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Hello hello, hello and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about one of the most extraordinary survival stories in human history.
It's the story of a plane crash in the Andes Mountains in 1972.
A group of young Uruguayan rugby players, some of the harshest conditions imaginable and one of the most agonising moral dilemmas that any group of people has ever been forced to face.
It's a story I'm particularly excited to tell because there is some backstory behind today's episode.
A few weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a Spanish teacher named Javier.
He told me that he was a regular listener to English Learning for Curious Minds and this had inspired him to start his own podcast for Spanish learners telling similar kinds of stories.
It's called Radio L, and he is doing a great job.
He also made a suggestion.
He offered to translate one of his episodes into English for it to appear here on English Learning for Curious Minds.
And he suggested this one.
I've made some stylistic changes, but the story is his.
So thank you, Javier.
And he is also releasing one I made about Lord Lucan in Spanish on the same day as this, which I'm sure will be fun.
So do check out Radio L if you happen to be learning Spanish.
Okay, long intro, I know, but thanks for bearing with me, and let's get right into it.
On the morning of 13 October 1972, a group of young men boarded a Uruguayan Air Force plane in Montevideo.
Most of them were members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, a team made up of former students of a Catholic school in a well-to-do neighbourhood of the Uruguayan capital.
They were young, between 18 and 25.
They were healthy and they were looking forward to a rugby tour of Santiago Chile, followed by a few days of holiday.
With the players came friends, family members and a handful of other passengers with no connection to the team.
45 people in total.
It was, by any measure, an unremarkable flight.
Except, of course, that it wasn't.
To fly from Montevideo to Santiago, you have to cross the Andes mountain range, and Crossing the Andes is far from straightforward.
The peaks can reach 7000 metres, which is far higher than the relatively modest military aircraft could manage.
So, a plane has to find a mountain pass, a gap in the mountains low enough to fly through.
The previous day, on the 12th of October, the plane made its first attempt, but was turned back by bad weather over the mountains.
The passengers spent the night in Mendoza, in Argentina, on the eastern side of the Andes.
The next day, the pilots tried again.
The weather still wasn't ideal, but they decided to press on.
It would prove to be a fatal decision.
As the plane entered the mountains, visibility dropped.
Cloud cover was thick.
The pilots, who were navigating largely by calculation rather than sight, made a mistake.
They believed they had already passed through the mountain pass and began their descent towards Santiago.
Except they hadn't.
Instead of descending into the Chilean valleys, on the other side, they were heading straight towards a mountain.
When the clouds cleared and they realised their mistake, it was too late.
A message crackled through the cabin.
Gentlemen, put on your seatbelts because the plane is going to dance for a while.
The passengers did as they were told.
Some of them were nervous, but none of them understood the full horror of what was about to happen.
The turbulence began.
Then came the mountains.
The plane clipped a ridge at more than 300 kilometers per hour.
The impact ripped the fuselage in half.
The rear section and everyone in it was gone.
The front section meanwhile became a metal toboggan, hurtling down a steep, snow-covered slope at terrifying speed.
In what would later seem like one of several extraordinary strokes of luck, it didn't hit a single rock.
Eventually, it came to rest thanks to a natural bank of snow.
Twelve people had died in the crash itself.
Five more died during the first night, as the temperature dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius.
When these survivors took stock of their situation the next morning, there were 27 of them.
They were at around 3,600 meters above sea level.
They were wearing summer clothes.
They had no food.
They had no means of communication. and they had absolutely no idea where they were.
Now, In the immediate aftermath of any disaster, there are two types of people.
There are those who freeze, who are so overwhelmed by the scale of what has happened that they simply cannot function.
And there are those who start solving problems.
Among the survivors of the Andes crash, there were, fortunately, enough of the second type.
The most immediate problem was the cold.
Without shelter, a night at minus 30 would kill them.
So they set to work, using the wreckage of the plane itself, blocking the open end of the fuselage with suitcases, seats and pieces of metal to keep out the wind.
It was crude, basic, but it worked.
There were a few medical students among the survivors.
Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino, in particular, had only completed one year of their studies, which meant they knew just enough medicine to be useful, but not so much that they could fully appreciate just how grim things were.
Perhaps that was a blessing.
They set broken bones using pieces of the wreckage as splints, treated head wounds and did what they could for those with internal injuries, all with no anaesthetic or proper equipment.
Another pressing problem was the lack of water.
Yes, they were surrounded by snow, but perhaps counterintuitively, eating snow to stay hydrated is a terrible idea.
To turn snow into water, your body has to heat it up.
And that requires massive amounts of internal energy.
Energy that the group needed to simply stay alive.
Fortunately, one of the boys fashioned a sort of solar powered water collector, which was just a sheet of metal heated by the rays of the sun, which could melt the snow.
There was still the problem of what to eat, but we'll come to that later.
On a more high-tech note, fortunately, one of the group was an engineering student.
He found a small radio among the wreckage and, with some considerable ingenuity, managed to build an antenna and get it working.
It could receive broadcasts, but it couldn't transmit anything back.
Still, it was a source of hope.
They could hear the outside world.
And initially, the outside world was looking for them.
But the Andes are vast, and the authorities didn't know exactly where the plane had crashed.
Several times the group saw planes flying overhead.
They jumped up screaming for help but collapsed to the floor as the planes flew by.
The search party simply couldn't see them.
The wreckage was white against white snow.
Then, on day 10, the radio operator Roy Harley picked up a news bulletin that made the group's hearts sink.
The search had been called off.
The authorities had declared them dead.
Nobody was coming. there was an immediate collapse of spirit.
The news hit them like a second crash.
But then, strangely, something shifted.
This knowledge that they were on their own now forced a kind of clarity, a newfound sense of urgency.
They stopped waiting They started planning.
But planning requires energy.
And energy requires food.
And food was the one thing they did not have.
In those first 10 days, 27 people, grown men, big rugby players.
They'd shared one small tin of preserved food and two squares of chocolate.
That was it.
After a week and a half of starvation, their bodies were beginning to consume themselves.
And so, around day 10, they arrived at the most agonising decision any of them had ever faced, or that most people would ever be asked to face in their entire lives.
There was food.
The bodies of their dead companions were outside, preserved by the snow.
Nobody wanted to say it, but eventually someone did.
Now, to reiterate, these were not hardened mountaineers or soldiers.
They were 20-year-olds, boys really, from comfortable homes in Montevideo.
Many of them were devout Catholics, for whom this decision carried not only physical, but profound spiritual weight.
At first, not everyone could bring themselves to do it.
Some refused, mostly for religious reasons.
But, in the end, everyone ate.
They made a solemn pact.
If any of them died, they would offer their body to the others.
It was a pact of survival and it gave them, as one survivor would later put it, the right to fight for their lives.
Some later explained that they thought of it not as an act of violence but as an act of communion, that the dead were giving their bodies so that the living might survive.
And they worked carefully, respectfully.
They avoided looking at faces.
The women's bodies were left untouched.
I should pause here for a moment, because this story has some remarkable individuals, and one in particular deserves a mention.
Fernando Perado, otherwise known simply as Nando, suffered a severe blow to the head in the crash.
His companions initially thought he was dead.
He lay unconscious for three days before waking from a coma.
When he came around, he learned that his mother, who had also been on the plane, had died in the crash.
And then, days later, he watched his younger sister die of her injuries.
The grief he must have felt is almost impossible to imagine.
And yet Nando Parado became, in the weeks that followed, one of the driving forces of the survivor's determination to escape.
But before that escape became possible, there was another catastrophe.
On 29 October, 17 days after the crash, there was a huge avalanche.
A wall of snow poured down the mountainside and into the fuselage.
Eight more people were killed.
The survivors were buried under metres of snow for three days.
Three days in total darkness, not knowing if there was enough air, not knowing if another avalanche was coming, not knowing if they would ever dig their way out.
Eventually, they did.
There were now fewer than 20 of them left.
And the experience had made one thing absolutely clear.
Staying in that place meant waiting for death.
If they were going to survive, they had to get out on their own.
Their survival depended on them and them alone.
Their first practical challenge was finding the tail section of the plane, which had separated from the fuselage during the crash, and come to rest somewhere further down the slope.
In the tail were their suitcases, clothes, useful objects and possibly food.
And crucially, the aircraft's batteries which they could use to fix the plane's transmitter and allow them to send messages to the outside world.
After several days of searching, they found it.
And while there was indeed clothing and supplies, the attempt to use the batteries to fix the transmitter ultimately failed.
There would be no calling for help.
But in the tail they found something else, an insulating material, a kind of foam padding, and with it they had a flash of genius.
They fashioned it into a sleeping bag, crude and improvised, but warm enough to allow a person to spend a night outside the fuselage in sub-zero temperatures.
This changed everything, because now they could walk, they could travel for longer than a day without having to return to the safety of the plane to escape the cruel freezing night of the Andes.
The plan was this three of the fittest survivors would set out on an expedition westward, hoping to cross the mountains and reach Chile.
Before they could do that, they needed to know what they were walking into.
So first they climbed.
Straight up.
A ridge at over 4,500 metres that took them three days to summit.
When they reached the top, they looked west, hoping to see green valleys trees, the brown of lower earth, something alive, something that indicated that there was a way out.
What they saw was more mountains.
Nothing but white in every direction, as far as the eye could see.
The three men, Roberto Canessa, Nando Parado and Antonio Vicentín, their hearts sank.
Canessa's first instinct was to turn back.
It seemed hopeless.
But Nando Parado refused.
He had lost his mother and his younger sister.
He had woken from a coma against all odds.
And he had decided with absolute clarity that he would rather die trying to get out than die waiting to be found.
If I have to die, he is reported to have said, I want to die walking.
Canessa agreed to continue.
Vicentín turned back, sliding down the mountain on an improvised suitcase sled to let the others know what they had found.
And so Nando Parado and Roberto Canessa walked.
Ten days in total, through snow and wind and altitude and exhaustion, in conditions that should have been beyond the limits of human endurance, especially given that they were two months into this ordeal.
Slowly, over the days that followed, the landscape began to change.
The snow thinned.
There was green.
There were signs that the world below, the living world, was not entirely out of reach.
And then on the ninth day of walking, they found a river.
They followed it.
And on the other side of the river, they saw a man on horseback.
The river was too loud and too wide to cross.
So Nando tore off a piece of paper, wrote a message explaining who they were and what had happened, tied it to a stone and threw it to the other bank.
The man was a Chilean herdsman.
He picked up the message and he went to find help.
Back at the crash site, those who had stayed behind heard the news on the radio.
Parado and Canessa had been found.
Help was on the way.
The rescue operation moved quickly.
Parado guided the helicopters back to the crash site himself.
The terrain was so steep and the altitude so high that the helicopters could only carry a few survivors at a time.
It took two days to get everyone out.
The families of the survivors, who had spent 72 days grieving people they had been told were dead, learned that their sons and brothers and fathers were alive.
Sixteen people had survived.
Now, when the story became public, when it became clear how the survivors had kept themselves alive, the reaction was complicated, to say the least.
There was enormous relief, obvious joy, especially from their loved ones.
But there was also shock, and for some, condemnation.
Some newspapers used the word cannibalism in large headlines.
Others called it a miracle.
The Catholic Church, to the surprise of many, came out quickly in support of the survivors.
The Bishop of Montevideo stated clearly that what they had done was morally justified, that the Christian tradition recognises the sanctity of life and that the dead had been used to save the living, not desecrated.
Most people, over time, came to the same conclusion.
And two of the protagonists of this story, its heroes even, Nando Parado and Roberto Canessa.
They would go on to live remarkable lives.
Canessa finished his medical studies and became a distinguished pediatric cardiologist.
Parado became a successful entrepreneur.
Both have spoken and written extensively about their experience.
Carlos Baez, one of the survivors whose accounts were drawn on in preparing this episode, has perhaps put the philosophy of those 72 days most simply.
According to him, in the beginning, they did what was necessary.
Then they did what was possible.
And in the end, they achieved the impossible.
It is undoubtedly one of the greatest stories of survival ever to be told.
Okay, then that is it for today's episode on the Andes disaster of 1972 or, depending on how you look at it, the Andes miracle.
Again, a huge thank you and congratulations to Javier from the Radio L podcast.
I get emails all the time from people who say they are thinking of doing a similar thing and that they would like advice, but this is the first time I've ever got one from someone who's actually just started.
So, Javier, well done, and thank you for sharing this story.
I hope it might provide inspiration to someone out there.
You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Budge, You stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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