After rescue, Parrado took over the family business in Montevideo and later worked briefly as a professional racing car driver. He married, had two daughters, and built a life that he has described in interviews as full and fortunate — a life he is conscious of having in part because of the deaths of people he cares about.
He has said that the experience of the Andes does not define him in the sense of being the most important thing about him. It is part of his history. But it is not, he has said, something he would trade: the clarity it produced, the understanding of what matters, the knowledge of what human beings are capable of when they have no other choice.
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## Roberto Canessa: The Doctor in the Mountains
Roberto Canessa was 19 years old when the aircraft crashed. He was a medical student at the beginning of his second year. His contribution to the survival of the group in the first days — the triage, the wound management, the application of rudimentary medical knowledge under conditions of complete inadequacy — was later described by survivors as having saved lives in the immediate aftermath of the crash.
Canessa has written about the survival experience in his memoir *I Had to Survive*, published in 2016. His account gives particular attention to the ethical and psychological dimensions of the decisions the group made — dimensions that his medical training and his subsequent career as a physician made him particularly attentive to.
After the rescue, Canessa completed his medical training and became a pediatric cardiologist. He works in Montevideo, where he has built a career focused on treating children with heart conditions. He named his first child Hilary, after a mountain — a choice that connects the most extreme experience of his life to the beginning of a new one.