When Nando Parrado opened his eyes, his first thought was simple: I’m dead. The fuselage had slammed into a frozen slope at nearly 12,000 feet, its tail and wings ripped away. His head throbbed, blood filled his mouth, and the silence was broken only by the wind across the peaks, as the Guardian later described.
It was Friday, October 13, 1972. The chartered Fairchild FH-227 had been carrying 45 people – young rugby players from Uruguay, their friends, and family – to a match in Chile. Now the aircraft was crumpled in a valley of snow and stone. Twelve were dead on impact. More would not last the night.
The crash was the result of a pilot’s fatal miscalculation. Believing they had cleared the Andes, the crew began to descend too early and clipped a ridge. One wing sheared off, then the other. The tail broke away and flung men into the blizzard. What remained skidded down a steep slope for nearly half a mile before grinding to a stop.
Parrado blacked out and did not wake for nearly two days. When he did, he saw bodies scattered in the wreckage, the dead and the living pressed together. Roberto Canessa, a fellow passenger, later said of those first hours: “I thought there would be a button to push and everything would be over. But there was no button.”
Under a gray sky, the survivors took count. Thirty-three remained. The fuselage became their shelter. They tore fabric from seats to use as blankets, pressed close to share warmth, and hacked a hole in the wall for air. Water came from melting handfuls of snow. Food amounted to a few chocolate bars, some crackers, jars of jam, and a splash of wine. Enough for one day, maybe two.
Several were badly injured, their bones shattered by the impact. By that first night, another body was dragged outside and buried in the snow. Even so, the group clung to hope. Rescue planes passed overhead, and each time the boys shouted and waved, convinced the nightmare would soon be over.
But hunger crept closer each day. By the end of the first week, nothing remained. On the tenth day, the boys managed to fix a small transistor radio. The message they heard chilled them more than the cold. The search had been called off. The world believed they were dead.
Canessa later described that moment: “I felt the world was going its way and we were out of the world.”
Why did the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash turn to cannibalism?
By the second week, starvation had carved them down to shadows. The question could no longer be avoided. Stay in the fuselage and die together, or cut strips of flesh from the frozen bodies outside. The choice was unthinkable and yet inevitable.
Nando Parrado admitted later that he felt no hesitation. “I didn’t have any doubts… This is the only way out,” he told his friend Carlitos. The survivors gathered for a solemn meeting, speaking quietly, weighing faith against hunger. Some placed their hands on the bodies, pledging that if they died, their friends should eat.
For these young Catholics, the word cannibalism felt unbearable. Roberto Canessa, the 19-year-old medical student among them, insisted on another term: anthropophagy. “Cannibalism is when you kill someone,” he explained. “We had not killed our friends. We were given food by the mountain,” as he told TIME.
Still, the act sickened them. Canessa remembered his jaw locking, his body refusing to swallow. “Your mouth doesn’t want to open because you feel so miserable and sad about what you have to do.” He fought the feeling of trespass, as if he was invading the privacy of the dead.
Then he thought of himself. If he had been the one buried in the snow, would he want to rot, or sustain those he loved? His answer was clear. Later he said, “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.”
Over time, they reframed the horror as generosity. Parrado put it plainly: “We donated our bodies. You could die, and you could help the others to live. That was a fantastic thing we did together.” No one had been killed, they insisted. They had only survived what the mountain demanded.
The new diet gave them strength, but survival demanded more than food. Canessa tended to the sick and cut away gangrene. Others turned seat cushions into snowshoes and stitched sleeping sacks from scraps of fabric. Their rugby discipline surfaced again, with Parrado and others taking on leadership roles.
Then came another blow. On the twenty-sixth day, a thunderous avalanche roared down the slope and swallowed the fuselage. Eight died in seconds. The rest clawed through ice and debris, suffocating in the darkness for three days before Parrado broke through the roof with a pole.
“If that had happened without that pole, we would have died,” he recalled. One survivor compared those days to hell itself, remarking that even fire and brimstone might have been more comfortable. Yet nineteen still lived. They patched their shelter, melted snow on hot metal, and counted the passing days in silence.
How did the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 survivors endure weeks alone in the ice?
Inside the fuselage, life settled into routines of survival. They huddled together, shared scraps of warmth, and forced themselves to laugh. Canessa later said they invented jokes at their own expense, anything to keep spirits alive. Even small humor felt like defiance against the mountains watching them.
Medical duties were shared as well. Infected wounds were cleaned with crude tools, and one man stitched his own leg while the others christened him “Dr. Frankenstein.” Outside the shelter loomed peaks like Sosneado and Seler, icy walls more than 14,000 feet high, reminders of how far civilization really was.
December brought the first sign of mercy. The southern sun began to soften the snow, but by then only sixteen of the original forty-five remained alive. It was now or never. Three of the strongest—Parrado, Canessa, and Antonio “Tintín” Vizintín—volunteered to risk everything on a trek through the mountains.
They dressed themselves in improvised layers: Parrado wearing three pairs of jeans, four sweaters, and stacks of socks. Tintín carried a small backpack filled with dried human flesh for protein. Aluminum poles doubled as tools to melt snow and probe for crevasses. Their equipment looked pitiful, yet it carried desperate hope.
For three days they climbed 2,750 feet toward a snowy saddle. Above them towered Aconcagua, South America’s highest peak, glowing like a wall of stone. At night their clothes froze stiff, their water bottle shattered at fifteen thousand feet, and each step cut into the lungs. Survival depended on relentless movement.
On the third day they reached the pass, only to find endless white ridges, no green valley below. “We thought we were five kilometres away; we were eighty,” Parrado said later. Turning back was impossible. They pressed forward, each mile heavier than the last, driven by hunger and sheer will.
Tintín, exhausted, made the courageous choice to return with spare rations so the others could continue. “I was the person to go,” Canessa recalled. That night, Parrado and Canessa slept beneath the stars with only a tattered sleeping bag. Ten days later, they finally spotted smoke rising from a valley.
When did rescue finally reach the Andes crash site?
On December 20, seventy-two days after the crash, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa stumbled into a herdsman’s hut near Los Maitenes, Chile. A rushing river separated them from help, so they scrawled a message on paper, wrapped it around a rock, and hurled it across: “I come from a plane.”
The message was believed. At dawn, Chilean peasants returned, and soon military helicopters were mobilized. On December 22, six men were airlifted out of the glacier. The remaining ten, too weak to move, were rescued the following day. According to National Geographic, sixteen had persisted. They emerged pale, skeletal, and bearded, yet unmistakably alive.
News traveled instantly. Images of gaunt boys wrapped in cloth transfixed the public. Relatives mourned their dead but also marveled at the miracle of survival. Some asked how such tragedy could happen. Others saw only resilience. The frozen valley of death had, against every odd, yielded sixteen breathing souls.
What is the “Miracle of the Andes” and why is it remembered worldwide?
The headlines were brutal at first. “They ate their friends.” Outrage swelled, and some families of the dead felt ashamed. Yet explanations followed. Journalists noted bluntly that human flesh had kept them alive in impossible conditions. Soon the survivors themselves reframed the story in language that resonated deeply with faith.
Roberto Canessa told reporters their choice had been inspired by Jesus at the Last Supper. “Jesus gave his body and blood,” he explained, and so too had their friends. Even the Church eventually absolved them, declaring their actions an act of survival and charity, not sin, offering relief to the families.
Within a year, the name had changed. What was once a horror story became known as El Milagro de los Andes—the Miracle of the Andes. People marveled at their ingenuity, from snow-melting contraptions to copper-tube sunglasses. More than anything, the miracle was their shared determination not to surrender.
Their struggle entered the pantheon of desperate survivals. Like the Donner Party trapped in snow at Donner Pass, or Franklin’s Arctic expedition where bones told a grim story, the Andes survivors had crossed humanity’s final boundary. Each case leaves the same question echoing: What would I do in their place?
For Parrado, Canessa, and the others, the answer was never abstract. They had faced it day after day in a valley of ice. To live meant to eat, to endure, and to walk out themselves. And so they did, carrying with them both the weight of death and the gift of survival.
Where are the Andes plane crash survivors now, and what legacy did they leave?
When the survivors returned home, they stepped into a blur of fame and lasting suspicion. Uruguay had already buried the dead, yet the living were embraced as heroes. Honor guards saluted, the President greeted them, and newspapers wrote of the Andes boys who had clawed their way back from nothing.
Time dulled the sharper edges of scrutiny. Parrado and Canessa, who had led the trek through the mountains, rebuilt their lives. Canessa became a respected pediatric cardiologist, Parrado turned entrepreneur and speaker, both publishing memoirs. To remember their lost teammates, survivors organized an annual rugby match played across the Andes.
Their story quickly became literature and film. Piers Paul Read’s Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors was a bestseller in 1974, as Britannica notes in its account of the tragedy. Nearly twenty years later, Hollywood brought it back with Frank Marshall’s Alive, where Ethan Hawke portrayed Parrado. Millions saw their story unfold on snowy mountains recreated for the screen.
Documentaries followed. PBS released Stranded in 2007, National Geographic featured Canessa in 2016, and the BBC revisited the story in its own programming. The latest retelling came in 2023 with Society of the Snow, filmed in Spanish on the actual glacier site, earning acclaim for its refusal to sensationalize.
Director J. A. Bayona worked closely with the survivors and their families, focusing not on gore but on humanity. The film’s reception showed how enduring the story remains. Even half a century later, audiences were transfixed by the boys who endured hunger, ice, and impossible choices, and yet still found life.
Looking back, Canessa often emphasizes gratitude. He told TIME that disasters transform people, forcing them to value what is basic: shelter, food, water, and courage. “You can wait for your helicopter,” he said, “but don’t wait too long. Walk out and search for your own rescue.”
The Andes crash remains etched in history not only for survival but for what it revealed about human limits. The twisted fuselage, buried in snow, had once looked like a tomb. Instead it produced sixteen lives reborn. Parrado summed it up simply: “We didn’t kill anyone. We endured. We lived.”
For another remarkable survival story on the open sea, read about Deborah Scaling Kiley, who survived five harrowing days adrift in shark-infested waters after a yacht disaster. Her experience, though very different from the Andes survivors, shares the same message of resilience and the fight to stay alive.