Showtime‘s Emmy-nominated hit “Yellowjackets” tells the story of a team of high school soccer players who survive a harrowing plane crash and must fend for themselves in the wilderness.
Ultimately, each surviving woman emerges from the wreckage with her own version of the traumatic events.
Fernando Parrado, 72, can relate.
Nearly 50 years ago, he and his rugby teammates were on the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The plane was carrying 45 passengers when it crashed into the Andes Mountains. 12 died instantly.
The remaining people fought for survival for months, stranded in the snow. By the time they were rescued after 72 days, only 16 men were alive.
Parrado remains close with his remaining teammates, but he’s adamant about only sharing his version of the events that transpired and not being interviewed alongside other survivors.
“Some create their own histories,” he told The Post.
On October 13, 1972, the Old Christians Club rugby union team chartered a plane to fly from Uruguay to Chile for a tournament and recruited family and friends to join the trip to afford the travel.
As the aircraft flew over the Andes nearly crossing over into Chile, the plane crashed into the snowy depths of the mountains. A search team was initially sent out to find the plane but the pilot’s final reports were incorrect and the white plane was nearly unrecognizable in the mounds of white snow.
Parrado spent the first four days following the crash in a coma, believing he was dead. “It was so dark. Darker than black,” he said. But his increasing thirst made him realize he wasn’t dead. He eventually awoke to learn that his mother, sister and two childhood best friends were dead and that he was stranded in the middle of the Andes with severe injuries.
“I understood at the beginning we were doomed,” said Parrado, who wrote a bestselling book about his ordeal, “Miracle in the Andes: The True Story of Surviving 72 Days on the Mountain Against All Odds.”
Team captain, Marcelo Perez, took inventory of everything edible, which wasn’t much. More people began to succumb to their injuries from the crash and the harsh elements as the terrifying days wore on and the meager supplies dwindled.
The snow preserved the bodies of the dead and as time passed, quiet conversations about the meat left on the corpses grew until the question was raised to the whole group.
Unlike “Yellowjackets,” which dances around the potential cannibalism, Parrado doesn’t shy away from the topic.
“Life is very simple sometimes,” he said. “Hunger is the most primal fear of human beings.”
On the 10th day stranded in the mountains, the starving survivors finally acknowledged the fact that they would have to eat their friends’ corpses if they wished to avoid death themselves. Some tried to resist for as long as possible, but eventually gave in to the horrific reality and took a bite.
“It’s not that it’s not as hard as it seems.” Parrado insisted. “There’s no food, there’s nothing. What do you do? I mean, you don’t want to die.”
The men also bravely promised their own bodies to the group. “We made a pact. If I die I give you my body so you can survive,” Parrado said.
As time continued to drag on, some conceded to their impending death as small groups tried but failed to trek out in hopes of finding help. On their 61st day on the mountain, Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio “Tintin” Vizintin took off in search of civilization as the meat supply ran low.
“We should have died,” Parrado said. But he had decided from the beginning, “I’m not going to die sitting down.”
Vizintin eventually turned back to leave the other two men with more supplies in hopes of allowing them to travel farther.
Together, Parrado and Canessa scaled down what they later learned was a nearly 17,000-foot peak and traveled through the wilderness for 10 days before they stumbled upon a Chilean farmer who took them in and called the authorities.
The two men led rescuers back to their friends, and the survivors were brought to a hospital in Santiago, Chile, on December 23.
The former teammates went on to have full, successful lives in various fields. Canessa is a pediatric cardiologist. Parrado works as a motivational speaker and television producer. They are godfathers to each other’s children.
“It’s like a brotherhood. I will die for him, and he will die for me. In any situation,” Parrado said.
Many of the survivors continue to live in their hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay, and see each other almost daily. One survivor, Javier Methol, died from cancer in 2015 at the age of 79, but the other 15 are still living and get together every December 22 to honor the dead and celebrate their second chance at life.
The first reunion was attended by the 16 survivors and two girlfriends, but last year 140 close family members got together to commemorate the accident.
“Imagine, all those lives that wouldn’t be here on this planet if I haven’t done what I did. I’m so proud.” Parrado said. “If you play rugby you die for your teammates and that’s what happened in the Andes.”
The rugby team’s harrowing story was immortalized in the 1993 film “Alive,” starring Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton. “Yellowjackets” co-creator Ashley Lyle has said that the movie and story behind it were “absolutely” inspiring to her, but she wondered how things would have played out differently if it had been a plane full of female athletes who crashed into the Andes.
“I was like, that will get very dark, but in a very different way,” she told NPR. “So it felt like a new story to be told.”
