My plane crashed in the Andes. Only the unthinkable kept me and the other starving survivors alive
All Nando Parrado remembers is a deep black hole and one recurring thought: “I’m dead. I’m dead. This is death. It’s so black that this is death.” Hours passed, maybe days. Then, a new thought: “I’m thirsty. I’m craving water. If I’m dead, I cannot crave water.”
His awareness increased. Why was it cold? Why did his head throb? Then, voices. Parrado opened his eyes.
“I remember the clear, beautiful faces of my friends,” he recalls. “And they were saying: ‘Nando, are you OK? Nando, are you OK?’ I was not OK. ‘The plane crashed.’” He looked around. He was inside a mangled fuselage that had rolled on to its side. The damage was catastrophic: exposed pipes and cables, crumpled metal, shattered plastic, detritus everywhere.
He pressed the side of his head, his hair clumped with clotted blood, the edges of splintered bone. His friend Roberto Canessa explained the plane they were travelling on had hit a mountain three days before and Parrado had been unconscious since. Parrado’s thoughts turned to his mother, Eugenia, and sister Susy.
“They told me: ‘Nando, your mother is dead. Panchito is dead.’” Francisco “Panchito” Abal was his best friend.
He’d made Parrado give up the window seat for him during the flight. “Panchito was my brother. He lived two or three days a week in my home, he used my clothes.” Susy was gravely injured, lying on the floor by the cockpit.
“I crawled to where my sister was and I embraced her on the floor. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t talk. She could only move her eyes. She lost her shoes in the crash and her feet were purple. Those are the images that I have. I stayed with her. I melted snow with my mouth and gave her water because we didn’t have anything. We didn’t have cups.”
Parrado didn’t leave her side until the next morning, when he staggered outside. What was left of the plane had stopped on the slope of a glacier. The eastern horizon offered only snowcapped peaks and plunging valleys. In every other direction they were ensnared by mountains. “I saw the magnitude of the place we were in. It’s immense. It’s huge,” he says. “And I said: ‘Fuck. This is going to be horrible. How are we going to get out of here? They won’t find us here.’”
* * *
Parrado was right – no rescue team found them. But, in December 1972, 72 days after Uruguayan air force flight 571 struck a ridge and crashed deep in the Andes, he and 15 other passengers did make it off the mountain alive. It is an astonishing tale of survival. At the time, newspapers christened the story The
Miracle of the Andes. Parrado, now 73 and speaking over videocall from his home in Montevideo, Uruguay, didn’t see it that way. “I think it was the effort of a group of young people who trusted each other beyond anything that you can imagine. And the result is that we are alive.”
Parrado is a pragmatist. More than 50 years on, he recounts the events with a careful matter-of-factness. There was a 26-year period where he didn’t speak about his experiences at all, but he was eventually convinced to do so and has since flown all over the world telling his story. He insists he’s not a motivational speaker, but I’m not so sure. His immediate warmth, with his rousing, booming voice and lyrical intonation leaves you invigorated as he speaks about his time in the Andes, his love for his father, Seler, and his zest for life.
Parrado doesn’t often give interviews, but he wanted to speak in the run-up to the release of Netflix’s thriller Society of the Snow, the second major film to tell the survivors’ story, after 1993’s Alive. Parrado has seen the new film twice and hails it as a “magnificent piece of film-making”. (It’s a likely nominee for best international feature film at the Academy Awards.) “I told the director: ‘After people see this film, they will really understand what we went through,” he says. “He has captured the essence of what we went through very, very well. Even my wife, when the movie finished, she grabbed my arm, she said: ‘Fuck, man. I didn’t know it was so hard. Now I understand.’”
***
In October 1972, Parrado was 22, just a regular middle-class Uruguayan man waiting to start university. He helped in his father’s hardware shop, tore around on his motorcycle, chased girls and played for his school alumni rugby team, Old Christians. “It was an exciting time.” He’d known most of the team for more than a decade and had already travelled to Chile with them for a match. When a second trip was announced, he wasn’t going to miss it.
Their team captain, Marcelo Perez, had chartered a plane to take them to Santiago, Chile. Parrado’s father