Saved! But with a dark secret that would shock the world
First came a terrifying plane crash. Now, a death-defying trek to find help — and to face the families whose loved ones they’d eaten to survive
Goodness knows what we looked like — dangerous wild men, probably, rather than the survivors of a plane crash.
Night-time was once again threatening. The man was weighing us, measuring us. Then he signalled to us with his hands and shouted a word we heard clearly over the roar of the water: ‘Tomorrow!’
Just before sunrise the next day, we saw the flicker of flames from the other side of the river. There was the man who’d first seen us.
The man took paper and a pencil out of his pocket, tied them to a rock and threw it across the river. ‘I’ve sent a man on his way over to you,’ it read. ‘Tell me what you want.’
Nando scratched out a reply on the other side of the paper. ‘We were in a plane crash on the mountains,’ he wrote. ‘We’ve been walking for ten days. There are 14 other survivors on the plane. We have no food. We’re weak.’
Then he threw the stone back to the other shore.
The man read the note carefully, then gestured with his hands as if to say: ‘I understand.’
Two hours later, a man rode up to us with two spare horses. He told us his name was Armando and that he’d been sent by Sergio Catalan, the man we’d first seen, who had set off straight away for the nearest police post — an eight- hour ride away.
Following Armando on horseback, we watched the scenery change. We came upon a bright green meadow irrigated by ditches. Was this Heaven on Earth, I wondered? Could we be sure that we didn’t die on one of those icy nights in the mountains?
Two small cabins poked up from the prairie. They were simple and beautiful, with thatched roofs surrounded by roses in full bloom.
The horse stopped by a table upon which was placed a fresh farm cheese. ‘May I have a piece?’ I asked.
I got down from the horse and brought the cheese to my mouth. I took one bite, then another and another, without swallowing the first. Nando did the same as the farmer watched in disbelief. Around six in the evening, Sergio Catalan and around a dozen police officers arrived. I looked into his eyes and thought: ‘ This is the man who saved us.’ It was the start of a lifelong bond.
‘Impossible!’ the sergeant said when we told him our story.
But we were emphatic. There was no time to lose: our friends were dying.
The helicopter commanders looked at each other, then said if they were going to try it — and it was a dangerous mission — one of us would have to go with them to point the way.
In the end, Nando went. I was exhausted, and he wanted to go.
That day, because of bad weather, only six of our friends returned to the land of the living. The other eight would be rescued the following day. All of them had survived in our absence.
No wonder our story came to be known in our homeland of Uruguay as El Milagro. The miracle.
Before I got on the helicopter to hospital and my old life, I shook hands with Armando and Sergio Catalan. When I thanked them, they looked at me with utter surprise, as if there was nothing to thank them for. These men, the guardians of paradise: Blessed are the humble, for they shall inherit the earth.
One of the hardest things about
returning to civilisation was facing the reality of what we’d done to survive: eating the bodies of our closest friends and team mates. When I finally got home to Uruguay, I went door-to-door to the homes of my friends who didn’t make it to tell their families what we had lived through, and why we’d had to do what we did to survive.
I didn’t fool myself into thinking they might understand, because they hadn’t lived through what we had. But I wanted them to hear from someone who’d actually been there how it had been, and to give each family keepsakes from their loved one that we’d carefully collected: watches, passports, valuables.
When I visited Gustavo and Raquel Nicolich, whose son had been badly injured and had died in the avalanche that struck the plane wreckage weeks after the crash, I saw how they reached up from the depths of their despair to help us, the survivors, try to heal our emotional and psychological wounds.
How could we ever forget their dying son’s letter to his girlfriend back home, explaining the sacri fices that had been made on the mountain and how he was happy to offer up his body if he didn’t survive?
‘I concluded that the bodies were there because God willed it that way,’ he’d written, of those who had died before him. ‘And since the soul is the only thing that matters, after all, I have no reservations about offering up my body, should that day arrive, so that I might help someone else live.’
We had huge support from the families of our friends.
Two months after the disaster, I returned to medical school. In my anatomy class, I had to dissect a human cadaver like the ones I’d lived with on the mountain, and I could feel everyone in the room looking at me out of the corner of their eye, wondering what was going through my mind. I don’t know how I managed to keep it together that day.
The following month, when I felt stronger, I started playing rugby again. It was a crucible of emotions playing alongside not only the other survivors but also with the ghosts of the team mates who remained in the mountains.
Several of us, including Antonio ‘Tintin’ Vizintin and me, went on to play rugby for the Uruguayan national side. All of us still meet every year, on the anniversary of our rescue, bound by ties as deep as human beings can know.
Our hero is Sergio Catalan, who has many times joined our gatherings. I make regular trips to visit him in Chile. Seeing him always renews my commitment to life.
I have tried to live in a way that would the make sacrifice of those who died count; in a way worthy of the price they had to pay.
Those who lost their lives had transferred their legacy, their progeny, on to us.
That’s why, when I returned to the mountain with my daughter, Lala, I said these words to my friends at the memorial site: ‘Just as I promised you, I made the most I possibly could out of my life. And I wanted you to meet the fruits of your sacrifice.’
ADAPTED from I Had To Survive: How A Plane Crash In The Andes Inspired My Calling To Save Lives by Dr Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci, to be published by Constable on March 3, £18.99. © Dr Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci 2016. To pre-order a copy for £15.19, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until February 27, p&p free on orders over £12.