A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Andes Flight Disaster
Join Kelli as she tells the amazing story of Uruguayan Flight 571, where 45 people crashed into the snowy peaks on the Andes Mountains on the border of Argentina and Chile. After ten weeks, two of the 16 survivors emerged from the mountains. To survive, they had to do the unthinkable - they had to cannibalize the flesh of their dead friends and relatives.
This is a story of resilience, survival, and how far one will go to make it out alive.
Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric
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Sources referenced in the podcast:
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read
Courage and Cannibalism: Inside the Andes Plane Disaster by 7News Spotlight on YT
The Andes Flight Disaster
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. If it’s bloody, gross, or mysterious, I’ll cover it. Today’s episode is one I said I’d do from the very beginning. Today, we’re going to look at what happened to Uruguayan Flight 571, which crashed into the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Only 16 of the 45 people on board survived.
On December 21st, 1972, a herder named Sergio Catalán spotted two men waving their arms frantically across the Río Azufre at Maitenes, a small mountain camp on the Chilean side of the Andes Mountains. Though he sensed the men needed help, the rushing river made it hard to hear. He made it clear he would return the next day.
When Catalán came back, he threw a rock across the river with a note and a pen tied to it - one of these bearded, skinny, and disheveled men wrote the following, before tossing it back to the herder. Quote:
“I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for 10 days. I have a wounded friend up there. In the plane, there are still 14 injured people. We have to get out from here quickly and we don't know how. We don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come to fetch us? Please, we cannot even walk. Where are we?”
The author was 22-year-old Fernando Parrado, known as Nando. With him, 19-year-old Roberto Canessa. They were two survivors of the missing Uruguayan Flight 571, a Fairchild FH-227 D that had crashed 70 days earlier on Friday, October 13th, 1972.
Though he was incredulous that these boys could be from the missing flight, the herder rode for ten hours on horseback to bring help. His efforts saved their lives, as well as the 14 other survivors who were still back at the plane.
Over the weeks that followed, more details emerged about the missing plane. And it didn’t take long before the world learned the shocking details of what happened to them - and what they had to go through to survive.
This is a story of survival against all odds, on top of an uninhabitable, snowy mountain. It’s a story of perseverance, of faith, and the lengths that man will go to to survive - for those who survived the plane crash had no access to food for ten weeks, so they made the choice to cannibalize their dead friends and relatives.
So sit back and prepare for an incredible tale of both survival and cannibalism in one of the most extreme places on earth - the peaks of the Chilean and Argentinean Andes Mountains. This is the story of the Andes Flight Disaster.
The Flight
40 passengers boarded Uruguayan Flight 571 on Thursday, October 12th. There were three crew members and two pilots - Colonel Julio César Ferradas and Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Héctor Lagurara. Ferradas was experienced, with over 5,000 flying hours. Lagurara, though older, was less experienced.
The flight was initially chartered to fly rugby players from the Old Christians Rugby Club in Uruguay’s capital of Montevideo to Santiago in Chile to square off against another team. The Old Christians were a group of alumni from the prestigious Christian Brothers Academy in Montevideo who played rugby in a league. Most of the people on the flight were the rugby players and their friends and family members, though some empty seats were taken up by others not affiliated with the group.
The plane left Montevideo for Santiago, but since there were considerable storms over the Andes, the plane landed at Mendoza, a town in Argentina at the base of the Andes. Here, the boys enjoyed a bit of vacation time, buying wine, cigarettes, gifts, and more. The next day they left for Santiago.
Now as the crow flies, Santiago is only 120 miles to the West. But because of the Andes Mountains, planes of the Fairchild’s size can’t fly directly there. Instead, they must use one of several passes through the mountain where the maximum altitude isn’t higher than what the plane can handle.
The less experienced pilot, Lagurara, took control of the plane. He decided to cross the Andes at the Pass of Planchon. Essentially, he was going to make a big U - south to Malargue [MA-LAR-GWAY], west to Curico, then north to Santiago. Essentially what happened was the pilot underestimated the distances they were flying. He passed through the Planchon but made the turn too soon. He thought he had made it to Curico, so he made plans to turn right and head north. But a blanket of clouds obscured the ground, so the pilot was only making estimates. It normally takes 11 minutes to fly through the Planchon to Curico, but the inexperienced pilot made the call after only 3 minutes. Lagurara radioed the Air Traffic Controller who trusted his word, and authorized the pilot to start the descent into Santiago. He started to bring the plane down to 10,000 feet.
But when the plane came down below the clouds, the passengers noticed quickly that they weren’t flying over the verdant valleys of eastern Chile, but the rocky, snow-tipped mountains of the Cordillera, the Andes Mountains. The wing tip was only feet from the side of the mountain.
One boy asked another - “is it normal to fly so close?” “I don’t think so,” his friend replied.
The Crash
Immediately after, the right wing hit the side of the mountain, broke off, and flew over the fuselage, the main body of the plane. The broken wing cut through the back of the plane, separating the tail from the rest. Two of the crew members and three passengers, still strapped to their seats, were sucked out the back of the plane when the tail separated. The fuselage, now without a tail or its right wing, hurtled toward the ground. The propellor broke off and tore through what remained of the back of the fuselage, and two more boys were flung from the plane. It eventually landed in a steep valley packed with snow and slid downhill. Luckily, the fuselage was not completely torn apart in the crash. Several seats broke loose in the impact, though, and crushed some people instantly.
The plane came to a stop without smashing into the mountains all around them - it was pointing downhill, but it wasn’t in danger of sliding any further. The impact of the crash crushed the nose of the plane. The more experienced pilot, Ferradas, died instantly. Lagurara, who was flying the plane, was strapped into his seat and stuck, but still alive.
A few of the passengers died instantly in the crash, including the only licensed doctor. Three of the boys were medical students though, and one of them was Roberto Canessa, one of the men who would later climb out of the mountains to find help. Canessa had had the most training, but it was only two years’ worth, about a third of what was needed to be licensed.
There were some pretty gruesome injuries. Lots of head wounds, lacerations, and impalements. One, Enrique Platero, had a metal pipe sticking out of his stomach. Zerbino, one of the medical students, pulled the pipe out - and with it came 6 inches of his intestines. Another, Rafael Echavarren, had half his calf muscle ripped off, and it was wrapped around the front of his leg, in front of his shin. Those who weren’t completely in shock helped out best they could, using items from around the wreck of the plane to staunch the bleeding or help clean up the blood. Even Platero, with his intestines protruding from his gut, tied a shirt around his injury and set off to help some of the other boys.
Some, though they survived the initial crash, died in the hours after. Canessa was sat next to a boy named Fernando Vasquez, who had suffered some sort of broken leg. Canessa went on to help others, but when he returned to Vasquez, he realized it wasn’t a broken leg, but a severed leg; the propeller had cut it in half when it tore through the fuselage. He had bled out and died.
Shortly afterward, it began to snow.
To make room in the mangled remains of the fuselage, the survivors got to work separating the living and the dead; those who had died were moved outside into the snow to make room for the living. Nando, the other boy who hiked out to safety and got help, had been knocked unconscious in the crash. The boys assumed he would die, so they moved him near the door, his head laying in the snow. Ironically, this act probably saved Nando’s life; the ice stopped his brain from swelling up. He woke up from his coma three days later.
After sorting the bodies and making room inside for the living, the survivors then went to the cockpit to see if they could radio out for help. A wall of seats, loosened by the crash, blocked the entrance to the cockpit. They did hear sounds of life inside, though, so one of the boys went around from the outside to see who was still alive in there.
Both pilots were strapped up tight in their seats, and they saw that Lagurara was still alive. He begged for help, but there wasn’t much they could do to help him other than feed him snow through the broken glass. Not only was he stuck strapped to his seat, but the cockpit was so badly crushed that there was no way to get him out.
Lagurara was in shock, and all he could repeat was “We passed Curico, we passed Curico.”
But of course, they hadn’t passed Curico. They had only just passed the Planchon Pass, and were stuck in the Andes mountains on the Argentinian side. But unfortunately for the rest of the boys, the pilot's insistence that they had passed Curico and made it to Chile meant that, for the entirety of the 72 days that the plane went undiscovered, the survivors believed they were in Chile. They were under the impression that on the other side of the mountains, to the West, were beautiful green valleys and the help they desperately needed. When in reality, it was just more of the terrible and beautiful Andean mountain range.
By the end of that first day, 32 people had survived the crash.
Now obviously, when the flight never landed in Santiago as expected, searches began for the now-missing plane. It made the news by 6 o’clock that night. Several rescue groups flew over their last known position looking for them, but the search was unsuccessful. They did fly over where the plane had crashed, but from above, the white fuselage was practically invisible surrounded by all that snow.
Five more people died overnight on that first day in the Andes, including the injured pilot who made the fatal error that led to the crash.
Turning a Plane into a Home
The survivors set about making their fuselage-home as spacious as possible, so they removed the debris, including the loose chairs strewn about the cabin. 28 people had to share an area no bigger than roughly 8 feet by 10 feet. For my non-American friends, it was 2.5 meters by 3 meters - smaller than most rooms. For 28 freezing people in the Andes. And it’s not like the fuselage was sealed off; it was ripped apart in the back, the side facing up towards the mountain peaks. To keep out the cold, they used luggage, seats, cushions, and even snow to seal off the open wall of their shelter. It was something they would have to do every night before bed to try and keep the cold air out.
They often had to improvise to survive up there. One of the boys, Fito Strauch [STROW-K], used sheet metal found under the seats to melt snow - snow, placed on the metal, would melt from the sun, which would drip into empty bottles placed below. In this regard, at least, the survivors had an abundance of water. Food would be another story.
Fito, more formally known as Adolfo, was on the flight with his cousin, Eduardo. They were both well-liked and respected boys amongst the rugby crowd. Fito later went on to improvise three pairs of sunglasses out of the pilot cabin’s visors, wires, and a bra strap. This was done to help with snow blindness.
If you missed my first episode on the Donner Party, snow blindness is where the light reflecting off the white snow can potentially blind you, either temporarily or permanently. It may look nice and white and shiny, but the UV rays bouncing straight into your eyes can do serious damage. In 1846, when leading a party to find help over the Sierra Nevada mountains, the only man who knew the way out succumbed to snow blindness, had to stay behind on the trail, and died in the mountains from hypothermia.
Snow blindness is no joke.
After 8 days, another survivor died - Susana Parrado, Nando’s sister. He had recovered from his coma after a few days and found out that his mother died in the crash. His sister, though alive at the time, was in bad shape. He stayed with her, helping her until she passed.
Now there were 27 survivors trying to live in a tiny, mangled plane, over 11,000 feet in altitude, shivering in nighttime temperatures of around -22 degrees Fahrenheit, or -30 Celsius. Most of them had never even seen snow before. Though they had ample water, they lacked food, medicine, and other basic mountain survival gear like warm clothes or snowshoes.
After eight days, on October 21st, the search was officially called off. The survivors had access to a radio - one-way, unfortunately - so they even heard the news that they were just lost and nobody was looking. What a soul-crushing thing to have to hear.
This news had a divisive effect. Some became lethargic and waited for death, while others were determined to find their own way out. But the problem, as it so often is in survival situations, was access to food.
When the plane crashed, the survivors had little to eat. The initial survivors had a handful of chocolate bars, a singular tin of mussels, a few jars of jam, some almonds, a bit of dried fruit, and a few bottles of wine. That’s it. For 28 people. The leaders of the group enforced a ration, which everyone followed, but you can imagine that they ran out of food really quickly.
Now when you’re in a survival situation, it’s best to think of the rule of 3’s - 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks. You can survive 3 hours without shelter in a harsh environment - luckily, though it was mangled, the fuselage of the Fairchild served as a decent enough shelter to keep the survivors alive. You can survive 3 days without water - as I already covered, that wasn’t an issue. Water (well, snow, really) was literally all they had up there. And you can survive 3 weeks without food. Though you’d be so severely weakened by that point that 3 weeks is really stretching it. It’s more of a rule of thumb, not a scientific fact.
Now at 11,000 feet up in the Andes, there is nothing else to eat. There is no natural vegetation, no animals, and until the end of their ten weeks, they didn’t even see birds. It was only when the snows started to thaw, right before their rescue, that condors started to hover overhead, waiting to eat the carrion they smelled below.
And so, knowing that the search had been called off, knowing that they were essentially out of food, and knowing they couldn’t get more, they had to make a difficult decision.
Cannibalism!
It was Nando who first mentioned it to his friend Carlitos Páez. In the book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, author Piers Paul Read recounts a conversation between the two. He wrote the book a year after the survivors were found, and interviewed many of them to get all the details of what happened over those ten weeks. It was this book, by the way, which served as the basis for the 1992 film of the same name.
As Nando was watching his sister weaken, he was growing in resolve to get out of the mountains alive. After confiding in Carlitos that he would get back to civilization to find help, Carlitos tells him that it’s impossible, he’ll freeze in the snow, and he doesn’t have any food anyway - one can’t climb mountains on a sip of wine and a square of chocolate. Nando’s response?
“Then I’ll cut meat from one of the pilots. After all, they got us into this mess.”
Carlitos didn’t take it seriously, as Nando was probably still loopy from his coma, from losing his mother in the crash, and for watching his sister slowly fade away. Carlitos told Fito Strauch what Nando had said about eating the pilot, and Fito quietly remarked that it might be the only way to survive.
It’s also more than likely that other boys felt the same - that to survive, at some point, they would have to cannibalize the dead. The snow and freezing conditions kept the bodies somewhat preserved, so it was possible.
But on the tenth day, it was Canessa, the doctor-in-training, who said it out loud to the whole group.
It was a medical necessity, really, if they were going to escape. That’s how he built his case. With every movement, the survivors were using up energy that they were not replenishing. At some point, they would be so weak that they would all die up there. And since the only food was human flesh, they would have to eat it to survive. I mean, he’s not wrong.
In a much later interview, when he became old and grey, Nando told a reporter that, quote, “I know 100 percent of the people who are watching this program they say oh, I wouldn’t have done it. If you were there, you would have done it.” End quote.
Luckily, most of us will never be in a situation where we need to weigh out these moral considerations. But in a case of extreme survival, when it’s eat or die, Nando believes we would all eat.
On top of his medical reasoning, Canessa also worked the religious angle. If you didn’t already know, the dominant religion in South America (and Latin America in general) is Roman Catholicism - a majority of the people are very devout Catholics. Many worried about the moral implications of what Canessa was suggesting, so he told them, quote,
“It is meat. That’s all it is. The souls have left the bodies and are in heaven with God. All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.”
The 27 survivors got together inside the plane and discussed it - Canessa, Fito and others argued that it was their moral duty to live - that God wanted them to live, which is why they were still here. And beyond that, they had families at home, friends, girlfriends… they had to get back - not only for themselves, but for their loved ones, and on behalf of the ones who died on top of the mountain.
Zerbino the medical student went on to say that if he died, he’d want his body to feed the survivors. Encouraged by this, others agreed, and they all eventually made the pact that if they died, their body should be consumed to keep the rest alive.
Though in the end everyone agreed that they needed to cut up the others to survive, and that it was acceptable given the situation, it was hard for some. A few refused to partake - at first - although they all eventually did.
By the end of the tenth day, it was decided. Four took ownership to go outside and get some meat from their fallen friends - Canessa, his best friend Daniel Maspons, Zerbino, and Fito Strauch. Most of the bodies were covered in a light layer of snow, but the first body part they saw was someone’s buttocks sticking out. Canessa made the first cut using a piece of broken glass. Though it was frozen, he worked at it, cutting away 20 slivers about the size of a match. He brought the meat back to the roof of the plane and left it there to dehydrate a bit in the sun.
He went inside to tell the rest that there was meat available, though everyone was reluctant to be the first to go. Or perhaps they weren’t ready to face up to it. Canessa made the first move - he took a sliver of the meat, overcame the revulsion of the act, put the meat into his mouth, and swallowed. Others followed.
There were some that just really couldn’t get over the taste and texture of raw human flesh, but in order to survive, they had to anyway. When it was possible, they lit a small fire to cook some of the pieces, making them more palatable. But a lack of fuel and kindling, and with strong winds meant that fires were an infrequent luxury. Other times they combined a bunch of pieces, including offal meat (you know, the organs) into a stew. But Canessa insisted that cooking them also wasted some of the vitamins and minerals needed, destroyed some of the proteins, and made the meat smaller. Raw, he thought, was best.
In a letter to his girlfriend, one of the 27 survivors, Gustavo Nicolich, wrote, quote,
“One thing that will seem incredible to you - it seems unbelievable to me - is that today we started to cut up the dead in order to eat them. There is nothing else to do. I prayed to God from the bottom of my heart that this day would never come, but it has and we have to face it with courage and faith. Faith, because I came to the conclusion that the bodies are there because God put them there and, since the only thing that matters is the soul, I don’t have to feel great remorse; and if the day came and I could save someone with my body, I would gladly do it.” End quote.
Unfortunately, Gustavo Nicolich ends up dying, but the letter was delivered to his novia.
It was only after another radio broadcast that confirmed there would be no more search and rescue operations that the holdouts ate the meat.
To help further justify it, one of the survivors, Pedro Algorta, said the following. Quote:
“It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.” Endquote.
Daily routines now expanded to include cutting and preparing meat for consumption, along with collecting water, tending to the sick and injured, cleaning out the living area, and preparing for a way out. Oh, and because I know some of you are wondering, they had designated places for having to use the bathroom, too. They didn’t want to do it too close to the entrance of the plane, but they also had to be careful not to, um, pollute their snow and water supply. They tended to go in front of the nose of the plane. Oftentimes at night they couldn’t hold their pee, so they would go near the entrance to the plane. But they attempted to create some kind of order so as not to spread diseases and maintain a modicum of decency despite the circumstances of… you know. Cannibalism.
Three of the boys, medical student Zerbino, Daniel Maspons, and the overall well-liked Numa Turcatti, went out in search of the tail of the plane. The primary mission was to find the battery, which was stored in the tail, so they could power a radio and hopefully contact the outside world. They were also hoping to find some of the luggage which got sucked out of the plane in the crash, which would maybe have food or warm clothes. Anything, really. This mini-expedition ended up discovering some of the other bodies, those who fell out of the plane when the fuselage was split in half. They didn’t find a radio or the battery, and overall the mission was unsuccessful - Zerbino even temporarily got snow blindness, which contributed to a serious drop in his morale.
The 27 survivors were settling into this horrendous new normal - cannibal survival in the Andes - when disaster struck yet again.
The Avalanche
On the night of the seventeenth day, as the survivors were all holed up in the fuselage of the Fairchild, an avalanche washed over them. And as the open part of the plane was facing uphill, the whole thing was filled with snow.
Now luckily for most, a handful of them were awake when this happened. Roy Harley, another of the rugby team boys, couldn’t sleep. He had just changed places with another boy who was having trouble sleeping because of a sore on his back. As Roy was laying on the floor, a shirt over his face, he felt a vibration and heard the unnatural sound of crunching metal. But there was no time to react because the next second they were all buried in snow. The makeshift wall they rebuilt every night to keep out the cold had collapsed, the freezing temperatures penetrating the interior of their only shelter. Roy was able to free himself, then dug for Carlitos who was laying next to him. Carlitos, now freed from his snowy prison, began helping others, reaching for the hands that were sticking out of the snow. In a chain, the freed were helping the trapped, until ice started to form on the top layer after a few minutes, further imprisoning those stuck deep underneath it. A few were crushed to death when the wall collapsed. And in all, 8 people died in the avalanche, leaving 19 survivors.
The 19 survivors knew they would soon run out of air, so they had to find a way of burrowing out. They used a pole to poke a hole through the snow-roof to see how much snow was covering them - luckily, it wasn’t so much that they weren’t able to tunnel out. They managed to get through to the pilot’s cabin, which by then they had cleared of debris, and pushed the glass out to escape. It took them about 8 days to clear all the snow out, retrieve the bodies of the dead, and make the place somewhat habitable again.
It was this incident that helped solidify the idea that they would need to send a group of the strongest out to find help. Nando, who by this point had become one of the fittest and most determined of the lot, wanted to leave immediately, but the others convinced him to wait until the snows started to melt, which they believed would happen after November 15th, when summer was in full swing. Most of you are in the northern hemisphere, so remember, our seasons are switched - November 15th in the southern hemisphere is the beginning of summer, not winter. It’s easy to think that its winter because they’re stuck in the snow, but it was in fact almost summer.
So in the meantime, the boys (and I can say that now, because the last surviving female, Liliana, died in the avalanche) tried to figure out who would be part of this expeditionary party that was going to hike to safety and get help. Several boys felt like they were strong enough to be considered - basically the only condition was physical fitness. Nando, for example, was the fittest of them all. Canessa was also very fit. But for the other members of what they decided would be a four-person party, they needed a test to see who could handle the snow.
A mini-hike was organized for three of them - Antonio Vizintin, who had emerged as one of the leaders of the group, Carlitos Paez, and Roy Harley, who had been the one who helped rescue the first of the survivors stuck in the avalanche. The test didn’t go well. Carlitos struggled with the conditions and repeatedly asked to be left behind, Roy’s spirit broke and he fell into fits of crying, and Vizintin grew resentful of having to keep them going. They did find some food and other resources, like some aluminum containers, a little bit of instant coffee inside a jar, and a garbage bin with a bit of broken candy stuck to the bottom. They ate the candy and brought the bin back to camp. It was decided that Carlitos and Roy Harley would not be in the real expeditionary group, but Vizintin could hack it.
The Expeditionaries
The four that were chosen to lead the expedition out were Nando, Canessa, Vizintin, and Numa Turcatti, who had previously gone out to look for the tail. And as soon as they were chosen, they were treated like royalty.
So I won’t get too into the intricacies of what happened to their social system, but if you’re interested, read the book I mentioned - Alive by Piers Paul Read. It is fascinating. I’ll link to the book in the podcast description.
There was so much politics happening. Canessa fancied himself the leader, but his power was kept in check by the Strauch cousins, who held the respect of most of the footballers. Nando was a powerful figure in the group, but it never prevented him from doing any dirty work. Reading it at times felt like I was reading the Lord of the Flies again - absolute chaos in the face of uncertainty and survival. And it wasn’t like the survivors were all grown men - they were adults, sure, but most of them were between 19 and 25. Still so young!
But when the four expeditionaries were chosen, they were given more shares of meat, fewer chores, the whole thing. There was a clear social hierarchy, and these four were on top.
Read, in his book, writes, quote:
“The expeditionaries were not the leaders of the group but a caste apart, separated from the others by their privileges and preoccupations. They might have evolved into an oligarchy had not their powers been checked by the… Strauch cousins.” End quote.
So, reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the Inca Empire's sacrificial maidens, perhaps because that too happened in the Andes. Okay, some historical context is needed. Finally! There hasn’t been any of that yet!
The Inca Empire was officially founded in 1438 when its leader, Pachacuti defeated its rivals the Chancas (not Chancla for any Latinos flinching out there) and he took control of what would later become their capital city - Cusco. The same city in today’s Peru. From there, the Inca expanded its territories rapidly, using military expansion to grow their civilization, but incorporating the conquered into their patchwork empire. They made this work in part due to their extensive road system, connecting the disparate communities of the Andes.
The Inca were polythetistic, as were many early civilizations, and would make yearly sacrifices to their gods. The one that stands out the most, that most people think of, is the Llullaillaco Maiden - a mummified teenage girl who is so remarkably well-preserved that she looks like she could have died last week, not hundreds of years ago.
I mention all this because when the girls were chosen for sacrifice, they were treated like royalty for a year - they were given the best foods, clothing, trinkets, you name it. They were given all of life’s luxuries. And when the year was up, and it was time for the sacrifice, the maiden would march to the peaks of the Andes to be closer to the gods, and sacrificed. It wasn’t a bloody spectacle, like the Aztec or Mayan sacrifices. In most cases, they would just die of exposure to the elements and hypothermia. But it was a sacrifice nonetheless.
So when I read about how these four expeditionaries - Nando, Canessa, Vizintin, and Turcatti - were treated like royalty before they embarked through the Andes on their sacred quest… I can’t help but make the connection.
So there was definitely a split in the group - those that contributed to the group’s survival, and those that did not. And those that did contribute were having a hard time being compassionate for those that could not or would not. Some had legitimate reasons - Echavarren, whose calf muscle had ripped around to the front of his leg, really couldn’t do much. Worse still, without proper medical care and poor nutrition, it was gangrenous. Others had similar health issues. But some suffered mental breaks and sat in the sun all day, listless, unable or unwilling to contribute to their own survival.
Some of the willing were reticent to continue supporting those that wouldn’t help, even going so far as to tell them that if they don’t help, they don’t get food… but in the end, they didn’t have it in them to let these men starve to death.
Unlike the Donner Party stuck in the Sierra Nevada’s in 1846, the Uruguayans did not consider murder, or put one another in harm's way. With the exceptions of some flared tempers and occasional scowls of contempt, they all banded together to support one another - the strong, both physically and mentally, supported the weak.
Despite being one of the four expeditionaries, Nando continued to do his part. He cut and dried meat, collected water, and cleaned the plane… if it needed doing, he’d do it. His only character flaw was that he was impatient and wanted to leave immediately instead of waiting until November 15th. But he did wait.
After weeks on the raw-human-meat diet, the boys were suffering from some pretty severe constipation. And for anyone who’s ever been constipated, so all of you, diarrhea soon followed. They ate more fat from the meat to help with the constipation, which of course triggered diarrhea. It was pretty brutal. They used to cheer each other on when trying to defecate, celebrating when they passed.
As the November 15th date was coming closer, they started to prepare… let’s call them socks. They didn’t have extra wool socks to help insulate their feet, so they used an old South American gaucho cowboy trick. The gauchos were cowboys, most commonly from Uruguay and Argentina - skilled horsemen and symbols of strength and bravery. They would sometimes use the hind leg skin of their dead horses - the hide would make good protection for their feet, the knee joint fitting snugly over their heel. I bet you can see where I’m going with this.
A hide, by the way, is the skin of an animal that has been tanned or dressed. Tanning is converting the skin to leather. So a tanned hide is essentially just leather - most leathers are made with cowhide, but they can be of any animal, really.
Well, using this ancient gaucho knowledge, the boys crafted their own… uh, socks… using the skin and fat from their dead friends. The elbow and forearm worked really well - the elbow skin and that natural bend would go over the heel, and the rest of the skin would be sewn together to form a covering.
It’s quite ingenious, really. Grotesque, sure, but hey. It’s survival.
Now before you start thinking back and saying “hey Kelli, didn’t you say they ate the flesh of their friends?” I will refer you to my previous episode on the Lost Franklin Expedition, where I lectured you on the stages of cannibalism.
At this point, the 19 survivors had, well, significant choice in meat. After the avalanche, they had to focus on the eight that died as a result, as the bodies from the early days were now buried under a lot of snow. They’d have to eventually dig and find them, but for now, they weren’t deprived of choice when rationed properly.
So, because it wasn’t yet a necessity, they were still in the early stages of cannibalism.
For those of you who haven’t listened to episode 10 - the Lost Franklin Expedition - boooooo. Go do that! But I’ll recap the stages of cannibalism real quick for ya.
The early stages of cannibalism is eating meat that can be mistaken for any kind of meat - thighs, arms, calves, the butt… things that, when butchered, don’t necessarily look any different. No hands, no feet, not the face… things that are obviously human. It’s psychologically easier to eat meat that doesn’t look like your dead friend.
But if things progress, and the situation worsens, or if the food supply dwindles even more, cannibalism progresses to end-stage cannibalism. This is when things like the skin, organs, and brains - things that are clearly more human looking - are eaten. For the Lost Franklin Expedition, there was even evidence that they were cracking open the bones to get the marrow. This will later happen to our Andean survivors.
But at this point, the survivors are not at end-stage cannibalism yet, so there is plenty of elbow skin to craft makeshift socks.
God that’s hard to say without cringing.
Who am I kidding - this stuff is fascinating! The lengths these men went to to survive are beyond incredible.
While still stuck in the Fairchild, one of the 19 survivors - Arturo Nogueira - dies of infection. He had broken both of his legs in the initial crash and never properly recovered. The gangrene eventually took him. It broke their spirits; they had initially felt that if they survived the avalanche, they would survive the whole ordeal. But Nogueira’s death reminded them that it wasn’t that simple. Hubris would not keep them alive.
November 15th rolls around, and our quad readies to leave. They only make it 3 hours out away from the Fairchild before needing to turn back because of snow, something they assumed wouldn’t happen this late in the year. But they were also Montevideo coastal boys, so they didn’t have much experience in 11,000 feet of Andean mountains.
The plan was to wait it out, then try again. But sometime between the 15th and when they set off two days later, someone stepped on Numa Turcatti’s leg - this happened in the night, since all the boys were crammed into the tiny fuselage of the Fairchild. Remember, it’s the size of a tiny bedroom with a really low roof, probably smaller than what you’re imagining. Like an apartment in NYC or LA or San Fran. Tiiiiiny.
Turcatti got a terrible bruise, which ended up becoming septic. Injuries were more serious for these boys, who by now had survived more than a month on nothing but raw human meat. At first, Turcatti dismissed the injury, but by the time the expeditionaries left on November 17th, it was clear he could not join them.
The Tail - Found!
So three set off - Nando, Canessa, and Vizintin.
They walked down the valley, and the plan was to eventually turn West when they could. Remember, they all thought they were in Chile. They believed they flew through the Planchon, past Curico, and were somewhere on the edge of the mountains, hopefully not far from Santiago. In reality, they were in the middle of the range, but they had no way of knowing that. It’s 1972. There’s no GPS or mobile phones yet. They trusted their pilot that they passed Curico, so that was their only intel. By looking at maps, they made a best guess where they must be, and figured they could go down the valley, swing West, and walk into the beautiful green valleys of Chile.
You already knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.
However, after walking down the valley, they did find the tail! Success! Inside were suitcases, clothes, food, and wool socks! The expeditionaries quickly remove their human-skin socks and replaced them with several pairs each of woolen socks. They also found those batteries for the radio, hoping they could hook it up and make contact with the outside world.
Night descended quickly, so they stayed in the tail. It was much more spacious and comfortable than the Fairchild’s fuselage, so it was a relatively decent night for them.
They progressed further down the valley the next day, but had to sleep in a culvert they dug in the snow - they barely survived the night because of the cold, so they decided to turn back and stay at the tail while they figured out what to do. From what they saw, there was no path West, and they had to go West, because Chile was right there!
The cruel tragedy here is that had they progressed further down the valley, they would have come across an old mountain hotel stocked with tons of canned food. A much better accommodation. And from there, a road leading down the valley into Argentina, where civilization awaited. They weren’t too far - 10, 15 miles maybe. They just had no idea where they were, and no idea how to get out.
The three worried they would get further lost in the Andes if they went any further East - again, they thought they were on the Western edge of the Cordilleras, so going East meant going further into the mountains.
They decided to put their hope in making the radio work, so they made plans to go back to the Fairchild. The battery was way too heavy, though, so they brought back all the supplies and clothes and whatever else they could find in the tail. It was then decided that they’d bring the radio to where the batteries were.
When the trio got back to the Fairchild, they were saddened to discover that Echavarren had died while they were gone - the gangrene eating away at his leg had killed him. Bacterial infections can be nasty pieces of work.
The only one of them who even had basic knowledge of radios was Roy Harley, the one who kickstarted the avalanche rescue. Roy Harley joined the other three and went back to the tail, where he worked on the radio.
End-Stage Cannibalism
Meanwhile, back at the Fairchild, end-stage cannibalism had begun. The group was running low on food “supplies” because the avalanche covered up those that died earlier in their ordeal. They reckoned that those who died before the avalanche would be, uh, “fatter” because they hadn’t suffered for as long. They would need to start digging, but that used up a lot of energy. So, they had to resort to eating the bits that were very human looking. One of the boys even ate a testicle. They all cracked bones to get at the marrow. They even had to resort to eating rotting flesh. Brains. They used skulls as bowls, carved utensils out of bones.
Survival can be brutal.
Many started to get sick, of course, from eating rotten flesh, but they’d already been suffering from constipation and diarrhea up to this point, so they knew well that pained feeling that one feels in the guts before a flare-up.
In happier news, they heard on the radio, after eight weeks, that the Uruguayan and Chilean governments were looking again. Some of the parents and loved ones back home hadn’t given up on finding them, even if some were resigned to the fact that they’d be looking for bodies, not survivors. This helped lift the boys’ spirits.
The radio situation at the tail wasn’t looking too good, though. Roy Harley had successfully dismantled and reassembled the radio, connecting all the unlabeled wires and hooking the whole thing up to the battery, but it just wasn’t working. They gave up. Since none of them were proper electrical engineers, or more experienced with radios, they had no way of knowing that the battery would never have worked with the radio - the transmitter they were trying to hook up required 115 volts, and the batteries could only give off 24 volts.
Though they were initially happy to hear that rescue flights would resume, Nando pointed out that they were likely looking for dead bodies, as it had been 8 weeks by then. It probably seemed impossible that anyone could survive in the snow for that long. So Nando again suggested they do another expedition, but this time head West over the mountains.
More tragedy struck the group - on December 11, Numa Turcatti died. As a result of the sepsis in his leg, he had been declining rapidly. He fell into a coma and died soon after. This shocked the boys - now the remaining 16 - and persuaded Canessa that they could no longer wait. The radio transmitter didn’t work, they hadn’t heard any rescue planes overhead, and they were all rapidly losing weight and getting sicker - they couldn’t survive here forever.
The Final Trek
Nando, Canessa, and Vizintin left the next day - December 12th. They packed enough food for 10 days and brought all the warm gear they needed, as well as pieces of meat wrapped up in socks, a hammer, a sleeping bag they had fashioned out of plane debris, and more.
The plan was to go West over the mountain into Chile, because again, they still don’t really know where they are and assume that going west over the mountain blocking them in would bring them into civilization.
It took three days, but they got to the top. The plateau gave them a beautiful view of the stark landscape of the Cordilleras… but it also caused them great anguish, because when they looked West from the peak, they saw more mountains. Not the lush, green valleys they were so sure were there.
We know now that they were close to the Tinguiririca [TIN-GWE-REAR-RICA] Volcano on the Argentinian side of the Andes, but they were close to Chile. After debating what to do, they decided to continue West - they would head down into a valley that they saw, following the landscape down until they found a town, or a river, or anything that would bring them to civilization.
Nando and Canessa also made the decision to send Vizintin back - they needed his food rations in case they couldn’t get out quickly, and Vizintin was starting to lag behind. They didn’t ask him, they just told him what the plan was. And he was fine with it and happily went back. He made it back to the Fairchild safely and told the other 13 boys about that plan, and then they all sat and waited.
Nando and Canessa methodically worked their way down the mountainside, sometimes sliding, other times carefully descending. By the sixth day they were at the valley they saw and followed it down. And eventually, they found a stream! And vegetation! For the first time in 65 days, they saw something other than rocks and snow. They happily ate the grass they saw and packed a bunch in their pockets.
As they continued down what they later learned was the Rio San José, they found a lush valley filled with birds and lizards, more grasses, flowers, all sorts. Canessa even thought he saw cows grazing on the mountainside, though he couldn’t be sure. He was starting to get sick - the diarrhea was bad, and he later found out he contracted dysentery. But as they continued, getting sicker by the day, they saw more evidence of human civilization - rusted old cans, a horseshoe, cow dung, and stumps clearly cut by axes… they were getting closer.
Assuming they were on the verge of civilization, they ate most of their remainig meat, which was now rotten. They had left the cold preservation of the mountain days ago, and their old human meat was going bad in the warmer environment. They ate what they could stomach and discarded other things they didn’t think they needed anymore, like the hammer and sleeping bag, to make their packs lighter. Luckily for them, they were on the verge of finding help.
They continued on until they saw a horse corral and cows. They spent some time thinking of ways to kill the cows for their meat, before accepting that they were too weak and had no suitable weapons. Then instead they planned on milking them, but had no vessel to collect it.
Luckily for the cows, Nando and Canessa didn’t need to do either, for three horsemen saw them from across the Rio Azufre - and one of the horsemen was their savior, Sergio Catalán.
Saved!
In the following days, Nando and Canessa got help, and more importantly food. All fourteen of their friends back at the crash site were rescued, alive. They were all brought to Santiago to be checked out, and they all ended up surviving the ordeal. Their families were overjoyed to see them - many never gave up hope they would be found alive. But with this joy also came pain, for the other 29 who didn’t survive and their distraught family members.
Eventually, the full story came out. At first, the public was uneasy about the cannibalism, and you know how the media can get. But when the boys first spoke to priests who visited them in hospital, they were reassured that the church agreed it was a necessary act. Survival cannibalism. They had not sinned, and their mortal souls were not damned.
Of course, everyone was asking questions, so once they were all well enough, the 16 survivors held a press conference at their old school - the Christian Brothers Academy in Montevideo. The most eloquent of the survivors, Pancho Delgado, was the one to tell the world about their inevitable choice to engage in cannibalism. Here’s what he told the press (and keep in mind this is an English translation of the original Spanish), quote:
“When one awakes in the morning amid the silence of the mountains, and sees all around the snow-capped peaks - it is majestic, sensational, something frightening - and one feels alone, alone, alone in the world but for the presence of God. For I can assure you that God is there. We all felt it, inside ourselves, and not because we were the kind of pious youths who are always praying all day long, even though we had a religious education. Not at all. But there one feels the presence of God. One feels, above all, what is called the hand of God, and allows oneself to be guided by it… And when the moment came when we did not have any more food, or anything of that kind, we thought to ourselves that if Jesus at His last supper had shared His flesh and blood with His apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same - take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all. It was this that helped us to survive, and now we do not want this - which for us was something intimate, intimate - to be hackneyed or touched or anything like that. In a foreign country we tried to approach the subject in as elevated a spirit as possible, and now we tell it to you, our fellow countrymen, exactly as it was…” End quote.
It did the trick - nobody was vilifying the boys anymore. The Catholic Church did have to clarify that their cannibalism was not a holy communion, but did agree that these boys were not villains, but heroes. Everyone understood that it was what had to be done to survive.
As the snow melted, crews went up to the crash site to recover the bodies of the 29 who died, burying them on top of the mountain.
The 16 went on to live their lives, with some serious trauma as you can imagine. Some, like Carlitos Paez, spends him time traveling and speaking about what he went through, trying to help other survivors of traumatic experiences. Others, like Canessa, dedicated their lives to helping others - he is now a pediatric doctor. Nando drifted for a while, but found purpose in racing, and was a professional racecar driver for a while. Most married and had children.
To this day, 15 of the survivors are still alive. One, Javier Methol, was older than the rest but lived to be 80. He died in June of 2015. Every year on October 13th, the surviving members of Uruguayan Flight 571 get together to honor those who died, and this past October marked fifty years since the harrowing experience. And to many in Uruguay, they will live on forever as heroes - both the living and the dead.
A Podcast Recommendation
Before I sign off, I'd like to recommend a podcast to you guys - it's called Obscure Appalachia and I'm obsessed. Candis, the host, has a really soothing and lovely voice, which is fun considering she talks about all kinds of occult stories! She's got, like, the perfect voice to do both true crime and occult legends - I just listened to her really well-researched episode on Zachary Davis, the Sledgehammer Killer. She's got a knack for narrative storytelling, and she brings all kinds of legends and stories to life. Like her episode on the cryptid known as the Appalachian Not Deer, where she gives a series of stories and accounts about people's run-ins with it! Brilliant stuff. At the end of each episode, she gives her analysis on whether or not the story falls in the realm of the paranormal - she's a skeptical believer. For someone like me who loves unpopular history, Obscure Appalachia is the perfect thing to binge. Go check it out!
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Andes Flight Disaster. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen! For more cannibalism, go listen to episode 1 on the Donner Party. If you like snowy winter survival stories, but want to hear about one that ends badly for everyone involved, check out episode 10 on the Lost Franklin Expedition. Follow my podcast, wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned for my next episode to get a popular history of unpopular things.
