On January 18, 1973, Argentine authorities and local officials arrived at the crash site. The remains of those who had died were gathered and buried in a common grave near the fuselage. The families of the victims were not permitted to attend this burial. Some family members were told that the site was too remote and the conditions too dangerous for civilian attendance; others received little explanation at all.
The burial was performed without the presence of any family members of the deceased. For many families, this compounded the losses they had already sustained: their relatives had died in a remote location far from home, in circumstances that could not be described in simple terms, and had been interred without any family member present, in a place they might never be able to visit.
One family attempted to recover their relative’s remains independently. Ricardo Echavarren, whose son Rafael had died before the rescue, traveled to the crash site to retrieve his son’s body. He was arrested by Argentine authorities for the attempt. He was later permitted to arrange a proper funeral.
An obelisk memorial was eventually built at the crash site, funded by survivors and families and completed in March 2006. The memorial acknowledged the deaths of all 29 people who had died in the crash and during the survival period. The common grave beneath the site became, in time, a place of pilgrimage for families and for those moved by the story.
The establishment of Fundación Viven in 2006 — a foundation created by survivors and family members to preserve the memory of those who died and to promote organ donation — formalized the relationship between the living and the dead that the survival experience had created. The survivors have consistently, in interviews and public statements, described their sense of ongoing obligation to those who died: an obligation expressed through the life they lived, through speaking about the experience, through the foundation’s work.