Meet the Man Who Survived a Plane Crash by Eating Human Flesh to Stay Alive

This article originally appeared on VICE US March 2016

Would you eat a hand? A human hand? What if you were really hungry?

"Staying alive was always the main task, for which it was necessary to eat well, but not from a rational decision, rather from an instinctive imperative. I always had a hand or something in my pocket, and when I could, I would begin to eat, to put something in my mouth, to feel that I was getting nourished."

These are the words of Pedro Algorta, who was stranded in the Andes mountains for 71 days following a plane crash in 1972, and ate the hands—as well as thigh meat, arms, and essentially anything that could provide nourishment—of both those who didn't survive the impact and the subsequent two months. Of the 40 passengers and five crew who took off on the fateful Uruguay flight to Chile, only 16 survived after the plane crash, an avalanche, and hypothermia. Those who did make it back to humanity—after an epic ten-day hike for help by Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa—survived for the most part on a combination of miracle-style mental toughness, group endeavor, and desperate cannibalism.

It's a little strange talking face-to-face with someone who ate a hand. When we met in an exceptionally loud café, I kept looking at Algorta's teeth, at how strong they looked, thinking, I wonder if eating hands made his teeth strong. At 65, he seems a good ten years younger, and you think, m aybe all that thigh meat has imbued him with a sort of semi-eternal youth.

Algorta is blasé about the whole eating-a-hand-in-the-middle-of-a-traumatic-mountain-experience thing. In his book Into the Mountains, newly translated into English and ostensibly what we're here to talk about, he explains plainly how the surviving group's decision to eat the frozen dead was made from a place of cold, distant logic: eat the flesh of those who perished or perish along with them. Today, he's much the same—unapologetic in a way that's so far from apologetic that it transcends the notion of apology—explaining cannibalism as plainly and matter-of-fact as eating a slice of bread if you were hungry and facing death. "Well," Algorta explains, always skirting carefully around words such as 'I,' 'ate,' and 'hands.' "That was a decision that was taken not with our minds—it's not like an authority figure came and said, 'Hey guys, I know what you have to do!' It was a decision that was taken with our stomachs."

I spoke to him about hand-eating, surviving in a group without squabbling, and how often he thinks about all the people he ate after going back to real life and just trying and enjoy a nice stew.

VICE: A lot of the crash survivors have different accounts of what happened after the crash, and due to the nature of time and memory they conflict each other quite a lot—names change, roles are altered, stuff like that. Did you find your story was scrutinized at all? What made you tell it now?
Pedro Algorta: Well, we are a group of guys that, 40 years ago, had this tremendous experience, and since then each one of us has followed his route, so we are quite different, and that has allowed us to look back and see our stories from a different perspective. And for 35 years this was a story which I didn't talk about. There was a backpack in the corner of my room, and I heard my friends talk about their story, and I thought it was my story, too. So at the time when I decided to open my mouth and start to talk about it, I realized that the way I saw my story is different, because it's mine, no one experienced what I experienced and no one has seen this side. But I realized that everyone has their own story, which is absolutely true. I don't claim to be the owner of the truth or whatever; I feel that all of us have the right to tell the story by themselves. This is mine, it is how I experienced it, what I learned from it and what I brought over from the mountains into my normal life.

What's it like being in a plane crash?
Getting into a plane crash is a very near-death situation, where you don't know if you're going to survive or not and you have instances of panic and you lose control of yourself and of your surroundings. You are being thrown into the air and anything can happen, and that was what I experienced there. The plane was shaking like chaos, and bumping from one mountain into the other, and finally we got to the bottom of a valley surrounded by mountains. At that time the sounds finished and everything was silent, and it was snowing softly and there in the plane was us survivors

You can buy Pedro Algorta's book, Into the Mountains: The Extraordinary True Story of Survival in the Andes and Its Aftermath, online at Amazon.

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