By Mariano Buren Y Ricardo Auré*
A Uruguayan Military Plane disappeared in the Cordillera
“MENDOZA, 13 (AP) — A Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying 45 people, many of them members of a Uruguayan rugby team, disappeared today during a flight over the Andes mountain range between Mendoza and Santiago de Chile”. (“The New Province”, Saturday, October 14, 1972).
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There are 16 survivors of a plane crash
They belong to the Uruguayan plane that fell in the Andes 70 days ago. 8 have already been rescued and the rest will be rescued today. At the time of the tragedy, 21 died and, days later, buried by an avalanche, another 8.
“MENDOZA, 22 (Télam) — What can be described as one of the most dramatic episodes lived by man to subsist in the midst of the hostility of nature, today comes to an end for the 16 survivors of the Uruguayan plane Fairchild 227, shot down last October 13 in the mountains.
“Eight of the victims of the tragedy, which claimed 29 lives, are in the hospital in San Fernando, Chile, recovering from their stay of 70 days, at 6,000 meters, in the area of the Azufre River, some 200 kilometers from the trans-Andean capital…”. (“The New Province”, Saturday, December 23, 1972).
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Newsroom of “La Nueva Provincia”, Friday, November 4, 2011.
Roberto Jorge Canessa is 58 years old, almost 40 years older than when he was a medical student, a member of the Montevideo Old Christians Club rugby team and a passenger on the Fairchild Hiller FH-227D, a Uruguayan Air Force turboprop that took off from the runway Carrasco at 8:05 a.m. on Thursday, October 12, 1972, bound for Santiago de Chile.
Today he is a renowned doctor, specializing in pediatric cardiology, twice winner of the Grand National Prize for Medicine for his research on prenatal coronary diseases. He is also a frequent motivational speaker, invited by universities, companies and institutions around the world who want to hear his story, that of one of the 16 survivors of the plane crash known worldwide as “The Tragedy of the Andes”.
In the company of Laura, his wife and mother of his three children, Canessa was in Bahía Blanca for the first time. He came after an invitation from the Sportiva Society to offer an open talk at the Cine Plaza (N of the R: today Teatro Gran Plaza), entitled “Human groups in a crisis situation. A real experience”, in which he capitalizes on his experiences during that 72-day odyssey, highlighting the values that allowed him to cope with extreme situations and overcome them, even against all odds.
Group work, the optimization of resources and the qualities of each member, mutual respect, the value of positive leadership and decision-making based on a specific strategy are some of the aspects that Canessa addresses before audiences that recognize it as a true specialist. There are very few times when a speaker is so authorized to talk about the topic he proposes.
-The word “crisis” could also be understood, from the etymological point of view, as a transition towards growth. Why do you think it is insisted on associating it with the dramatic?
-Because I believe that the crisis is a moment in which one is in a situation in which one does not want to be. When we speak of “critical”, we speak of extreme or terrible situations in life that everyone, sooner or later, is going to touch. I understand what I am being asked but we say that, in the Andes, we were in a crisis situation.
-But it could be said that it was an emergency situation.
-Yes, or a borderline situation, because emergency sounds more like medicine to me, like a bleeding patient, out there due to my professional training. Like the emergency is something that one gets out of quickly. Ours, on the other hand, was something maintained over time. It is possible that those 72 days were a situation that is very similar to people who lose a child or who have a cancer situation. People who have their own Cordillera.
-What do you propose through your conferences?
-I seek to point out what happens inside ourselves in these critical or emergency moments. That is to say, what happens when you hit rock bottom, what springs you have to use to continue. What to hold on to in the toughest moments of life.
– Where is the value of what counts?
-We were a critical experiment, like guinea pigs put in a terrible situation. What happens at that moment? Well, I’m one of the guinea pigs that tells what happened to him. And that experience about behavior in certain situations is in the reflections that I can make in the talk, plus those offered by the public. The great value of this story, seen in retrospect, lies in being able to tell it ultimately as an experiment in human behavior, the need for adaptation, and how values change every day.
-What social nerve do you think they touched so that this story continues to be so well known?
-I think I have the answer. But what do you think it was?
-There is a mixture of admiration and curiosity. Especially morbid.
Yes, it is a very interesting item. I think it’s one of the keys to enter this story, because when people tell us: “You were saved because you ate the dead”, I always answer them: “After we ate the dead, we were exactly in the same place”. Despite everything that has been said, that is a part where we only buy time to continue living.
-Is there also a part of admiration?
-The story is valid because the world officially declared us dead. We were forgotten and abandoned, and then they saw that we turned up alive… I still remember when, in an interview with the BBC in London, they told me: “You are resurrected”. I replied: “No, we were always alive.” There is that human error of having decreed us dead in advance, and then the questions arise: And how did they do it? And how could the whole world be wrong? How can it be that we all gave them up for dead? What wrong assumptions did we make?
-Something ideal to be portrayed by Hollywood.
-Of course, the bad thing is that Hollywood gave a very Hollywood version of us. They had a reality and they distorted it to make it more romanticized.
Have you ever faced a situation as extreme as that?
-Yes, when my brother had an accident. He was clinically dead and I had to resuscitate him.
-With your experience in overcoming at least two critical instances, what did you learn?
-Last year we went to Chile to play a commemorative match, and one of the players had a cardiac arrest on the pitch. He had to be revived right there, almost at the foot of the Cordillera.
-Don’t go anymore.
-(Smiles) I looked at the Cordillera and thought it was telling us: “You guys back…”. The moment was terrible. Luckily there were about 10 doctors around to help, until a helicopter came with some probes and equipment to connect it. When it was all over, I thought about how weak and vulnerable we are. That is learning, something we must never forget.
-Now that many sense that before 2012 we are on the threshold of some kind of Apocalypse, do you think we are really going to be tested as a species?
We are a spoiled species. We have plenty of water and food, all our basic needs are met, we receive much more than we need, we do much less than we can, and we live complaining. That is the reality of our society. Until one day the plane crashes and you realize how good it was.
-What could be, in that case, the fall of the plane?
-When I say that, I mean that you give yourself a blow that makes you lose the joy of living, that transforms everything into a struggle to survive.
-In that fight, do you think that life is only limited to this earthly plane?
-No. I believe that there is an afterlife, that the soul transcends life time, that my soul is going to pass into some other state after this. In that sense, materialism goes against spirituality. I always say that I met a God in the Andes that is different from every day. One accompanied me, while the other forbade me everything.
How was that company?
-That God made me see that the problems of men belong to men and the problems of God belong to God, and that there is a superior logic that is difficult to understand. Why do some live and others not? Man needs to count on this superior strength when he feels that his own strength is weakening.
-What part of you will always be in the Andes?
-The impotence of man in front of the mountain, and the fact of knowing that what one believes impossible can be achieved.
– Is there any detail that has been sworn never to reveal publicly?
-Yes, what we take from the dead. That is something we will never tell.
-After 40 years of interviews, is there any question on the subject that you are already tired of?
-“What did you feel when the plane crashed?”, “Was it a rugby team?”, “Tell me about the Cordillera”, “How was the avalanche?”. It annoys me to be asked the facts that are already known. You have to look at it as a story to discuss how reality works, about behavior, values and ideas, where money is just paper, where each man is worth what he does, where many of the usual vanities are lost, where all known values change. It is curious that society later cast us in the role of heroes, taking our experience and trying to box it into the usual lanes, when it was something completely different from the usual.
-On the other hand, is there a question you would have liked to be asked that hasn’t come yet?
-A few years ago I would have liked to have been asked what advice I would give my children and how this experience reflected on them. But it’s already out of fashion. They are 30 years old and, when they kiss me, they prick me…
They live!
* The plane crashed on October 13, 1972. After 66 unsuccessful missions, the search was called off eight days later.
* The survivors endured temperatures between 25 and 42 degrees below zero. After a disputed decision, they decided to feed themselves with the meat of the corpses, except that of relatives and women.
* Roberto Canessa assumed leadership. With the seat covers he made gloves, boots with the cushions and glasses with the tinted plastic.
* On December 12, Fernando Parrado, Canessa and Antonio Vizintín set out in search of help. On the third day, Antonio was injured in a slip and returned to the wreckage of the plane.
* Ten days later, after having walked about 55 kilometers, on the other side of a river that they cannot ford because of the melting ice, Canessa and Parrado see a Chilean muleteer and send him a written message: “I came from a plane that fell in the mountains. I’m Uruguayan. I have an injured friend upstairs. There are 14 injured people left on the plane. We have to get out of here fast and we don’t know how. We don’t have food. We’re weak. When are they going to look for us up there? Please, no we can walk. Where are we? When are they coming?”
* The muleteer, Sergio Catalán, handed them some bread and went to warn the Carabineros. Ten hours later he returned with help.
* On December 22, guided by Parrado, two helicopters came to the rescue. The survivors were taken to Santiago.
* A month later, the deceased were buried 800 meters from the plane. On the cross it is read: “The world to his Uruguayan brothers”.
*Article originally published in the “Sunday” supplement of November 27, 2011
50 years after the Tragedy of the Andes: when one of the survivors visited Bahía Blanca