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5 de ene. de 2024 · Here's what to know about the true story behind Society of the Snow. How did the plane crash? On Oct. 12, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 took off from Montevideo, Uruguay, with 45...
- Megan Mccluskey
5 de ene. de 2024 · “It was the worst nightmare you can imagine,” a real-life survivor said of the 1972 Andes plane crash and the cannibalism that followed, an ordeal depicted in Society of the Snow.
14 de dic. de 2023 · New Spanish-language film Society of the Snow is based on the horrific events of a Uruguayan plane crash in 1972. Its sensitive take on the tragedy has it tipped for Oscars success. The...
- Overview
- Flight 571 crashes in the Andes
- Whatever it takes to survive
- A devastating avalanche
- Saving themselves
- The return home
The Uruguayan rugby team’s 1972 plane crash inspired the new Netflix film. It tells a story of disaster, endurance, death—and cannibalism.
Survivors of the Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes huddle in the fuselage of their wrecked aircraft on December 22, 1972, shortly after rescuers arrived. To survive for 72 days in the harsh environment, they resorted to eating the flesh of dead passengers.
On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into the Andes with 45 souls on board. After 72 days, only 16 survived.
This incident has inspired several films, books, and television series, ranging from 1993’s Alive to Showtime’s Yellowjackets. Most recently, Netflix’s Society of the Snow recounts the harrowing months on the mountaintop.
Flight 571 was a chartered flight on that October day. It was carrying members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, along with some friends and family. They were traveling from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, for a game. Only one passenger had no relation to the team.
As the plane neared its destination, the co-pilot—Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Lagurara, who was flying the plane—asked the Santiago airport for permission to land. The plane began its descent.
There was one problem: Lagurara and pilot Colonel Julio César Ferradas had misidentified the plane’s position. So when the plane descended from the clouds, it didn’t approach the airport’s landing strip—it crashed into a valley high in the mountains.
(This man survived the crash. Read Nat Geo's interview with him.)
Thirty-three survivors managed to pull themselves, and each other, from the wreckage. Then they faced an even greater challenge: staying alive in the frozen Andes, where temperatures plummeted below zero and blizzards dumped several feet of snow. The dry air was also dizzyingly thin at the high altitude.
Without medical supplies, heat, or food, the survivors used the wrecked plane as a shelter and repurposed its parts, turning luggage into walls and seat covers into blankets.
Though the survivors found a limited supply of food in the plane—like candy, wine, and jam—it did not last long.
The extreme cold and starvation had already begun to claim lives. The bodies stacked up, one after another. Within 10 days, six more had died. Those who didn’t die weakened.
So they reached a radical, if necessary, realization: They would need to eat the dead in order to live.
(Was the 'Colorado Cannibal' a villain or a victim? You decide.)
In the afternoon of October 29, a little more than two weeks after the crash, disaster struck. While the survivors rested in their makeshift shelter, a cascade of snow roared down the mountainside, burying the plane and taking the lives of eight more people.
“I nearly gave up when the avalanche struck us,” Canessa shared in an interview with National Geographic in 2016. “But then one of the other boys said, ‘Roberto, how lucky you are that you can walk for all of us.’ That was like a heroic infusion into my heart. He had broken legs—but I could walk. My mission was not to just think what was better for me, but what was better for the group.”
A small group opted to go on a rescue mission: Canessa, Nando Parrado, and Antonio Vizintín. The three young men would have to scale a mountain and hope they could find help on the other side. They spent weeks preparing.
The trio began their journey on December 12. Three days into the expedition, Vizintín returned to the camp so that Canessa and Parrado had a better chance of success with their limited rations.
(Survival depends on what's in your backpack. Here's what one explorer packs.)
On December 20, the pair spotted another human: Sergio Catalán Martínez, a Chilean herdsman. After the man brought help the next day, Parrado and Canessa led authorities to the 14 other survivors.
News of the so-called “miracle in the Andes” quickly spread around the world. Elation over the rescue soon gave way to horror when the survivors admitted they had eaten human flesh to stay alive.
They defended their actions. “You can’t feel guilty for doing something you didn’t choose to do,” Canessa told The Washington Post in 1978.
Nonetheless, the survivors carried the memory of cannibalism with them in the decades that followed. In his memoir, Canessa explained, “For us, taking this leap was a final break, and the consequences were irreversible: We were never the same.”
Though 16 young men came down the mountain, the remains of those who did not survive would never leave the Andes. They were laid to rest near the place where they died.
Left: Flight 571 crashed in the remote Andes Mountains on the Argentine border with Chile—and the survivors were ultimately rescued with the help of local farmers. In this image, relatives of passengers who died ride on horseback to visit the site.
Photograph by Mariana SUAREZ, AFP/ Getty Images
Society of the Snow (Spanish: La sociedad de la nieve) is a 2023 survival drama film directed by J. A. Bayona and based on Pablo Vierci's 2009 book of the same name, [5] [6] which details the true story of a Uruguayan rugby team's experience in 1972 after Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes mountains.
10 de ene. de 2024 · In October 1972, a plane carrying members of a rugby team from Uruguay, among others, crashed in the Andes. A group of survivors lived through the plane crash, only to face the frigid cold...
4 de ene. de 2024 · Society of the Snow: the horrific true story of the Andes disaster that shocked the world. Only 16 of the 45 passengers on board Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 survived the 1972 crash....
