En el año 1972 partió de Montevideo, con destino a Santiago de Chile, un avión Fairchild F227 de las Fuerzas Aéreas uruguayas en el que viajaba un equipo de rugby y sus acompañantes. Pero en realidad les aguardaba un destino muy distinto del que ellos habían proyectado. Las infernales condiciones meteorológicas determinaron la catástrofe, y el aparato se estrelló en Los Andes.
Sólo dieciséis de los cuarenta y cinco pasajeros que viajaban en el avión sobrevivieron al accidente y a los casi tres meses de indescriptibles rigores que compartieron con el hambre, el frío y el dolor. Sin otras provisiones, se vieron obligados a enfrentarse al horror de alimentarse con la carne de sus compañeros muertos, en un acto desesperado con conservar la vida. ¡Viven! relata con toda suerte de detalles esta escalofriante peripecia y la de los familiares que en ningún momento dejaron de buscarlos.

403-1

This is the gripping, dramatic, grim and thought-provoking account of a group of young Uruguayan rugby players and their family and friends stranded in the snow capped Andes after their plane crashed when the pilot misjudged his location and wrecked his aircraft one day in October 1972. A number of passengers and crew perished in the crash itself or died of their injuries shortly thereafter. Even so there were some 29 survivors at this point of the original 45 passengers and crew. The survivors had very little food to share among them while waiting to be rescued, and soon they faced the inevitability of death .....until they took the shocking but necessarily life-saving step of eating the bodies of their dead friends and fellow passengers and crew. The account of these events is very detailed and entirely matter of fact and unsensationalised. It would be easy to be appalled and disgusted by this, but without this recourse, there have been no eventual survivors at all. In the end, after the deaths of 8 in an avalanche, and a further few from a combination of injuries and malnutrition, 16 of the boys eventually made it, after two of them managed to find a way out of the barren area where they were stranded by scaling a mountain, and raised the alarm. This is a great and almost spiritual account of reportage, written only two years after the events from the accounts of the survivors. ( )

One of those narratives that you just can't shake out of your head. ( )

8427938284