Their story became the basis of a best-selling book and Hollywood film. Today, we're here to win a game," crash survivor Pedro Algorta, 61, said as he prepared to walk on to the playing field surrounded by the cordillera — the jagged mountains that trapped the group.
During the anniversary ceremony military jets flew over the field, dropping parachutists draped in Chilean and Uruguayan flags. In a corner, survivors wept when officials unveiled a commemorative frame with pictures of those who died.
To live at 4,m without any food," said another survivor, Eduardo Strauch, They made the sacrifice for others. The Uruguayan air force plane that carried the team crashed in a mountain pass in October en route from Montevideo to Santiago. Of the 45 passengers aboard, 16 survived by feeding on dead family members and friends preserved in the snow.
A disbelieving world looked on as the boys led rescuers to discover 14 other survivors from the plane who had lived for over two months on the mountain.
Their rescue became an instant media sensation and people from all over the world were aflame to know how they had survived for so long in such a hostile environment. How could such a thing happen? There were 27 survivors in the initial crash; most were members or supporters of the rugby team which had chartered the plane to fly to Chile for a match.
They had a small amount of food and wine, and these they rationed severely until rescue would arrive. But no rescue came, and after ten days they heard the news on the small transistor radio they had found in the plane that the search had been called off.
He began to climb, until the plane was nearly vertical and it began to stall and shake. Then we smashed into the side of the mountain.
I was thrown forward with tremendous force and received a powerful blow to my head. I encouraged everyone to write his own book because they are 16 different stories of survival. Personally, I believe this was a kind of experiment by a malicious hand that decided to throw onto the mountain a group of young rugby players. University students with education and a belief in God—ideal guinea pigs for an experiment in human behavior.
Who survived? The ones who survived were those who most felt the joy of living. That gave them a reason to survive. Because I was lucky. And because I always go step by step. There was always something to do, and I am very active. I nearly gave up when the avalanche struck us. He had broken legs—but I could walk. My mission was not to just think what was better for me, but what was better for the group. We needed blankets, so we skinned the seats of the plane, which contained a wool fabric.
We put all the suitcases at the back of the fuselage to keep out the weather. We used the bottom of the seats for snowshoes and built hammocks for the people with broken legs. Everyone had a role, and because I was a medical student, I was in charge of the injured persons. We melted snow to get water. We filled our rugby socks with meat for the trek out and used the insulation from the kitchen to make sleeping bags. At night, we used rugby balls to pee in because if you went outside your pee would freeze.
Cannibalism is when you kill someone, so technically this is what is known as anthropophagy. We had to eat these dead bodies, and that was it. The flesh had protein and fat, which we needed, like cow meat. I was also used to medical procedures so it was easier for me to make the first cut. The decision to accept it intellectually is only one step, though.
The next step is to actually do it. And that was very tough. My main issue was that I was invading the privacy of my friends: raping their dignity by invading their bodies. But then I thought, if I were killed I would feel proud that my body could be used for others to survive. I feel that I shared a piece of my friends not only materially but spiritually because their will to live was transmitted to us through their flesh.
We made a pact that, if we died, we would be happy to put our bodies to the service of the rest of the team. I think we survived because we were a team and because we managed to walk out of the mountains.
The night after the avalanche—when we could hear the mountain moving and were terrified of being buried in the snow—was tougher than the torment of eating human flesh. When we got to the top, we realized we were much further from safety than we thought, so we decided to send Tintin back down to the plane to tell them we had headed south, and so our food supplies would last longer between the two of us.
We were at 15, feet, and the temperature was 10 below zero.
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