He returned to Argentina after the rescue — he was Argentine, one of the non-Uruguayan passengers on the flight — and went to work at a bank in Buenos Aires. He built a career and a private life. He did not write a memoir in the first years when the story was being processed publicly. He did not become a public figure on the basis of what he had survived.
This changes after the 2010 rescue of thirty-three Chilean miners who had been trapped underground for 69 days — a rescue that received enormous international attention and that brought the 1972 Andes survival back into public discussion. Algorta began speaking about his experience after watching the Chilean miners’ rescue. He published *Into the Mountains* in 2016, more than four decades after the crash.
The long silence and the eventual publication are both significant. The silence represents something that multiple survivors have acknowledged: the difficulty of the survival experience was not simply the 72 days in the mountains but the return to normal life and the ongoing management of an experience that had no equivalent in ordinary human reference points. Some survivors processed this by speaking publicly. Some processed it by not speaking publicly. The processing, by all accounts, was a lifelong process rather than something that resolved at a particular moment.
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## Carlitos Páez and the Hardest Years
Carlos “Carlitos” Páez Rodríguez was one of the younger survivors — a teenager at the time of the crash. His father, Carlos Páez Vilaró, was a well-known Uruguayan artist and painter who refused to accept that his son was dead during the official search period and conducted his own private search for the aircraft after the official search was called off. His father’s search did not find the crash site, but the story of a father’s refusal to give up became part of the broader public narrative around the crash.