After rescue, Páez eventually earned a degree in agricultural engineering and founded an advertising agency. He wrote a memoir called *After the Tenth Day* and subsequently two more books about the experience. He also became a motivational speaker.
He has spoken publicly about struggling with addiction in the years after the crash — a detail that multiple biographical sources cite. The survival experience, by his own account, was not a simple transformation into someone permanently grateful and focused. The return to ordinary life after extraordinary experience is not automatically successful; the psychological weight of what had happened was real and ongoing.
His openness about the difficult years after rescue — the acknowledgment that surviving does not automatically produce wisdom or clarity, that the return to life involves its own struggles — is an important part of the public record of what the survival meant for those who lived through it.
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## Sergio Catalán: The Man Who Received the Note
Sergio Catalán was 51 years old when he saw two strangers across the Río Barrancas on December 20, 1972.
He was an arriero — a word that translates roughly as herdsman or drover, referring to the men who moved livestock through the Andean foothills. He had been in the area with cattle. He was not expecting to find anything unusual.
The two men he saw across the river were clearly in distress. He threw them bread. He received their note. He rode for ten hours to bring help.
In accounts of the rescue, Catalán is typically described as having responded to what he found with the matter-of-fact competence of someone who understood that people needed help and that the appropriate response was to provide it. He did not hesitate. He did not wait to see if someone else would handle it. He rode through the night.