A plane crash survivor has spoken and shared how he was forced to eat his friends as they waited for rescue. It’s now almost 49 years to the day the remaining survivors of an Uruguayan rugby team was rescued after their plane crashed into the Andes.
It is reported that on 13 October, 1972 a charter jet transporting the Old Christians Club rugby union team across the Andes mountains crashed and killed 29 out of 45 passengers and crew on board.
The survivors remember that 8 passengers and 3 crew members died on the spot. Additionally, 18 other passengers died within 72 days before the survivors were rescued on 23 December 1972.
Most of the survivors were from Uruguay capital City, Montevideo, where they lived by the sea. For the 72 days, they had to struggle with extremely low temperatures (-30 C) and night and snow.
The survivors had no access to adequate warm clothes, they lacked medical supplies, no food and no equipment.
Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, stated that “We were starving in earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious that we searched anyway.
“Again and again, we scoured the fuselage in search of crumbs and morsels. We tried to eat strips of leather torn from pieces of luggage, though we knew that the chemicals they’d been treated with would do us more harm than good.
“We ripped open seat cushions hoping to find straw but found only inedible upholstery foam.
And
“Again and again, I came to the same conclusion: unless we wanted to eat the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing here but aluminium, plastic, ice, and rock.”
Jose Luis ‘Coche’ Inciarte recalled that they made a decision to eat the flesh of their dead friends “there was no other option if you wanted to stay alive”.
In fact the survivors had a meeting where they had to make a choice on whether to eat or not to eat the flesh of their dead friends. Everybody decided to eat.
“When you went to take a piece of flesh, the body of your friend, their frozen body, the hand doesn’t obey and you have to make a great effort of energy and mind to make your arm obey, and then it obeys, not immediately.
“It was the same with opening mouth to put it inside the mouth and swallow.”
After 60 days since the crash happened, the 3 strongest survivors were selected and asked to trek across the mountains in quest for help.
Nando Parrado, Robert Canessa and Antonio Vizintin (survivors) walked for 10 days across the vast mountain range when they discovered that no one was coming looking for them.
The three survivors set on a torturous journey on 12 December without any gears for climbing the mountains and just supplies that would last for three days.
For 10 days, they climbed 38 miles of mountains and reached their safety. On the way, they were forced to send back Vizintin to the crash site because of depleting supplies.
Parrado told Canessa that “We may be walking to our deaths, but I would rather walk to meet my death than wait for it to come to me.”
After walking for several days, the two survivors started seeing signs of human presence before meeting farmers in Chile who helped them and the other 14 who were waiting at the crash site.
23 December 2021, will be exactly 49 years since the crash happened.
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I’ve never imagined that it is so easy to turn into a cannibal.