After the accident of flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, which crashed on October 13, 1972 in the Andes mountain range, only 29 of the 45 people traveling on board the aircraft, including crew and passengers, managed to save their flight. life. To survive in extreme conditions and endure all types of adversity, those almost 30 survivors – of whom only 16 were finally rescued – They formed what was known as the ‘snow society’the name that gave title to the book and the film that deal with this tragedy.

For that snow society to work, there was a more or less specific distribution of roles; a cast in which the three Strauch cousins ​​were key, whom Jordi Évole will interview next SundayJanuary 28. The work of ‘Fito’, Daniel and Eduardo (agronomists and architects, respectively) was crucial to increasing the group’s chances of survival. Not only because some, like Eduardo, were who encouraged the rest of the group to consume meat of the deceased so as not to faint.

Also because it was precisely the three of them who were in charge of going to cut that meat that not all those who saved their lives in the accident ate. ‘Fito’, Daniel and Eduardo Strauch signed a kind of pact with the rest of their colleagues by which they tried to No one except them knew which deceased person the piece of meat belonged to. that they were eating; a pact of silence that, it seems, has continued to this day, as they themselves have reported on subsequent occasions.

Recently, and on the occasion of the release of Juan Antonio Bayona’s film, Eduardo Strauch gave an interview in which he spoke about this topic. In it, he assured that from the moment he assumed that it would be necessary to eat human flesh to leave the mountain range alive, he did not feel guilty again. And he took the opportunity to remember a telegram from Pope Paul VI in which he did not want to judge what the young people did to survive: ““He said what we had done was good.”

“Many people suffered a lot, many were waiting for what the Pope would tell us,” recalled Eduardo, who nevertheless made clear his position regarding what happened in those years. “YesIf (the Pope) had said that we had acted wrong, it would not have affected me in any way.“I had my conscience completely clear, I was alive,” he concluded. The Strauchs’ work went beyond the topic of meat; ‘Fito’, for example, invented the machine to melt ice and the sunglasses they used.