Psychologists who study solitary confinement and isolation consistently note that maintaining structure and purpose — having something to do, something to track, something to build or maintain — is one of the most important factors in long-term psychological survival. Alvarenga’s approach, whether explicitly designed or intuitively arrived at, aligned with what the research suggests about how people maintain psychological coherence under conditions of extreme deprivation.
## The Absence of Ezequiel Córdoba
There is a version of Alvarenga’s story that focuses entirely on him — on his survival, his techniques, his psychology, his return. This version is understandable; he is the survivor, and the story came to the world through his account. But any honest telling of this story has to hold space for Ezequiel Córdoba, because the story is also his, even if he did not survive to tell it.
Córdoba was twenty-two years old, from a family in Chiapas, signing on for a routine fishing trip that he expected to be over in thirty hours. His mother Roselia Díaz Cueto, speaking to reporters in February 2014, described a son — not a cautionary tale or a narrative device, but a specific person whose loss she was living with while the rest of the world focused on the man who survived. His aunt Magdalena described him as quiet and hardworking. These are not detailed portraits; they are the scraps that exist when a young man’s biography is known primarily through the grief of the people who loved him.
What happened to Córdoba during the drift is known only through Alvarenga’s account. The account describes a man who became ill from eating raw food — a reaction that Alvarenga attributed to Córdoba’s relative inexperience with the conditions they were in and the kinds of food they had to eat. The account describes Córdoba eventually refusing to eat, weakening progressively, and dying at approximately the four-month point of the drift. These details cannot be independently verified. They are what Alvarenga reported, attributed to his account.