Uruguayan survivor of the 1972 Andes plane crash, died on March 29th 2025, aged 71.
Mangino was a passenger on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was carrying a young Uruguayan rugby team and a few others to Chile for a match in 1972. The plane hit a mountain a little after 3:30pm; both wings sheared off and the fuselage slid down to rest in the Valley of Tears, at 11,500 feet. The pilot and co-pilot were killed instantly.
The survivors organised themselves into what some later called the "society of the snow" (after the journalist Pablo Vierci's book of the same name). Two medical students, Roberto and Gustavo, tended the wounded. A hierarchy and division of labour emerged almost immediately: some melted snow for water, others planned expeditions to find help.
Mangino's left leg was completely broken below the knee after the crash. Roberto, then 19, reset the bone so expertly that a surgeon later said he could not have done better.
After 72 days, an expedition party made contact with a horseman and rescue helicopters arrived on December 21st. Sixteen passengers survived.
The crash site was too high for birds or lichen. The survivors ate the bodies of their dead companions. Mangino found the first day's raw meat impossible to swallow, but eventually became a "cutter"—his job was to chop the flesh into pieces so small that it was impossible to tell which part of the body it came from. At first they ate only muscle; eventually they consumed kidneys, liver, heart, brains and marrow.
Mangino worked as a businessman. He rarely spoke about the crash, even to his own family, having hoped for compassion from the outside world but finding mostly shock.
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, But it's very funny -- did you ever try buying them without money?