Never give up

25.Ago.2012

 

EXHIBITION ABOUT THE ANDES SURVIVORS IS LAUNCHED. 

The exhibition “they had to be Uruguayan” was inaugurated, showing for the first time in Uruguay clothes and elements that the survivors of the Andes tragedy had to use to survive in the mountains. 

The 16 survivors of the Andes tragedy who were isolated for 73 days at the top of the mountain range after a plane crash in 1972, inaugurated on Wednesday and exhibition I Montevideo with objects taken from the mountain, turning them into a “manual for attitudes when faced with adversity”.

The exhibition “they had to be Uruguayan”, which will be open for a month in the BGMOCA center in Montevideo, shows for the first time in the country, the clothes and tools the young rugby players used to survive in the mountain. It is easy to perceive the terrible circumstances they had to endure until they were rescued.  

On 13th October 1972, a plane which was transporting a team of rugby players and various family members crashed in the middle of the mountain range on the way to Santiago de Chile. 

Only 16 of the 45 passengers and crew members survived the “Andes tragedy”, as it soon became called. The terrible trials and tribulations that they endured have been portrayed in films and literature.

According to Roberto Canessa, who together with Fernando Parrado were the ones who managed to make it through an 11 day walk in the snow and were able to contact a Chilean mule driver to give the world the news that they were still alive, the exhibition is “a manual” to explain “what attitude must be had in the face of adversity”. 

"The 16 survivors have agreed to assume this educational role since we had such a hard time and we were the guinea pigs of a situation like this, it’s good for people to be able extract teachings from what happened to us”. 

Apart from the tools and clothes that were used throughout those days in the mountains, there are some parts of letters from people who didn’t make it out alive, speaking about the terrible situation and the need they had toe at the remains of their friends that had passed away, without ever losing faith that they were going to be rescued. 

“Be strong! Life is hard but it deserves to be lived, even in suffering. Courage” reads a fragment of a letter written by Arturo Nogueira a little before his death in the mountain. 

Canessa explained that he preserved part of the clothes that appear in the exhibition today because his father in law told him to, saying that one day they would build a museum. He pointed out that the shoes with which he had made that last walk in the mountains, as his favorite. “I look at the soles all worn out, and I remember the rocks and peaks and all the uncertainties we had to go through – with only the sun to guide us” he said.

Virginia Robinson, the person responsible for the exhibition and on of the promoters, told EFE that the most impacting thing for the audience will be to be a witness of what was lived at that moment, and knowing that “even in true moments of hardship their final message was one of faith and courage”.