After releasing the body, Alvarenga says he considered suicide. He had survived the storm, the motor failure, the growing realization that rescue was not coming, and now the death of the only other person in this situation. He was alone, he was thousands of miles from any coast, and he had no immediate reason to expect rescue. He has said that his Christian faith — and specifically a warning from his mother, which he recalled, that suicide would prevent him from entering heaven — was part of what stopped him. He told Franklin: “I suffered hunger, thirst and an extreme loneliness, and didn’t take my life.”
There is nothing verifiable about the interior experience of those days. What the historical record shows is that a man who was in this situation chose to continue. He continued for approximately ten more months.
The accusations that emerged from Córdoba’s family through a lawsuit filed in 2015 — alleging that Alvarenga had cannibalized Córdoba’s body — were denied by Alvarenga, who passed a polygraph test on the matter. His lawyer denied the claim. There is no evidence in the public record that the allegations were found to be accurate. The prompt for this article correctly notes that these accusations were made, and correctly instructs against repeating them as established fact. They are noted here as allegations that were raised, denied, and for which no corroborating evidence has been published.
Córdoba’s mother, for her part, did not make these allegations. Her public statements were characterized by grief and a desire for information, not accusation.