MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Hero of Andes crash looks back 34 years

Over and over again during his 72-day ordeal in the Andes, Nando Parrado would tell himself, “I am already dead, I am already dead.” That mantra allowed him to vanquish the fear that gripped him, and perhaps also explains why, when given a miraculous second chance at life, he has lived ever since with such gusto.

Parrado, 56, is perhaps the best-known of the 16 survivors of the crash of a Uruguayan Air Force plane in the Andes Mountains in October 1972 as it was carrying his rugby team to a match in Chile. It was he who, with a single companion, trekked through the harsh cordillera with virtually no supplies or protection and eventually guided rescuers back to the crash site to save his friends and teammates.

Since that deliverance, chronicled in the best-selling book "Alive" and a subsequent movie, Parrado has been a race car driver, television host, motivational speaker, entrepreneur and, most recently, author of a book called "Miracle in the Andes."

But no matter what he does, he said, his actions are guided by the lessons learned and the conversations about life, death, God and religion that took place during his struggle to survive.

"We were lucky, extremely lucky," he said. "We didn't have any food, clothes or water, and they weren't searching for us. So how could we survive? I lost everything - my family, friends and future - but I was resurrected. I came back to life from the grave."

Even after nearly 35 years, Parrado confronts curiosity about his experience everywhere he goes. The trials of "an untested boy who had never really suffered" - who could "be studying math in my room and 48 hours later be trying to survive on a glacier, like an animal" - force people to speculate how they would behave in a similarly extreme situation.

"This is like the Titanic or the first man on the Moon," he said. "A lot of things combined to make this a great story, one that I don't think will ever happen again, because now there are cellphones and Blackberries and GPS devices on every plane and the rescuers would find them in one hour."

But behind the world's continuing fascination with the ordeal, Parrado acknowledged, is the inescapable and grisly truth that "we broke a human taboo that was very big."

"We ate human flesh with complete knowledge and acceptance of what we were doing."

Parrado's mother and younger sister were among those who died there in the Andes, his sister succumbing to injuries and cold as he held her in his arms. His awareness that theirs "would be the last two bodies" to be consumed by the group was one of the things that drove him to climb through the mountains on a quest that many of his teammates thought was impossible.

Before he left, he gave the other survivors permission to consume the bodies of his mother and sister, preserved in the snow near the wreckage of the plane. But the idea of having to eat their flesh himself, he said, was too awful to consider.

Mountain climbers have hailed Parrado's nine-day journey as one of the greatest mountaineering feats ever. But he scoffs at the notion that he did something heroic. "I don't want this to be seen as an epic trek of superhuman beings, because I was so afraid, so humiliated by the size of those mountains," he said. "It looks like courage from the outside, but I had this physical fear in my stomach. And I was thinking of me, not of saving the other guys.

"You have to, because the pressure is so great that you cannot elaborate on friendship and beautiful thoughts. There was no space for that."

After his return to Uruguay, Parrado went to work at his father's hardware store. He is a part-owner of that business even now, but soon found that it was not enough to satisfy him. So he took up professional automobile racing, tutored by the likes of Jackie Stewart and Mario Andretti.

Parrado knows that it is tempting for others to see his love of race cars, which continues today with weekend rallies, as stemming from some kind of immortality complex, from a conviction that having survived the Andes he could survive anything. But he swears it is not that way at all.

"I'm not a daredevil, foot-to-the-metal-and-let's-see-what-happens kind of guy," he said. "I'm quite aware of the consequences of an accident, but I approach things very calmly. I'm very relaxed because I know what's going on."

Parrado's yearning for adventure seems only fitting. As a child, he said, he would leaf through his family's collection of National Geographic magazines, read novels of derring-do in exotic places and peruse atlases, wondering what those places were really like.

Today, Parrado is a host and narrator of National Geographic television specials. His production company here also makes a pair of weekly automobile and racing programs, a travel show and a program on fashion and beauty whose host is his wife, Veronique, whom he met on the Formula One circuit in Europe.

In 2001 and 2002, Uruguay was drawn into the financial crisis that struck its much larger neighbor, Argentina, with banks and businesses collapsing. Parrado's friends and partners were frantic, spending sleepless nights worrying that their companies would not survive, and marveled at his composure.

"Those endless nights in the Andes were terribly, terribly, terribly cold, and so we burned all the money we had," he said. "I can tell you that a $1 bill burns in the same amount of time as a $100 bill."

For many years Parrado simply did not want to talk in public about his experiences and beliefs.

He and the other survivors would meet in Montevideo periodically to reminisce, "but I was busy racing my cars and leading my life."

In the early 1990s, however, a friend invited him to a conference in Mexico. And there, invited to speak, all the memories that had piled up inside came spilling out. He now travels the world addressing business and university groups on topics like leadership and creativity under stressful conditions.

That, in turn, led him to start putting down on paper the memories that eventually became his book. He originally envisioned something modest "for my daughters and grandsons, because after three generations, nobody remembers." But the book has become an international best seller.

In March, Parrado returned to the site of the crash, his wife and their two daughters accompanying him there for the first time. His daughters told him that they wanted "to see the place where they were born," as he put it, and were moved by what they saw.

But for him, the visit only reinforced what he has felt all along about existence and destiny.

"I think that life is simpler than we tend to think," he said. "We look for answers and more answers. But there are no answers. Things happen in life, good things and bad. People say why did it happen to me? Well, why not?

"Some people win the lottery and others die in a car crash. It happens and there is nothing we can do about it. The universe doesn't care what happens to you."

By Larry Rohter The New York Times