The former Uruguayan rugby player, Roberto Canessa, states serenely: “My friends transplanted my life.” Canessa was one of the 45 people who were traveling inside the Uruguayan Air Force plane that crashed in the middle of the Andes mountain range on October 13, 1972. The 69-year-old man, who was 19 when traveling with the team youth rugby Old Christians, He assures in the video that accompanies this news that the tragic accident changed the course of his life and of all his companions.
In the video you can see the stories of some of the survivors who spent more than 70 days under the snow, without communication with the world and without access to basic supplies. “We ate the soles of the shoes, the leather of the clothes, some cigarettes and toothpaste,” says engineer Roy Harley. The group also fed on the meat of some of their colleagues who died in the accident, since the plane was traveling with hardly any food, beyond eight bars of chocolate, three small jars of jam, a can of mussels, some candies and several bottles of wine that they shared in small quantities. “We had to make the decision to eat the bodies for energy,” adds Harley.
The plane, which was descending to land in Santiago, fell in the mountains of the border between Chile and Argentina, a remote area with difficult access. The artist Carlos Páez comments in the video on the difficulty of maintaining optimism during the rescue: “The permanent thing was the no, but our great merit was that when we didn’t, we said yes,” shares Páez.
50 years after the accident, this story that moved the world will be told again and will become a new Netflix movie. The Snow Society, Directed by the Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona, it will tell some of the stories of the survivors of one of the greatest air tragedies in history.
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