One of the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash (¡Viven! / La sociedad de la nieve), after two months on the mountain he and Nando Parrado walked ten days across the cordillera, with no gear and no map, to bring back help. He became a pediatric cardiologist: a man who owed his life to impossible odds and spent the rest of it improving other people’s.
The story crosses three borders, which is why the map tags look odd. Canessa is Uruguayan: he was a medical student in Montevideo and the Old Christians rugby team was flying from there to Santiago de Chile when the plane went down. The wreck itself lay in Argentina, in the Andes of Mendoza province near the Chilean border, and that is where the sixteen of the forty five aboard spent seventy two days. The walk out went west, so it ended in Chile, where an arriero called Sergio Catalán read the note they handed him and went for help.