Marcelo Pérez, the rugby team captain, was the initial primary leader. He had the authority that comes from an established athletic role — the other rugby players knew him as their captain, and in an emergency that resembled in some ways the structured stress of competitive sport, that authority transferred naturally. He organized the food distribution, the work of sealing the fuselage, the collective effort to maintain morale.
His death in the avalanche was not only a personal loss but an organizational one. The group had to redistribute the functions he had been performing.
What emerged in the weeks after the avalanche was a more diffuse leadership structure in which different people took responsibility for different aspects of the collective survival. Fito Strauch organized food preparation and distribution with a methodical attention to equity — ensuring that the available nutrition was divided fairly. Canessa provided the medical knowledge that kept injuries from becoming fatal more rapidly. Parrado increasingly served as the focus of the escape planning, his determination to attempt the trek providing a goal around which the group could organize its hope.
Roy Harley took responsibility for the radio attempt, bringing his electronics knowledge to the problem and spending days working on a solution that ultimately failed. His contribution was not less real for having failed; he attempted something that might have worked, and the attempt was a rational use of the skills he had.
The dynamics of the group shifted throughout the 72 days as physical conditions changed and different crises emerged. The avalanche created one kind of crisis; the radio failure created another; the progressive deaths of the later weeks created another. The leadership responses to each of these shifts were different because the crises were different.