The survivors have consistently honored Catalán’s role in their survival. In 2007, by some accounts, survivors raised money to help pay for Catalán’s hip surgery — a reciprocity offered across the decades that separate the moment of rescue from the ordinary needs of an aging man.
Catalán died in 2020 at the age of 91. He had spent nearly fifty years as the person who had received the note wrapped around a rock from two emaciated strangers across a river, and had ridden for help, and had thereby saved sixteen lives. By accounts of the last decades of his life, he received this role with the same straightforward quality with which he had fulfilled it in 1972.
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## The Books and What They Say
The literature about the 1972 Andes crash is unusually rich for a survival story because the survivors themselves became, in many cases, writers who engaged directly with the historical and ethical questions the story raises.
Piers Paul Read’s *Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors*, published in 1974, was the first major English-language account. Read was a British author who was given access to the survivors in 1973 and conducted extensive interviews. His book is a work of literary nonfiction that takes some of the narrative liberties typical of the genre — reconstructed scenes, attributed dialogue, psychological interpretation — while being based on documented survivor interviews. It has never been out of print and remains the most widely read account in the English language.
Nando Parrado’s *Miracle in the Andes*, published in 2006, is the most significant first-person account. Parrado wrote the book with Vince Rause over three years; it is detailed, emotionally direct, and focused particularly on the internal psychological experience of the survival period — what it was like to be Parrado in that valley, what thoughts and decisions he was having and why.