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Alive
The Story of the Andes Survivors
Piers Paul Read
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends
JOHN 15:13
We decided that this book should be written and the truth known because of the many rumours about what happened in the
cordillera. We dedicate this story of our suffering and solidarity to those friends who died for us and to their parents who, at the
time when we most needed it, received us with love and understanding.
Pedro Algorta, Roberto Canessa, Alfredo Delgado, Daniel Fernández, Roberto Francois, Roy Harley, José Luis Inciarte,
Javier Methol, Alvaro Mangino, Carlos Páez, Fernando Parrado, Ramón Sabella, Adolfo Strauch, Eduardo Strauch, Antonio
Vizintín, Gustavo Zerbino.
Montevideo, October 30, 1973
Preface
On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild F-227 of the Uruguayan Air Force, chartered by an amateur rugby team, set off from
Montevideo in Uruguay for Santiago in Chile. Reports of bad weather in the Andes brought the plane down in Mendoza, a town
on the Argentinian side of the range. The next day the weather had improved. The Fairchild set off again, flying south to the
Planchon Pass. At 3.21 p.m. the pilot reported to Air Traffic Control in Santiago that he was over the Pass of Planchon, and at
3.24 that he was over the town of Curicó in Chile. He was authorized to turn north and begin his descent to the airport of
Pudahuel. At 3.30 he reported his height as 15,000 feet, but when Santiago control tower spoke to the Fairchild a minute later
there was no reply.
For eight days the Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans searched for the plane. Among the passengers there had been not
just the fifteen members of the rugby team but twenty-five of their friends and relations, all coming from prominent families in
Uruguay. The search was fruitless. The pilot had evidently miscalculated his position and flown north towards Santiago when he
was still in the middle of the mountains. It was early spring in the southern hemisphere, and the Andes had suffered exceptionally
heavy falls of snow. The roof of the plane was white. There was little chance that it would ever be found, and less chance still that
any of the forty-five passengers and crew could have survived the crash.
Ten weeks later a Chilean peasant tending his cattle in a remote valley deep in the Andes saw, on the far side of a mountain
torrent, the figures of two men. They made wild gestures and fell to their knees as though in supplication, but the peasant, thinking
that they might be terrorists or tourists, went away. When he returned to the same spot the next day the two figures were still
there, and once again they made signs to him to approach. He went to the bank of the river and threw a piece of paper and a pen
wrapped in a handkerchief to the other side. The bearded, bedraggled figure who received it wrote on the paper and threw it
back to the peasant. It read: ‘I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan.…’
There were sixteen survivors. This is the story of what they suffered and of how they remained alive.
One
1
Uruguay, one of the smallest countries on the South American continent, was founded on the eastern bank of the River Plate
as a buffer state between the emerging giants of Brazil and Argentina. Geographically it was a pleasant land, with cattle running
wild over immense pasturelands, and its population lived modestly either as merchants, doctors and lawyers in the city of
Montevideo or as proud and restless gauchos on the range.
The history of the Uruguayans in the nineteenth century is filled first with fierce battles for their independence against
Argentina and Brazil and then with equally savage civil skirmishes between the Blanco and Colorado parties, the Conservatives
from the interior and the Liberals from Montevideo. In 1904 the last Blanco uprising was defeated by the Colorado president,
José Batlle y Ordóñez, who then established a secular and democratic state which for many decades was regarded as the most
advanced and enlightened in South America.
The economy of this welfare state depended upon the pastoral and agricultural products which Uruguay exported to Europe,
and while world prices for wool, beef and hide remained high, Uruguay remained prosperous; but in the course of the 1950s the
value of these commodities went down and Uruguay went into a decline. There was unemployment and inflation, which in turn
gave rise to social discontent. The civil service was overstaffed and underpaid; lawyers, architects, and engineers – once the
aristocracy of the nation – found themselves with little work and were paid too little for what there was. Many were compelled to
choose secondary professions. Only those who owned land in the interior could be sure of their prosperity. The rest worked for
what they could get in an atmosphere of economic stagnation and administrative corruption.
As a result, there arose the first and most notable movement of urban guerrilla revolutionaries, the Tupamaros, whose
ambition was to bring down the oligarchy which governed Uruguay through the Blanco and Colorado parties. For a while things
went their way. They kidnapped and ransomed officials and diplomats and infiltrated the police force, which was set against them.
The government called upon the army, which ruthlessly uprooted these urban guerrillas from their middle-class homes. The
movement was suppressed; the Tupamaros were locked away.
In the early 1950s a group of Catholic parents, alarmed at the atheistic tendencies of the teachers in the state schools – and
dissatisfied with the teaching of English by the Jesuits – invited the Irish Province of the Christian Brothers to start a school in
Montevideo. This invitation was accepted, and five Irish lay brothers came out from Ireland by way of Buenos Aires to found the
Stella Maris College – a school for boys between the ages of nine and sixteen – in the suburb of Carrasco. In May 1955 classes
were started in a house on the rambla which looked out under vast skies over the South Atlantic.
Though they spoke only halting Spanish, these Irish Brothers were well suited to the task they now sought to perform.
Uruguay might be far from Ireland, but it too was a small country with an agricultural economy. The Uruguayans ate beef as the
Irish ate potatoes, and life here, like life in Ireland, was led at a gentle pace. Nor was the structure of that part of Uruguayan
society to which they catered unfamiliar to the Brothers. The families who lived in the pleasant modern houses built amid the pine
trees of Carrasco – the most desirable suburb of Montevideo – were mostly large, and there were strong bonds between parents
and children which persisted through adolescence into maturity. The affection and respect which the boys felt for their parents
was readily transferred to their teachers. This proved enough to maintain good behaviour and, at the request of the parents of
their pupils, the Christian Brothers gave up their long-standing use of the disciplinary cane.
It was also customary in Uruguay for young men and women to live with their parents even after they had left school, and it
was not until they got married that they left home. The Christian Brothers often asked themselves how it was that, in a world
where acrimony between generations sometimes seemed to be the spirit of the age, the citizens of Uruguay – or at least the
residents of Carrasco – should be spared this conflict. It was as if the torrid vastness of Brazil to the north and the muddy waters
of the River Plate to the south and west acted not only as natural barriers but as a protective shell in a cocoon of time.
Not even the Tupamaros troubled the Stella Maris College. The pupils, who came from Catholic families with conservative
inclinations, had been sent by their parents to the Christian Brothers because of this order’s traditional methods and old-fashioned
objectives. Political idealism was more likely to flourish under the Jesuits, who trained the intellect, than under the Christian
Brothers, whose aim was to build the character of their boys – and the generous use of corporal punishment, which they had
abandoned at the request of the parents, was not the only means to this end at their disposal. The other was rugby football.
When the Christian Brothers first came to Uruguay, rugby was hardly played there at all; indeed, they found themselves in a
country where soccer was not just the national sport but a communal passion. Along with per capita consumption of beef, it was
the only sphere in which Uruguay triumphed over the great nations of the world (they won the World Cup in 1930 and 1950),
and to ask young Uruguayans to play a different game was like feeding them on bread and potatoes instead of their usual diet of
beef.
Having sacrificed one pillar of their educational system in giving up the cane, the Christian Brothers were not going to give up
the other. They held to their contention that soccer was a sport for the prima donna, whereas rugby football would teach the boys
to suffer in silence and work as a team. The parents expostulated but they acquiesced, and in time they even came to share the
opinion of the Christian Brothers as to the merits of the game.
As for their sons, they played it with growing enthusiasm, and when the first generation had passed through the school, many
of the graduates were unwilling to give up either rugby or the Stella Maris College. The idea of an old boys’ group of alumni was
conceived, and in 1965, ten years after the foundation of the school, this association came into being. It was called the Old
Christians’ Club, and its chief activity was playing rugby on a Sunday afternoon.
As the years passed, these games became popular – even fashionable – and each summer brought new members to the Old
Christians’ Club and a wider choice of players for a better team. Rugby itself caught on in Uruguay, and the Old Christians’ first
fifteen, with the shamrock on their shirts, became one of the best teams in the country. In 1968 they won the Uruguayan national
championship, and again in 1970. Ambition grew with success. The team made a trip across the estuary of the River Plate to play
teams in Argentina, and in 1971 they made up their minds to go farther afield and play in Chile. To make this possible and not too
expensive, the club chartered a plane from the Uruguayan Air Force to fly them from Montevideo to Santiago, and tickets for
seats not required by the team were sold to their friends and supporters. The trip was a great success. The team played the
Chilean national team and the first fifteen of the Old Boys Grange, winning one match and losing the other. At the same time, they
had a short holiday in a foreign land. For many it was their first journey abroad and their first sight of the snow-covered peaks
and glacial valleys of the Andes. Indeed, the trip was such a success that no sooner had they returned to Montevideo than they
planned to go again the following year.
