Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  They piled into the plane each night and lay in the freezing darkness with their thoughts of home and family. Gradually they dropped off to sleep, the feet of one on the shoulders of another, Javier and Liliana together, Echavarren and Nogueira on the hammock, Nando and Susana Parrado lying in each other’s arms.

  On their eighth night on the mountain, Parrado awoke and felt that Susana had grown cold and still in his embrace. The warmth and the movement of breathing – both were gone. At once he pressed his mouth to hers and with – tears streaming down his cheeks blew air into her lungs. The other boys awoke and watched and prayed as Parrado tried to revive his sister. When exhaustion forced him to give up, Carlitos Páez took over the task, but it was all to no avail. Susana was dead.

  Two

  1

  When Air Traffic Control at the airport of Pudahuel in Santiago first lost contact with the Uruguayan Fairchild on the afternoon of Friday, October 13, they immediately telephoned the Servicio Aéreo de Rescate (the Aerial Rescue Service), with headquarters at Santiago’s other airport, Los Cerrillos. The commander of the SAR was away, so two former commanders were called in to direct the search-and-rescue operation – Carlos García and Jorge Massa. They were Chilean Air Force officers who were trained not just to command but to fly all the types of aircraft they had at their disposal: Douglas C-47S, DC-6s, Twin Otters and Cessna light aircraft, and the powerful Bell helicopters.

  That afternoon a DC-6 began to search on a path starting from the last reported position of the missing aircraft, the air corridor from Curicó to Angostura and Santiago. The populated areas in this zone were ignored because any crash would have been reported; the search was focused on the more mountainous areas. Finding nothing, they moved farther back along the supposed route of the Fairchild to the area between Curicó and Planchon. There was a snowstorm over Planchon itself, so nothing could be seen, and the DC-6 returned to Santiago.

  The next day García and Massa analysed more precisely the information they had at hand: the time the Fairchild left Mendoza, the time it flew over Malargüe, the speed of the plane, and the head wind it faced in flying over the Andes. They concluded that the plane could not possibly have been over Curicó when the pilot had reported this position, but over Planchon, so that instead of turning toward Angostura and Santiago and descending to the airport of Pudahuel, the Fairchild had turned into the middle of the Andes and flown down into the area of the Tinguiririca, Sosneado, and Palomo mountains. With great precision García and Massa plotted a twenty-inch square on their map, representing the area in which the crash must have occurred. They then sent planes out from Santiago to cover it.

  The difficulties presented were obvious. The mountains there rose to 15,000 feet. If the Fairchild had crashed anywhere among them, it would certainly have fallen into one of the valleys which lay around 12,000 feet and were covered with twenty to a hundred feet of white snow. Since the Fairchild had a white roof, it would be virtually invisible to an aeroplane flying above the level of the peaks. To fly in the turbulence between the peaks was a sure way to lose further planes and lives, but a methodical search of the whole area was a ritual they were obliged to perform.

  From the very start the professionals in the control room of the SAR at the airport of Los Cerrillos had little hope that anyone could have survived a crash in the middle of the cordillera. They knew that the temperature at that altitude at that time of year went down at night to 30 or 40 degrees below zero, so that if, by some quirk of fate, a few of the passengers had survived the crash, they would certainly have died of cold during their first night on the mountain.

  There is, however, an international convention that the country in which an accident occurs will search for the wreck for ten days, and in spite of the political and economic chaos that Chile faced at the time, it was a duty the SAR had to perform. Moreover, the relatives of the passengers had started to arrive in Santiago.

  For those at home, the hours immediately following the first reports of the plane’s disappearance had been filled with confusion as well as desperate anxiety. After the initial broadcasts which told that the Fairchild had stopped at Mendoza – which none of the parents had known – and taken off the next day and disappeared, official silence set in and a number of conflicting reports from unofficial sources rushed into the vacuum. Daniel Fernández’s father learned on Saturday the fourteenth that the plane had been ‘found’ even before he had known that it was missing, for he had not listened to the radio the night before. Others heard that the boys had arrived safely and were booked into their hotel in Santiago, and there was still another rumour that they had landed not in Santiago but somewhere in the south of Chile.

  The means through which some of the reports were first conveyed and subsequently corrected was a radio in a Carrasco home. Rafael Ponce de León was a radio ham, a hobby he had inherited from his father, who had installed a whole range of sophisticated equipment – including a powerful transmitter, a Collins KWM2 – in the basement of their house. Rafael was also an Old Christian and a friend of Marcelo Pérez. He himself had not joined the trip to Santiago only because he was reluctant to leave his wife, who was seven months’ pregnant. At Marcelo’s request, Rafael had used his radio to book rooms for the rugby team in Santiago, calling a fellow ham in Chile who had connected him to the Chilean telephone system. Quicker and cheaper than telephoning, the practice was not strictly legal but it was tolerated.

  When he heard late on the thirteenth that the Fairchild was lost in the Andes, he went at once to his radio. He contacted the Crillon Hotel in Santiago and was told that the Old Christians had checked in. When later reports cast this in doubt, Rafael called the hotel again and discovered that only two of the players were there – two who had flown to Santiago on scheduled flights: one, Gilberto Regules, because he had missed the Fairchild; the other, Bobby Jaugust, because his father represented KLM in Montevideo.

  No sooner had he scotched this rumour than the telephone rang with the news that the Chilean novia of one of the boys on the plane had spoken with her future parents-in-law, the Magris, to say that the plane had landed in a small town in southern Chile and that all on board were safe. Having raised false hopes with the rumour of the Hotel Crillon, Rafael was determined to check this one, and he got in touch with the Uruguayan chargé d’affaires in Santiago, César Charlone. Charlone told him that he thought it unlikely; the official news was still that the plane was lost.

  By now the story that the plane had been found had spread from the Magris to half the families involved. Fearing that their hopes might be false, Rafael decided to go to the source of the rumour, the novia of Guido Magri, María de los Angeles. He contacted her through his radio and asked her if it was true. María confessed that it was not. Señora Magri had sounded so depressed over the telephone that she had told her this white lie. ‘I was so sure it would be found,’ she said, ‘that I told her it had been found already.’

  Rafael recorded what she had said and later that night sent the tape to Radio Monte Carlo for use in their next news bulletin. It was well past midnight when he closed down his transmitter, but his work had not been in vain. By nine that morning the rumour was dead. The plane had not been found.

  Carlos Páez Vilaró, a well-known painter and the father of Carlitos, was the first to arrive at SAR headquarters at Los Cerrillos. He had heard the news of the plane’s disappearance at his former wife’s home in Carrasco – only by chance, as he left his daughter there on Friday afternoon, for since the divorce the children had lived with their mother, Madelon Rodríguez. He had made what inquiries he could in official circles, from the Uruguayan chargé d’affaires in Santiago and a Uruguayan Air Force officer whom he knew personally. Charlone, the chargé d’affaires, had not been reassuring, and although the Air Force office called Ferradas ‘the best and most experienced’ pilot in the force, Páez Vilaró knew that his friend and Ferradas were the only two surviving pilots of their generation; the rest had been killed in ac
cidents. Telling Madelon that he himself would find the boys, he set out for Santiago early on the Saturday morning.

  That afternoon he flew in an Air Force DC-6 along the likely route of the Fairchild. When he returned to the airport another of the boys’ relatives had arrived, and by the next day there were a total of twenty-two on the scene.

  Faced with this flood, Commander Massa announced that no more relatives would be permitted to fly on the planes taking part in the search, so they congregated instead in the office of César Charlone. There they heard the news that a miner named Camilo Figueroa had told the Chilean police that he had seen the Fairchild fall in flames about seventy miles northeast of Curicó in the zone of El Tiburcio.

  On Monday, October 16, García and Massa directed the search in that area. Nothing was seen in the morning, but in the afternoon a pilot reported from El Tiburcio that smoke could be seen rising from the mountains. Closer inspection revealed that the smoke came from the hut of a hill farmer.

  On the same day search parties set off overland made up of carabineros (Chilean Militarized Police) and members of the Cuerpo de Socorro Andino, a body of volunteers formed to rescue those who are lost in the Andes. They left from Rancagua and made for the area between Planchon and El Tiburcio but were stopped in the afternoon by heavy snow and strong wind.

  Those weather conditions also grounded the planes the next day and the day after that, October 17 and 18. Impenetrable clouds and snow covered the whole area of the search. Dispirited, some of the relatives returned to Montevideo. Others remained and began to think of mounting a search of their own. It was not that they felt that the Chileans were doing less than was possible – even the sister craft of the Fairchild which had been sent to assist the Chileans by the Uruguayan Air Force had been grounded by the weather – but they knew that time was running out and that the professionals had no real faith that their sons might be alive. ‘Impossible,’ Commander Massa had said to the press. ‘And if anyone were alive he would sink into the snow.’

  Páez Vilaró considered what he might do on his own. He found a book in a shop in Santiago entitled The Snows and Mountains of Chile which contained the information that the land covered by the Tinguiririca and Palomo mountains belonged to a certain Joaquín Gandarillas. Reasoning that the man who owned the land must know it best, Páez Vilaró went to see Gandarillas, who received him politely but explained that his huge estate had recently been confiscated under President Allende’s programme for agrarian reform. Nevertheless, Gandarillas knew the land like the back of his hand, and by the time their meeting was over, Páez Vilaró had persuaded him to leave with him the next day for the area of the Tinguiririca volcano.

  A two-day trip by car and on horseback brought them to the western slope of the mountain. The heavy snow had ceased but the freshness of the fall only emphasized the emptiness of the place. There was nothing to be seen – either living or dead – and yet Páez Vilaró stood staring at the immense mass of the mountain and whistled, thinking that by magic the sound might reach his son. The whistle echoed in the rock and was muffled by the snow. There was nothing to do but return.

  While Páez Vilaró was taking these steps to find his son, there were some at home who had recourse to less orthodox methods of search and rescue – among them the mother of his former wife, Madelon.

  Accompanied by Javier Methol’s brother, Juan José, on October 16 she went to see an old man in Montevideo, a professional water diviner who was said to have powers of clairvoyance that could seek out far more than hidden springs. With them they took a map of the Andes. When the old man held out his forked stick over the map, the stick quivered and then fell at a point on the map on the eastern slope of the Tinguiririca volcano nineteen miles from the spa of Termas del Flaco.

  Her daughter Madelon reported this position to Páez Vilaró in Chile, through Rafael Ponce de León’s radio, but Páez Vilaró told her that the SAR had already made a thorough search in that area and that, if they had crashed there, there would be no chance they had survived.

  This last was something that Madelon never wished to hear, so she put the water diviner out of her mind. Yet the idea of help from a clairvoyant stayed with her. She went to the Uruguayan astrologer Boris Cristoff and asked him for the name of the best clairvoyant in the world.

  ‘Croiset,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Gerard Croiset in Utrecht.’

  Rosina Strauch, Fito’s mother, hoped for help from another source. The Virgin of Garabandal, she had been told, had appeared to some children in Spain about ten years earlier, an apparition never accepted by the Vatican. To persuade the Pope of it, the Virgin must surely want to perform a miracle. If so, here was her chance, and in this belief Rosina and two other mothers began to pray to the Virgin of Garabandal.

  But others had already resigned themselves to their loss, and their prayers were for the strength to bear it and for their sons’ souls. For the mother of Carlos Valeta – the boy who had disappeared in the snow right after the crash – hope was impossible. On Friday afternoon she had had a vision, first of a falling plane, then of her son’s wounded face, then of him sleeping, and by five thirty she had known he was dead. Other parents’ reasons for resignation were based on the conclusion that they could not escape, that surviving a crash for several days in the cordillera was out of the question.

  Nevertheless, Rafael Ponce de León’s basement each evening was crowded with relatives, friends, and girl friends of the boys, desperate for news.

  The search by the SAR was resumed on October 19. It continued throughout that day and the next and into the morning of October 21. At the same time, sorties were flown by Argentinian planes from Mendoza. Páez Vilaró and others continued to search in a Cessna lent to them by the Aero Club of San Fernando. In spite of all this effort, there was no trace of the Fairchild.

  The search had been going on for eight days, two of which were lost because of the weather. The lives of SAR men were being risked, and expensive fuel was being burned up, in a search which all reasonable men must know was futile. Thus at midday on October 21, commanders García and Massa announced that ‘the search for the Uruguayan Aircraft 571 is cancelled because of negative results’.

  Three

  1

  On the morning of the ninth day, the body of Susana Parrado was dragged out onto the snow. No sound but the wind met the ears of the survivors as they stumbled from the cabin; nothing was to be seen but the same monotonous arena of rock and snow.

  As the light changed, the mountains took on different moods and appearances. Early in the morning, they seemed bright and distant. Then, as the day progressed, shadows lengthened and the grey, reddish, and green stone became the features of brooding beasts or disgruntled gods frowning down upon the intruders.

  The seats of the plane were laid out on the snow like deck chairs on the verandah of an estancia. Here, the first out would sit down to melt snow for drinking water while staring at the horizon. Each could see in the face of his companions the rapid progress of their physical deterioration. The movements of those who busied themselves in the cabin or around the fuselage had grown heavy and slow. They were all exhausted by the slightest exertion. Many remained sitting where they had slept, too listless and depressed even to go out into the fresh air. Irritability was an increasing problem.

  Marcelo Pérez, Daniel Fernández, and the older members of the group feared that some of the boys were on the verge of hysteria. The waiting was wearing them down. They had started to squabble among themselves.

  Marcelo did what he could to set an example. He was optimistic and he was fair. He talked confidently of rescue and tried to get his team to sing songs. There was one desultory rendering of ‘Clementine’, but no one had the spirit to sing. It was also becoming evident to them all that their captain was not as confident as he seemed. At night he was overtaken by melancholy: his mind turned to his mother and how much she must be suffering, to his brother on a honeymoon in Brazil, and to the rest of his fa
mily. He tried to hide his sobs from the others, but if he slept he would dream and wake screaming. His friend Eduardo Strauch did his best to comfort him, but Marcelo felt that as captain of the team – and chief advocate of the trip to Chile – he had been responsible for what had happened.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Eduardo. ‘You can’t look at things like that. I persuaded Gaston and Daniel Shaw to come, and they’re both dead. I even rang Daniel to remind him, but I don’t feel responsible for his death.’

  ‘If anyone’s responsible,’ said his cousin Fito, ‘it’s God. Why did He let Gaston die?’ Fito was referring to the fact that Gaston Costemalle, who had fallen out of the back of the plane, was not the first of his family to die; his mother had already lost her husband and her other son. ‘Why does God let us suffer like this? What have we done?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Daniel Fernández, the third of the Strauch cousins.

  There were two or three among the twenty-seven whose courage and example acted as pillars to their morale. Echavarren, in considerable pain from his smashed leg, remained cheerful and extrovert, screaming and cursing at anyone who stepped on him but always making up for it afterwards with a courteous apology or a joke. Enrique Platero was energetic and brave, despite the wound in his stomach. And Gustavo Nicolich made his ‘gang’ get up in the morning, tidy the cabin, and then play such games as charades, while at night he persuaded them to say the rosary with Carlitos Páez.

  Liliana Methol, the one woman among them, was a unique source of solace. Though younger, at thirty-five, than their mothers, she became for them all an object of filial affection. Gustavo Zerbino, who was only nineteen, called her his godmother, and she responded to him and to, the others with comforting words and gentle optimism. She too realized that the boys’ morale was in danger of collapse and thought of ways to distract them from their predicament. On the evening of that ninth day she gathered them around her and suggested that each tell an anecdote from his past life. Few of them could think of anything to say. Then Pancho Delgado volunteered to tell three stories, all about his future father-in-law.