To mark the release of Juan Antonio Bayona's new film 'Society of the Snow' Euronews Culture revisits Fernando Parrado, a survivor of the 1972 'Miracle of the Andes' plane crash to discuss the chilling pact he and fellow passengers made to stay alive.
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00:00 I shouldn't be talking to you.
00:02 I should be dead, buried in a glacier 50 years ago.
00:06 I was a rugby team player, amateur, in a club.
00:13 We were invited to play a rugby match in Chile.
00:16 We chartered a plane because it was much cheaper than flying on a commercial plane.
00:21 And since there were free places, I invited my mother and my sister to fly with me,
00:25 who were fans of my team.
00:28 Air accidents are always a pile of things that add up to each other.
00:33 And we didn't make it.
00:35 We crashed in the middle of the Andes.
00:38 I had my head fractured in a coma for four and a half days,
00:46 in an absolute black hell.
00:49 Despite that, I recovered.
00:51 I found that my mother, my sister Susy, were dead.
00:55 My two best friends Panchito and Guido are dead.
00:58 Survival didn't give me time to think about anything other than survival.
01:02 I can tell you what I remember about how beautiful, how bad, how horrible, how frightening
01:07 the friendship, the group, the trust in each one of us that allowed us to survive,
01:13 the leadership that went hand in hand,
01:16 the absolutely terrible thirst, because there is no water there.
01:21 The cold that bites.
01:24 We came from the beach.
01:26 95% of the boys had never touched snow and seen a mountain in their life.
01:30 It happened to us all.
01:31 We fall off a swing, there are injured.
01:34 Everything you can imagine of a hell.
01:37 When I heard on the 10th that the search had ended, I said,
01:40 "I'm going to try to leave here."
01:43 I almost panicked, and I remember that panic kills you and fear saves you.
01:48 And from that moment until the day I left,
01:51 my only intention, in addition to helping and doing the best I could,
01:55 as everyone did, was to focus, look at the mountains,
01:59 and say, "Well, where do I escape from here?"
02:02 Because we were surrounded by mountains of 5,000 or 6,000 meters,
02:06 all surrounded by a glacier.
02:07 We had no horizon, we didn't know where we were.
02:10 We knew that the best alpinists and andinistas die with experience,
02:15 with the best teams.
02:16 We didn't even have gloves.
02:17 Summer clothes.
02:19 So I said, "I have to wait for summer to come to try to escape from here."
02:23 And my friends said, "But there are two or three months left for summer.
02:26 What are we going to do?"
02:28 Anyone would have come to the same conclusion.
02:31 Hunger is the most terrible fear that human beings have,
02:35 the most primal, the oldest, the most terrifying.
02:38 No one will understand the terrible anxiety of hunger
02:43 until the body begins to consume itself.
02:47 The fat goes away, the muscles go away,
02:50 you feel that something is moving, that your liver is consuming,
02:55 and you are dying.
02:57 We made a pact.
02:58 Because I told Carlitos, "Carlitos, I have to get out of here.
03:03 I don't want to die.
03:05 We have food for the body of our friends, the passengers."
03:09 And we all made an absolutely fantastic pact.
03:14 We were the first donors, conscious of our body.
03:18 Today, how many donors are there in the world?
03:21 And we, feeding ourselves that way, came out 16.
03:25 Today we are 140.
03:27 Can you imagine a more fantastic life story than that?
03:33 Daughters, grandchildren, families that would not exist,
03:37 they would not be breathing if we had not done what we did.
03:41 So for us it was much more difficult to fight the cold, the thirst, the uncertainty.
03:46 All that, feeding ourselves of that, once you decide.
03:50 That's it.
03:52 The most difficult decision was to leave the fuselage,
03:55 and the second most difficult, to be above 5,000 meters high.
03:59 There are no mountains as high as those in Europe, or Mont Blanc.
04:03 Without gloves, with blue jeans, with Roberto, my brother in life,
04:07 looking at what is ahead, all the Andes Mountains, and saying, "Let's go."
04:12 There were two thoughts that consumed me.
04:17 One, how I was going to die.
04:20 How I was going to die.
04:22 In a crack of hunger, frozen, thirsty, abandoned, thrown into a glacier.
04:28 And another, that because of what was happening, I was never going to have a family.
04:33 The lighthouse was my father, I wanted to go back to him.
04:37 I had lost his family.
04:39 And I thought, "Nando, you're not going to stop until your face hits the ice and you can't get up."
04:45 I lost 45 kilos.
04:47 No, my skin weighed me, my hair weighed me, my shoes.
04:51 And luckily it gave us strength for 10 days.
04:54 At the end of the last day with Roberto, he sees it first, at the top.
04:58 He says, "Nando, look, a man on horseback."
05:00 I look and I see him.
05:02 Down, down, down the slope, the slope until you reach the river's edge.
05:06 And there it was very wide, and we couldn't communicate by voice,
05:11 because of the noise of the water and all that.
05:14 But this man, Sergio Catalán, had a lot of common sense.
05:18 He grabs a stone, puts a piece of paper around the stone,
05:21 a pencil, something to write, and throws it across the river.
05:26 And there I write to him.
05:28 "I'm from a plane that fell in the mountains. I'm Uruguayan.
05:31 I have 14 friends injured up there. Where are we? Please, we can't get out.
05:35 We're hungry. When are they coming to get us?"
05:38 He goes to get help.
05:42 And this was 50 years ago. There were no phones, no Twitter, no web, nothing.
05:47 And when they arrive, the day after tomorrow,
05:51 we spent the night there with Roberto,
05:53 they couldn't believe we were from the plane that had fallen two and a half months ago.
05:57 The chief of the rescue team asks us, "Where are the others?"
06:01 And I say, "In there."
06:03 And they show me a map, and they look at me and say,
06:06 "But that's Argentina. That's 60, 70 kilometers from here."
06:11 When they put me in the hospital,
06:19 they take out the clothes that I hadn't taken out in 72 days.
06:23 They put me in a shower, the best head wash I've ever had in my life.
06:29 They put me in a tunic and put me to bed in the room.
06:33 I became a man of wool, of rubber.
06:35 I was weak.
06:37 And I almost fainted from the softness I had.
06:44 I was weak in a way that everything was gone.
06:49 And that's when I realized I was alive.
06:53 When we all return to Uruguay,
06:57 my friends, my mountain brothers, are embraced by their families.
07:01 I get home, and my father was desperate.
07:05 He had lost his family, my mother's clothes hanging,
07:08 my sister's clothes still hanging, all that.
07:10 No, my life was destroyed.
07:14 But my father said, "Nando, thank you for resurrecting us,
07:17 but don't destroy the second part of your life.
07:20 We're going to live it."
07:22 My neighbor ran me over.
07:26 I had my whole life ahead of me.
07:30 I had a life, not planned, but imagined.
07:33 And I was so wrong.
07:35 That change was so fast.
07:38 We survive in the worst place a human being can survive.
07:42 One can survive better in the sea, in the ocean, in the jungle, in the desert,
07:46 but in the high peaks of the Himalayas or the Andes,
07:49 it's very difficult to survive.
07:51 That's why this still resonates 50 years later,
07:54 because it's not possible for it to be repeated.
07:56 And today there are 50 mobile phones on that plane.
08:00 The plane would have much more modern technologies,
08:03 it would have much more effective satellite beacons.
08:07 Today, that accident is rescued in 8 or 10 hours, it's over.
08:15 Sometimes this story is romanticized, but it was a horrifying tragedy.
08:19 We were in hell.
08:21 Compared to what we lived, hell was comfortable.
08:25 When destiny runs you over, it doesn't warn you.
08:28 It doesn't warn you.
08:30 The best day of your life and the worst day of your life are the same.
08:34 50 years later, life goes on.
08:37 So I tell people, enjoy the present.
08:40 The past is gone.
08:42 [BLANK_AUDIO]