On October 13, 1972, a plane with forty-five people on board took off from Montevideo in Uruguay. Its destination was supposed to be Chile, but it never arrived.
Instead, the plane crashed horrifically deep in the Andes mountains. Astonishingly, a remarkable 33 survivors found themselves facing the prospect of a bitter winter in the mountains, completely alone. How do you survive being stranded in the middle of the Andes? For those left on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, the answer involved courage, tenacity, and eating the bodies of their dead comrades.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because these real-life events inspired the plot of 1993 film Alive. And now, thirty years on from the thriller's release, the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 is being made into another, Spanish-language film.
Society of the Snow offers a harrowing look at the strength and courage it took to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Many of the details are so incredible they defy belief – the initial crash, and the setbacks that followed – here’s what you need to know about what really happened, as told by those who were there.
The crash
The flight took off on October 13. On board: almost the entirety of the Old Christians amateur rugby group, most of whom were boys in their late teens and early twenties, and all heading to play a match in Chile.
As the plane flew through the Andes, the weather took a turn: clouds obscured the mountains, making it impossible to see. Only four years old, the plane had clocked 792 hours in the air and was called the “lead sled” by some of the pilots, who thought it was underpowered.
At the controls was the inexperienced co-pilot Dante Lagurara. He miscalculated where the plane was relative to the Andes and began their descent too early. As the plane cleared the fog, the passengers saw the ridge of the mountains – but it was too late. Though the pilots pulled back on the controls to try and regain altitude, it hit the ridge two or three times, breaking up the plane and sending it skidding down the mountain before eventually coming to a stop.
“I could never forget that,” survivor Daniel Fernández tells the Standard, recalling the moment when he first saw the crash depicted in the film. “Even to the last, minute detail… I saw myself there on the screen, in the chair, holding on.”
The aftermath
Those who survived the crash (initially, 33 people) then found themselves stranded in the Andes during the harshest period of the year. Though attempts were made to find the plane – and the survivors tried to mark an ‘X’ in the snow with their luggage – its white fuselage meant it went unnoticed in the miles of white snow.
One of the boys managed to salvage a working radio from the wreckage, which Fernández listened to religiously.
“We had a very small radio and you could hear Radio Spectator coming straight from Uruguay, from Montevideo,” he remembers. “No one touched the radio… I didn't want to touch the dial at all, because that radio was my connection to Uruguay. Listening to it, it felt like I was at home.”
It was also Fernández that heard the dreadful news: the search for the plane had been called off, eleven days after their crash.
Without the prospect of rescue, the survivors made a shelter out of the plane wreckage, stripping out the seats and huddling inside for warmth. Meanwhile, they set about collecting supplies, as well as trying to get the plane radio working, but tragedy struck again seventeen days after the crash, when the plane they were sheltering in was hit by an avalanche coming down the mountain at midnight on October 29.
Eight more people were killed, and those who survived were trapped alongside the bodies of their comrades for three days before the storm that caused the avalanche abated enough for them to dig themselves free.
The remaining survivors called themselves The Society of the Snow – an acknowledgement of the fact they saw themselves as a democracy, rather than a dictatorship.
“We had a kind of cupboard, where we would have the cigarettes and the food," Fernández says. "It wasn't closed, or locked with a key, but everyone knew not to touch it. It was completely open, but no one would go in. It didn't occur to anyone to steal anything.”
“No one person was more important than anyone else," he adds. "We were all equal. And that was the basis of the trust between us.”
At night, he says, “there was lots of laughing; lots of joking and lots of dark humour”: the only way they could keep their spirits up. “On the mountain at night, we would often do mad things. We would talk to the dead, and we would send kind of telepathic messages.” Fernández wasn’t immune – he says that he talked to his dead grandfather, especially the night before they were rescued, pleading for help.
Eating the dead
The survivors soon found a more pressing problem on their hands: food. There was hardly any of it available to eat on the slopes, and soon after the crash, they began to starve.
The only source of potential nutrition were the bodies of their deceased comrades. Many of the survivors (understandably) rebelled at the idea of eating human flesh, and as they were Catholics, many of them also thought they’d be sent to hell as a result.
In his memoirs, fellow survivor Robert Canessa wrote that “for a long time, we agonized. I went out in the snow and prayed to God for guidance. Without His consent, I felt I would be violating the memory of my friends; that I would be stealing their souls.
“We wondered whether we were going mad even to contemplate such a thing. Had we turned into brute savages? Or was this the only sane thing to do? Truly, we were pushing the limits of our fear.”
As Pablo Vierci (author of 2009 book La sociedad de la nieve, upon which the film was based) explains to the Standard, “some people in the plane didn’t want to use the body as food. But they reached a conclusion that they could make an agreement.”
This agreement – which was set out in a letter from one of the boys who died in the avalanche – was that if one person died, the other survivors could use his body to survive.
“It's a contract. It's not in legal words, but he says – he’s speaking to his girlfriend – ‘For you, it will be strange, but we'll use [the] bodies [as food]. And if the time comes when I die, and they need my body, I will be happy to do it.’”
Once this was decided, the survivors felt they could bring themselves to start eating. As one of the leaders, Fernández took on the responsibilities of stripping meat from the bodies, alongside the cousins Eduardo and Fito Strauch; by the end of their ordeal, only skeletons were left behind. As Fernández says, “I was in charge of distributing the cigarettes. I was also in charge of cutting the meat; distributing the meat. I had all the worst jobs."
The rescue
Eventually, two of the survivors, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, decided they would go and seek help (their first attempts to do so had failed). Armed with a sleeping bag made out of the plane’s waterproof insulation, woven together with copper wire, as well as several layers of clothes, they set out to seek help. It had been almost two months since the crash.
“The moment that they left to seek out help was the end for us,” Fernández says. “It was the end of all the time that we'd spent selecting who would go on that journey and preparing that final expedition. Because the expedition was the way out for all of us.”
The pair trekked for an incredible ten days to find help, crossing almost the entirety of the Andes mountain range as a result. Fernández, stuck back at camp, had to keep everybody’s spirits up. “I was convinced that they would make it; I always knew that they would make it,” he says.
“Dark humour came into play a lot here. Believe it or not, we even started taking bets on which of the people that went on the journey would die first… maybe it was quite morbid, but that's what happened.”
Finally, Fernández turned on the radio one morning and heard, unusually, the sound of Ave Maria. “We thought, listening to Ave Maria at 9.30 in the morning? Why would they be playing Ave Maria? And that's when we decided, okay, it must be good news.”
On 22 December 1972, the helicopter bearing Parrado and Canessa, as well as the rescue team, finally arrived.
“There are five photos that Bayona uses in the film,” Fernández adds. “Real photos that he places in the film with the actors [where] they're waving from the helicopter.” It had been 72 days since they crashed, and out of the 45 people who set out, only 16 had survived.
The legacy
The survivors soon found themselves at the centre of a media storm. Initially, the story of their rescue was hailed as ‘The Miracle of the Andes’; later, they faced a backlash as news broke of their eating human flesh to survive.
“I didn't speak about the accident for 30 years because I thought no one was interested in hearing about it,” Fernández says. But for the 30th anniversary of the accident, the surviving Old Christians visited the site of their original intended rugby match in Chile.
“We arrived at the press conference and we saw CNN and all the major channels around the world. And we were all a bit shocked and surprised… and I realised that telling my story could really help people. So that's when I started to give talks. My relationship to the accident is a good one. I don't have any trauma leftover. I don't have any pain.”
The decision was made to leave the victims’ bodies at the site of the crash, as well as the plane’s wreckage; today, a memorial exists on the site, dedicated to their memories.
“It was absolutely disruptive,” says Vierci. “What they did… The Society of the Snow is mercy; it's compassion; it's generosity. And they never gave up… in the middle of the of the Andes, the worst place in the world, they created that kind of society.
“When you are in the worst situation, the worst of the worst… what emerges is the best of us.”
