“Today we start cutting up the dead to eat them, we have no other choice.”
On the pages of an aviation notebook, Gustavo NicolichCoco for his friends, a 20-year-old Uruguayan who intended to play a rugby match with his club in Chile, wrote what was happening to him, something that would later become a human survival feat that would shock the world.
Eight days before, the October 13, 1972the Fairchild plane of the Uruguayan Air Force that was taking them to Santiago de Chile collided with a mountain in the snowy Andes mountain range.
The plane broke in two, some died when they were ejected from the aircraftothers in the impact against the front of the aircraft when it touched down in a valley at 3,500 meters above sea level.
For those who remained alive, a merciless 72 day stay Isolated from everything, with very low temperatures during the day, intolerable at night, and almost without elements to survive.
40 passengers – most of them rugby players, friends and family – and five crew members took off from Montevideo; 16 could tell it.
Coco Nicolich captured the horror of what they were experiencing in her own handwriting, including anthropophagy: eat the bodies of the dead to be able to continue.
“I, for my part, asked God in everything possible that this day never came, but it came and we have to face it with courage and faith. Faith because I came to the conclusion that the bodies are there because God put them, and Since the only thing that matters is the soul, I don’t have to have great remorse.”, said.
“And if the day came and I could save someone with my body, I would gladly do it,” he continued noting.
Those who remained alive had formed “The Snow Society”, as they called it. A way of life far from the known world, with other rules, established for survival in a more than extreme context. A vicissitude that no one could ever imagine.
“The Snow Society” gave its name to a documentary by the Uruguayan Gonzalo Arijón, and from it a book by the Uruguayan Pablo Vierci – who knew many of the protagonists since school – emerged, published in 2008.
Based on that book, The Spaniard Juan Antonio Bayona directed the film of the same name that premieres this week in Latin America and Spain, and that will arrive on Netflix in January.
“The Snow Society” was nominated for best non-English language film for the 2024 Golden Globes and represents Spain at the Oscars.
The setting and environment in the story
Coco Nicolich was part of a group of amateur rugby players from the Old Christians clubformer students of the Stella Maris Catholic private school, founded by the Christian Brothers congregation, who were traveling with friends and family to play a friendly match against the Chilean Old Boys.
Coco liked to write and that’s why she decided to tell what she was experiencing in two letters, one dedicated to her parents, her three brothers and her girlfriend, and the other exclusively to her girlfriend.
In his narration, he sweetened some aspects of what they were experiencing, especially at the beginning of his first epistle.
“We are in a divine place, everything surrounded by mountains and with a lake in the background that is going to thaw as soon as the thaw begins. “We are all very well.”
Of the 45 who were on flight 571, 18 had already died that day.
It was October 21, 1972. They had not yet begun to feed on the bodies of the deceased.
Meanwhile, at home in Montevideo, his family still put a plate for him on the table at mealtime.
“The existing morale is incredible and there is permanent collaboration between everyone. Roy [Harley]Diego [Storm]Robert [Canessa]Carlitos [Páez] and I are perfectly fine, just a little skinnier and bearded,” he said.
“Last Sunday, two planes passed over us, twice each, so we are very calm and, what’s more, convinced that they are going to come looking for us. The only thing that makes us doubt a little is that, since the plane deviated from the route, who still knows if they saw us. Our faith in God is incredible (you could say it is common in certain cases like this), but I think it is far above.”
With the diversion of the plane, Nicolich was referring to the fact that, as the weather conditions were not good that day, the pilot and co-pilot had decided not to cross directly to Santiago but rather went south first, to a place where the passage was more difficult. sure, only to cross the mountain range there.
“Do you wonder how we live? Well, the truth is that the plane is not yet perfectly conditioned and at the moment it is not a great hotel, but it is going to be quite good.”
“We have plenty of water, since we make it constantly. Food, we were lucky to have one can of Costamar left, four cans of sweets, three cans of seafood, some chocolates and two small bottles of whiskey. Of course [que] The food is not very abundant, but it is enough to live on,” he detailed.
The reality was that Those scarce foods were rationed to such an extreme that, for example, when there was almost nothing left, one of the survivors ate only one peanut with chocolate in three days: the first ate the chocolate coating and kept the peanut in a pocket, the second broke the seed and ate half , and the third finished it.
“The days here, when they are nice, you can be outside until about six in the afternoon; Now, if it is cloudy, we generally stay in the hotel (plane) and only a small crew goes out to look for snow,” Nicolich said.
“I’m dying of cold”
The young man then described the conditions in which they had to spend the days in that “hotel.”
“The rooms are not very comfortable, since the rooms are for 26 people (we couldn’t get less), but it’s something. The space is a little limited, since what was left of the plane was from the cabin (which is destroyed) to the part of the wings, which were scattered far behind.”
He said that to make room in the fuselage, They moved the seats outside and removed the synthetic fabric that covered them to transform it into blankets.
Coco slept next to someone who, until that flight, was a complete stranger, Ramón “Moncho” Sabella, a friend of teammates from the club who joined the trip because he thought a vacation would be good for him.
“I’m freezing to death, I can’t take it anymore, I’m freezing.”, he told Moncho the first night in the mountain. Next to them they had the body of a woman they did not know either, dying, between irons and seats, against the pilot’s cabin.
Moncho lay on him and hit him so that his body temperature rose.
This continued in the following nights. They held hands and put them in their pockets, and exhaled at each other to keep warm..
“As you will see, little by little we are improving comfort,” Coco wrote optimistically.
Later he told his family how much he loved them, and even that all he wanted was to get to Montevideo to marry his girlfriend, if she wanted it too.
“But I can’t think much about all this because I cry a lot and they told me to try not to cry as I get dehydrated. It’s amazing, isn’t it?,” she lamented.
The second letter
Coco Nicolich continued writing what happened in the tragedy in a second letter, this time addressed exclusively to his girlfriend, Rossina Machitelli.
“Today was great, a divine sun and a lot of heat,” he began by saying.
“Today, apart from everything, was a slightly depressive day since many people became discouraged (we’ve been here for 10 days), but luckily I haven’t gotten discouraged yet, since just thinking about what I’m going to see again, incredible strength comes to me.”
“Another cause of general discouragement is that In a while we will run out of food. We have nothing left but 2 cans of seafood (girls), 1 bottle of white wine and a little grenadine, which undoubtedly for 26 men (well, also boys who want to be men) is nothing,” she explained.
And there he told him how they were going to start feeding.
“One thing that will seem incredible to you; It seems to me too. Today we start cutting the dead to eat them, we have no other choice”.
He went on to say that if he died he was okay with them eating his body to try to survive.
“When you see me you’re going to be scared. I am filthy, bearded, a little skinny, with a large cut on my head, another on my forehead that has already healed, and a small one that I got today working in the airplane cabin, as well as small cuts on my legs and neck. shoulder. But, with everything, I am very well,” he wrote, looking for the positive side of the tragedy.
Then he told him about his hopes of being found, and said that if the search efforts were suspended, He would be part of the group that went out to find help..
“In three or four days, when we regain some strength, I think a group of us will set out to cross the part of the mountain range that we have left, which I hope [que] be little.”
“We have no idea [de] where are we since when we flew to Chile the pilot thought he had passed Curicó and in Chile they told him to descend. He immediately slowed down and in a few seconds we caught some air holes that made us go down 1,000 to 2,000 feet, and when the mechanic (who is alive with us) gave him all the power possible, it was already too late.
“The crash was incredible, […] The tail caught on the mountain and the wings flew at once. The plane immediately began to slide down the mountain at the same time that snow entered through the gaps and froze us little by little, until it suddenly stopped.”
Soon he remembered the first night in the mountain range again.
“It soon got dark and it was the longest, coldest and saddest night of my life. It seemed like the descriptions of Dante’s Inferno: there were screams after screams, an infernal cold that entered from all sides since we couldn’t cover anything and some passengers that we hadn’t been able to completely remove from their places, and they had They had to sleep hooked in their places and unfortunately the next morning several died. Undoubtedly no one will ever be able to suffer again what we suffered that nightbut luckily it’s over.”
“Thinking about everything I have and never being able to value it; It is incredible, I have everything I want and I am dissatisfied with everything,” she reflected.
After 10 days of being on the mountain, the search stopped. The Chilean Air Rescue Service said that if they had not turned up by then, they would no longer be found alive.
A group of survivors managed to fix a small Spika and tuned in to a station that was just talking about them.
Coco heard what they were saying on the radio and ran to inform her companions: “I have two news to give you, one bad and one good. The bad news is that the search was suspended. The good thing is that now living or dying depends only on us”.
The miracle of the Andes
Gustavo Nicolich’s father was in Chile, searching for his lost son in the hope that one day he would appear.
It was December 1972 and Christmas was approaching.
And at one point, the news that some Uruguayans had appeared from the middle of the mountain range paralyzed society, but even more so the family members.
Coco’s mother, Raquel Arocena, heard that there was a boy named Gustavo on the list of survivors. Without hesitation, she got on the first plane to Santiago.
Upon arriving at the hospital, the elevator door opened and Gustavo Zerbinowho was trying to escape, appeared.
Raquel fainted. The Gustavo on the list was not her son.
On the night of October 29, an avalanche destroyed the fuselage. Coco Nicolich and seven others died buried in the snow.
Gustavo Zerbino gave Raquel a kiss and said: “I have a letter for you from your son.” Only then did he react.
Zerbino had taken them from a pocket of his namesake’s jacket, attached to his heart, and had kept them in a bag with other belongings of the dead to give them to his loved ones.
“When I realized that no one else was ever going to go up to that place because it had never been stepped on by a man and it was like a grain in the desert, I felt within me that if I didn’t bring some tangible memory of those people, their family I wasn’t going to be able to grieve,” says Zerbino speaking with BBC Mundo.
He felt it was a mission he had to accomplish.
Before dying, Coco showed him where she kept them and said: “If something happens to me, please hand over these letters.”.
His parents and siblings read them as a family. He was very hard, very emotional, recalls his brother Alejandro in conversation with BBC Mundo.
But they were the way to veil him through a farewell message, something that others could not do, and to understand from his own words the act of anthropophagy, even with his remains.
“I feel proud that he said it. I know he said it because it is written. And perhaps that is why my father was one of those who supported the survivors the most,” says Alejandro.
Gustavo Nicolich Sr. traveled to the mountains in February 1973 to accompany the father of another of the deceased who wanted to bury his son’s remains in Uruguay.
When he returned, his face was different. She had seen, now without snow to camouflage the landscape, the carnage that that place had become. AND “there was nothing left of his son.”
“Nothing,” Alejandro reiterates.
Some fragments of the second letter took a while to become known publicly because his parents preferred to keep the description of cannibalism private for a time, despite the fact that the survivors spoke about it days after being rescued.
Today, the two letters are jealously guarded on Raquel’s nightstand, who at 96 years old continues to commemorate her son’s truncated life every time she can.
Click here to read more stories from BBC News World.
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