Álvaro Mangino was a last-minute addition to Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The aircraft had been chartered by the captain of Uruguay’s Old Christians amateur rugby team to get them from Montevideo to Santiago in Chile for a game, and most of the passengers on board were rugby boys or alumni from the Jesuit Stella Maris School. Mangino was neither but the flight had cost the team $1,600 and to make it financially viable friends and family had been invited on board. The 19-year-old had tenuous links to the team: his girlfriend Margarita was related to one of the players and he had befriended another at the Jesuit Seminario, a private school. Like many on board, he came from a prominent Uruguay family; at the time he was at an agricultural college.
Few had been abroad before, and when the flight left Montevideo in Uruguay the mood was light and celebratory; they played cards and ate sweets. That soon changed. Reports of bad weather in the Andes brought the flight to a stop in Mendoza, a town in Argentina. They set off again the following day, on October 13, 1972. An hour into the flight the pilot misjudged his location and began his descent too early, smashing into the side of a mountain in a valley known as the Glacier of Tears. Both wings and the aircraft’s tail were lost and 12 of the 45 passengers were killed instantly in what became known as both “the tragedy of the Andes” and “the miracle of the Andes”.
Mangino was one of 33 passengers to have survived the initial crash. He had been crouching with his feet on the seat in front and on impact his fibula was driven into his knee cavity. In the immediate aftermath he was trapped beneath the twisted steel of his seat — “From the knee down was completely loose,” he recalled, “just hanging there as if it didn’t belong to me” — until one passenger, a medical student called Roberto Canessa, pulled him free. “I told Álvaro to concentrate on anything else, and then quickly, I set the break,” Canessa said. “Tears ran down Álvaro’s cheeks, but he didn’t so much as grunt. I wrapped his leg tightly in a piece of torn shirt.”
For the first few weeks he was confined to a makeshift hammock at the rear of the craft, where an open “porch” had been assembled with a roof canopy; the injured were placed there in part to stop disturbing the others with their cries of pain, but the porch was freezing cold.
At the start, his injury meant that he couldn’t help as the survivors tended to the wounded, crafted blankets and mittens from the cushioning on the seats or used perfume as disinfectant. One of his jobs, which he did from one of the wrecked aircraft seats, was to filter water from the snow by holding an aluminium water-maker they had devised towards the sun, catching drops of water in empty wine bottles. Soon he was well enough to hobble around the fuselage, helping to tidy up.
Mangino was a practising Catholic and prayed most nights. Before leaving for the trip his girlfriend had given him a small cross and, clutching it to his chest, he would talk to the cross, “certain that she, from Carrasco, could hear him. He told her how his day had been, that he missed her and that he would return soon, every night and every time he was sad or lonely,” recalled Juan Caruso, the actor who played Mangino in the 2024 Netflix film of the crash, Society of the Snow.
As the survivors formed just that — a society of the snow — each had their role to play. Some were proactive, positive and resourceful. Others were fearful or panicked. Mangino, at first, irritated the other boys. One of the youngest, he was — many complained — spoilt and self-pitying. He annoyed one boy so much that he reportedly said that if he was his father he’d have beaten him.
“Mangino felt isolated,” wrote Piers Paul Read, who interviewed Mangino for Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. “He had not known many of the boys before and felt no restraint now at telling them to go to hell. In the days just following the accident he had been selfish and hysterical, but he came to work more for the group than most, in spite of his broken leg, and some of the other boys felt protective towards him.”
Ten days after the accident they learnt from a radio broadcast that the search mission had been called off. Spirits were low and they had run out of the meagre supplies they had scavenged from the suitcases — eight bars of chocolate, several jars of jam, a tin of mussels and almonds, some sweets, dates and bottles of wine. At first they tried to eat strips of leather from luggage or the material of seat cushions before several survivors began tentatively to suggest they try to eat the bodies of the dead.
Some were pragmatic; others were repulsed and refused the food. “All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home,” said Canessa, the medical student. Mangino partook, and though his leg was still broken he volunteered to cut the “meat” using a shard of windshield glass. At first this was small slivers of flesh or muscle, sometimes dried in the sun to make it more palatable; after a while they ate almost everything including lungs, heart and the brain.
As most were Catholic — they celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 — the decision was justified in part by comparing it to eating the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion. And their hunger was primitive and irrational; at the time they thought they had gone mad but later realised it had been the only sane thing to do, because it kept many of them alive.
By mid-December there were 16 of them left — several had died of injuries, starvation or hypothermia, a dozen in an avalanche which buried the rest in the fuselage for three days. Mangino had escaped by lying in the hammock. He didn’t take part in the scouting missions to look for dry land, but the mountains humbled him. “Being up here makes one realise how dreadful one was before,” he said. “I used to kick my brother if he annoyed me, or throw away the soup if it wasn’t just right. If only I could have that soup now.”
Near Christmas, three of the boys set off on another trek to find help. About ten days later a helicopter came to rescue the remaining survivors. “Those helicopters were the most beautiful symphony I’ve ever heard in my life, when they flew around us and took us out of that place,” Mangino said in a YouTube interview.
The boys were taken to a local hospital for treatment. Though few of them were in a critical condition, psychologists observed that they showed signs of psychotic behaviour, such as excessive talking and an inability to be left on their own. Mangino, like the others, had few qualms about telling the doctors and a priest called Father Andres Rojas who did the rounds what they had done to survive. Rojas said no sin had been committed and suggested Mangino take communion that afternoon.
When he was reunited with his family and girlfriend, the first thing Mangino did was to buy a jar of dulce de leche, which he ate in one go. It was hard to adapt to normal life — most became frenzied when presented with normal food — and the media circus around their survival, but eventually they were hailed as national heroes, Uruguay’s greatest source of pride since the 1950 World Cup victory.
Mangino, for his part, was certain he had been the beneficiary of a miracle and felt compelled to make use of the experience in some way. He felt touched by God and inspired to teach others the lesson of love and sacrifice, sharing his story through lectures and interviews. “We had an enormous desire to survive and faith in God,” he said. “Our group was always united. When the spirits of one went down, the rest made sure to raise them. Praying the rosary every night strengthened the faith of all of us, and this faith helped us get through. God gave us this experience to change us. I changed. I know now that I shall be different to what I was.”
After the crash, Mangino, born in 1953 in Montevideo, lived a quiet life in the Uruguayan capital with his wife Margarita Arocena and four children. He worked in the heating and air-conditioning business and kept out of the spotlight until Society of the Snow dragged him back into it; he went on set, participated in various promotional events and befriended the actor who played him.
One of his treasured possessions was the silver cross that had accompanied him for 72 days in the mountains. Like the other survivors, he sometimes returned there. In a final Instagram post in February last year, taken at base camp after his final climb to the site, he wrote: “Once we descended and reached the camp where we spent the night, the sky gave us a double rainbow. I like to think it was a sign from my friends who stayed on the mountain that they were happy we had come to visit them. I already knew it was my last climb, and I was saying goodbye.”
Álvaro Mangino, survivor of the Andes plane crash, was born on March 30, 1953. He died following a bout of pneumonia on March 29, 2025, aged 71
