Cannibalism on the Cordillera

THE snowcapped Andes of South America are a cruel and unforgiving barrier. When storms are brewing, plane crashes are frequent; invariably after an aircraft goes down, mountain people remark that "the Cordillera never gives anyone back." Last week, though, the Cordillera had been forced to give back 16 of the 45 people who had been aboard a Uruguayan air force plane that hit a mountain peak in mid-October. Incredibly, the survivors lasted for 73 days in deep snow and subfreezing temperature. They took extremely grim measures in order to do so--they ate the bodies of those who had died in the crash.

The 16 survivors--all men and all but one 26 years or younger--were rescued after two of them had struggled down the mountains in an epic ten-day hike. The pair encountered a stray shepherd, and four climbers of Chile's Andean Rescue Corps helicoptered in to bring out the remaining 14. Some survivors had lost as much as 60 lbs., and six required hospitalization for injuries; otherwise, they were in remarkably good condition despite having spent more than two months on a snow-drenched mountain. Only when the rescuers discovered that nine bodies near the wreck had been strangely carved and mutilated in ways unrelated to a plane crash did the truth emerge. Reluctantly, the survivors admitted that they had chopped the dead flesh into small pieces and eaten it. "It was like a heart transplant," explained one of the 16. "The dead sustained the living."*

The strange events on the Cordillera began last Oct. 13 when the F-27 turboprop, manned by a crew of five, took off from Montevideo for Santiago, Chile, normally a 2 1/2-hr, flight. Aboard were 16 members of the Old Christians, a rugby team composed of socially prominent college boys from the prosperous Montevideo suburb of Carrasco. Along with 24 friends and relatives, they were making a trip to Chile for a series of matches. Because of bad weather in the mountains, the plane was forced to stop at Mendoza, Argentina. The players used the layover to stock up on chocolate for their Chilean hosts.

Toboggan. When the F-27 took off again, the storm had abated, but the flight over the Andes proved to be rough going. Still in a holiday mood, the rugby players happily yelled "!Ole!" or "!Conga!" each time the turboprop hit an air pocket. But then, recalled Roberto Canessa, a 19-year-old medical student, "I looked out as we turned and saw a mountain only a few feet away." Without warning, the plane hit a peak and slid like a toboggan for half a mile down an 80DEG slope. When the plane finally stopped in a huge snowdrift at 11,900 feet above sea level, 18 people were dead or dying. "One of the pilots was alive," said Canessa, "but he was pleading for a revolver to kill himself."

The crash occurred at 4 p.m., just as sunlight on the mountains was fading. That night the survivors huddled together in the wrecked fuselage. When dawn came next morning, they ripped off seat covers and put on rugby uniforms over their light summer-weight clothes for extra warmth. Pieces of tinted glass from plane windows became sunglasses against the snow glare. On a transistor radio hooked up to the plane's only working battery, they heard that a search had begun. When a plane appeared overhead, they flashed pieces of aluminum from the wreckage to signal it. The effort was in vain; the wrecked fuselage was white and invisible against the snow. On the eighth day they heard that the search had been abandoned until the snow thawed.

On the 16th day of the ordeal, a sudden avalanche killed eight of the people who had survived the crash. After that, life on the mountain developed into a routine of strange and sometimes demented daily tasks. The dead were buried in the snow, but as the snow thawed they had to be reburied over and over again. Group members became obsessed with locating their luggage and spent days and weeks probing for suitcases in waist-high snow. They snapped pictures of their predicament. Chunks of aluminum were fashioned into snowshoes; the plane's foam insulation was worked into sleeping bags. Snow was melted into drinking water on the sun-warmed fuselage; pieces of Alka-Seltzer were added to reduce cravings for salt. Talk increasingly centered on food and on great meals they had eaten. One day rummaging for usable debris the bearded survivors stumbled across a stack of 40 plastic plates in the snow and laughed to the edge of hysteria.

The chocolate purchased in Mendoza helped keep the survivors alive for 20 days, but then the modest supply ran out. Their stomachs gnawing, the half-frozen members of the group finally made a dreadful decision. They hacked off sections of the dead bodies, thawed them on the warm metal of the aircraft, sliced them into small pieces with a razor, and ate the pieces raw because there was no fuel for a fire. The choice of cadavers was circumscribed: no relatives, no one with injuries that might have become infected.

On Dec. 13, the group made a desperate move. Two of them, Canessa and Fellow Medical Student Fernando Parrado, 22, would set out westward down the mountains in hopes of reaching civilization; it was decided that if in 15 days they had not been heard from, two more members would go to seek help. On the seventh day, however, using the plane's compass, Canessa and Parrado managed to reach the Azufre River and sighted a shepherd and his flock. It was five days before Christmas.

Authorities decided to bury the dead on the mountain where they had died. The survivors went home to Montevideo and picked up life as best they could. At first relatives of the dead were morally outraged that the bodies had been desecrated by cannibalism. From the viewpoint of Christian ethics, though, it was not certain that the men on the mountainside had sinned by eating the flesh of their dead companions. By and large, Roman Catholic moral theologians agreed that the act was justified under the circumstances. A few perhaps extravagantly, even likened the situation to the central act of the Eucharist, where the faithful consume the body and blood of Christ under the species of bread and wine.

Preaching at a thanksgiving Mass in Montevideo for the survivors and their families, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Eduardo Rodriguez said: "What happens to them will depend on us now, and on the love and understanding that we are capable of giving them." As a Chilean paper asked rhetorically in the headline of one story about the incident: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?

* The incident was reminiscent of the history of the Donner Party, a group of 87 pioneers who were trapped by early snow in the California mountains in 1846. When their food gave out,they resorted to cannibalism to survive. As George Keithley wrote in his narrative poem The Donner Party, "Men dug the dead out of the snow and took whatever would make a meal."

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