Roy Harley had spent days attempting to make the radio work, knowing that the entire group’s last-resort hope for rescue from outside was resting on that effort. When it failed, he absorbed the failure and continued to contribute to the group.
The Strauch cousins — Adolfo “Fito” and Eduardo — had been among the most practical and organized members of the group throughout the survival period. Fito Strauch had been a central figure in managing the food supply and in developing the food preparation methods that made the available nutrition usable.
Canessa, twenty years old at the time of the crash, had spent ten days walking through the Andes on starvation rations after sixty days of deteriorating health. He had been the most medically knowledgeable person in the group and had watched people die who he might have saved with proper equipment. He arrived at rescue having completed one of the more remarkable physical feats of the entire ordeal.
Parrado, also twenty years old, had lost his mother and sister in the mountains. He had been the driving force behind the final expedition. By every account, including his own retrospective accounts in his memoir and interviews, the experience of spending 72 days in the Andes — beginning with the deaths of his mother and sister and ending with the walk that brought rescue — fundamentally remade him as a person.
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## The Buried: Families, Funerals, and the Common Grave
The question of what to do with the remains of those who had died at the crash site was managed by the Argentine authorities who reached the site in January 1973.