Plane crash victim recounts the desperation that led him to eat friends for survival

The sliver of meat, dried like a strip of jerky, had no flavor. It was tough and odorless, neutral to the senses.

Yet “I swallowed it with disgust,” writes Eduardo Strauch in his memoir “Out of the Silence” (Amazon Crossing), out now. “I felt my entire body rejecting that tiny bite … a taboo thousands of years old had been crushed in my mouth.”

It was his first taste of human flesh.

Strauch’s horrifying story of survival in the high Andes was the stuff of gruesome global headlines in 1972. The tale of modern cannibalism — the Donner Party of the late 20th century — spawned the bestselling book “Alive” and a Hollywood film.

Click Here: bape jacket cheap

But to Strauch, who kept silent about the ordeal for decades after he and 15 others endured 72 days stranded on a glacier, it was a spiritual experience.

“It united me with the universe and with other living beings in a profound way,” the Uruguayan explains in his book, written in 2012 and now translated into English.

Strauch was one of 45 people on a charter flight ferrying an amateur rugby team from Uruguay to Chile on Friday, Oct. 13, 1972. Although not a player himself, he was friends with many members of the squad. Their treacherous route took them over the cordillera, the high spine of the Andes.

When the aircraft accidentally grazed a 14,500-foot peak, the collision sheared away one wing and lopped off the tail — where five people perished while still strapped in their seats.

The plane’s fuselage careened 3,000 feet down the mountainside. Thirteen, including the entire crew, died of traumatic injuries. That left 27 survivors.

Search planes passed over them, but no rescuers appeared. When some of the surviving men struggled up the slope, they understood why: “What was left of the [plane] could barely be seen … an insignificant spot in the white expanse,” Strauch writes.

With no food beyond the nibbles they had packed for the short flight, the survivors soon began to debate cannibalizing their dead companions. They agonized for days, Strauch writes.

“If I die, you can eat my body,” he told his friend Marcelo Perez, the remorseful team captain who blamed himself for the desperate situation. “I’m not going to need it, and it might mean life for you.”

That won over the doubters. “We had become blood brothers,” Strauch writes, ”those of us who miserably shared that chalice and the others … who had left us their flesh as a gift of life.”

Strauch and his two cousins took charge of butchering the bodies of the fallen — or, as he more delicately puts it, “cutting the meat.”

Only they “really knew where the food came from. The others received their ration of frozen meat, usually left to dry in the sun, and that facilitated the ability to forget.”

But when an avalanche swept tons of snow into the fuselage, smothering eight of the survivors, they no longer had that luxury.

Entombed along with the fresh corpses, the living had to cut into the bodies of friends who had been breathing only hours before.

“Tearing out the first piece from a slightly warm body that was releasing steam from the torn area made me retch violently,” Strauch remembers. “Eating meat that was still wet and bloody … we wondered if we were becoming wild, savage animals.”

When the spring thaw arrived, two of the strongest survivors free-climbed up and over the summit to seek help.

Strauch, who stayed behind, was manning their transistor radio when he heard an incredulous newscaster say that his friends, presumed dead for 72 days, had been found — and that Chilean Air Force helicopters were on the way to rescue the remaining survivors.

“Life flooded back into everyone,” he remembers. “It was the resurrection of the dead.”

One month after the rescue, mountaineers collected the human remains surrounding the shattered plane and buried them in a common grave, erecting a huge iron cross over the mound.

In 1995, Strauch and 11 other members of the “Society of the Snow” paid their respects to those whose flesh had sustained them.

“At last I could mourn my dead friends, something I had not been able to do properly in those days when our emotions had shut down to enable us to survive.”

Today, he makes an annual pilgrimage to the site.

“I hope to go on like this until the day comes when I will make my final visit,” Strauch writes. “My children will leave my ashes at the base of this iron cross, to rest forever near my brothers of the snow.”