(CNN Spanish) – “I thought they were people just sightseeing.” With these words, in 1972, Sergio Catalán described the first thing he imagined when he saw Roberto Canessa and Fernando “Nando” Parrado, two of the survivors of the “Tragedy of the Andes.” who had climbed the Andes Mountains in search of ten days to help.
Canessa and Parrado were among the 16 survivors of the accident on October 13, 1972, when Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes en route to Santiago de Chile with 45 people on board, including 19 members of the Christian Bross School Rugby team in Uruguay.
In total, 29 of the passengers died (some immediately, others over the course of days). The 16 living people spent more than two months in the snow-capped mountains of the Andes, surviving thanks to the little food they had and even a diet based on human flesh.
But there was another factor that was crucial to everyone's survival: the Chilean muleteer Sergio Catalán.
Catalán's character appears briefly in the Netflix film The Snow Society, based on the tragedy. He is the first person the survivors meet after 72 days in the creek, and although he rides away, he is responsible for the rescue, and a decades-long bond has been formed between him and the survivors. This is his story.
Sergio Catalán, the muleteer who saved 16 lives
When Canessa and Parrado separated from the group in search of help, the survivors had already been stranded in the Andes for almost two months.
They decided to separate from the others because it was their only chance of survival because they had heard on the radio that the authorities had stopped searching efforts.
After climbing the mountain range from where they were staying for ten days, they reached a mountain peak and passed it. Once there, they changed from the snowy landscape to one full of life, Canessa said in 2020 as part of the Uruguayan Informal Breakfasts program.
“It came from the mountain range, from the glacier, where there is no life. And you come back: first you see water, then you see grass, then a lizard, then you see cows… but you're missing the man,” said Canessa, who was 19 at the time of the accident and is now a cardiologist.
“Have you really reached civilization?” We missed the man. And when I saw it, I said, 'We have a real opportunity for this tomorrow,'” he added.
Sergio Catalán, who died in February 2020, was working when he saw the two survivors of the “Tragedy in the Andes”.
The Chilean was a muleteer and was with the cattle when he saw the Uruguayans.
“When I first saw them I was rounding up the cattle, but I thought they were people just out sightseeing. Then when I saw them running towards me, almost to the point where they could shout at me, they made me.” [señales] with their hands, but I didn't understand what they were saying,” Catalán said in a 1972 interview with Televisión de Chile, included in the documentary El arriero on the YouTube channel Contacto.
Canessa and Parrado were unable to get closer to Catalán because of a natural obstacle: a stream that did not allow them to get to the side where the muleteer was. In reality it was not a wide stream, but the rapid current prevented passage. In addition, the noise of the current was so strong that the words of the Uruguayans could not be heard.
“They had nothing to communicate with. Nothing. They didn’t have paper, they didn’t have a pencil,” Catalán told Contacto in a 2011 interview included in the 2013 documentary.
Catalán went to a friend's animal shelter to get a piece of paper and a pencil, and he gave both things to Canessa and Parrado so they could write a note and thus find out what was going on.
And the story he read in that note is the incredible odyssey we all know today as the “Tragedy of the Andes.”
This note was written by Parrado. Some of his words on the paper were the following: “I come from a plane that crashed in the mountains, I am Uruguayan, we have been traveling for 10 days, I have a wounded friend upstairs.” [Canessa, que no bajó a la orilla del arroyo por una lesión]14 people were injured on the plane. We have to get out of here quickly and we don't know how. We have no food, we are weak. When will they examine us upstairs?
Sergio Catalán gave up his activities to help them. He toured 120 kilometers on horseback to report that he had found two survivors of a plane crash.
Catalán, who was on the Chilean side of the mountains, traveled “all day and one night” with the message to take it to the authorities, he told Contacto. It took 10 hours on horseback to deliver the message to the carabineros of the town of Puente Negro.
Sergio Catalán climbs on a horse with Roberto Canessa at his side during the 30th anniversary of the Andes tragedy on October 12, 2002. (Source: JULIO CASTRO/AFP via Getty Images)
At first the authorities assumed he was drunk, but the note from “Nando” Parrado was conclusive evidence that he was telling the truth, and so they set out to find the two Uruguayans.
Catalán first saw Canessa and Parrado on December 21, 1972. The muleteer spent the entire day notifying the authorities. On December 22, helicopters arrived at the crash site where the remaining 14 survivors were. According to Contacto, rescue operations lasted two days due to bad weather conditions.
Canessa told Informal Breakfasts that despite the years following the rescue, the good relationship with Catalán was maintained, up to several meetings and the creation of an unbreakable bond that lasted decades.
For his part, Carlos Paéz, another survivor of the accident and whose father organized expeditions to search for the survivors, said that Sergio Catalán was like a father to the entire group.
“It is a difficult moment because a chapter of our story is coming to an end and he was like a father to us. “We had a lasting bond over these 47 years,” Paéz told CNN Chile after the death of 91-year-old Catalán.
Sergio Catalán, “a great man with a great family. We owe him our lives.”
With information from CNN's Darío Klein and Karen Esquivel.