with that of others, eventually became everyone’s. Nobody was bothered by another person smoking, no one was bothered by someone else’s smoke, nowadays I wouldn’t tolerate it.

One time someone asked me if I thought we were going to get out. “What I know is that for now we are alive,” was all I answered and I think that anyone would have said the same. Although we accepted that death was a very real possibility, I never thought that we weren’t going to survive, I never thought that we wouldn’t get out, I only connected with my most basic rhythms and continued feeding myself and doing my little exercises, very much in touch with myself, feeling my pulse, watching myself breathe. So much so that I didn’t worry about what would happen to me if I died. I never thought that my friends would use my body for food. It was almost self-evident, I didn’t think about what they would do with me just as I didn’t think that I was going to die. KK OK

As summer progressed the snow began to recede, rapidly exposing the bodies that we held in reserve, and we continually had to cover them with snow, morning

and afternoon,

so they

didn’t decompose. Previously, it had been the other way around, we had had to search for them as they had been buried by the avalanche; now they were appearing with the thaw and we ran the risk that they'd go bad, leaving us with no food. Several times I found myself digging to find a body, taking turns with another boy. I don’t know how those teams formed, I just assumed that 82

Part One

that was my role and that it was my duty to do it. But neither

did we kill ourselves in the effort. The air was thin and we were weak, so we took turns and there were always one or two watch-

ing another person dig. Moreover, we now had to climb to enter the plane. The snow below the plane had frozen and transformed into a pedestal of

ice, so the plane had become higher than the level of the snow around it and that actually made the plane wobble a bit. Every

day it was moving more. If we didn’t get out soon, the fuselage would fall from its base and would roll downhill along the glacier. As an additional measure to complement Nando and Roberto’s expedition, we had marked a large cross on the white ground that was designed to be seen from above by anyone searching for us. At first we used suitcases and clothes, but that wasn’t enough. Later we started walking, shuffling our feet so as to make grooves that would project a shadow visible from a distance. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it required a huge effort to maintain, because any little snowfall or afternoon blizzard would be enough to fill in the grooves we had made and our sign would fade away. Also, when it was cloudy, the shadows would hardly project at all onto the cross. Every now and then, in a fit of decisiveness, we would get a small group of volunteers to walk along the axes of the cross for a while so as to maintain it in a good enough condition for the shadows to show up. Whenever I did that I ended up exhausted, sitting on one of the suitcases that marked the end of the axes, watching the endless mountains, wondering if it had served any purpose. We were continuing to deteriorate, becoming progressively more placid, more inert, weaker, but always expecting to get out of there. I was relatively well off. I wasn’t deteriorating as fast as some of my companions and I continued to work; I became increasingly involved in what was happening. Naively, I felt that we could win that race. Numa’s death had been a blow because at the beginning he had been one of those in better condition, but there were some 83

INTO THE MOUNTAINS who were following in his footsteps. Once Coche used a razor blade to open a boil that had erupted on one leg and it produced the same yellow liquid that we had found in the bodies of those who had recently died. He didn’t have a good prognosis. He hardly ever left the plane any more, and he was losing his sense of humour. Roy was following the same path, he was progressively thinner and more haggard. His gaze was turning grey and his eyes were becoming lifeless. He had almost no muscle in his legs. Those two were clearly listed, but I didn’t know who would be following them. KK

It was ten days since Nando, Roberto and Tintin had set out.

I remember that for three days we watched them climbing that terrifying mountain that rose up behind us, until Tintin returned with the news that Nando and Roberto had decided to continue walking west. They were heading towards Chile, without much hope because they’d found an endless range of more and more

mountains on the other side with no end in sight. ‘Tintin didn’t have much to say, we asked him what he saw and whether he had reached the other side. Had he seen the line on the mountain in front of us? He himself wasn’t sure whether he had seen where the mountains ended.

I wondered whether the decision that Nando and Roberto had made up there at five thousand metres had in fact been a difficult one. Did they have any alternative? Probably not; their options had been played out. It had taken them three days to climb the mountain; to return meant to start from scratch again. ‘They had already done the incredible, it made sense just to keep walking. Those of us remaining at the plane had mixed feelings and we waited in hope for the rescue without knowing when it would come. We were hoping that our friends would arrive somewhere and would send relief crews. Would mountaineers come with dogsleds? Would there be helicopters? How would the rescue 84

Part One

take place? Would there really be one? Yes, of that I was sure, I don’t know how, but I was confident that we would be rescued. Nor did I consider the possibility that one day, before the unforeseen occurred, before we ran out of bodies for food, we would all

have to set out walking in search of an ephemeral survival. Or that we would fight among ourselves, we would kill each other in order to be able to feed ourselves. Assassinate each other in order to keep on eating. We never thought about that, it was only long after that somebody asked me whether we would have killed each other if the food had run out. Clearly we didn’t analyze it as a possibility, and I think that, in fact, we would not have done so. Maybe we would have all set off walking towards certain death, perhaps we would have abandoned the injured and the weak on the plane, but I don’t know, by then the strongest might also have been too weak. The good thing is that it didn’t happen. I don’t know what we would have done, and I haven’t needed to know. We didn’t have

an alternative plan other than to send out another expedition, but because of our weakened condition, and the hope we were placing on Nando and Roberto, we were only just starting to talk about that, and without much conviction. We knew how many bodies were left, those that we were leaving to the end, I remember Daniel speaking with great authority, Eduardo and Fito nodding seriously, but it didn’t matter at all to me who would be next. Nando’s sister and mother, Javier’s wife and some others remained untouched. It was clear that the dead were not untouchable, no one thought we would die rather than use the last bodies. We had three or four intact bodies that would last us another fortnight. We assumed that we would get out before this happened, it didn’t occur to us to think otherwise. If we ran out of food, we had already left it too late to come up with an alternative. But the days passed and we had no news of Nando and Roberto. Most likely they had fallen into a crevasse or over a precipice and had finally died in the mountains. What could we do? 85

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

In our minds and our conversations we began to propose alternatives. I was sure that we had to go to the east, towards where the water flowed down, in the direction in which Nando and Roberto had originally set off more than forty-five days previously, but had decided to return after finding the plane’s tail. That time, a great storm, coupled with indecision and fear, had brought them back. I now had the impression that the valley that opened to the east never doubled back to the west, towards Chile. Moreover, I knew that the Argentinian side was desert and that there would be few people in the foothills. We imagined ourselves getting out of the mountains, weak and starving, and not encountering anyone. Who would walk down the mountain this time? We became less willing as time went by. I was tired and weak, but if I had to,

perhaps I would do it. Actually, I've always said that I would have done it, but nowadays I'm not so sure, weakness and fear would surely have imprisoned us inside the plane and we would not have set out. I never really thought it through, nor did I consider the enormous risks involved or dare to think at all about what it would entail. In truth, it was just a possibility, we had nothing concrete. We had not selected anyone to prepare as a walker, and we weren’t accumulating food or special clothing like we had done for those who were currently walking, In the ten days since Roberto and Nando’s departure, nothing had happened in the

group, we were waiting expectantly, without news. On occasion I have been asked whether I felt that we ceased to be human, if we had turned into animals. We cannot stop being human, our essence is always there and we cannot avoid it. Animals, in front of their prey, in front of the body of a dead animal they’re going to feed on, fight each other and each one tries to eat as much as it can. We never did that, even though we were living on the edge and having to do unthinkable things, we always behaved as humans, we never fought among ourselves over a piece of meat, we never ate so much that we couldn’t eat any more, we never attacked one of our comrades in 86

Part One

order to eat them. Even though feeding oneself was the most basic

instinct, we never competed to the point of killing one another.

On the contrary, there was always dignity, we always respected one

another,

the solidarity to stay alive, a team. The in order for the others.

we

did our utmost

arose from our in the end that survival instinct each individual

to collaborate,

and

although

own individual feelings of wanting made us persevere and behave as is individual, but we realized that to be saved, he had to work with

%* OK3%

December 22 dawned early in the Andes. A clear, cool day, which would heat up with the passing hours. ‘The summer sun was shining on the snow that still covered the mountains. We noticed that the snow was receding fast, the white colour of the snowy peaks was giving way to the dark reddish colours of the rocks and the stones of the mountain. The retreating snow also left behind

alluvial traces and formed penitentes, characteristic pinnacles of

ice, on the slopes. Although there was less snow around us each time we looked, the ground where we had been for the last seventy days was still all snow and ice. As on every other day, those of us who got up earlier left the plane to listen to the radio which we could tune more easily in the early morning. We could pick up the Uruguayan radio stations clearly. In those last days, almost nothing was said about us anymore. Sporadically we would hear some news about the search, but it was clear that there was no hope that we were still alive. One day we heard the news that they had seen a cross made in the snow. Could that be the trace from our walkers? Later we knew it was another mix-up. No one had seen us yet, but we still turned on the radio every day to see whether Nando and Roberto had arrived somewhere, if they’d been found, if any of our signs had been seen, if this was the day that they’d come to rescue us. The radio batteries were getting weaker and it was becoming 87

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

increasingly difficult to tune into the Uruguayan stations. We concentrated on the very early listening period, when we could still distinguish the morning voices. Finally, on 22 December, we heard on the radio that two people had been seen walking through the cordillera and could be survivors of the Uruguayan plane lost in the mountains. What we heard was not very clear, but they spoke of two people who had appeared in the Azufre River canyon saying they were survivors of the Uruguayan plane and that, incredibly, a group of their companions were still clinging to life after seventy days in the icy

peaks of the Andes. They gave it as a preliminary report, as a possibility; but after a while they confirmed their names, they were Nando and Roberto who had arrived and had said that fourteen survivors were waiting to be rescued from the heart of the Andes.

‘To this day it makes me emotional to recall the incredible saga of Nando and Roberto who walked through the mountains for ten days under the most incredible circumstances while we were waiting up there. It 1s, in fact, the only thing I remember that gives me goose bumps and brings tears to my eyes. Now as I put this down on paper, I’m finding it difficult to write because it makes me emotional to think about the incredible feat of my friends. How after almost being given up for dead, they appeared just when we most needed them to. Daniel and I were the ones listening to the radio that morn-

ing, probably also Carlitos and maybe some others. Several say

they were there, and if that were really the case, we would have been quite a crowd listening to the radio. We could barely hear the reports, at times the interference made it impossible for us to maintain the signal. We moved the dial on the radio, and we realized that we were the news of the day. Suddenly, all the radio stations were talking about us, the news was flooding the airways, there were survivors from the Uruguayan plane that had disappeared seventy days earlier and they had to go and rescue them. We changed the station and it was the same, from the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Netherlands Antilles, RAI, all of them 88

Part One

spoke about us. We heard their names, they spoke of Nando and Roberto, and that they were fine, intact, had arrived in Chile. There was no doubt now that they would come for us. % 3K OK

I felt a great joy that we were approaching the end of our journey, that we were achieving the goal for which we had we had all suffered and worked so hard. I was assured that I would survive the Andes and that I was finally going to get off the mountain. But it was not a surprise, it was the news that I had been expect-

ing and for which we had fought. So there wasn’t an uncontrollable explosion of emotions, shouts, joy and tears; we were always confident that, in the end, we were going to get out, I didn’t know how, but that was the news that gave meaning to the seventy days of suffering, of anguish, of waiting; without the news, nothing we had done would have made sense. Now, we had to be ready for the rescue, which was on its way. Radio interference caused us to lose the signal again and soon we couldn’t listen any more. Every so often, the signal cleared and we would listen some more, but clearly we were the news of the day. We heard that they were coming to pick us up in rescue helicopters. We looked at each other with satisfaction, this time it was certain, there was no place for false alarms, they had mentioned the names of Nando and Roberto, it had to be them, now they would come for us. So we prepared for the rescue. The first thing we did was to tidy up the large cross which we had drawn out with suitcases and other items on the white ground of the glacier, hoping that in this way the helicopters would see us from above. We had made it several days previously, the snow and the wind had covered it up and we had to work quite hard in order for it to be seen clearly again. After seventy days lost in the mountains, our physical appearance was frightening. But we didn’t realize that at the time. We did feel that we should make a small effort to be a bit more 89

INTO THE MOUNTAINS presentable. So I combed my hair, washed my face, brushed my teeth and changed my clothes. I was wearing three woollen sweaters, one of them the red turtleneck sweater that I’d been wearing at the time of the accident, three pairs of trousers, several pairs of socks and two or three jackets, split between casual jackets and sports coats. I remember I was wearing the white jean jacket that had belonged to Arturo and a blue double-breasted sports coat with gold buttons that I really liked. What I did was take off my white jacket and keep the blue jacket on with the buttons fastened. I felt well-dressed, like someone who was about to sit an

exam. My chapped lips hurt me a lot, and I had the beginnings

of a beard of which I was very proud. I tidied it with my hands, so that it wouldn’t look bad. That last day, before the imminent rescue, we ate again as

usual. As the hours passed, we began to grow hungry, so without much debate, we carried out body, distributed the portions didn’t feel that we were doing been doing for so many days,

our daily ritual. We began to cut a between ourselves, and we ate. We anything strange, it was what we’d it was what had enabled us to sur-

vive until then. Why would we stop doing it at the end? Each to

his own. I took out the hand that I had in my pocket, and slowly, like any other day, I started to suck the bones and to extract all the nourishment I could. Then we distributed the last of the cigarettes, and we sat

down to wait for them to come and pick us up. We talked again about what we would do when we got off the mountain. We went through the checklist that we had discussed so much; we would call our families by phone, we would inform them that we were fine but that unfortunately some of our friends had died and would remain in the Andes. However, the hours passed by and we had no news, nothing was happening, and we had lost contact and were not hearing anything on our radio. Around noon it clouded over and began to get cold, it was a bad sign, perhaps we would have to wait one more night. Would this time be the last? We continued reviewing our plans, we would 90

Part One

somehow get to Santiago, we had hardly any money, somebody would lend us some or we would go to the Uruguayan embassy so that they could get us home. We wouldn’t go by plane, we didn’t discuss it, but we ruled out flying. I was picturing the map, we would get out from the mountains somewhere in central Chile, we would go by bus to Santiago, there we would phone our families, then take the train to Buenos Aires, and finally reach Montevideo by boat. I forgot my Chilean friends, I forgot that I had lived in Chile for three years and had many contacts that could help me. I had completely mimicked my companions in misfortune, I was just like them, as Uruguayan as they were. I also forgot my Chilean girlfriend whom I had originally been going to visit. In our planning it didn’t even occur to me that she would be in Chile; what I would say, what she would say to me, how her life had been in the last seventy days. All of that was very complicated and in the end I had totally forgotten about it. I couldn’t get my hopes up for a meeting that might not be pleasant. The important thing was that we were getting out, who we would find there and what we would do afterwards didn’t enter my thoughts. But we committed ourselves to staying united as a group as we had done until then. We would stay in contact and maintain an almost virtual knowledge of one another. Without discussing it or intending it, we knew what we were about; after co-existing for seventy days, we had by now got to know one another. We planned to start business ventures together, but above all, we would visit one another and we would eat the delicious delicacies that we had promised. We would not abandon the practice of eating raw meat, although no more human meat which, for practical reasons, would be complicated. Not because it was bad, that didn’t occur to us. We couldn’t imagine life without being part of that group that had formed on the mountain. The hours passed and no one came, the day was cloudy and the sun would soon be setting behind the mountains to the back of us. Due to the bad weather, we were back in the plane, 91

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

a little sad, looking for positive signs among ourselves, but without thinking too much since we could do nothing to speed up the rescue. It was clear that Nando and Roberto had been rescued and it was just a matter of time before they came looking for us. KK

It was close to three in the afternoon already when we heard a strange sound. We had never heard anything like it. It was

the sound of engines, it was the sound of helicopters. We left the plane to wait for the rescuers, this time it was different, they really were coming for us. The noise was very intense but within minutes it disappeared. Again silence, again curiosity ... would we get out that day? After a while, we heard the engine noise again, louder this time; it was coming from below, from the valley. In the distance and against the backdrop of the clouds that covered the valley, we spotted three black dots that approached us, and after a while, they grew bigger. They disappeared again for a time and then, from below the glacier, we saw them reappear. The helicopters made several turns over us as if they were trying to clear the area, and finally they dropped out some packages. We greeted the arrival of the rescuers jubilantly. Then one of the helicopters landed one ski on the steep slope of the glacier and two rescuers from Chile’s Andean Rescue team jumped out. The other helicopter also landed one of its skis and some other rescuers Jumped out. They started towards us. The helicopters were making a lot of noise and had generated a huge swirling wind. Our fragile and weak bodies could barely stay on their feet in the midst of such commotion, helicopters, noise, wind, people jumping out; we didn’t understand much of what was happening, nor did we know what to do. My weakest friends couldn’t stay on their feet, they couldn’t approach the helicopters and were being blown to the ground by the wind. In my mind I can still Gz

Part One

see the blades of the helicopter spinning dangerously close to the

ground. The steep slope was such that the slightest unexpected movement might cause one of the blades to touch the ground

and a terrible tragedy would ensue. Finally, a member of the rescue team reached us. I don’t remember his face, nor what he said, but I ran towards the heli-

copter taking the risk that one of the blades might hit me. Instinctively and without thinking I emptied the contents of my pockets while running, and threw into the snow the remains of the hands that I’'d been saving. I had to climb into the helicopter, to reintroduce myself back into society. I fell a couple of times while

running. The rescuers gave us instructions, but I didn’t understand anything, I just ran to the helicopter. When I got near, I

saw a person inside it beckoning me to come closer. Another of my friends was running alongside me and when we got to the helicopter they stretched out a hand from inside and I felt myself lifted into the air; I already weighed very little and I fell forward into the helicopter. Daniel and Carlitos were already there. Eduardo also made it. “Let’s go, let’s go!” I heard the pilot say. And the machine unsteadily started to rise up.

I still didn’t feel safe, I wasn’t ready for a trip like that. The

helicopter headed straight up towards the mountain to the west, towards Chile, and tried to climb several times but wasn’t able to, there were air currents that were moving it all over the place and it was juddering violently. All of a sudden it came perilously close to the black rocks. Nobody said anything, the pilots included. The situation was very tense, we made several attempts to rise up over the mountain but the descending air currents pulled us back down and we weren’t able to clear it. I began to feel afraid, I was petrified, I felt the same panic that I’d felt seventy days previously on the day of our accident, but I retain only images of that, the fear isn’t registered in my memory. I do remember to this day the panic that I felt flying in that helicopter commanded by those two brave pilots who were risking their lives to rescue us from our hell. 93

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Two snapshots taken by the Andean Rescue Corps.

Finally, they decided to go back the way they had come. ‘They continued to the east and were able to cross at a lower altitude. There was almost zero visibility, we heard another helicopter but we didn’t see it. ‘The sound of that other helicopter flying so close to us made me very scared. Once we had crossed the ridge, the flight began to get a little quieter and we found the courage to look around and encourage 94

Part One

one another. It seemed that this time we were going to get off the mountain. My friends were also scared, but smiling, we looked at

each other with great complicity, happy to leave our fate in the

hands of those rescuers who had come with helicopters to pick us up, whom we couldn’t direct, they were in charge of us and we let them transport us. Our pilots communicated something by radio, they reported that they were returning with four more survivors.

One of us said that Nando was on the other helicopter with two

more of our companions. They were Coche and Alvaro. I don’t know how they managed to come because they could barely move. I hadn’t seen Nando. Much later, I learned that pilots had

brought him along for guidance, reversing the route that he and Roberto had walked. Without his help, they would never have found us. The pilots couldn’t believe that Nando and Roberto had crossed the Andes walking without any preparation or equipment, after surviving so many days in the worst conditions.

95

Resilience is not the ability to recover. [t is the ability to go through hell, to endure the indescribable, and not to break.

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LMC OL

MLLER

LLL ELLEN

normal life. Pe UO RMAC LLL CLL RTOS return to cwilization and reintegrate successfully, On the other hand we had no accounts to settle. Unkke those returning from wars, maltreated and humiliated, or those returning Jrom concentration camps or any situation where there’s a human CURR MECHEL OSS

OCC

ML

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hostile and aggressive, but not by a human. We never suffered that wound of resentment. Up there we always recognized ourselves in one another, we always remembered that we were human. And, later, wherever we have been, people have always recewed us with kindness, with restraint and affection, OTTO

ERS La OO aL MLR LLL MLTR ALLO IS and to live a normal life, without ghosts or nightmares.

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4.

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|

Nhe helicopter took us to a place belonging to Sergio Catalan, the Chilean herdsman who had found Nando and Roberto on their last legs at the confluence of

some rivers they couldn’t cross. ‘They were exhausted, unable to move, after walking ten days, negotiating glaciers, ascending and descending mountains, leaping across crevices, and crossing fast-flowing rivers. Catalan, with the frugality of a humble country man, took his time but he understood the urgency and he went

for help. They say he rode for an entire day carrying the emotional letter written by Nando, indicating who he was and where he came from, and the urgent need to rescue the fourteen who were still at the plane.

When

the

helicopters

landed

at Catalan’s

place

in Los

Maitenes, we were ecstatically happy. The arrival of the helicopters was well covered by Chilean television and even today I get emotional when I watch the main scenes of the rescue again. We see ourselves skinny, with long hair, emaciated, with pronounced and very white teeth, with injuries and sores on our lips, with wounds on our legs, but happy with the joy of putting our odyssey behind us. Our happiness contrasts with the anxiety of the rescuers and those around us, they didn’t know how to treat us, they didn’t understand how we had survived, they didn’t know what we’d eaten but neither were they asking us anything. 97

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Catalan’s place was simple, but the landscape was verdant, and the air was fresh; it was the base that Catalan used to take

his animals to spend the summer in the mountains, their summer pasturage. There were people, animals, food, and it was full of life. Everyone looked after us with care and with great generosity. We enjoyed being the centre of attention, everything revolved around us.

The first images taken of the survivors just after getting off the helicopter. In the first, Coche is walking supported by two rescuers whilst in the background Pedro Algorta watches his companions get off the helicopter. In the second, a close-up of Pedro showing his joy at having arrived at Catalan's place. 98

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As we were assumed to be extremely weak from a general lack of food, they fed us ali manner of high-calorie foods: chocolates, bread, cheese, beans... A mixture of the rustic food that Catalan

and his men kept in their huts and the food brought by the mountain rescuers. I don’t know if anyone actually commented on it, since no-one imagined that we had consumed only proteins, but

we ate it with great relish. It was different, it was delicious, it was

a change from what we had eaten for the last seventy days. We looked and we laughed. With joy, complicity, knowing how many secrets we were leaving behind in the Andes. The first familiar face I saw was Carlitos’s father, who was already in Chile. There were other parents, with longer sadder faces, because at that moment they were hearing the worst. With our arrival, they were getting the confirmation that their children wouldn’t be returning, that they would be staying on the mountain. I didn’t know them, nor could I put myself in their place.

We had never even considered that. Our getting out confirmed

the best for some and the worst for others. But we couldn’t deal with it. We couldn’t put ourselves in their place. We were still alive, their children had been dead for days in the Andes, and in some way they had come back with us. ‘They didn’t ask me anything, but they did ask some of my friends. “How is so-and-so? When is he coming?” they wanted to know. “So-and-so is not coming back, he stayed on the mountain.” Later, they put us back on the helicopters and flew us to the hospital in the city of San Fernando, where they had set aside an area to receive us. Everything was strange, people looked at us in amazement, astonishment, they touched us, they treated us as creatures who had come back from the dead. I have vague memories; we were each shown to a hospital room where several doctors checked us over; they looked at us with concern, wanting to know our secret, but they didn’t say much, they didn’t ask us tough questions, although we would have told them everything. ‘The nurses, female experts in first aid, looked after us with much care; they also told us nothing, neither that we 99

INTO THE MOUNTAINS were in a serious condition, nor that we were out of danger. For the first time since the accident, I undressed completely and I could see my body, emaciated and damaged by the seventy days on the mountain.

It was pale, almost lifeless, yellowish where

I had not been exposed to the sun, and burnt dark where the sun had punished me severely over the course of seventy days. I didn’t smell anything, we had lost our capacity to smell some things, but I imagine that we had the stench of the dried blood that stuck to our bodies. I had a relaxing bath, and then, under

the supervision of the doctors and the attentive nurses, I spent

my first night in a bed. While I was having my bath, I left the clothes ’'d been wearing for the last seventy days on a table. They brought me clean clothes, smelling of life, but my cherished old tattered ones, with their stench and their traces of blood and death, with who knows what mementos in their pockets, disappeared. Someone must have collected them with other cast-offs and diligently burned them, or may have taken them as souvenirs. Some of my brothers still have what they were wearing when they left the Andes and they keep

them as a precious memento. I have nothing.

sé

2

: ee

a

= ce

c

5 4

Pedro Algorta on December 23", 1972, the day after getting rescued. 100

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That night, we wandered around the hospital despite the nurses wanting to keep us confined to our beds. I slept for a while,

but I visited and received visits from my brothers of the moun-

tain. We were delighted and excited about the novelty of feeling alive, of surprisingly being the centre of so much attention and care. But we were still very weak, and had difficulty understanding what was going on around us. When I awoke, I had another bath, and for a reason I still don’t understand, I shaved off my seventy-one day old beard, which I had cultivated so carefully, and which had given me so much pleasure to feel, growing with my hands for company. How much I regret having shaved it off since I don’t have any good pictures of that beard that grew with me over seventy days! I left my moustache because my sore lips wouldn’t allow me to shave without pain. I also washed my hair, greasy and flattened from staying unwashed for so long in the mountains, and a thick head of hair emerged. I also cut my long nails that had been growing for seventy days. KOK

Soon my father arrived. Even today I remember his arrival with anxiety. He wanted to know how I was, he wanted to know what state of recovery his son was in. At the time, my father was nearly fifty years old, younger than I am today. He lived with my mother and my five siblings in Buenos Aires and on the weekend in which we had the accident in the Andes, my parents had decided to go to the popular Uruguayan summer resort of Punta del Este to spend the long weekend of 12 October. On 13

October, they were returning by car to Buenos Aires, when they

heard on the radio the news that a military plane had been given up for lost in the Andes. They were dismayed, but they didn’t believe it to be ours, we were supposed to have arrived in Chile on the 12 October, and if it was our plane, it would already be returning without passengers; I shouldn’t be there. But later, the 10]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS news began to be more disturbing, until finally the worst was con-

firmed, the plane that they were talking about was actually ours, with us as passengers, and there was little hope that we would be found alive. My parents returned to Buenos Aires to break the bad news to my siblings and then they took the first plane to Santiago. Like many other relatives of the missing passengers they went to the Uruguayan embassy, they spoke to the Chilean Air Force, they even went close to the area where they thought we had crashed. Everyone wanted to help and comfort those parents who had lost

their children. A few days after the accident, they offered a Mass for me at the school where I had finished my secondary studies, the San Ignacio de Pocuro School. I imagine that father Del Piano said the Mass attended by a lot of my friends, my parents, my siblings,

and my Chilean girlfriend. I had been given up for dead, I had

been lost in the Andes, and only my mother maintained the conviction that I was still alive. Their return home was difficult. My father, with great courage, insisted that life had to continue. But my mother confined

herself to her room where she cried and prayed for hours. She

always had two bags at the ready, one for going to Chile at a moment’s notice, the other one with my clothes, thinking that I would need them when I returned from the mountains. Years later, I once said in front of her that everyone had given us up for dead. She corrected me firmly: “I always knew you were alive.” Anyway, my siblings faced the reality, their older brother was not coming back. My brother Javier moved into my room, life had to go on and he was now the oldest. My family in Buenos Aires, with sadness, received outside visitors. It was difficult to give condolences to those who didn’t know for certain that I was dead. I was missing in the Andes. But on 22 December, some strange news began to emerge, two people had been seen walking through the cordillera and

they said they came from a crashed plane. A friend of my father 102

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phoned him to let him know. Without thinking too much or waiting for confirmation or for them to give the names, my father took the first plane that was leaving for Chile, while my mother remained in Buenos Aires. He still didn’t know who those possible survivors were, nor what had happened to the rest. He had even less idea as to whether I would be among the survivors and under what conditions he might find me. When my father arrived in Chile, it was confirmed to him; the walkers were Roberto and Nando and fourteen other boys were alive in the mountains. But the list of survivors hadn’t been communicated yet and my father didn’t know whether I was alive or not. As soon as he got off the plane that had brought him to Santiago, he took a taxi to the Uruguayan embassy and he asked the driver to turn on the radio to hear the latest news. Just at that moment they started reading out the list of survivors, one by one, and I was on it. Yes! I was on it! My father, crying, hugged the taxi driver, whom he then asked to change route and take him

straight to the Hospital in San Fernando, over 140 kilometres to the south. The driver, who was deeply moved, refused to charge

for the trip. When my father reached the hospital, it was too late for him to be let in to see me, but he found some of my Chilean friends who had arrived earlier and they offered him lodging in their house. ‘The next morning they let him go to my room and he found me a ghost of my former self. It was not the same person who had left full of life seventy days earlier, but it was me, and I was alive. Not knowing what to say, deeply moved, he hugged me, and amid a flood of tears, he only managed to say: “Forgive me, Pedro, we had given you up for dead.” Several years later, going to see a Nacional (Uruguayan football team) match in the Parque Central stadium, he tripped and hit his head very badly. He spent a month in intensive care and on many occasions I thought that he was going to leave us. I cried a lot because he was suffering, but I also cried because if he were to leave, I wouldn’t be able to continue receiving his love. 103

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7K OK

That phrase “Forgive me, Pedro, we had given you up for dead” holds enormous significance, which I didn’t understand at the time. I couldn’t, because I wasn’t dead, I was alive, I had never died, not even a little. But for him, I was dead and then seventy days later I returned from the dead. For him, and for most people, we had disappeared and died in the Andes, and life had to go on. ‘They had mourned and then had gone back to a routine, ensuring that my five siblings would adapt to the new situation.

Only much later did I understand what that phrase repre-

sented for my father. His great sense of guilt, he had given me up for dead, he hadn’t had enough faith in me to think that we were still alive. He had closed a chapter and started life anew, leaving me on the mountain. My mother had not, and many other fathers and mothers had not; they had continued to believe that their children were still alive when, in fact, in many

cases, they were

dead. And the opposite was also true. So a lot of people felt the same way. In reality, I have nothing to forgive, it is logical, I would also have presumed that I were dead; it’s impossible to survive what we went through, but we did, and seventy days later, skinny,

rough, and unkempt, we returned from the dead.

I arrived back with the mountain and to reclaim my been through, nor

transformed by an unfathomable experience, on my shoulder, but alive, eager to keep living place. I was neither conscious of what they had was | able right then to put myself in their place.

But I was tired and annoyed with the protocol, with the med-

ical care, with the questions unasked by people wanting to know all the secrets of our survival, who

looked at us as if we were

actually ghosts returning from the dead. I was somewhere else, I wanted to rest, I was worried about myself, I wanted to know how

I looked, and I wanted to regain my weight, but above all I wanted

to be with my brothers of the mountain, I wanted to feel their love and friendship that had been forged by our common adversity, I wanted to share with them what was happening. 104

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My father asked me how we had fed ourselves, what had we eaten. I looked at him with a smile, I don’t think I said much more. I don’t know whether he understood right away. But I remember that he turned pale and he hugged me. He didn’t probe further,

he never spoke about the subject again. * ok OK

And there we were in San Fernando. The dawn of the first day out of the mountains was different, we were enjoying clean, fresh sheets for the first time in very many days, and the clear morning sun was streaming in through my window. My Chilean friends came to visit me. ‘They were the first to arrive. I know that Ana Luisa, Christian, and Enrique were there, and several more. I had finished high school and started university in Chile, so I had several friends there. But I don’t remember much; although I wanted to see my Chilean friends, my main goal was to be with my brothers of the mountain, with my brother survivors. There were many people, and many journalists, who interviewed us and took photos. I've seen some of the interviews that we did then. I am extremely lucid and articulate. Many times I have thought that we hadn’t been able to express ourselves when we got off the mountain, but that’s not the case, in the videos I've seen we were happy and conscious of having done something fantastic. Although we didn’t talk about the transcendence of what we had done, of how unique our experience was, we were beginning to enjoy being interviewed, being asked questions, we felt that we were coming back as victors. Later my mother arrived, and then I spoke to my siblings by phone; I suppose that I must also have talked to my grandmothers and to others. Some people touched us as if it were a miracle that we were alive; there was a group of mothers who gave thanks to the Virgin and wanted us to hang up rosaries, medals and other relics, as if we were the actual manifestation of the miracle. Suddenly I had sixteen mothers and sixteen fathers. They all shared 105

INTO THE MOUNTAINS the joy of getting their children back. They already called us by our names, I became “Pedrito” to people who had never met me, I was part of the family of survivors and they made a place for me among them. Actually, I don’t remember much about whom I talked to, but I enjoyed the affection of all those people who were new to me. They always had a happy face for us, affectionate, and kind. But between the lines I read their preoccupation with understanding what had happened, their concern for how the mountain would affect us for the rest of our lives. One of the things that has always intrigued me is how it was that, in those early moments, we didn’t talk openly to the press about how we fed ourselves on the mountain.

For us, it was the

most natural thing, logical, what anyone would have done. My

cousin Veronica was among the first people who saw me in Chile. She recently reminded me about our reunion. She told me that I had brought up the topic myself, asking her if she knew how we had fed ourselves on the mountain; like most of our family, she hadn’t imagined the truth. When she said that she didn’t know, I told her everything immediately, with the goriest details, trying to entertain, to shock. She couldn’t believe it.

Actually, we never asked ourselves whether or not it was correct; for us it always was, and at that time we had the tact not to speak of it. It’s amazing that Nando and Roberto, within hours of leaving the mountain, faced the world’s press and didn’t talk of it. There’s an impressive video which shows that when a journalist asks with great ingenuity how we had fed ourselves, Nando looks at Roberto not knowing what to say and Roberto speaks, among other things, of “the lichens and what little there was to eat.” And no one said anything. Actually, it’s lucky that nobody asked us anything openly because we had no plan; we would have told everything without restraint, but except for the specialists who were treating us, none of those we initially met had any inkling of it. Anyway, it impresses me to this day, the delicate silence that Nando and Roberto and all of us kept when we were interviewed by journalists right after we’d come down from the Andes. 106

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We spent that first morning in San Fernando among the journalists who interviewed us, and our families who talked among themselves about who-knows-what; smoking, we told our story, leaving out the bit about how we’d fed ourselves on the mountain. I still I have one of the interviews that I did that same day, 23

December, while eight of our friends were still on the mountain

being rescued via helicopter. It’s a great interview, I like it because I am basically saying what I still say today. ’'m consistent. I say that “ours was no miracle, we knew we were going to save ourselves and we worked hard in order to save ourselves. We weren't

rescued by some angel who parachuted down from heaven, rather it was because we worked hard to get out. We organized ourselves, God gave us strength, and we saved ourselves.” Watching the interview today, I blush when I see the incredible arrogance

and confidence with which I spoke. The “God gave us strength” 1s entirely consistent with what I thought and felt about God before the accident. It has to do with my conviction that God is love, that He acts through us and is the force that mobilized us, but that

we were the ones who decided our fate. The “and we saved our-

selves” at the end sounds a bit blithe, as if it had been achieved by pure logic, without too much suffering. I'm struck by the incredible minimization of the facts, the extraordinary devictimization

of the tragedy, we didn’t remember our dead comrades, not a

word, we were celebrating life, ours, and we were proud to have made it out. The dead were with us. If they hadn’t died, we would not have been able to survive. That was something that we were very clear about. I was not alone, several of my colleagues were in the same position. All the videos of the interviews match. We were amusing, entertaining, articulate, proud, arrogant about what we had done, and we

couldn’t let them take that moment away from us. All this added to the mystery and the extraordinary nature of what we had done. Ordinary beings like us had carried out an incredible feat, and we were talking about it like players who had just won an umpteenth game of rugby. 107

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These interviews are the basis for a five-minute video that I’ve used as an introduction to my presentations. I am speaking in it, but so too are Nando, Carlitos, Daniel, Eduardo, and Roberto. I

like this video because there is no fiction, we are talking as we were when we left the mountain.

There was a mass that day in San Fernando. Our parents felt the need to thank God for the miracle of our reappearance. I have several photos of the ceremony in which Ana Luisa, my Chilean girlfriend, is sitting next to me holding my hand. She

was fulfilling her role as a formal girlfriend. Poor girl, in those

seventy days she had found another boyfriend, a boyfriend who was alive and who lived near her home. At some point, too soon, she brought up a difficult issue, she didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know how to handle it. I had died in the Andes and, for

her, our complex relationship had ended. She had started again

and had met someone else, but seventy days after the accident I had come back from the dead, demanding attention and a place in her heart. It was too much for her. But I was coming out of a difficult situation, I had been between life and death, I had been living in a diminished state, it wasn’t the sort of decision that could be made at that time. It wasn’t possible for me to resolve such a complex problem of the heart when I was returning from death. So that was easily solved and by mutual agreement we left

it that she would continue with the other boy because I had other

things on my mind. And with that, my relationship with Ana Luisa ended. I saw her on some later occasions, but she never dealt well with this

quite absurd courtship where she had to resolve what I had brought about by dying and coming back from the dead. Of course, I understood

the uncomfortable

situation that she had

gone through. Some time ago, when I returned to San Ignacio College to tell my story, she was there, as she was when I returned to Chile on the issue of the thirty-three miners. Things were fine between us.

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The survivors at a mass celebrated in San Fernando on the day after the rescue.

I imagine that when we got off the mountain, our parents and friends were very happy that we’d come back from the dead, but none of them placed any bets on our mental health and our consequent ability to live normal lives. I'm sure they thought we were going to live marked by what we had experienced in the Andes and perhaps would not escape some problematic traumas. ‘Thank God, that hasn’t happened, those of us who returned from the mountains have all lived normal lives, we landed more or less where we would have landed on that trip, only seventy days later

and several kilos lighter. 3K 3K

After Mass in San Fernando, about which I remember little, my parents took me to the Sheraton San Cristobal in Santiago on the same day, 23 December. The eight who remained one more night on the mountain, waiting to be rescued, were transferred directly to the Central Hospital of Santiago. Some were released there, and they were also taken to the Sheraton hotel. Roy, weighing 38 kilos, was still hovering between life and death. Doctors fought to save him and 109

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they almost lost that battle. I went with my parents from San Fernando to Santiago. I remember some things from that journey. At one point, my father had to slow down because there had been a car accident. An accident victim lay by the side of the

road covered with newspaper. My mother reacted instinctively

to try to protect me: “Don’t look, Pedro,” she said. I looked on, unperturbed, the image of that dead person didn’t affect me, all I did was calculate how many days that body would have fed us on the mountain.

When we arrived at the hotel, there was a swarm of journalists from around the world looking for brown, skinny youths.

That first day we ate like gluttons and obviously I paid for it with a colossal diarrhoea that almost incapacitated me. I wasn’t prepared for such a drastic change of diet. I rested a lot, I spent

long hours dozing in the hotel room. But it was difficult to sleep

properly, wanting to know what was happening downstairs, how my brothers of the mountain were spending those first days away from our routine.

In fact, every time I’ve returned to the Santiago Sheraton I

relive those first hours back. The news, the happiness, the surprise, the incredible publicity of the event, journalists from across the globe “hunting” survivors, beautiful women who wanted to have their photos taken with us for something that we had a hard time understanding, for something that we hadn’t wanted to do, for having fallen into the Andes and doing what anyone would have done to survive. I remember people in the hotel corridors wanting to interview us and to have photos taken with us. Sud-

denly, we were almost celebrities. For a long time I resisted those

moments of fame; I no longer resist when it happens today, I generally consent to the photographs and I sign the books, in fact I am writing one now. My five siblings arrived on 24 December, eager to see their older brother, to share their anxieties with me, to see me back from the mountains. I don’t know how they prepared for the reunion, I remember they came when I was resting, and my 110

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response was: “Give them some chocolates, [Pll see them later, right now I'm resting.” I was fine, but I wasn’t able to put myself in the shoes of my siblings who had come to see me and to hug me, to welcome me back home. Evidently I had other customs, other habits, I wasn’t interested in seeing my dear siblings and

giving them my attention. I had lived without them for seventy days, I could live without them for a few days more. OK ok

We spent Christmas Eve at the hotel, where we had a Christmas toast to our new family, but on 25 December my brother survivors all went back to Uruguay and I stayed with my family in Santiago. On arriving in Montevideo, my brothers of the Andes

spoke at an incredible conference in front of the world’s press, our families, and the families of the boys who hadn’t returned. Pancho excelled in it, explaining in a few intensely beautiful words what everyone already knew or had guessed; how we had fed our-

selves in order to survive, although in a far more eloquent way than I had explained it up on the mountain.

He said: ““That moment came when we no longer had food or anything like that and we thought: if Jesus at the Last Supper distributed His body and blood to all His apostles, this was a sign that we must do the same and take their incarnate body and blood. And it was an intimate communion between all of us, it was what helped us survive ... And it was a giving of each one, and we are telling it as it should be, as it must be interpreted and understood in its true dimension. And you need to think about all that was

great about those boys.”

Nothing more, that was all he said, and he and all of us received a tremendous ovation. In this ovation, parents of children who had died were telling us that it was all right, that they understood what had taken place, and since then no one has persecuted us or accused us of anything. Had it not been the case, had they blamed us for something, probably neither I nor my 11]

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friends could have had the normal lives we’ve led; we would have spent our lives defending the indefensible. Those days in Santiago were very active. We were still walking around in a daze. On the morning of the 24 December, I went shopping with my parents; I had to get some new clothes, buy a shirt, some trousers, what they’d given us at the hospital in San Fernando was just a temporary change of clothes, the rest had stayed on the mountain, and the ones I had from before were being used by my brothers or were too big for me. ‘The clothes

that my mother had diligently brought in her suitcase ready for my return weren’t of any use to me. She hadn’t expected me to be so thin. We were recognized on the street by our thinness, by the brown colour of our skin, by the sores on our mouths, by the

joy and the puzzlement with which we looked at the world, leaving behind seventy days of suffering and our dead friends. Our appearance betrayed us and people looked at us with amazement, with respect, and with a bit of admiration. For some reason, my parents decided that we would stay

in Chile for a few days and we went to Vina del Mar, instead of returning to Buenos Aires. I went to a hotel with my father.

Mum and my siblings went to a borrowed apartment. I remember that I loved being with my father. Until then, he had been a hard man and aloof towards me; in the days after the cordillera, there was a clear bond between him and me, which was never broken. He had enormous patience with me. Even though I was well and feeling increasingly better, I had outbursts of bad temper. Sometimes he contradicted me, something I couldn’t stand, and

when he annoyed me, I became brutally hurtful and humiliating towards him. I put him through episodes that distress me today

and I wouldn’t want my kids to do the same to me. Poor dad, he endured my rebellion of those days without complaint. As the

parable of the prodigal son relates, the father’s role is to wait for the child to come home, and when he returns, the father’s joy is boundless, even to the extent of forgetting those who have stayed loyally at home and conducted themselves well. 112

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Finally we returned to Buenos Aires and, after a brief holiday

in Uruguay where I met up with my brothers of the mountain

again, I decided to return to Argentina, to my parents’ house. After three months, already physically recovered, and without mentioning anything of what had happened to me in the Andes, I enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires in order to complete my studies in economics. Gradually the mountain became part of me, and came to be little more than a blurred memory;

blurred

by everything that, thank God, I’ve experienced after having sur-

vived the Andes.

KK ok

One of the things that affects me the most is scrutinizing the photographs we took of ourselves on the mountains. I’m deeply moved by the photo in which we are sitting on the sleeping bag we made to enable Nando and Roberto to make their trek. That picture is very significant. We are all active, eating, feeding our-

selves, but I'm not in the middle of the group, I'm on the periph-

ery, sitting above the fuselage, watching the group from the outside, keeping my distance without committing myself too much. Those who are close to me know that this aloofness has been a constant in my life. The way we have all been in our later lives has, in one way or another, paralleled what and who we were on the mountain. For example, Nando lecturing around the world, as if it were a continuation of his incredible hike with his enormous willpower, embodying his tragic and heroic story with a powerful presence, but rising above the trivialities of the group. And Roberto, fully immersed in the group, participating in all the battles, always with great dedication. ‘Then there’s me, watching from outside, like a bird flying high, without alighting, committed to my own way. There is a very special group feeling among us that I've felt for many years, which was forged up there in the mountains, but which I felt that first night back as, with great complicity, we roamed 113

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through the hospital, evading the nurses and visiting each other in our rooms. I feel we have an invisible halo that envelops and protects us. Gone is the mountain with all its sensations, emotions and sorrows, its secrets that are not so secret, but that seem to be

so all the same, with only us able to understand them. But in those first hours, that group feeling which distinguished and united us was already present. We shared a uniquely difficult experience, we recognize a deep, common bond, we acknowledge having shared a very special communion and we feel pride at having overcome the mountain. That’s our code, our lowest common denominator, our most profound communion, to have overcome the mountain, to have come face to face with our most basic humanity, to have experienced with one another the most primitive essence of being human, to have felt the need and the instinct to live. I once asked Pablo Vierci, author of La sociedad de la nieve, whether we had a common denominator. I put him in a tight spot and he attempted a complicated answer. He spoke of shared values, of the experience, of what we had learned. It was almost a trap, the truth is much simpler. Our common denominator 1s something else, it is the communion of the mountain. There are no complex explanations, it is having lived together through hell, it is sustaining that common wound, which was collectively starting to heal. As my sister Gloria says, we have a protective aura

that safeguards us and defines us as a group, it’s our secret that

is not a secret, it is the intimacy of having shared those seventy days in the Andes. OK

Here I am. The truth is that I never thought I would return to this place. It is amazing. I'm sitting above the slope of the glacier on a ridge, at one end of which are the memorial cross and monolith of the Valley of Tears. I look at the glacier bed which I don’t recognize. When we were there it was white. Now the movements of the mountain have been transforming it into a moraine, 114

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and it’s a brownish colour. But I can clearly distinguish where we

were and try to imagine the path of the plane careering down the slopes until finally coming to rest in the middle of the valley. ‘That part is hard to imagine, there isn’t a clear line, it’s quite incredible how we didn’t crash against the rocks and the penitentes that protrude from the mountainside.

But what has not changed is the mountain. It is different,

because it has much less snow than when we were there. But there are the same rock formations, the same profiles, there is the same

unsettling silence. That’s what makes the biggest impression. The silence. I look

at the summits, the outlines of the mountains, the upper glacier that looks like it might crumble and collapse at any moment, and I feel a great awe, a great insignificance in the face of such tremendous magnitude. The distances are incalculable. How far is it from where the plane was to the opposite side of the valley? I don’t know, one or two kilometres, perhaps only a few hundred metres, but fortunately we never dared to venture there. ‘The crevices grow bigger as you approach the mountain opposite, where there are always shadows, where the glacier tends to rise jaggedly up the slopes of the mountain. I look at the glacier wall. There is a part that hangs menacingly over the valley. I remember feeling that it could fall on us. ‘Today, I don’t think it will, but everything is dangerous, the mountains are threatening and they are still there.

One looks at them, scrutinizes them, interrogates them. But they

don’t communicate, they stare, unresponsive, in the same way that forty years ago they watched us impassively, and we looked back at them, mistakenly trying to elicit some response in the face of such immense silence and majesty. Today they are the same, and even though it’s a clear and transparent day, the ridge at the summit of the mountain seems undefined to me. There is always a breeze, a mist, a misleading reflection, a difficulty that tells you that not everything is quite as it seems. ‘The peaks cannot all be seen from below, there are always peaks beyond the ones that one can see, so the ridges are irregular and the mountains are not fully visible. Miles

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But it is the silence and loss of perspective that impresses the most. You lose the ability to calculate distances, to see. Everything is close and at the same time it’s far there have been quite a few people here today, it The deafening silence of the mountain blocks out

gauge what you away. Although isn’t noticeable. everything else,

it’s a special silence, because it has particular noises. I try to listen and to remember. I feel alone. I look at the mountains, trying to recognize places. I try to identify where Nando, Roberto and Tintin climbed. Next time, I should bring one of them along with

me so that they can point it out. Obviously they didn’t climb up the middle of the glacier, that way up looks impossible. So perhaps

they climbed up the wedge between the glacier and the mountainside. It looks flatter above, there are some clearings where Nando and Roberto could have spent the night before starting their hike. From where I am, I search for the plane’s tail, where it should have been. I don’t know, I can’t make it out. What I do see 1s that the glacier falls off abruptly after a few metres. You wouldn’t be able to walk there. ‘To go that way would have meant certain death. But the tail was in that direction...! How many risks we ran!

Nor am I able to recognize where I climbed in the first few days, or where we found we crashed in the though everything The altitude is

the body of mountains. remains the killing me.

our friend who was lost on the day The landscape has changed even same. I'm out of breath. I would like to

walk down to the glacier and regain the feeling of being on it. In

‘95 we did that but now I can’t even feel that it’s necessary. From where I am, you see the same profiles and the same mountains as forty years ago. It’s the same panorama, the same view, only this time we have gone and we have left the mountains there. I think of how incredible this occasion is. Actually I came with low expectations, I look at the cross and the memorial where the remains of some of the boys who didn’t return are buried; the grave is now covered with flags and objects left behind by people who have come here on pilgrimage. I look at the monolith, I think that maybe I should have stayed there and we all should have 116

Part One

died. Because it’s not every day that one crashes in the Andes,

and is still alive seventy days later. My expectations have been exceeded. I didn’t think I was going to get hooked by the place. But it has affected me deeply, I cannot think about anything else. I want to take home the silence and the majesty of the mountain. I wonder why I left this place and not Arturo or Felipe. It wasn’t

meant to be. But these are questions without answers. It doesn’t make sense to ask these questions and, thank God, they are not questions that torment me either. But they do arise up here, at almost four thousand metres, and I ask them automatically. I leave those questions behind, still without answers, and I turn to gaze at

the mountain once more, to feel the silence, to look at the ndges and the peaks that I know so well, that have changed so little and

that will continue here for very many years, unperturbed, outlasting me and my companions who continue on our journey. I’m taking this moment home with me. I feel emotionally tied

to this place where I shouldn’t have been but which I stubbornly

wanted to leave. I’m happy to have returned, it has given me this experience.

117

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open for much longer and the mountain moves and appears with more vigour. In the meantime, I lead a normal life. Wherever I go, people know of my adventure, but they don’t ask me anything. But Pm ORI

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spent that summer of ‘73 in Uruguay, alternating between my [es and my brothers of the mountain. The truth is, I had a

good time with them. We retold anecdotes of our experience

in the Andes, we relived what had happened, we laughed a lot and we felt like brothers. The group was fulfilling what we had agreed upon and we would not separate anymore.

Anyone hearing those conversations would probably have thought that we were all hopelessly insane and traumatized.

Above

all we talked about our food on the mountain,

and we

were constantly making the most shockingly rude jokes we could think of. We had promised that when we got out we would continue the practice of eating raw meat, but luckily it was not necessary; those promises were quickly forgotten. We very much enjoyed being with one another, under the shocked-but-patient

eyes of our parents, siblings and friends. Those closest to us already understood and were not horrified. But if someone new came into the group, they had a tremendous shock. We didn’t talk about anything else. We met up with one another, in groups, in Punta del Este, in Punta del Diablo, in Montevideo. Always the same; we laughed a lot and enjoyed that unexpected media attention that made us popular. Everyone greeted us, everyone wanted their photo taken with us. Without a doubt we had returned victorious. Moreover, 120

Part One

A reunion of the survivors one year after the tragedy. From left to right, standing: Pedro Algorta, Daniel Fernandez, Roy Harley, Alfredo Delgado, José Luis Inciarte, Fernando Parrado, Adolfo Strauch, Piers Paul Read

(author of Alwe), Eduardo Strauch and Carlos Paez; below Javier Methol, Gustavo Zerbino, Alvaro Mangino, Ramon Sabella and Roberto Canessa.

our interest in women was returning, an instinct that was totally suppressed while we were in the Andes. Gradually, they were returning to their place in our conversations. I remember that British writer Piers Paul Read was in Uruguay. Our parents had contracted him to write a book documenting our experience and so forestall the appearance of alternative versions of what had taken place. Different publishing houses had proposed various writers and our parents chose Read, for being Catholic, and because he promised that he would write a book that was dignified and not scandalous. I also understand that although the publisher who put him forward made an acceptable financial offer, it was not the best. Read interviewed all of us, he

made a huge table of people, events and dates, and he immersed himself in our story. He practically became one of the group and he shared several get-togethers with us. He also had enormous patience in tolerating our sick jokes and our total lack of restraint. He then returned to London and wrote Alwe. When he returned 12]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS to Uruguay to show what he’d written, several of my brother survivors didn’t like it. As Read says in the preface of his book, some thought that the full human depth of our story wasn’t reflected in its lines. I disagree. For me, it’s a very good account of what happened, and even today, when we disagree on some fact, we usually end our discussions by returning to Alwe. It is our bible. However, the book does have some inaccuracies. I don’t find any mention of my climb from the first few days. That expedition is either missing from Alive or someone else has taken my place on

the expedition. When I read the draft I was more preoccupied by what it said about me than by the omissions and that’s the price I paid for my relative remoteness from the group once I returned to Argentina. During those first days back in Uruguay, I visited the families

of Felipe and Arturo. They were ill-judged visits. It was difficult with the parents of my friends; they were in mourning for their children,

and I got there, full of anecdotes

and life, euphoric,

eager to take on the world. Arturo’s father wouldn’t see me and I barely got the chance to greet Felipe’s father. Or maybe it was

the other way around. At the time I couldn’t understand them, and what I had to say wasn’t what they wanted to hear. I was returning from the dead without having mourned their children; the meetings were very tense.

I remember having a serious chat with my uncle Rodolfo

who advised me to return to Buenos Aires. After the attempt to get re-established in Uruguay, which had been disrupted by the plane crash, I decided to return with my family to Buenos Aires. Life hadn’t been easy for me in Uruguay even before the

accident, and now I had a

new start in Argentina with more

family support. Once I was back at my parents’ house in Buenos Aires, the flow of visits decreased. At some point Felipe’s siblings came to visit me. His sister Sandra later told me that it hadn’t been a satisfactory meeting, I hadn’t been able to tune into their needs at that time. I also remember that, one day, a psychologist appeared. 122

Part One

Someone brought her thinking that it might help me. She started

with some basic questions, of the kind that no one had dared to ask me, and I began to talk, but that was enough for my father. The psychologist never appeared at the house again. That is not to say that I haven’t resorted to psychological ther-

apy in later life. I don’t say, as Coche says, that we provided therapy to one another up there on the mountain. Being a group was essential to our mental health today, but it wasn’t therapy. Subsequently, at different times in my life, I have been on the couch, with varying degrees of success, perhaps in accordance with what I was going through at the time.

Someone else who turned up was the teacher whom Felipe and

I had visited at the University of Mendoza and who had taken us to the airport just in time for us to make the flight. He had been struck by the tragedy and during the period in which we were missing he had visited my parents in Buenos Aires and Felipe’s parents in Montevideo. Once I returned, he became a regular at our house, he came with his partner almost every month. At first he was well received until at some point it began to become intrusive and I guess my father showed him the red card. A lot of people stopped by. Many who were coming expressly to see me; relatives, Chilean friends, Uruguayan friends, new friends, they all came to see me. I already felt well but I didn’t fully understand what was happening. I wanted to return to a normal life. Many visits were out of courtesy, visits to greet my

parents, visits to see a curiosity. But I had already moved on. I was

more interested in what was happening outside. I had resumed my studies, important things were happening in the country, and my hormones had recovered and were flying around. I didn’t have much time for social visits. I lived this contradiction, I liked

the ephemeral fame, I liked having a good time, but I didn’t want to forget my principles and values completely, and I wanted to return to a normal life. KK

12Z3

INTO THE MOUNTAINS So after three months I enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires without mentioning what had happened to me. The Argentina of *73 was in ferment. The university was in turmoil. The classes were in chaos. There were some more or less orderly activities, others were run by committee. The university authorities were overwhelmed, students were taking the most important decisions and controlling the university. My admission was decided by a student and nobody questioned it. I don’t know if my father had told him where I came from or who I was, but at the time I was

one of many Uruguayans who were crossing the river to study in Argentina. I remember classes in which ERP guerrillas entered the classroom and walked around armed under the complacent eyes of the teachers and students. I lived those two or three years with great intensity and also

with some doubts, fears and ambiguities. I met Noelle at an event

at the Uruguayan Embassy. I was struck by her intriguing beauty, her penetrating gaze, her special nature, and her respectful distance from the mountain. We were married in April ‘74. I was the second of the survivors to marry; Coche had done so a few

months earlier. Our wedding was a synthesis of the contradictions

Pedro and his wife Noelle, whom he met one year after the accident and whom he married in April 1974. 124

Part One

of those times. The guest list included high-ranking government

officials and friends of my parents, some of my companions from the mountain, and a group of my friends who made no attempt to hide their sympathies for the guerrilla movements. ‘That summed up the times we lived in. So I got married, our first daughter Fernanda, was born, and

gradually I began to worry more about myself, Noelle, and Fer-

nanda. I stopped worrying about the marginalized people of the world and about my socialist ideals and I took care of myself. Always with my heart to the left, but with my feet on the ground. Many of my friends from that time, including some who attended

our wedding, disappeared; among them Roberto, my sister’s boyfriend. Others left the country and many I’ve never seen again. I’ve followed the careers of some of them who today nent businessmen or have held high public office. Some to see and we remain good friends. Life has continued, lenges have arisen, more mountains, and each has run

are promiI continue more chalits course.

I’m still married to Noelle. In addition to Fernanda, we had

Cecilia and José, and today we have two grandchildren in Spain, Mateo and Olmito. Noelle is a wonderful woman. With much love, challenges, and a lot of hard work, we have built, and continue to build, the family we have; scattered around the world, but

a family nonetheless. I finished my studies in economics and after studying some other things I was admitted to Stanford University to study for a Master’s degree. I must confess that when I first applied to the university, I said that I was an Andes survivor on my admission form. However, no one said anything to me, they never asked me if I had anything to tell. I always suspected that my experience as a survivor might have influenced their offer because the selection process was very difficult, but I later learned that that feeling of “how come they accepted me, will it turn out to have been a mistake?” is quite common among students. Anyway, I was not out of place, and I was an average student. With the money I received from the book Alive and financial support from the bank where I 125

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Pedro in Sitges with his children José, Fernanda and Cecilia (pregnant with Mateo) and his wife Noelle; on the left, with his grandson Mateo in

Uruguay in January 2014, proud of having caught a tiger fish; on the right, with Olmo, his grandson from Madrid, in his arms in October 2013.

was working, I paid for my studies and for life in California, US, for two years, for me, Noelle, and my three children. It was a very positive experience. I returned to Argentina in June 1982, and decided to embark on a business career. On my return, the bank that had financed part of my studies, and for which I had therefore committed to work, had been sold

and was being run by a new board of directors from France. They didn’t know me, nor that the bank had financed my trip to the US. I lasted a short time, they didn’t understand what I could or could not do for them, and I left within the year. 126

Part One

Graduation day at Stanford University in June 1982. Pedro Algorta is the first from the left.

The management team at the Quilmes brewery, where Pedro held the post of general manager, during a visit to the construction of an industrial plant in Chile in 1996. Pedro is the fourth from the right.

127

INTO THE MOUNTAINS I then had an outstanding business career. I think “outstanding” is the best word, because I stood out both for my successes and for my other endeavours. I spent time at four companies holding important positions. The most significant was the Quilmes Brewery where I had an eleven-year career. ‘Uhere, my first task was to build an industrial plant in the city of Corrientes, and later I became, in effect, the number two in the company, responsible for all operations throughout Argentina. However, in one of those business moves that are so common, my boss left and I also had

to go. Previously, I had spent a few years with the ‘Techint Organization, learning to work in a large corporation, and after the

Quilmes Brewery I had an interesting experience with Penaflor, in charge of a wine and beverage company that allowed me to familiarize myself with the fascinating world of wine. After that,

I was with Campofrio in Argentina, surviving the 2001 crisis and

trying to keep the company afloat when everything around was sinking, and finally with Cepas Argentinas, managing the handover to the next generation. During this last job, I started to get in

touch with the mountain again, and when I left I was in no doubt: I wouldn’t return to full-time employment, it was time to take the

mountain out of the backpack. Actually, my business career didn’t go at all badly. I think I had the indispensable luck to be in the right place at the right time, a

few decisions I made went well for me, and I took advantage of work opportunities with vigour and enthusiasm, both respecting others and gaining respect. I had moments of great satisfaction and important achievements that I still remember with a smile, but I also had difficult moments, I have had to make painful decisions

and I have fought battles along the way, trying to reach consen-

sus In matrix-style management situations in which I would grow completely exhausted negotiating with my peers. In that sense, the corporate jungle was not too dissimilar to group survival in the Andes. ‘The same well-understood policy existed in both scenarlos; in both, one had to forge alliances, seek allies, choose one’s battles wisely, and above all, work hard, for oneself and for the 128

Part One

group. I learned that to survive and thrive in my working life, I needed to work conscientiously and have the necessary dose of

good luck. Because the end result, as in the Andes, didn’t depend

on me alone, I did the best job I could possibly do, then I trusted, I hoped, and I kept working. Business careers are like that, with ups and downs, with successes and failures, with valleys and mountains. I think they’re all that way. I don’t know anyone who can say they’ve had a straightforward career. There are very few, if any. The good thing is that walking up mountains is something I know about. You see, when facing a new mountain, I don’t think it will be any easier for me

just because I’ve already climbed others. All I know is that I don’t know how difficult it will be. The peaks aren’t visible from the

base of the mountain, and we don’t know how high it 1s. Nor do I know whether I will be able to climb it or not, I only know that the one thing we can do is to start walking. And that just as we ve climbed up and made it out of one mountain, we will also emerge, walking, from one of those new mountains. That certainly won’t be possible if we don’t walk. We have nothing else to

do but to start walking.

* OK OK

For a long time I didn’t speak publicly about what had happened to us in the Andes and I limited it to being an incident in my private life. I was even convinced that it hadn’t affected me at all, that I had simply recovered and had led a very similar life to the one I would have lived if we hadn’t crashed in the mountains. I no longer say that today. Although I believe that I've had a similar life to the one I would have lived had I not fallen into the mountains, I now know that a part of me suffered a lot in the Andes and that is still with me. There’s a young Pedrito who was very scared, who was hungry and cold, who had to use his dead friends for food, who couldn’t mourn for them, who had to keep

thinking about staying alive when his friends died. Of course that 129

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Pedrito is still with me. But fortunately I have integrated him into my being, and today I am reconciled with myself. I don’t disown him, I don’t hide him, I understand him, I indulge him, and I comfort him. I show him everywhere we’ve walked, everything we ve done, everyone we’ve loved, everyone who’s loved us. The children we’ve had, the family we have, my birth brothers and sis-

ters who love me, my brothers of the mountain who are still alive

and who also love me. Pedrito and I need to be one if we want to live with one another. I always said that the mountain was with me in my backpack, I opened it when I wanted, talked about it, and

then packed it away until the next time. ‘Today I don’t say that so clearly, now I know that the mountain and I are the same. In fact, someone once suggested that I conduct an experiment and try to talk to Pedrito. I remember one afternoon a couple of years ago, I was very uneasy because the next day I was due to travel to Azul, a city in Argentina, to talk about our experience in the Andes, and I was scheduled to fly in a small corporate jet. There was something that unsettled me and I didn’t know what it was. That day, I imagined myself at twenty-one, I imagined the Pedrito who was flying in the plane that crashed, I sat him down in front of me and told him that the next day I was going to fly and I was worried about having to get on a small plane that I considered unsafe. As I was telling Pedrito what was happening, I began to tremble and to feel a lot of fear. Suddenly I was shaking from head to toe and was very frightened. I couldn’t recover, I was crying uncontrollably. Finally, I was able compose myself and I imagined myself hugging Pedrito and consoling him; I told him that he need not be afraid, that we had already done many things together since we had left the mountain, that I understood him but that he shouldn’t be afraid anymore because nothing was going to happen to us. After hugging and unburdening each other, I felt a great peace and the next day I made the trip without any problem, with the great satisfaction of having connected with my Pedrito, the one from the Andes, and of enjoying this trip. 130

Part One

% OK

Even with Pedrito on my back, I cannot link anything in my business career or family life to the fact that I survived seventy days in the Andes. I cannot say that I've made any decision influenced by what happened on the mountain or that it has allowed me to be more patient, more persistent, to have more emotional intelligence, or a more global outlook. I cannot say that I learned to value the little things of life more deeply or that I value family life or simple friendship any differently. Nor can I say that I have any more or any less fear of flying, In fact, when the flight is calm and the sky is clear, I enjoy it; when the plane is small and is buffeted by turbulence, I get scared, like most passengers. Only once did I make a decision not to fly, when returning from Corrientes with the imminent prospect of a horrible flight through a storm that was raging at the time. I turned around and went home saying that the Andes had already been quite enough for me, I didn’t want to experience another ordeal. I'm sure that most of the other passengers would have gone with me! I’m not sure, but I think ’m more or less as I would have been if I hadn’t crashed in the Andes.

Before the accident, I valued

family just as much, I was always sensitive to others, and I always had a certain ability to interpret what was going on around me. Likewise, I've always been distrustful, and that distrust has sometimes made it difficult for me when I’ve need to integrate myself into new environments. Nor did I emerge with any special mysticism. I felt God on the mountain, the loving God that I already knew, with whom I always spoke, the one telling me that I had to work hard on Earth to build the kingdom of heaven, but who didn’t produce miracles if one didn’t work hard. That God has stayed with me ever since. I believe that the crash in the Andes accelerated a process of personal growth in me that was already taking place. To move away from social concerns and put the emphasis on my family and myself was the logical result of my individual process, aided 131

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

by the circumstances that existed in the country at the time, and by my personal experience. In that sense, the accident was a tipping point in my life that accelerated the process I was already going through. The only reference I have to what has been said behind my back, when I have not been speaking publicly on my experience in the Andes, comes from what happened when I met the head of the Brewers Union at the opening of a new factory. After I greeted him cordially, he looked at me and pronounced: “People are scared, they’re afraid of you.” I didn’t understand why he would say that, there was no reason for them to fear me, so this man, to the dismay of everyone around me, added: “The workers are afraid that you want to eat them.” It’s the only time anyone has, to my face, raised the topic out of context, and in such a disrespectful way. kk

So far, I've returned to the crash site twice. The first time was

in March 1995. On that occasion, my brother Roy organized a great expedition, which started in San Rafael in Argentina, in which thirteen of the sixteen survivors took part. Only Nando, Bobby and Pancho were missing. It was an amazing trip. At the time, I was the general manager of the Quilmes Brewery, and for many years, I had completely put aside the memory of the Andes. I had hidden it away in my backpack under lock and key. On that occasion, I had gone to visit a brewery in Mendoza which fell under my responsibility, and I then travelled on to the town of El Sosneado, in the foothills of the Andes. I arrived in

a suit and tie to meet up with a lively and relaxed group of my brother survivors. The reunion was quite intense. I had left the group several years previously, with other things to occupy me, and so hadn’t evolved with them. I didn’t know their new norms or their new shared topics of conversation, so I came with the 132

Part One

conversations and the jokes we had made before, and the culture shock was considerable. At the time, they were shocked by the way

I treated the topic of food which they had continued dealing with throughout that time. They no longer made the same jokes, they had distanced themselves somewhat from the anthropophagy, the eating of human flesh, and they talked about things they had done in which ['d had no part. Many had travelled the world promoting the book and the film Afve and had gained some celebrity. ‘They had married and some had also remarried. ‘They had shared many experiences together, including inviting the herdsman Sers10 Catalan to spend a weekend on a ranch in Uruguay; they had changed jobs, they had become more united in some things and less so in others. ‘They had also climbed different mountains from the ones I had climbed. I was married, I had lived in the US, then in Corrientes, where no one else had been, and I was pursuing a career in business. I had forgotten the Andes, or at least, I hadn’t participated in the big events with my brother survivors. In the end, they had made up some story about my life on the outside. It wasn’t mine. But I got there, expectant and eager to reconnect with my side of the story, albeit in a suit and tie.

The grave at the Valley of ‘Tears (March 1995). loo

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Thirteen of the sixteen survivors at the memorial in the Valley of ‘Tears, in March 1995 (23 years after the accident).

The next day, accompanied by guides and muleteers, we began

our ascent into the Andes and we made our way up towards the Valley of ‘Tears. After a two-day ride on horseback we arrived at the crash site to find the same scene that we had left so many years before. I don’t remember having broken down or having suddenly discovered the reason for my existence or anything like that, but it was important being with my brothers of the mountain again at the site of the accident. We embraced and we prayed, we gave thanks for being alive, and although I didn’t cry, I did experience this reunion in the cordillera with great intensity. I think that reuniting with them in the place where we had survived seventy days

was the most important part of that occasion.

The plane was no longer visible. ‘The glacier had swallowed it up although there was still some debris scattered around the area. At dusk, our guides departed and we were left alone at the crash site. We spent the night up there, in the Valley of ‘Tears, in small tents. That night, I had to sleep in a tent with Moncho, whom I'd barely seen since we had escaped the Andes and with whom Id had very little to do. ‘The night was quite nerve-racking, a very strong wind buffeted us and made us tremble with fear inside that little tent. I remember that I even had to cook our dinner inside the tent, as the

wind that night didn’t allow us to be outside. The next morning, we 134

Part One

walked out onto the glacier to where the plane had been, and we

could see the wreckage between the crevices, several metres below.

We recognized the place, we tried to locate the exact spot where the plane had been, but we couldn’t do it accurately. The glacier had moved and it was no longer exactly the same. ‘There was a lot less

snow, but the mountains were still there, with the same shapes and ridges. I imagine that perhaps, in thousands of years, the glacier

might expel what remains of the plane from its guts. Around noon, while the mountain guides and the muleteers were bringing us the horses, a group of journalists appeared. I

sensed that this was going to cause problems. Some of my brothers and I felt they were invading our privacy and we welcomed them

by throwing stones. Others, in contrast, felt seduced and flattered by the members of the press who had followed us there: a photo of the moment on a magazine cover, a new article that would highlight our value, an opportunity to appear as the protagonists of the story, who knows what appealed to them, but it was the end of the expedition group as organized. The presence of the journalists triggered a metamorphosis and some who had, until then, been quiet opened up and changed their behaviour. Roy, who had, up until that point, led the expedition with a firm hand, lost control and the group broke up in the face of the media presence. Anyway, the trip was emotional and I was glad to have gone and to have reconnected with my brothers of the Andes and with the mountain. Finally, after spending two nights at altitude, we arrived in San Rafael. I was already part of the group again. I had learned the new customs, I had relearned how to treat certain sensitive issues among us, I knew what I could or should not speak about now, but I was still enjoying digging out the old codes once in a while for shock value. On arriving in Buenos Aires, I had to leave the group. Roy remembers my words to this day: “T must close the gates, tomorrow I return to work.” The next day, exhausted but happy, I put my suit and tie back on and assumed my role as manager, with the mountain moving around in my backpack. 133

INTO THE MOUNTAINS To top off that great expedition, we had a large gathering at my house on 22 December of that year, to which all my brother survivors and their wives came. Even Moncho appeared with two

of his friends. It was a great reunion, one of the few in which

there had been full attendance since we’d escaped the Andes. My second trip took place more recently, in March 2013. In the summer, Noelle and I had the opportunity to spend some quiet days on the beach talking with Raquel Nicolich, the mother of Gustavo, who died in the Andes in the avalanche. She has always followed and supported our group unconditionally. For her, Gustavo lives on in us. Also around then, I had the opportunity to attend the presentation, in Punta del Este, of Eduardo Strauch’s book, Desde el silencio, and I was struck by how well written it was,

by its emotion, and by how different it was to what might be in

my book. At the time, I was particularly sensitized by these two situations, and just then, a friend, Maxi, called to invite me to go with him and a group of people to the mountain. Without much thought I invited Noelle to come along with me, and to my surprise she accepted, so a few days later I was back in San Rafael to

start another expedition to the Andes.

Pedro during his visit in the summer of 2013 to the Valley of Tears, where the fuselage had lain in the winter of 1972. 136

Part One

Again, it was a wonderful trip, full of memories and emotions. Maybe this time I enjoyed it more. The mountain overwhelmed me again with its vastness and its silence. I returned home exhausted, and the next day, while putting some photos in order, I felt a great tiredness come over me and I slept for two days straight. Without that trip, this book wouldn’t have been possible. It has allowed me to reconnect with my mountain and to shape this project that had

been deferred for so many years. Perhaps [’ll return to the Valley of Tears another time, hopefully with one of my children. %* Kk

Every December 22 most of the group meet up to celebrate another anniversary of our escape from the Andes. Despite living outside Uruguay, I’ve been to several of these reunions, but not all. Except for ‘95 in Buenos Aires, we’ve never all managed to make it. For some reason there’s always one of us missing. I almost always contrive to spend a few days of vacation in Uruguay at the end of year in order to coincide with the event. For many years, the reunions were in Pancho’s house; more recently they have been hosted by Carlitos or Roberto. The reunions have changed in character as the years have gone by. At first, they were parties that ended with a great dance. Then the children began to appear, and much later, the grandchildren. The recent reunions have been very large gatherings, where we can see how prolific we have been, and we proudly contemplate everything that wouldn’t have been created had we not escaped the Andes. I have a better time at some of the reunions than at others; I feel a bit lost at the larger gatherings where I know just a few people but everyone knows who I am. % OK

Anyway, when anyone asks me what I learned in the Andes, how it changed my life, after explaining that I fundamentally cannot 137

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say because I don’t know who I would have been if I hadn’t crashed in the Andes, I try to comment on two things. First, if I did save myself it was only because I worked to survive just twenty-four hours at a time. Although I dreamed of leaving, as if seeing a light in the distance, the focus needed to be on the day-to-day, on living that moment. I couldn’t die, even for an instant. I had to stay alive constantly and be as well as possible. That clinging to life so as never to die was what allowed us to reach the end of our journey. We had no plan or preconceived idea as to how we were going to save ourselves. We were surrounded by uncertainty, but day-

by-day, with our successes and our failures, we were building the narrative that ultimately allowed sixteen of the forty-five of us to leave the mountain. I feel that many times in our lives we are lost, we don’t know where we need to go and yet we still have to move forward, we have to walk in the hope and belief that, as we walk,

the alternatives will become clear and we will eventually arrive at our destination, or at least some destination. The second thing I say is that we are not a shining example of fraternal coexistence and teamwork. Yes, we worked together,

but not because we had done a course in teamwork or mountain

survival, nor because we were a rugby team. We worked as a team because each person wanted to save himself, but we had to save ourselves as a group in order to make that happen. The survival instinct is individual. Everyone wanted to save himself but no one could save himself alone. Moreover, nobody gained anything by

saving others if he couldn’t get out himself. That same survival

instinct told us that we had more chances to get out as a group. So we worked as a team. Not out of pure generosity or anything like that, but because each individual had intimate need of others in

order to get off the mountain.

We also fought up there. We had our conflicts and we weren't all friends. We argued about positions of power and authority within the group. We struggled to be heard, to be taken into account, to avoid being marginalized. I felt that that, in itself, gave

us life. Everyone had their own strategies, some more explicit than 138

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others. I had my friends and those who were not my friends. I knew whom I could, and could not, trust. I believed I understood

how to operate within the group, and when I had an idea I knew to whom I should talk about it first, who would agree with me

and who would not, simply because it was me who said it. I could tell who was going to protect me, who would be my ally ... ‘There

were some whom I simply had to put up, others had to be, or should have been, restrained. And that always happens. All of that caused tension. When a group works on issues of adaptation, it creates tensions. It wasn’t easy to adapt to what we were experiencing, we had values and beliefs to re-evaluate, paradigms to discard, things to change, and atavistic tendencies to overcome. Somehow, thank God, we always found our way back to the path of reconciliation. After a big fight or argument, things didn’t go any further. Not that we all became friends again. But there were never any violent acts of aggression, and peace reigned at night, allowing us to rest. Today, things are much the same. Some are committed to harmony, others less so. I make sparks fly in some of the group, others make sparks fly in me and I don’t have much patience with them. Even today, I cannot say that we’re all friends, but I love them for all we went through together, for the fact that I know them intimately, and because in the end, with all of our mistakes and successes, they are my brothers of the mountain. *K OK

Recently, several activities were arranged to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of our crash in the Andes. A group of my brother survivors travelled to Buenos Aires and took part in a joint event in the auditorium of the Colegio San Pablo, organized by my friend Miguel Altgelt. Quietly, eight of the sixteen survivors gave their accounts of what happened. Consequently,

when Channel 12 in Montevideo organized an interview with all the survivors, I couldn’t refuse the invitation and I went. I had

1S?

INTO THE MOUNTAINS hardly ever spoken in Uruguay, so this interview was a challenge for me. And it was a strange interview. Almost without me realizing it, and without much effort from the host of the programme, the group plunged into the topic of the anthropophagy. ‘There seemed to be no other subject, and to my surprise, several of my brothers participated actively in the discussion. I felt uncomfortable, I didn’t have much to contribute. At one point, there was silence and I seized the opportunity to say that I was bored and that I wanted to go. My voice was heard clearly and the cameras focused in on me. I clarified with

much discomfort that I didn’t like the fact that most of the conversation was revolving around the issue of anthropophagy, as if it were the only thing, as if no one could talk about anything else. The programme coordinator asked me if there were other things I wanted to talk about. I told him that anthropophagy, for me, was

just one incident among many, that the important thing was the solidarity, the struggle for survival, our group dynamics, how we had returned home, what we had done since, how important it

was that forty years later the sixteen survivors were still alive and had led normal lives. I didn’t sound very convincing. Watching the

programme later, I noticed the shocked and smiling faces of my

colleagues, they couldn’t believe my ill-judged participation. But it wasn’t ill-judged for me. ‘That’s me all over, entering the ring with an imprudent remark, sticking my neck out too far, saying the politically incorrect thing, not keeping to the script. Maybe up there on the mountain this went unnoticed because I had other priorities to attend to, but I’ve done it on many other occasions. Once my shackles are removed, I break free without regard for the consequences. Reviewing my writing, anthropophagy has also played an important part in this book, but for me it’s not the most important thing, it’s just what we had to do. Also, speaking in Uruguay intimidates me a little bit. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s due to the presence or proximity of the families of those who didn’t return, or due to the criticisms 140

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I’ve heard of some of my brothers for how they talk about the

topic; maybe it’s because, in my real family, some of my sisters don’t like it or don’t understand why I speak, or perhaps it’s to

distance myself artificially from the rest of my brothers of the Andes. I’m sorry for my mother and for all those who do want

to hear me; but I will continue doing it for them when I have the opportunity. * K

Yes, we are, I believe, a resilient group. Resilience, that word

that comes from the physical and explains our ability to return to our former ways, to return to living a normal life and not break under the extreme strain. We have been resilient and we’ve more or less landed where we would have landed if we hadn’t crashed in the Andes, and, with our Pedritos on our backs, we have led similar lives to the ones we would have led anyway. We’ve had other mountains, other successes and failures, like everyone else in the world.

But we have been resilient because,

up there, we

weren’t alone and at no point did we break. We were a group and we saw ourselves reflected in one another, the look of a brother reminded us that we were human. We recognized ourselves in each other, we were never alone. And since we returned, we've

received nothing but affection, understanding and love. Wherever

we go, people have a healthy interest in our story and are captivated by hearing it, moved, thinking of their own mountains, their own difficulties, but very attentive, respectful, thinking that if we could overcome our mountain, anyone could overcome their own. And the affection, understanding and love that we received wherever we went is what has allowed us to lead normal lives. You see,

it’s not an ever increasing straight life with successes and failures. On occasion, I have referred to Benedictine monk Anselm Grum. that men can do when something

line of successes, but a normal a parable that I heard from the He said there are three things serious happens to them. One 14]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS is to remain incapable of resolving it and to stay entangled in the past, focusing on a wound that doesn’t heal and continues to fester, looking for someone to blame, and (misguidedly) seeking justice. This stance, although sometimes fair, doesn’t promote healing; it

doesn’t allow one to turn the page and look ahead. The second is to try to forget the unforgettable and to live as if nothing has happened, without acknowledging that something did indeed take place and that, sooner or later, the wound will appear. The third is to do what an oyster does: when it sustains a wound, such as a

grain of sand penetrating its shell, it concentrates on that wound, on that grain of sand, transforming it into a pearl and offering it

to the world. ‘The oyster doesn’t stay anchored to it and it can offer the outcome of that wound to others. It is a very beautiful parable. For a long time I searched for my pearl, not knowing where it was,

wondering what I had to offer. Finally, I believe that I have found it, my pearl is our resilience, it is precisely this ability we’ve all had to resist without breaking and to have been able to lead normal lives after the experience in the Andes. I’m also convinced that, had we been told at the moment we fell into the mountains, “don’t worry, in seventy days we'll come and find you”, we would certainly have died. It would have been too big a task, we would have known we wouldn’t have been able accomplish it. It was the uncertainty that saved us, the need to live for the moment, to survive another day and to reach the end

eventually. That kept us focused on the immediate, in contact with the most basic, the most elemental manifestations of ourselves, without complexities, living day-to-day. Had we not had that uncertainty, we would have had the certainty of seventy days

that we wouldn’t be able to bear, and we would surely have been

lost on the mountain.

What is happening with the group today? We need and we feel a fraternal appreciation. I love them all but I love some more than 142

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others. Almost all of us meet every year in Montevideo in December, around the anniversary of the rescue. ‘The reunions are enjoyable, more or less easy-going, although quite crowded due to the number of children and grandchildren we have engendered. In practice, what has kept us together has been the saga of our story. A book is written, a film is made, we fight for the rights, we

make some commitment, we get judged in some way. That has kept ago stay tion

us together. What happened already happened many years and it’s not enough. Groups need present-day objectives to together, otherwise they will disperse. However, our foundais that we all recognize and continue to recognize ourselves as

“the Andes survivors”. The sixteen of us who got off the mountain are not special people. It’s not the case that those of us who escaped are the ones who had the right attitude or anything like that. ‘Those of us who got out were the ones sitting in the right places on the day we crashed in the mountains, those who were sleeping in the right places on the day the avalanche engulfed us. We are no different from our friends who didn’t return. I am no different from Arturo and Felipe, they loved life just as much as I do. Some who didn’t return made important contributions to the group while they were alive in the mountains, or would have made far more important future contributions than those of us who survived. But they didn’t survive, and today all we can do is thank them silently for what they did by dying, allowing us to live and tell the tale. Today, all but one of the sixteen of us who escaped the Andes are still alive and leading normal lives. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, life has taken us down different paths, how could it be other-

wise? I'm in Buenos Aires. Roberto is a great doctor and dabbles in politics, he works hard to keep us united but doesn’t always succeed; he remains the same as always, active, with great dedication, generating support and sometimes creating a stir. Fito doesn’t talk much but when he does talk he has interesting things to say. ‘Iwo of the Strauches have written books that have done very well. 143

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Eduardo’s is fantastic; he says that he experienced a higher state of consciousness in the mountains. Daniel’s book is complex, it’s more personal and has little to do with the mountains. Daniel was central to the group and remained so afterwards. There are some who say that the Strauches were a triumvirate but I don’t think so. Daniel was the one giving the orders, the others lacked the unequivocal weight of authority that he possessed. Nando, one of our heroes, who lost his mother and sister in the

mountains, is a great businessman and continues walking through the world giving incredible lectures. When I started talking about the Andes, he gave me two or three pieces of good advice for which I’m grateful. He still has the same enormous willpower that allowed him to carry out his feat. Carlitos has continued to polish his personal story of multiple cordilleras and gives very

good conferences, but he has his own world into which I don’t enter. I'intin doesn’t appear very often but he has very nice things

to say. He was wounded on the mountain, recovered, and joined

Nando and Roberto on the trips to and from the plane’s tail, and then accompanied them on the most difficult part of the expe-

dition when they climbed the mountain that separated us from Chile. He’s a for being his smoked like painting and

bit of an unsung hero. Coche, who has thanked me relative on the mountain, and who until recently a chimney, has given us the Fundacién Viven, his his detached view of life, his incredible affection

and his lovely character. He’s like my big brother. Bobby remains

the same, he’s very affectionate, he’s had a thousand mountains

and he continues to climb them one by one. Alvaro, of whom I see too little, recovered from his broken leg, is friendly and has a normal life. Pancho is well, he’s affectionate and remote, but has not been flying since we crashed in the Andes and he doesn’t want to talk about the topic. Our dear Javier died just days before this book saw the light of day. His mysticism, which I didn’t share, led him to see God as the reason for everything that happened to us. He remarried and between Liliana, who died on the mountain, and Ana Maria, 144

Part One

his second wife, had eight children. Roy, my friend, who I always thought had saved me in the avalanche although he now denies it, with whom I shared, for many years, a phobia of speaking about the mountain ... what is he going to say about this book? How I

wish he would understand! He has a lot to say, but he shares it in dribs and drabs. And when it was proposed, he was able to lead

the group up through complicated mountain gorges. For Moncho, business and love led him to Paraguay where he’s now based. I have had a reconciliation with Gustavo, at whom

without understanding. We

made

I used to look

an amazing trip to Chile to

greet the families of the miners who were trapped underground

in 2010; a journey where we got to know each other again and I learned to love him for who he is. I still have to learn to love others for who they are, but no matter, I love them for what we went through together, our story that unites us, for the invisible halo that protects us. On occasion, we’ve made presentations or participated in conferences together. And the truth is, they turn out to be reasonably well-organized. We plan that each one of us will talk about a particular thing that happened and we assign the topics beforehand. We’ve never had a problem and we appear as a united and coordinated group. I also remember with gratitude the times

Roberto has invited me to come forward to answer questions and I remember one memorable night in which I invited Roy

along. Roy was brilliant and dazzled everyone with his honest and witty answers. The last time we did something together was with Eduardo, when, aside from our different interpretations of what happened, we had many more points of agreement than I thought. Anyway, many years ago at a conference in which three or four survivors were speaking somewhere in Buenos Aires, to which I’d gone without making myself known, Gustavo said out loud that there was another Andes survivor hidden in the audience and that he didn’t want to talk. It was a very embarrassing moment at a time when I didn’t speak publicly about the topic, 145

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

I wasn’t prepared and I didn’t know how to respond, nor can I remember how I got out of that situation. Today, the landscape has changed and things are a bit clearer for me. ‘That wouldn’t happen again. On the thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of the accident, a large group of survivors travelled to Chile accompanied by the Old Christians rugby team to commemorate the game, against the Old Grangonians, which in theory we would have played, had we not crashed in the Andes. On both occasions we played

a kind of parody of a rugby match in which I participated enthusiastically. In the first, I kicked the ball out of play when I should have passed (thereby ending the game) and in the second I won the ball in the air... breaking a finger! The events were

very enjoyable and our Chilean friends entertained us with great generosity. Sergio Catalan, the herdsman who had found Rob-

erto and Nando, was also present on both occasions, and he’s already advanced enough in years to have become a kind of icon of our survival.

Commemoration of the ruby match which was never played, 40 years after the accident in Santiago de Chile. From left to nght: Eduardo Strauch, Javier Methol, Alvaro Mangino, Adolfo Strauch, Pedro Algorta,

Roy Harley and José Luis Inciarte in October 2012. 146

Part One

I have not had much contact with Catalan. Except for those

two occasions I had not seen him in forty years. On his trips to Uruguay, either as a guest of the group or when the book or the movie Alive were launched, many of my brother survivors took the opportunity to get to know him a bit better or just to chat with him. I wasn’t present at any of these occasions, so although I had

returned to Chile many times, Catalan was, to me, only a happy

and pleasant reference in our story. However, recently, visiting the San Fernando region of Chile with Noelle, I sought out Catalan’s house and when I found it, I

rang the doorbell of a very modest house in the Chilean precor-

dillera. | was greeted by an old man who could barely walk. “Don Sergio, I'm Pedro Algorta, one of the Andes survivors, I came to say hello.” Catalan could hardly contain his joy and excitement. He invited me into his house where he was alone and he seated us in the main room. Catalan’s room seemed to be an Andes museum, full of the most diverse posters, photos and mementos of his forty years of life with us. Everything there breathed our adventure, everything referred back to the Andes.

Pedro with Sergio Catalan, the Chilean herdsman who found Nando and Roberto, and his wife at his home in San Fernando (Chile). 147

INTO THE MOUNTAINS Don Sergio had a bad hip and Roberto and Gustavo were coordinating an operation with their medical friends in Chile. I later learned that this operation was successful and Don Sergio regained his mobility, which had been so limited when I saw him. He was happy to see me despite the fact that I was one of the survivors who had paid him less attention over the years. When we parted he thanked me for the visit and asked us not to forget him because we were very much in his thoughts. KOK OK

We have had normal lives. Some have fallen and have got up again a thousand times, some have had problems with alcohol and drugs, others have been married several times. As for me, I remain somewhat marginal to the group, I live in another country, my

children have not grown up with the children of my brothers of the mountain nor with the children of the siblings of those who didn’t return. ‘Today, my children have gone even further away, to live in Spain, and have left Noelle and me alone with the dog. It’s

not insignificant that my children have gone far away. It’s been very difficult for me. It wasn’t in my plans. Luckily, we continue to see them quite often, in Buenos Aires, in Uruguay and in Spain. But the departure of my children, prompted by the Argentinian crisis of 2001 and by the lack of family roots in Argentina, has

been my mountain ever since, the great cordillera that Noelle and I have had to cross of late. And so here we are here climbing the

peaks one by one. It’s not only us who are survivors. Everyone is a survivor, those who fell into the mountains and those who didn’t, we all live

through extreme and very difficult situations that we don’t know

how to resolve. Luckily, life gives us a second chance. I think the only difference between the relationship I have with my survival ordeal and the relationship that anyone else has with their own survival situations is that mine 1s better known, books have been written and movies have been made, but fundamentally it’s all relative. 148

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Time has healed the wounds and I have not lived haunted by the ghosts of the accident. If these survival events were not relative, if I had experienced something absolute, I could never have recovered to live the normal life I have lived; I would have spent it sitting on top of a mountain pontificating, or believing afterwards

that I had found the philosopher’s stone and there was nothing more I could do. And the truth is, that hasn’t happened. After that

mountain, there were more and more mountains, because that’s life. It’s about climbing mountains. I have had many more mountains. Maybe not as clearly defined as the one in the Andes. But that one from years ago hasn’t been of much help to me in overcoming other difficulties I’ve faced in my family and professional lives. The departure of our children to Spain has required us to adapt, to accept our new reality, to

be willing to travel when they need us, and to leave the comforts of our home to go to work with the enthusiasm of parents and

grandparents. It was not in my plans but, as we know, plans rarely succeed, and in the end it isn’t that serious even though this new mountain has cost me a lot, personally. Moreover, I didn’t choose with whom to fall into the Andes. Nor did I chose my brothers, my parents, or my neighbours. In general, you also don’t choose your work colleagues. They are there when you arrive. When you accept a job, it comes with the people who are there. Sometimes you can or should change one or two, but in general, that’s the way it is, and that means that you must learn to work with whomever you're given, in the same way that we learned to work together on the mountain, with whomever we were given. I believe in diversity, in which we all, more or less, have our own skills and strengths distributed across the group. The important thing is to draw out the best from each member of the team. I am convinced that great teams are formed of ordinary people, working in extraordinary ways, with difficulties and tensions, but focused on their challenges. And taking advantage of the relative talents; as we made use of our talents in the Andes and

as I have tried to do later in my professional life.

149

INTO THE MOUNTAINS KOK OK

Twenty-five years after I graduated from Stanford, I attended a reunion with my fellow graduates in Palo Alto, California. My university classmates, whom I hadn’t seen since graduation and who in general, had lived international lives, organized a series of panel discussions where those who had undergone significant events in their lives shared their experiences with others. I had never talked about the mountain, so they didn’t invite me to share

my experiences. One speaker, Michael O'Brian, talked about how he had escaped with his life on the day the planes hijacked by Al Qaeda slammed into the Twin ‘Towers in New York City. His story was harrowing. Michael couldn’t contain his emotions and ended his presentation in a flood of tears. We were all deeply moved. But then I realized that, when I was studying at the university, eight years after I’d escaped the Andes, I wouldn’t have been able to do the same, I could not have spoken so openly about what had happened to me. I would certainly have broken down and I was not prepared

for that. How would I have been able to continue my studies? How

would I have been able to go home and be of any help to my wife and children after breaking down talking about such a moving experience? But now I felt that enough time had passed and that I could open my backpack and talk about what had happened in the Andes. So I went up to Michael and said, “I would like to tell you my story.” And I told it to him. I felt that it did a lot of good, I felt that it was also very beneficial to me, that it also helped to heal my wounds. Michael listened, emotionally moved, he knew me but he

hadn’t known my story, he thanked me very much and afterwards

he invited me to come to his home in New York to tell his people what had happened to me. And so it was that a short time later I travelled to New York and got together with Michael’s friends and the families of those who had died in the ‘Twin ‘Towers and I told them my story, I told it in detail and I described how afterwards, despite everything, I had been able to live a normal life. 150

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A similar thing repeated itself in 2010, when thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped in a mine in Copiapo. I followed the events from a distance without relating our story to what they were going through. But I was moved when it was discovered that they were still alive, and when the world heard that rescuers had been able to communicate with them. For several days the miners

had heard them searching, but they didn’t know whether they would be able to rescue them.

That day, my sister Trinidad called me and said “it made me think about you a lot.” ‘Then it occurred to me that, as Andes survivors, we had something to say. I contacted my Chilean friends and I proposed that a group of us travel out to Chile to give a message of hope to the miners’ families who were waiting with great anxiety and uncertainty, hoping that their husbands and sons who were underground would be able to get out. Coche, Gustavo, Moncho and I went there, but when we reached the entrance to the mine we realized we didn’t have to say much, our

very presence, the fact that the miners’ families could see that almost living would would

forty years after escaping the Andes we normal lives, was enough of a message get out of the mineshaft in which they also be able to lead normal lives again.

were still alive and that their people were trapped and It would be easier

for some than for others, some would also return to the mines,

but when they got out they would be able to recover and to have similar lives to the ones they’d led before. It was an incredible trip, I learned a lot from them, I learned from the professionals attending the miners, I also learned a lot about what had hap-

pened to us in the Andes.

When I spoke with the professionals attending the miners, they told me how it was that although they had already established contact with them, they didn’t anticipate solving all their problems for them, they were letting them present the problems, in their own time, and only then would they help the miners themselves to work out a solution. ‘They wanted them to be active and focused on issues that had to be resolved, not to relax waiting 131

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

From left to right: Gustavo, Pedro, Moncho and Coche during their visit to the mine in Copiapo, where 33 Chilean miners had been trapped.

for a rescue to come at some still unconfirmed future date, they wanted the miners to feel that they were still the protagonists and that the solution would rely very much on themselves. They were also working on controlling the tension and stress. The ideal was for them to maintain the right level of tension, which occurred when they were working to adapt, when they were involved in solving their problems. Again, not letting themselves go, not relaxing; working and having an active role was what was keeping them alive. Recently, I got to know Mario Sepulveda, one of the trapped miners. We had a couple of very emotional encounters. In one of them, speaking before a large audience, he mentioned how we were present at the mine and that he even remembered the brief telephone contact Moncho had had with them from the surface. He said that within days of the accident, they were already considering that they would perhaps have to do as we had done and eat human flesh. His comment disturbed me and I said, “but Mario, you had no dead bodies!” He replied: “No matter, we would have had them soon enough. I had already prepared a grill to cook the first one to die.” Mario

... what character! However, even at the

limit, they didn’t kill one another, and like us they worked together IS2

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in order to survive. And they had us with them, our epic was with them; they felt that if we had been able to get out, they would also be able to escape, and they worked hard to make it happen. KOK

Throughout this encounter with the mountain, I have distanced myself from it in order to understand it better, but at the

same time I have connected with it intimately through my feelings

and through reliving the experiences in my mind. In this process of “returning home”, in which I've been able to live a normal life and also to accept that the mountain is in my backpack and moving around, there have been some particular situations that have helped me. I have already mentioned several, but I think it

was particularly important for me to start writing a blog, which allowed me to set my ideas and my thoughts in order. The blog was very important when I started it back in 2008 and I invested

quite a few hours of my time in it. With no clear idea of the course it would take, I witnessed the changes dealing with the issues as they appeared. However, the blog had a problem. When myself and wrote about my memories of the a reasonable impact and several people would posts. But when I came out of testimonial mode something more conceptual or some reflection rectly to the Andes, I would receive very few

I was making in I connected with cordillera, it had comment on my and tried to write linked only indicomments, and a

blog needs feedback so that the author feels that he’s not writing

in a vacuum, that someone is reading it. In other words I had two audiences and I couldn’t address them both at the same time. That’s the reason for the structure of this book. For a long time I debated how I should write it until I finally found this way. The first part is predominantly testimonial and emotional, and then, little by little, I leave the day-to-day of the cordillera until I’m focused on my “return home” and my intellectual musings. What do you think? ins

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

When I started the blog the Re-Viven! people appeared. They form a virtual group and are our most loyal followers. They forgive us everything and follow us everywhere. They know more about our story than we do because they’ve taken on the task of cross-checking all our accounts, they travel every summer to explore the site where we crashed in the Andes, and every 13 October they travel to Uruguay or to Chile to attend the match that the Old Christians play with the Chileans. In fact, I have asked them for photographs and for complementary information to clarify some parts of this book. ‘They know exactly where the plane went down, the reasons for the accident, and they have an

incredible collection of photos, books and other items. Back then

in 2008, when I began to speak about the Andes, they called me one day because they wanted to meet me. I remember they had called me years previously, but at the time I was not yet disposed, even less prepared, to open up my backpack with its mountain for people I didn’t know. But this time I accepted and more than fifty people from around the world arrived at my house to eat empanadas one Sunday at noon. I remember seeing them arrive like a human tide, as they approached my house. They are a very special group, our most faithful fan club. Even today, when someone contacts me for information, I recommend that they talk to them, and I will also let them know when this book gets published... at least I’m guaranteed a certain audience on its launch! I have always been intrigued by this and other similar groups. How is it that we have groups of fans who follow us everywhere? How incredible our story must be, that even today it still generates these

reactions. If you want to know about them you can visit them at www.facebook.com/groups/Reviven/ * KOK

In these past five years, many people have invited me to give my account. On occasion, I just tell my story and leave; sometimes I lead a workshop in which I ask the participants to validate my 154

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conclusions against their everyday life. At other times I combine

it with my business career and what I've learned about leadership in adaptive situations. I have shared the stage with other people, university professors, war veterans, including Vietnam veterans in the US and Malvinas veterans in Argentina; at other times with a sportsperson who’s became a paraplegic or with someone

fighting a terminal disease. I have spoken at schools, universities,

companies, hospices, nursing homes, conferences and even family homes,

here, there, and everywhere;

from

events like the ‘TED

talks, to classes at some university in the US. There have been thousands and I don’t want to list them because I neither want to overwhelm the reader by giving the full list, nor leave any out. But all the talks have a common denominator. People come out of curiosity and with respect, but when they hear our story, everyone thinks about their own mountains and considers that if we could

deal with ours, then they can deal with theirs.

On occasion, one of my friends from the past, who [ve not seen since, appears in the audience. Or someone who has known me, has been my friend, has worked with me but has never dared to broach the subject. The fact is that in my “normal” life, apart from the previously mentioned situation with the union boss, only very occasionally has someone spontaneously raised the topic with me. “We don’t talk about that” seems to be the norm. ‘That’s good. I don’t like to talk about the Andes out of context. If someone asks me in the street, I don’t answer. I need the environment and the necessary attention and that’s how I've always talked about the topic. But when those people who have known me appear and have never felt that they could talk about the subject, a special chemistry occurs, my testimony is directed to them, in gratitude for the respect they have shown by their silence and in gratitude

also for their interest in listening to what I now have to tell.

It was the same with my children. They have known me living my “normal” life where the subject of the Andes, although never hidden, was by no means central to our lives, it was only margin-

ally touched on at the family table. It was as if I had a birthmark

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INTO THE MOUNTAINS on my shoulder; everyone is aware of it and knows it’s there, but it never gets spoken about unless I mention it. | remember that we went together to Ganada when the movie Alwe was being filmed and that they took part in other events with my brothers of the Andes. My children live far away now. All three live in Spain, and

as adults, they have all been to listen to me giving a presenta-

tion. Cecilia heard me speak alongside Roberto at the Newman College in Buenos Aires and at her husband Max’s office in Barcelona; Fernanda in Madrid and Barcelona a couple of times;

and José had to accompany me to Lebanon to hear me speak.

The three of them are my most special audience. Although they were never too involved and they don’t know their “cousins of the Andes”, they are now waiting anxiously to see what I’m going say in this book. And now [’m preparing for the next audience. On my next trip to Spain, I have scheduled a very particular talk. I must go to my five-year-old grandson Mateo’s school, and tell him, his Catalan classmates and their parents, that Mateo’s grandfather, besides being a great guy and living far away in Argentina, also has the peculiarity that, when he was young, he fell from the sky in a plane and survived seventy days in the Andes.

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There are heroes and there are leaders. Leaders are leaders to the extent to which they perform acts of leadership. In our case, there COGIC TOMA

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Reflections forty years on.

Memory

I have heard Doctor Facundo Manes say that we remember things according to the last time we spoke about them. In other words,

not necessarily as they really were, but as we have recounted them,

and every time we tell a story we add to it and so we build up our own story layer by layer. That happens to the Andes survivors, and I suppose to any survivor with their own story to tell. No wonder there are sixteen stories and each one of us has his own account. All valid, all credible. We have each built our own story and interpret our experiences on the mountain as we’re able, and we make sense of what

we experienced through our individual stories, from how we each talk about what happened to us. And with every telling we assign new meaning to what we experienced, which we then believe. My story has a different value and meaning for me today than it had forty years ago. I have heard it said that memory can be thought of as lost islands in a sea of forgetfulness. ‘The islands are those blurry and disconnected images that we still retain, which we join together by jumping between them, by building bridges so as to construct a story, SO as to give meaning to what we experienced. I recognize my limitations, I remember the islands and I build the bridges, but not because I try to remember more, nor because other islands Ls¥

INTO THE MOUNTAINS appear as I start to write. Perhaps new meanings. And new questions: what ultimately does it all mean? What do I retain from all of this? Sometimes I wonder if I’ve constructed something that doesn’t allow me to see things differently. Luckily, my brothers of the mountains have their own stories and I can contrast theirs with mine. I am choosing my own. I’m choosing to draw meaning from the harsh struggle for survival, from the day-to-day, from the immediacy of life, from the ordinary in the extraordinary, from the fact that one minute lived does not guarantee the next, which will have to be constructed and lived anyway.

In my case, when I returned from the mountain, my parents gave me a tape recorder so that I could pour out my story into it, tell a lifeless machine the secrets of the mountain. I remember those summer days of ‘73, recently returned from Chile, in our

house in Martinez, telling the tape recorder how empty the skies

were in the mountains and how criss-crossed by planes were the skies in Buenos Aires. That was more than forty years ago, and during all that time the tape with my testimony was literally sitting

in a box with my other mementos. When I reopened this stage of my life just over six years ago,

when I met with my mountain again and started talking about it afresh, one of the first things I did was to replay the tapes that had been recorded in that summer of ‘73 to listen to what I had said

back then. I was intrigued to think of what else there might be that time had But to my already knew. of the phrases

made me forget. disappointment, I didn’t find much more than I I found a boring, sensible, uncomplicated story full that were already being used at the time and that

soon became part of our common story. Unintentionally, we were all very well prepared to talk about it. Not by chance or because

we had planned it, but because living together and talking about the same things for seventy days had given rise to a common language. Perhaps with the passage of time and the different interpretations that we’ve dared to give, the stories have begun to differ. In fact, Pablo Vierci’s great book, La sociedad de la nieve, 160

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has that merit, it gathers together our sixteen stories thirty-five

years on... and they certainly are different! However, those tapes helped me form the first version of the presentations I give when I talk about our survival experience. And it hasn’t changed much, I continue to say the same things that I said in the interviews when I got off the mountain and I

told the same things to that tape recorder in those early summer days of 73. % OK OK

My Conversations With Read

Six years ago, I obtained the tape recordings that Piers Paul Read made when he interviewed me for the book Alwe. I don’t say anything in them that I’ve now forgotten, my stories are the same as on the tapes, simple, very straightforward, explaining what had happened, without fanfare or interpretation. But it struck me that Piers Paul Read had questioned me persistently about two things that are more or less present in his book. One was about my political leanings. At that time I was the

most left-wing of all the Andes survivors, if that meant anything.

I was a product of the era, 1968 hadn’t passed by without me noticing, we were living in turbulent times and I didn’t live in a bubble. On the mountain, Arturo was the one with the most committed political views, which Read notes in his book. But Arturo died in the Andes and it would be great for Read’s account if one of the survivors was also to the left, and he diligently looked for me to fill that role. I only partly did so, much to Read’s frustra-

tion, I wasn’t able to fully play the part and I appear in the book

as little more than an intellectual somewhat to the left, but not at all the contentious revolutionary who would have been perfect for the development of the book. It may be that I was somewhat contentious and marginal, but that was down to character and personality rather than ideology. Ideology had no place on the mountain, it wasn’t present at all. 161

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The other thing that Read quizzed me about was whether Pancho had, or had not been, the bad guy, whether it was true that he had stolen food or the famous toothpaste, and if not, why or how was it that the group had put him in that role. Read was wondering whether Pancho was, in fact, the bad guy or whether

it was us who were the villains, unjustly punishing him by unloading all our tensions and frustrations onto him. ‘Today this issue is very clear to me. He was not the bad guy, and nor we were the bad guys. We did what we could. Read appears to

misunderstand it and takes it out of context without realizing that

what we had found was a scapegoat — which occurs in almost all groups — regardless of whether he was guilty or not. At an altitude of almost four thousand metres, surrounded by mountains, snow and rocks, surrounded by our dead companions or what remained

of them, we did what we could. We were all looking to feed ourselves, we were trying to eat all the time, to be better fed, more protected, warmer, more integrated into whether or not Pancho stole more than what we could in order to survive and frustrations and tensions on him quite

the group, so I don’t know anyone else. We all stole the group unloaded their naturally, over and above

whether he had, or had not, stolen one extra piece of meat or some

toothpaste that didn’t belong to him. Pancho was functional to the group and was targeted for being an outsider, for some mistakes he had made, for not finding allies, for not being in the inner circle,

for misreading the dynamics of the group, because he looked a bit sly, perhaps because he wanted to survive too much. It is unlikely that this was resolvable back then in ‘73, with the mountain

so fresh. ‘Today, I believe that, forty years on, we

can understand it better, and Read would not put quite so much emphasis on knowing who “the bad guy” was; whether he was stealing or the group was accusing him unjustly. It is clear that the group needed someone on whom to release their tensions and Pancho played that role. * KK

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Talking of Read, I remember that, some fifteen years ago, walking near his home in one of the loveliest parks in London, I

asked him how the critics had received his book Alwe. He said it had received very good reviews in general and that Alwe had been a mainstay in his life as a writer. However, one of the negative reviews it had received was from William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. In that book, Golding relates the adventures of a group of boys who, flying in a plane over the Pacific Ocean, crashland on an unknown island. The group manages to organize itself and to survive, but soon internal difficulties begin to surface and the boys eventually get into conflict, they all start fighting, and the group disintegrates. As I understand it, Golding postulates in his

book that humans, abandoned to the most primitive situations, return to their most basic instincts and end up fighting and killing in their struggle to survive. Within limits, we are a demonstration that this assumption is wrong. Because we, who were also in a completely extreme and primitive situation, did not kill one another in order to survive. We kept on working and collaborating, even partaking

Pedro, John Guiver (translator of Into the mountains) and Piers Paul Read (author of Alwe) in London in June 2015. 163

INTO THE MOUNTAINS in anthropophagy, with difficulties and with conflicts, reconciling ourselves and then fighting again, with stress and with a lot of anxieties. And what emerges is that humans, put into extreme and primitive situations, do not kill, do not disintegrate as a social organization, rather they collaborate in order to survive. At no

time did we think of killing one another, even when facing the

possibility that we might run out of supplies, that the dead bodies might all be gone. That was never even raised as an option, nor did it enter our minds. I wasn’t clear about all of this until, one day, I questioned the

noted philosopher Humberto Maturana, who was talking about how humans function at the evolutionary frontier and how the

work we do to adapt is essentially collaborative. I asked him: ‘Where is Darwin in all this? Where is the struggle for survival? Where is the competition by which the fittest survive?” And he said, “Darwin is not here; man, at his limit, collaborates in order to survive, he doesn’t compete, he doesn’t destroy himself, he doesn’t kill, he collaborates.” This seems to me to be a very strong concept, it was just what we did, pushed to our limits, we collaborated in order to adapt and survive. * ok

Write A Book, Plant A Tree, Have A Child

On one occasion, I imagine around 1998 or 1999, an institution

related to logotherapy (a school of psychotherapy founded by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl) invited me to receive a prize entitled ““The meaning of life” as a representative of the “Alive Group” as if such a group would have its own identity. I was a businessman with no time or appetite for these sorts of formalities so I declined the invitation without much thought. In the end, a large group of my brothers of the Andes came to Buenos Aires to receive the award. Again I went incognito and I mingled with the public. What happened gave me pause for reflection. Along

with my brothers of the mountain, there were prize-winners who 164

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did very significant social work: working in prisons, helping in hospitals, bringing assistance to flood victims. I wondered what

connected us to them, what was it that this group of survivors could contribute to the meaning of life... When they accepted the award, my brothers didn’t say anything special, they simply acknowledged it with thanks as if receiving an Oscar. The prize consisted of an honorary mention and Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Even though I went incognito, they also presented me with a copy of the book and, curious to know more, I immersed myself in it as soon as the event was over. The book impressed me and I felt that I had a lot to learn and I imagined that the next time I was given the opportunity to discuss the mean-

ing of life I wouldn’t waste it and I might be able to contribute something from our Andes experience. I felt that much of what Frankl said fitted perfectly to what we had experienced. Basically, we both spoke from the edge, from the boundary between life and death, and we both stubbornly decided each day that that

day was worth living. Likewise, and without intending to discuss Frankl at length, there are some interpretations of his book that don’t sit well with me, especially when the meaning of life is associated with having

an external objective, whether it is writing a book, planting a tree

or meeting a loved one. Because that was not the case for me. In the Andes I had no other goal than to live another day. I thought that I might have a chance of getting out if I always stayed alive, every instant, because I wanted to live not for any external objective, but simply because I wanted to preserve my life, I wanted to keep on living. Frankl wondered why some people who appeared to be weak survived the World War II concentration camps whereas others who looked strong became mere human remains after a short time

and could not survive. Frankl speaks of the attitude, the capacity we

have to decide to live, to decide to be men and to always be free, even

in the most difficult conditions; why some could survive and others would succumb. However, my own experience is that all of us 165

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always wanted to live as long as a breath of hope remained. And we can’t discriminate between those with the nght or wrong attitude, those who got out didn’t have any special characteristic since many of those who didn’t make it had much greater strength and will to live than others who did get out, and vice versa. La sociedad de la neve is a great account that especially illustrates this. With our differences, we all wanted to get out. Even Bobby with his indolence, his candid admission that he did nothing to stay alive, did continue living, crossing one mountain after another. Every day, we all decided that we had to live that day. No one gave up, we all

struggled to live, and those who didn’t get out also wanted to stay alive and get off the mountain. However, without wanting to compare our experience with those in the death camps or in extreme war situations, I think that what distinguishes us is the fact that we didn’t have to con-

front another human being. Our enemy was the mountain, nature

oppressed us and threatened us, but not a third man who, with his small-mindedness and aggressions, would humiliate us and kill us, whom we would have to fear. We left without any debts to collect, we never felt persecuted or threatened by others since that was a calculation we didn’t have to make. We left confident, the others were always our companions and our friends and no-one had attacked us. Primo Levi, in his trilogy about the death camps (most notably If This 1s a Man), said that the ones who survived were not the best, the most athletic, the fittest or the most generous. The ones who survived were those who understood the game better, those who adapted, those who, in adapting, acted selfishly in order to save their own

lives, those who

sometimes

stole to feed them-

selves better. ‘That wasn’t the case for us because, as I said before,

I cannot differentiate between those who got off the mountain

and those who didn’t, we all wanted to live, but what I take from

Levi is the demystification of the struggle for survival. He presents it as something personal, harsh, uncertain, difficult and not necessarily glorious. 166

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None of us was saved because he wanted to write a book,

plant a tree or have a child. Some say that what saved them was their desire to return to see their fathers, their mothers or their girlfriends. I can’t say that. I didn’t think much about my parents when I was on the mountain. Nor did I think about my Chilean

girlfriend who, in theory, like Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, was faithfully awaiting me in Santiago. I thought only of myself, of that particular moment in time, of the present, of how I was going to be my best that day without giving up on the distant and undefined goal of getting out of there. And day after day, I continued to find meaning in what we were doing, looking back to recognize what we had already accomplished and remaining in the present, feeling the pain and suffering of everything that was happening to us, the cold and the hunger and the unmourned deaths of our friends. If all this was happening and we were staying alive, if it had not been my turn to die, it was worth staying alive, simply in order to live a little more, one day more, to live and be my best for the day ahead. Someday I would reach the end of the journey, of our odyssey, and we would leave the mountain. That spirit of survival, that intimate desire to live another day, that breath of life, never left us. The work focusing on survival, although often disorganized and haphazard, allowed us to find meaning in what we were

doing. Meaning is not built facing forwards according to intent,

rather it is built by looking back and joining the dots, as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said in his famous 2005 Stanford speech. Up there on the mountain we joined the dots, if we were alive, if we had reached that point, if we were doing all these things to survive, it made sense to stay alive. Meaning, ultimately, 1s the projection into the future, through our present-day activity, of all we have done and experienced. Finding meaning ensured that the group didn’t disintegrate, that order and structure were maintained, that no one had to walk alone, that Nando would wait for the group to be ready before he, Roberto and ‘Tintin left. 167

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So I think that the main function of true leaders is to build meaning, to allow and encourage groups through work, through trial and error, to find meaning in what they do and to know who they are, where they come from, where they can go, and to ask the

questions that define them. Obviously, looking back and joining the dots like Steve Jobs is an incredible exercise. My lines inevitably pass through the Andes, but they don’t start from there. They start from my childhood in Uruguay, from my migration across South America, from the times in which I lived, and they pass through the Andes and my

Master’s degree at Stanford, through my business career, through

the woman I married, through the children we had and the grandchildren who followed and through all that is still to be done. It is very difficult to answer why some survived and others

did not. I don’t have a rational response, nor do I believe that it’s an appropriate question to ask. I can only repeat that we all

struggled to get out and, at the end of the day, those of us who did get out were the ones who were sitting in the right place when we crashed into the mountains or were sleeping in the right place when the avalanche fell on us. In addition, three others died from their wounds and their weakness, in a deterioration that many of us would have followed had we stayed up there a few days longer, but I don’t have much else to add, and I am not the one

to say why I was able to leave and others were not. I can only

give thanks to God for being here today, but I don’t have any

more explanations and I must accept this mystery, just as there are many more mysteries that we can’t explain. And again, be intimately grateful for life. *kK OK

Our Daily Work

We weren't sure if we were going to escape or not. We held some hope that we would get out. We knew there was a possibility, we felt we had a chance. The death of our friends was not a sign 168

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that we applied to ourselves, we didn’t take it as a forewarning of what would happen to us. ‘The dead, no matter whether it was a brother or a friend, was someone else, it wasn’t me and I didn’t question why it was them. My dead friend was actually the source of our life, with his death he gave me meaning for his life, allowing me to survive. I never remember anyone saying for certain whether we would get out or not, we just kept working, Roberto and Nando kept walking, we continued cutting meat, exercising, checking our

pulses, doing what had to be done every day, getting things wrong a thousand times. We thought: “If we are alive today, it 1s worth fighting to be alive tomorrow.” Perhaps that way we might someday get off the mountain. But above all, we had no idea how we would get out. We had our expeditionaries who would begin or had already begun to walk and from there we jumped directly to the assumption that we would get out. We knew we had to be as strong and as healthy as possible for the day of the rescue, to be our best possible so as not to die, so that what we were going through would have some meaning. However, because we had never been ina situation like this, we neither imagined, nor could we imagine, how this might

happen, what skills we would need, when and how we would get out. We could not plan it any more than we could plan our return and the reunions we would have with our families. We never gave it any serious thought, nor could we have done so. However, we were very aware that we had to work in order to get out, to keep all our options open, to be ready for the moment we needed to leave. And that readiness and attitude were forged in our daily work. In this work that we did for our eventual exit, uncertain and unlikely as it was, in our daily work of trial and error, of progress and setbacks, of successes and failures, we were building our mutual Andes story day by day, and each one of us was building his own. I felt God there. In that immediacy, in the force that gave us the spirit to keep living, in the pleading eyes of my companion, who 169

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

didn’t have anything more to give, but who also decided every day that he had to live that day. ‘That immediate God didn’t bring us

out of the Andes against our will or without us doing anything.

That God was present in our sufferings, with us and in us, in that breath of life that kept us alive and alert. When people ask me if I think that our survival was a miracle, I answer that I believe life is a continuous miracle. That a thousand things could happen to us, all the time, but they don’t happen to us and we continue living. But I can’t attribute our salvation to God alone, or say that we were saved by a supernatural act. Because if that were the case, I would have to complain to

God about the twenty-nine people who didn’t return. And I am sure that He had nothing to do with that, and that somehow He

feels it just as we do. I don’t think God had anything to do with it being down to a matter of millimetres that we didn’t all die in the impact, in the same way that He had nothing to do with it being a matter of millimetres that twenty-nine friends died. God was in the strength that we had to live day by day, that let us be active and constantly working in order to get off the mountain, He was in the eyes of the brother who asked us for help, in his look that reminded us that we were human. A recurring theme is whether we have developed a special

ability to confront adversity. I get tired of explaining that no, experiences are unique and are not transferable. We all suffered like any other person when we faced situations of uncertainty and adversity later in life. Surviving the mountain serves only

to remind us that we once overcame one challenge, and that in

turn merely serves to get us walking again when faced with a new challenge. The converse of that is resilience, the ability that we humans have to resist, to recover, to forget and to live a normal

life again. For in fact we learn very little and we stumble repeatedly on the same stone. On occasion I have met with psychology professionals who look at me and listen to me with suspicion. Basically they are looking for trauma, they can’t understand that I have no symptoms 170

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of that traumatic event, that I have returned to flying, that I don’t wake up at night haunted by horrific visions of my suffering or of my friends who fell in the Andes. On one occasion, by way of example, they told me about the case of a young boy who would wake up with nightmares at the same time every night only to discover that long ago, at that exact time of night, a traumatic event had marked him for life. I don’t think that’s how we function. I respect our unconscious and irrational life too much to simplify it like that, I am convinced that it exists but is much more com-

plex and not linear. While some of my brothers of the mountains have not returned to flying, most of us have done. And I don't think we can automatically attribute their fear of flying to the

accident we had in the Andes. Those who don’t fly will have their own reasons, they will have lived other experiences, or it’s simply a step they don’t want to take.

Again, it’s not that there haven’t been consequences of the accident, but the good thing is that we’ve been able to live normal lives with the mountain on our backs and moving around in our backpacks. KK

A

Leadership And Strategy My friend Ernesto Gore says there are two words that get confused, they are usually devoid of content and have misleading usage: “strategy” and “leadership”. What was our strategy in the mountains? ‘To wait to be rescued? ‘To look for several ways out at the same time? ‘To keep a few boys very strong while the others got weaker? No, none of those define what our strategy was. To be precise, what happens in general is that strategies primarily serve to explain how we got to where we are, to take stock of our relative strengths and weaknesses, to try to understand who and what we are. They are not like roadmaps, since they are very difficult to carry out. iF]

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Future strategies have the problem that, due to uncertainty and our inability to predict what will happen, they are nothing more than simple projected scenarios that we know we won't be able to accomplish because, in general, we can’t anticipate what’s going to happen. It’s one thing to have a purpose, a vision, another to have a strategy and it’s an even more difficult thing to implement that strategy and to realize it fully. Sometimes we don’t have a clear objective, but we can’t just sit still and be silent. In fact, talking, moving, discussing, putting problems on the table, these are the mechanisms we use to try to begin to under-

stand where we are and what we can do to start making sense of the situation. We did have a vision, a goal, a purpose, which was to get off the

mountain and to try to live the next twenty-four hours so that there was a possibility we might still be alive at the end of our odyssey. That forced us to eat well and to maintain a reasonable balance between our options. We had to build up reserves to last as long as possible and our expeditionaries also needed to be in the strongest possible condition in order to walk through the mountains. When to leave, in which direction to go, who would go, all these were decisions that we were making day by day, with the information that was available at the time. It didn’t make sense to be making those decisions ten days in advance. Numa was going to be one of the walkers and he died before the expeditionaries departed, the captain exhorted us to endure until we were hit by the avalanche that killed him; only Roberto and Nando know how difficult that deci-

sion was to decide to continue walking when they reached the crest of the mountain and saw that the way ahead was a lot longer and

more uncertain than they had imagined. Once they got there, there was no point in returning to the plane. ‘They couldn’t be prepared for what was coming and they made the decision themselves once they got there. It didn’t make sense to have prepared a roadmap, it was impossible to know what lay beyond the mountain. But that doesn’t mean that strategy is useless. It is useful if only to get started. Ernesto Gore tells the story written by Karl Weick 172

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of a group of explorers who, having been lost for many days in the Alps, finally discover a map that allows them to find a way out

and escape from the mountains. But once they have found their way out, they realize that they have been saved by a map of the Pyrenees, not the Alps where they had been. ‘The map, although wrong, had caused the explorers to get to work, and once they

were working and trying things out, with successes and failures, they found their way out.

That’s what happened to us. Not knowing where we were, the ongoing discussion and evaluation of the alternatives and our review of what had already happened led us to act, to begin to understand the reality bit by bit, to focus in on the pieces of information that we had and which, of course, we didn’t understand. But above all, it got us moving. Moving, always trying things out, talking, finding alternatives, these activities prevented us from becoming immobilized, prevented us from giving up and finally dying, ‘Talking passionately about the problems, discussing, communicating, putting them on the table, not avoiding the “elephants in the room”, allowed the problem to begin to have a solution, and so changed the essence of the problem. The other difficult word is “leadership”. I find Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s definitions of Adaptwe Leadership to be especially valuable. They say that when we are faced with technical problems where the solution is known, where we have been before, where we have the solution, the answer lies in authority, whether it be formal or informal; authority whose function it is to direct, to protect and to organize. If for whatever reason we know the solution, no matter how complicated or important the problem is, the answer lies in authority, which must be exercised in order to solve the technical problems. But if we don’t know, if there is uncertainty, if we have never been there before, the answer doesn’t lie in authority but in the act of leadership, which is not reserved for the “bosses” invested with the authority, but for any person who can carry it out, and who can be considered a leader precisely to the extent to

which they perform an act of leadership.

173

INTO THE MOUNTAINS The act of leadership, ultimately, is one that mobilizes people

to take charge and to face up to their own adaptive problems. The act of leadership is different to the exercise of authority, in as much as it consists of handing the problem back to those involved, so that they themselves take charge, they work and contribute

what they can so that the collective work of the group will enable its adaptation and ultimately its survival. In the mountains, we had our bosses with formal and informal

authority and we also had our leaders. Clearly, Marcelo, the team

captain, was our first boss. He knew how to lead the team against a known adversary, against another rugby team, in a scenario that was also understood, namely a delegation of rugby players visiting

a foreign country. But when we fell into the Andes, everything changed, since we were no longer facing another team, instead we were facing a totally new, unknown and unprecedented challenge. We had to confront the mountain, the snow, the hunger and the cold. We had never been there before, and his authority no longer served its purpose. And out of our relative strengths and weaknesses, several peo-

ple stepped into the void and took charge of what was happening, committing themselves to the group, not knowing the solu-

tion but tying their actions to outcomes for the group. The act of leadership is a disruptive activity, leading to conflict, breaking the inertia, breaking with what the system we have created urges us to do. The act of leadership leads us to try new things, to face different challenges, to confront situations that the group doesn’t know how to manage. In our case, there was no order for us to start using the bodies of our friends for food, the group had to resolve the issue in a collective discussion until we all were doing it, out of our own personal conviction. In any case, the important thing was the example of those who were first, but no one was obligated to do it. The starting point for the act of leadership is to recognize that we don’t know, that we need help, that we can’t progress alone, that we need the contributions of others and their diversity. This 174

Part Two

leads to handing back the problem to whom it belongs, so that the group can work and make progress. With its trials and its

errors, its successes and its lessons learned. We must recognize that when we face an adaptive challenge, authority doesn’t work,

however much we want it and yearn to be under an authority

figure who will tell us what to do. Clearly, in our case, no one held the solution, we didn’t know how to survive, what to do, and

there were several who, with their successes and failures, helped us to do our adaptive work. And in fact Marcelo, when he was trying to bring order and to encourage us to expect a rescue, was not helping the group make the substantive decisions we needed

to make. People yearn for authority to solve our problems, even if the authority is overwhelmed and can’t provide solutions. Luckily,

on occasion, we accept the challenges and we engage, displaying those wonderful small and large acts of leadership. But an act of leadership also requires care. Even if it takes courage and is dangerous, whoever performs it exposes himself when he crosses a line and accepts his share of the responsibility. And one should know the risks, calculating the potential losses and not sacrificing oneself unnecessarily for battles that cannot be

won. To adapt and survive we can’t enter into all wars, we must

choose which ones we are going to wage, also knowing that if we wage none, we remain on the sidelines, and ultimately will neither adapt nor survive. When what we have is a sacrifice, a giving of oneself for another, a calculation whereby we are willing to lose in order for others to gain, it is more than an act of leadership, it 1s

at that point an act of heroism. Moreover, the way we treated Pancho is a logical consequence

of the dynamics of a group like ours, but it also showed a lack of leadership to defend the accused. He lacked the capacity to inteerate, to point out the injustice being done to him. So leadership 1s dangerous, difficult and it requires a lot of courage to go out and defend lost causes. Each of us necessarily chose, out of our relative strengths and weaknesses, which battles to fight. Sometimes 175

INTO THE MOUNTAINS I wonder whether I should have fought more battles, but I wasn’t capable, I could barely defend myself. Up there on the mountain, we had our authority figures, we had our leaders and we also had our heroes: Roberto and Nando,

for setting out to walk, for their willingness to sacrifice themselves

for the group, for offering their lives walking in the Andes, are not necessarily our leaders, they are our heroes. They did the heroic, they did what I couldn’t have done, they walked steadfastly for ten days across the mountains, wearing rugby boots, badly fed, poorly clothed, without the right equipment. A true feat

which had that dose of sacrifice and self-giving so prevalent in heroic acts. That is not to say that they didn’t perform acts of leadership. Roberto, with his defiant, irritating, and provocative attitude, kept

us on edge, attentive, busy, working hard to get out. Roberto says that one day he asked me if I wanted to set out on a walk with him. I don’t remember the question, and Roberto says that he doesn’t remember the answer. But Roberto’s question, forcing me to define which side I was on, how much

I would or would not

contribute, is for me, an act of leadership.

Nando and Roberto are also leaders for another reason. In setting off on their walk they abandoned us, they left the group on its own and compelled us to take care of what was happening. And the fact is that no one died on the mountain while they were

walking through the Andes. Their act of abandonment, of leaving the group alone, forced us to draw from our last reserves of strength and to endure until the end. The fourteen who were alive when those two set off were still alive when we were rescued from the mountain ten days later. Whatever title we give it, it seems important for me to stress that we would not have got out without the self-sacrifice, courage and determination of our walkers. They know that they have our well-deserved and immense gratitude, as do all my brothers of the Andes, those who returned and those who did not, because without them I would never have returned. 176

Part Two

This approach to leadership has allowed me to understand how I have always felt satisfied with the role I played even though

I was not one of the bosses on the mountain. I always felt that with my questions, my thoughts, and my constant activity in trying to keep myself alive, I had contributed significantly to the group doing the things it had to do in order to adapt and to

move forward. Finally, writing this book has also been an act of leadership. As

my friend Bill George, a professor at Harvard University, says, the act of leadership begins by aligning the inner compass that we all have with our true north, in being true to our own story and feel-

ing vulnerable, in searching for each person’s story from the heart itself. So, all in all, I have felt very much at peace with myself,

true to myself, aligned to my story, based on my values and on my experience, projecting forward the line of my life; especially at this time of my life when I’m at the age at which it is necessary to start

giving back some of the wisdom we’ve gained.

Telling my own story allows me to align this inner compass and to join the dots. Because my Andes story is not that of Nando, or Roberto, or Tintin, neither is it Roy’s nor that of any of the others. It is mine. We all have our own stories because we live our own lives, and not the lives of others. Revealing our stories allows us to understand who we are, where we are, how we got to where we are and from there deliver a true testimony, from the heart. That true testimony is ultimately powerful and helps us to consol-

idate our personal growth and also helps others to overcome their own mountains. % OK

Some Words About Shackleton Sometimes, when I run a seminar, I use the case of Ernest Shackleton and compare it with our own. Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who, between 1914 and 1917, led an ambi-

tious expedition with the goal of walking across the Antarctic

177

INTO THE MOUNTAINS continent, something that had never been done before by humans. Shackleton left with his twenty-seven men from a whaling station on the island of South Georgia. ‘They sailed among the icebergs trying to get close to Antarctica in the Endurance (quite an appropriate name), until it became trapped by the ice, and after eight months drifting with the icepack they finally had to abandon the ship before its imminent destruction. For several months more they eked out a precarious existence camping on the moving icepack until eventually it broke up enough for them to take to the three lifeboats they had salvaged from the Endurance and ultimately reach a small deserted ice-covered island. From there, Shackleton and five companions navigated almost a thousand miles across the roughest ocean in the world in one of those small lifeboats, and after fourteen days they reached the same island from which they had started out two years earlier. Shackleton and two of his

men then traversed uncharted mountains to reach civilization. Not content with this, Shackleton organized the final rescue of

his men and he personally (like Nando) went to where his men were waiting. It was an exceptional feat. ‘The resilience of those

men is incredible. When Shackleton found his men, they were all alive and in reasonable health, having spent the winter feeding on seals, gulls and penguins. It only lacked anthropophagy to outdo our story! I don’t want to go on and compare our experience with theirs or to analyze Shackleton’s leadership style which has already

been studied by many authors. I just want to mention that, writing later about the arduous and dangerous trek across the uncharted mountains of South Georgia, Shackleton says: “I have no doubt that providence guided us...1 know that during that

long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed

mountains and glaciers it seemed to me often that we were four, not three”. This inspired some famous lines in TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land:

178

Part Two

“Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you”

Images of the rescues of Shackleton's men and of the Andes survivors. Both groups greet their rescuers in the same way: with open arms and waving jubilantly.

179

INTO THE MOUNTAINS I asked Nando if during his final walk with Roberto he felt that there was a third who walked beside them. He said no, there were just the two of them. But I know that there were more. At the very least we also went with them. The ordeal of Shackleton and his men impressed me more than our own, but because I was in the Andes and not the Ant-

arctic and because I know that ours could be endured. Probably if we had been able to recount our story to Shackleton, he would have been equally impressed by our ability to survive and would have thought the opposite.

Finally, I am struck by the photograph Shackleton’s men took of themselves when they were being rescued by their boss, with

open arms and waving jubilantly. I am struck by its similarity with our photograph, the one taken from one of the rescue helicopters, in which we welcome, also with open arms, Nando and the others who came for us. Shackleton’s advertisement recruiting people for the trip also merits further reflection. He knew what kind of people he wanted to recruit. And he didn’t recruit the best in each specialty, he recruited those who, along with their specific talents, would be able to work together. Without doubt, Shackleton had a great discerning eye because he didn’t get it wrong, but he made some unusual decisions. For example, the cook also had to know how

to sing, which in the end was important for harmonious coex-

istence. In our case, there was no clinical eye, we were what we were, and yet, with our relative abilities and shortcomings, we were doing the adaptive work that allowed us to escape. We were a fairly homogeneous group, which is usually taken as a plus. I’m not totally convinced about that. Perhaps a more heterogeneous group would have given us other options. They would have generated other alternatives for action and perhaps we would have seen possibilities that we didn’t see. Adaptation requires variety in order to generate those successful alternatives among the thousands that fail.

180

Talking of survivors, I have an aspiration. Someday, I hope to talk to Clara Rojas, who spent seven years kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). She spent

seven years, not seventy days, shut away in the impenetrable jun-

gle, living in appalling conditions. ‘There in the jungle she gave birth, she had a son fathered by one of her captors. There, on the edge of life and death, a life was begun. I am struck by her story, by her subsequent silence and by the strength of mother-

hood. I would someday like meet her and talk with her, survivor to survivor.

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Summary

ometimes I’m asked to summarize what can be taken from my Andes experience. It’s a very difficult task, because what I have had more than anything else is a living experience,

a very personal feeling. I can try to write something but I do this with the explanation that this is a rationalization that serves only as such and does not explain how I felt or what I experienced. Anyone is free to take what they want and what they can from

my story and for that reason it cannot be summarized. But some-

times we have to work with the intellect and here are some of the ideas that arise: ¢ Our strength to survive did not come from outside. It came from our innermost being, where the essence of man mixes

with the most divine. From our intimate and personal will to survive. I call it God, you can give it any name you want.

But it didn’t come from outside. In my case, I didn’t survive the Andes because I wanted to see my family, my girlfriend, my friends, or because I wanted to write a book. I survived because I wanted to live, always one day more, and in that way, day-by-day, I arrived at the end. ¢ Our experience was amazing, extraordinary, but it was lived and achieved by an ordinary group. Any group of people, of the same age and in the same state of health as us, would

have done the same, and possibly would have survived. You

183

INTO THE MOUNTAINS also could have done it had you been on our plane. In the end, our ordinariness elevates what it 1s to be human. We are all capable of surviving our Andes. We could not have survived individually. Ours was a group task that arose from the individual desire to survive. Everyone wanted to escape, but we knew we needed to work together to have any chance of survival. The survival instinct,

that

sacred

urge,

1s individual,

but

we

instinc-

tively knew that we had to work together, in a coordinated manner, so that everyone would have a better chance of

getting out. We didn’t know whether or not we were going to escape because it didn’t depend only on us. We were hoping we would get out and we worked hard as if we were going to

escape. We also didn’t know how we were going to leave the mountain; the most important thing was to stay alive every moment and to be our best: if I am alive today, what we are experiencing has meaning.

The leadership and authority structure of the group as a rugby team didn’t help us to confront the mountain. We had to change and adapt to what we were experiencing. We had to take charge of our new situation, and from our relative strengths and weaknesses, several people performed the acts

of leadership that were needed to face the new challenges.

In addition, Nando and Roberto are our heroes, they did something heroic, something that I couldn’t have done. In the daily struggle for survival, we found meaning in what was happening to us. Active work, resolving the various challenges as best we could, with difficulties, conflicts, and tension, kept us focused and structured as a group and we remained unified. In fact, nobody broke away in search of an individual solution; even Nando,

who wanted to leave,

waited until the group was ready for his departure. We have led normal lives. Fifteen of the sixteen of us who left the mountain are still alive — Javier Methol has 184

Epilogue left us recently — and with our cordilleras on our backs, we

continue to climb our mountains, one by one. We have been resilient, because up there on the we saw ourselves in one another were human beings. Afterwards, have always been welcomed with

mountain we didn’t break, and always knew that we ever since we returned, we the same regard, restraint,

and affection wherever we go. This has prevented us from spending our lives defending the indefensible and we have

probably led similar lives to those we would have led had we not crashed in the Andes. Each one of us has our own mountain, our own story.

Understanding it allows us to join the dots and make sense of our path in life. Being honest and true with it, with who we are, allows us to surrender it and to see the way ahead.

185

Your comments are welcome

1)

ear reader, I propose a deal. If you’ve reached this point it is because you found my testimony from the

early

chapters

interesting

and

perhaps

motivating,

and in addition I’m grateful for your patience in accompanying me through the later chapters about “my return home” and other intellectual ravings. You make me feel great and it fills me with satisfaction. And it could be said that you know me well

enough. But I now ask that you don’t tell anyone what I’m going

to ask you, so that it’s a surprise for those who, like you, have come this far. The request is very simple: since you know me so well, I want to get to know you also, and I ask you to send me

a message, in English or Spanish, through www.facebook.com/ las.montanas.siguen.alli and tell me what you think of the book,

what has grabbed your attention, what has helped you or not. But on the other hand, if you are someone who, like me, some-

times jumps to the last pages of a book or you read it back to front, well, you can also write to me, but tell me that you are someone

who hasn’t read it yet and Pll know how to handle it.

186

Passenger list

Plaque commemorating the twenty-four passengers who died. Copy of the original located in Stella Maris School in Montevideo. The five Uruguayan Air Force crew members are missing.

I,

Adolfo (Fito) Strauch + Alexis Hounié Alfredo (Pancho) Delgado Alvaro Mangino Antonio (Tintin) Vizintin 187

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

+ Arturo Nogueira Carlos Paez + Carlos Valeta + Carlos Roque 1).

Daniel Fernandez

11.

+ Daniel Maspons

Le

+ Daniel Shaw

LS.

+ Dante Lagurara

14.

+ Diego Storm

Lon

Eduardo Strauch

16.

+ Enrique Platero

Li

+ Esther Horta de Nicola

18.

+ Eugenia Dolgay de Parrado

19.

+ Felipe Maquirriain

a.

Fernando (Nando) Parrado

ills

+ Fernando Vasquez

oe.

+ Francisco (Pancho) Abal

2s

+ Francisco Nicola

2.

+ Gaston Costemalle

ae

+ Graciela Mariani

188

Passenger List

26,

+ Guido Magri

Di

+ Gustavo Nicolich

28.

Gustavo Zerbino

29. Javier Methol (f 2015) 30. José Luis (Coche) Inciarte DL.

+ Juan Carlos Menéndez

a

+ Julio Ferradas

Soh

+ Julio Martinez Lamas

34.

+ Lihana Methol

oo)

+ Marcelo Pérez del Castillo

36.

+ Numa ‘Turcatti

ot

+ Ovidio Ramirez

38.

Pedro Algorta

39.

+ Rafael Echavarren

40.

+ Ramon Martinez

41,

Ramon (Moncho) Sabella

42.

Roberto (Bobby) Frangois

43.

Roberto Canessa

44.

Roy Harley

45.

+ Susana Parrado 189

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Acknowledgements want

to recognize

those without whom

this book would

not have been possible. I don’t want this part to be a mere formality, but obviously my brothers of the mountain must

come first. In one way or another, I am drawing from a common, collective experience and making it personal. Without their support, I would never have survived nor would I have

written this book. I hope that my side of the story, my interpretation, hasn’t caused them any difficulties, and that they accept it simply as mine. ‘Then there are those who are my inspiration, those always encouraged me to write. Some, on occasion, gested writing something together. In the end, I did it they were present and many have read at least part of and have offered their suggestions. I have taken some on board; on other occasions, I have not been able

who have have sugalone but this book of them to under-

stand their comments and they have been left out, so that the

responsibility for what has been published remains mine alone. These people are Ernesto and Silvia Gore, Claudio Fernandez Araoz, Jaime Fernandez Madero, Marcelo Serantes, Ricardo Aranovich,

Mario

and

Marina

Arbolave,

Marcelo

Galmarini,

Noelle Algorta, Hugo Igenes, and Mireya Soriano. Additionally, I would like to thank Glenda Vieites and Laura Madrigal who have contributed in major ways to previous editions of this book. A special thanks to my editor Sara Taheri, whose expertise has been instrumental in smoothly guiding this project to the English-speaking world. She has been both patient and responsive, and it has been a pleasure working with her. Finally, I would like to thank John Guiver, who spontaneously offered to translate my book, and who, in the end, has provided me with a translation that has allowed me to express myself better in English than in my native tongue. There we are, that’s it.

19]

INTO THE MOUNTAINS

tne

see

facing Sosneado.

The glacier where the fuselage lay, and the headwall climbed by Nando, Roberto, and Tintin (photo from January 2015) 192

Pedro Algorta was born in Montevideo in 1951 and is one of the sixteen survivors of the Uruguayan plane that crashed in the Andes in 1972. After the accident, he

lived in Buenos Aires where he graduated with a degree in Economic Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, and went on to get an MBA from Stanford University. He has had a successful business career as an executive at various companies:

Techint, Quilmes and Pefatlor, among others. He is married and has three children and two grandchildren.

John Guiver is married, with three children, and lives in Saffron Walden,

England. He has had a litelong interest in the Andes story and has been on two > ¢ol-tell ela mom al MelkOhAMCTICe

BBS etoc lag

“It is rare that a person exposes so much of himself with such heartfelt and emotive words. My memories of having shared with Pedro on the mountain all the feelings

that a human being can have— love, grief, anguish, pain, anxiety, fear, happiness and rebirth— are perfectly captured in these pages.”

Nando Parrado, Andes survivor and author of Miracle In The Andes. “It is extraordinary that, so long after the event, Pedro Algorta should have written. such a lucid account ef what heiexperienced during the seventy days trapped

in the Andes. He was a distinct fig e among the sixteen survivors, and now

ks back on their ordeal from a'unique perspective and with an admirable detachment. His reflections on what he learned make fascinating reading.” Piers Paul Read, ets

“Andes Survivor Pedroagers

of Alive.

has written the 2m

of what happened on thé-mountain to the survivors of the’ he learned from this crucible. His writing in Into The Mounte that you feel you are there with him. You'll be moved to t rescue helicopters finally arrive after seventy days. This: Bill George, author of Discover Your True’

Harvard Business School professor and former CEO

“Pedro Algorta has mined his harrowing ordeal in the Andes to produce a £ reflection on everyday leadership. His insights are invaluable for each of us as we tackle the unexpected mountains in our own life journeys.” Marty Linsky, faculty, Harvard Kennedy School, co-author of Leadership on the Line and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. “Very few people on Earth have endured what Pedro Algorta and companions

lived through in the Andes. The experience, Pedro writes, brought him, ‘face to

face with our most basic humanity’. And his book made me ponder deeply the meaning of my own humanity as well.” Chris Lowney, author of Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World.

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