The Andes survivors

Excerpts from interviews from some of the Andes survivors. I include the Alfredo Delgado interview in its entirety and some insightful parts from a couple of others. All interviews from top to bottom were intensely enjoyable and inspiring to read. Read them in Spanish or English.

Alfredo Delgado, 1973, one month after being rescued

- We are going to talk, but not about what happened at the mountains, not about the external facts; we are going to talk about the things that happened inside of you, about the person you were and the person you are; about the things that changed in your relationship with the world and life, and the things remained as they were before the accident. Is this O.K?
- Yes, it is.

- To start…, something very vague: How are you? How do you find yourself?
- I’m not here yet, I still don’t find myself.

- How can that be possible?
- The thing is that I’m still floating; I couldn’t come down to earth yet and I haven’t come back to my old life. The interviews, the way back to Montevideo, the people’s welcome, each encounter with a friend is a new blow. It’s being hard to me to get back to my life, because there is always something that comes and blows me; a hug, an encounter. There is nothing I can do, I can’t finish waking up.

- Maybe you have already waked up but you haven’t realized it...
- I don’t understand your point.

- Maybe you have waked up but in a different way, so different that you can’t notice it, and because of that you are confusing your wake up to a new vision of the world with a sort of nightmare or something like that.
- Yes, it could be something like that. I’m waking up and I see everything different, but I’m sure I haven’t return yet, I’m not completely awake because I haven’t had a single break since I got here, everything is too recent. I can’t get used to be back I just can’t. I see that corner that I’ve seen many times but I see it for the first time since the accident and it makes me feel something strange. I see that coffee, that bridge, those threes and I feel that everything is new but old at the same time. Who was going to say that I would ever walk here again, that I would ever pass through this bike store again?

- How was the return to your bed and your pillow?
- Not very good. It has been hard to me trying to catch up on sleep. The first days I didn’t sleep much, little more than 4 hours, but now I’m sleeping almost 6 hours. This problem is because during those 70 days on the mountains I could never sleep more than 3 or 4 hours a day. I spent the nights without sleeping a wink; I could only sleep during short periods of time because I was afraid of sleeping and also being awake. That wasn’t living, that was surviving. We used all our energies and thoughts to find a way out, and by doing that we learnt new things, things unknown to us.

- What sort of things?
- Among other things I learnt, together with the rest, something which is essential to live together in an extreme situation like the one we were living; I learnt to grit my teeth and to hide my feelings. Due to the circumstances I learnt to withdraw myself into a sort of shell that didn’t let the others notice what was happening inside me. Doing this we avoided to hurt the others and we could give strength to each other. It was with this shell that I could remain without having shed a single tear, not even when my friend died, two months after the accident and being only at ten days of the rescue. That friend was my closest friend since we were very little, he died on my arms but I didn’t let my tears out because the tears of one of us could make the whole group collapse.

- How was the cold?
- The cold, how cold is the cold… It’s so hard to describe how freezing the cold is… when there are 30 degrees below zero nothing can relieve the cold, so you learn something you didn’t know; what the “human heat”, the body’s temperature and the warmth are, especially the warmth which comes from seeing a person with faith and will to survive in front of you, at half a meter or at ten centimeters from you. If after the accident only 4 or 5 of us would have survived, we would certainly be dead because surviving depends almost entirely on the state of mind of the others. In a group of more than fifteen people is always possible to find six or seven in a good mood and those are the ones that hold the group up; when these ones are no longer in that mood there will certainly appear another six or seven to hold up the rest of the group. The cold does not affect only your body but it affects also your soul. We piled ourselves up in the endless nights inside the plane, we squeezed up, we heard our breading, we warmed each other up to heat the bones but above all to maintain our state of mind. I never knew what the human heat was, but now I know it and I will never forget it.

- And what happens, Delgado, when men are starving?
- The cold, the anguish, the hunger, are successive steps which start to undress us more and more. We started to get prepared for the inevitable before the reserves were off. All of us philosophically bore the idea of taking the dead bodies to feed ourselves, but not all of us bore it physically. Anticipating this possibility it was commented once and when the moment came of taking that tremendous decision we expected an atrocious reaction… but we didn’t reach the desperation or the limit because the cold consumes lot of your calories, and taking this to the limit was falling into an abyss. We were forced to decide before we run out of strengths because after that it would be too late to recover from it. The cold, the loneliness, the isolation, the death surrounding us, the hunger it was one step after the other; each step seemed to be the last, the end, but in each of them we learnt that there is always a strength remaining somewhere, strengths unexpected that come from the most unexpected places of us. I learnt this too, how enormously strong we become as we become weak.

- On these nights in which you slept three or four hours could you balance the anguishes of the day? Did you dream? What did you dream?
- At first as I closed my eyes I was already dreaming …, it was terrible. I dreamt that I was living my life normally, my ordinary life in Montevideo and I believed inside the dream that the accident was a nightmare. In my dreams I saw myself at Montevideo, going to the university, with my girlfriend, at home, with my parents…, every time I woke up was a tremendous shock, I opened my eyes and I saw the phosphorescent letter of the plane’s sign which says “EXIT”. It was so depressing! On the first few days it was all the same, sleep and dream about that, my life in Montevideo and the nightmare of the plane’s crash and after that the slap of waking up and seeing the plane’s sign “EXIT”. I felt that I was going crazy. The depressions that came after my wake up were devastating me more and more. And it was for that reason that I decided not to sleep, but without sleeping I wouldn’t stand much, so I manage to go my mind blank before sleeping. That was a big effort but with the time I made it, I could finish with the torture of dreaming.

- And during the slow and long days, what effect did the memories and the distance of both your family and friends have on you?
- With the memories it was the same as with the dreams. At first I remembered my parents and my girlfriend very clearly, but when I stopped remembering and went back to the reality it was a shock. I realized that instead of helping me that was weakening me, bruising me inside. So I decided to stop hurting myself by cutting the people from my memories.

- How did you do that?
- I remembered places, moments, but no people. Sometimes I traveled to my home in my memories and I walked through it, I sat on a corner or I read in my bedroom; others I remembered a summer, a three and some shade and I stayed there for a while. But I always took care of taking the people out of my memories; doing that I could take my travels as stimulus to avoid getting depressed. I knew that if I got depressed too frequently, that depression would turn into madness.

- Delgado did you ever have the premonition or the feeling of what happened to you at the mountain?
- Yes, I knew that the plane was going to crash. It was when we were at Mendoza, in The Plumerillo; I was just about going into the plane when I felt that something was going to happen, I felt it clearly, very clearly.

- And what did you do?
- I just delayed a few seconds, but it was too late to regrets, I entered the plane convinced that we were going to have an accident, convinced but quiet at the same time; I was so convinced that I sat on a seat at the back, because my experience told me that the plane’s tail was much safer than the other parts of the plane. The stewardess cleared those seats saying that it were for them. I ended up on a seat in the middle of the plane…and at the first turbulence I confirmed my premonition, so I just closed my eyes and prayed. The accident happened right after that, and I saved my life by not being seated at the tail, because the tail came off the rest of the plane’s body.

- That premonition, the feeling of death was just for that moment or does it happens frequently to you?
- I’ve never had such a clear feeling, but I always felt that I was going to die young and in an accident. I told my mother and my girlfriend that feeling.

- Have you found out the reason of that supposition?
- I always thought that, because I had the feeling that I had lived too much, because in spite of not having an opulent existence, life had been very generous with me.

- So, you saw the death as a sort of compensation?
- Exactly. Although I haven’t had an easy life, I was very happy; that’s the reason why when I was a boy, being 17 or 18 years old, I already felt that and I told it to my relatives.

- Did you take that feeling of death with fear or with anguish?
- No, I’ve never had fear of death… I think that nobody has it, what’s feared is the way in which death can come, for example: the death which comes with lot of pain and agony.

- And at the mountain, facing the death so close to you, did that attitude change?
- I was surrounded by deaths whether it were at the accident or because of it or even the deaths caused by the avalanche. I learnt to live with it with the feeling that there is something superior. That life sheared with death, let’s say pacific, was possible because I became more convinced that after the death comes something better… it couldn’t exist something worse than that situation. I had the idea of dying inside me, and I took it with clearness of conscious. I could almost affirm that I felt it like a companion.

-All that is over now Delgado, the mountains were left behind. Now you are here so, what happens now between you and that idea of the death?
- Some years ago I had the feeling of a prompt and accidental death, but now I am completely calm about what may happen to me. It’s not that I don’t want to live any more, actually is right the opposite, but if somebody comes and tells me that I have only three days left, I would remain immutable, I would keep walking with you across this street.

- You are another man; you know that, another man different from the one who boarded that plane to Chile, Aren’t you?
- Yes, I’ve moved to another world, to an unknown maturity. Now I know, or I think I know, what happens inside an old man who sees the death like something that could knock his door at any moment. The religion was essential to my way of seeing things and to accept the death. I could only put up with that horrible situation during 70 days and 70 nights because I saw a life purgatory in it. Many times I wondered why we had to put up with such a terrible and unnecessary pain. I always answered myself that it was a prior act, a requirement to enter a better life. Many times, up in the mountains, I said to myself: “Maybe this is the purgatory”. This justified absurd and unbearable facts, like the death of a friend sixty days after the accident and at ten days of being rescued.

- In the middle of that nightmare, did you ever stop your thoughts and enjoy the landscape? Is an absurd question but maybe it isn’t so absurd considering the situation.
- During that “season”, or that “summer”, there were moments in which, effectively, I stopped my “travels” around far empty places, and I enjoyed the silence, the landscape. That was a new sensation. That silence wasn’t a bedroom’s silence or a sea shore silence or a plain silence… that silence had other sound…

- Wasn’t that sound of the new silence overwhelming to you?
- The feeling of being overwhelmed was due to the snow to me, you can’t imagine how I missed the green. It was like a desperation I had for something green, it was like being thirsty of something green. The snow was unknown to my eyes, and suddenly it invaded all…, it was all white, white, white…

- Another absurd question: Don’t you miss sometimes that feeling about the white color, or that sound from the silence?
- No, not yet. In that situation there was a side of peace, of deep peace but I haven’t came down yet, I haven’t had time; maybe later, when I found myself immersed in this agitated world, I could miss some peaceful moments in the middle of the snow.

- How was the relationship with God up in the mountains?
- My faith in God was crucial. The God I talk with has nothing to do with any specific religion, or has to do with all of them. The God I’m talking about, to define him, is something, somebody who is very close to the conscience, which is in fact the only thing people can’t lie to.

- Talking of conscience, what happens between you and her during those 70 days?
- Lots of things happened, much more than a revision of facts and situations of my life. I did a behavior test. That test gave, as a result, something that may seems a banality: terrible wills to change and to be a better person sprung up on me… It seems a bit childish, but I can’t express that strong will to be good in other words.

- That will is still alive? How long would last in you?
- I can’t tell you how I will be in six months or in a year if I don’t know what I want to be. I can’t tell you if this feeling I had now will still be here in a year, two or more. But I’ve reached at the conclusion that I must live in the most upright way possible. Things have changed: I used to think mostly about me, now I’m thinking more about the others. …Material things, comfort, dollars and all that it’s in the background to me.

- Has your opinion about the world and the century we are living in also changed?
- Yes. There are very elemental things which I now feel deeply inside. I know this is an extraordinary century in many technical aspects, but the madness about comfort, the lack of concern about other people’s problems, about what happens to the others, about the spiritual values, all this spoil the rest. The spiritual side of us, which is so left out now, is precisely what allowed us to survive. We were realistic but even in the most terrible moments we thought about the others, we resorted to our internal strengths, which were withdrawn and neglected.

- Your personality and your relationship with the others have also changed?
- Yes, pretty much. I used to be very witty and nice, cheerful, funny, but now I have that shell on me, and my love and affection don’t show anymore. I want to be like I was before; I want to show my feelings. Now, when I want to caress somebody or when a tear comes to my eyes they remain in the middle of the way. In that aspect I want to be the one I used to be.

- And in what aspects you don’t want to be the one you were?
- Before the accident, although I was a good-tempered person, I had periods of very bad-mood. I’d like to modify that. I also used to sleep a lot, but now I’m going to sleep only the indispensable hours, I’ve understood now how valuable a minute of life is, and I don’t want to waste my time.

- How was your childhood? Go back to your first memories.
- My childhood? The earlier memory I have from childhood? No, I can’t remember.

- Make an effort, try to remember something, some situation, some face, something you saw, or something that happened to you.
- Let’s see… my childhood, no it’s useless, I can’t remember anything.

- Nor even a special prank?
- No, I just can’t, it’s very difficult for me to remember. You can’t imagine how hard I’m trying… Childhood, with those seventy days is something so distant to me that no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember anything clearly.

- Don’t you remember your school days?
- Yes, but vaguely… from the school, what comes now to my mind is my best friend, Numa. ..Numa Turcatti, Turcatti with double “t”. He was in the plane too I convinced him to go, I convinced his mother first to make him go because he wasn’t very enthusiastic about going out… Numa died sixty days after the accident, only ten days before the rescue, in the morning, in my arms. He was like a brother to me, even more than that… and I didn’t cry, I couldn’t cry because I already had the shell on me.

- How old are you?
- Twenty-five, I spent my 25th birthday at the mountains.

- Some minutes ago you said: “When I was a child”, referring to your 17 years. You speak as if you were a man approaching to his 40 or 50 years. How long do you expect to live now?
- I place myself in God’s hands. Look, what are the premonitions for? I used to believe that I was going to die young in an accident, and that was not true…, it doesn’t matter if I die tomorrow, I’m not young anymore, I’m 25-years-old plus those 70 days and nights.

Nando Parrado

- Does what you did at the Andes amaze you?
- There are questions that don’t have answers and you can’t spend the rest of your life wondering about those things otherwise you can’t live. I’m very practical and I have inherited it from my father who once said to me: “Nando, what happened is already past, and the sun which rises every day doesn’t care about what happened, you have to continue with your life…” I assume that I had an enormous trouble, a fatal accident that I wish it hadn’t ever happened, but it has happened and I had to assume it just as it was. I lost my mother, my sister and my best friends in there; I had to pay a huge cost. Today I don’t suffer it but Roberto can tell you how horrible and inhuman was what we had to live at the Andes. He’s the only one who can tell you, better than anyone, because nobody imagines what was that walk like. On the 25th anniversary we went there and we wanted to do the same rout but just the other way round, but we couldn’t although we went really prepared with a great expert’s team of mountaineers, people who climbed the Everest and horses; the glaciers were so dangerous that we couldn’t, and I see that the difference is that we had only our lives, nothing more than that, and still we did everything we could to get out of there, we didn’t notice if we were dying or in danger, we just didn’t care about that. It’s a situation that goes beyond anything; it’s all lost for you. I couldn’t have done that without Roberto and he couldn’t have done it without me because we encouraged each other. That rout was just for two people. We were a perfect team we did a perfect combination. When we saw the laborer we weren’t just tired we were dying, there was no more strength, energy or muscle; you have to bear in mind that we had been walking for ten days over the snow and constantly in danger, and after being more that sixty days in inhuman conditions.


- Did that prove that you have to pass change your attitude towards life?
- It has given me the opportunity to believe in human spirit, in people, what people is able to do facing some situations; all that helped me on my way, comparing my problems today with the ones we faced at the Andes, today’s problems are very small. I consider my problems and I say, luckily I’ve problems. Today I should be buried in a glacier. I’m optimistic in a hundred per cent.

- What’s the most important thing you taught your daughters?
- This might appeared a bit twee but the most important thing I taught them is “love”. I totally agree with that song that affirms that “love moves the world”. The economy, politics, those things don’t exist; the most powerful strength in the world is love. The love for my father made me find the way out of those mountains because I had to save my life for him. The love towards my wife changed my life , the love for my friends makes me happy every day. It’s proved statistically that every man that has done something important in his life did it for somebody else; and generally for a woman.

- Talking about women have you fell in love more than once?
- I’m a difficult guy. I had my passions like everyone else but I think that I’ve fallen in love only once. The day I met Veronica, my wife, my life changed for ever. When I return from The Andes I was still a boy and due to all the things that happened to us I wanted to swallow the life in one go. I lived out of control for some years, I wanted to do everything, to experiment everything I could. I didn’t stop. I used to do motor racing, which was my passion, I used to run motorbikes. I used to travel all the time, I knew lots of people, I was kind of Kamikaze. I had the feeling that I couldn’t waste my time , not a single minute, it seemed to me that the time wouldn’t be enough for me. Veronica calm me, she showed me another world. She took me out of that intensity that for moments became infuriating and injected me some peace.


Carlos Paez

- It was “a miracle” to you having survived, or it was just “something provoked or made by men’s hand”?
- If there is a miracle, that is certainly “the man”, how is he been created with the ability to support and adapt to extreme situations. But this was not a miracle. Some people entitle it as a miracle and called it “the Andes miracle”, but I think that it’s more a natural men’s fight for life. We keep the holiest human right up to the end, which is fighting for our lives. More than a right, it is an obligation. I think that God influenced in this, but it would have been a miracle if the 45 of us would have appeared alive after 70 days. This is not our case.


Gustavo Zerbino

- Do true leaders come up in hard moments?
- Leaders are everywhere. It is in the adversity when they seem to have stepped forward but what really has happened is that somebody has stepped back. The leader is who gives examples by little gestures. At the mountain the leader was the one who laughed, the one who comforted you, it was somebody different each time. Being at 4.000 meters high you don’t have strength not even to stand up, but when you see that one partner with a broken leg stands up, that’s your leader. The love we felt in those adverse moments was stronger than ever. You have to accept the reality and decide from that point.

- So you’ve decided to be happy for the rest of your life?
- My days are intense. It’s an explosion. I live each day as it were the last one. When I got angry I’m fierce because I try to give people my best and if that effort is not seen by the others then I got very angry.