Green Cross was a Santiago club with a loyal following, and the plane was bringing its players back from a match in southern Chile. The journey was a long island-hopping haul up the country: the flight had begun far south in Castro, on the island of Chiloe, with stops at Puerto Montt, Osorno, and Temuco before its final leg toward the capital. The passenger list read like a roster - eight first-team footballers, two members of the coaching staff, and three referees, alongside other travelers and the crew. They were not statistics. They were young men in the middle of a season, with teammates waiting and families expecting them home. The aircraft itself was a veteran: a Douglas DC-3 registered CC-CLDP, built in 1943 as a military transport and converted to carry passengers in peacetime.

The plane had left Temuco late in the day for what should have been the routine final run to Santiago. Somewhere over the high cordillera near Linares, something went wrong - the crew's last transmission described ice building on the wings and propellers, the kind of load that can rob a piston aircraft of the lift it needs to clear the peaks. Investigators later suspected a navigational error, but the wreckage was too badly broken and burned to say for certain, and the official cause was never settled. What is certain is that the mountains took the aircraft quickly and completely, on a route the airline had flown without incident many times before.

One name on board carried weight far beyond Chile. Eliseo Mouriño, born in Argentina in June 1927, had been a star of Boca Juniors and a centre-back for the Argentina national team at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. By 1961 he was playing in Chile, and he died with his Green Cross teammates on the mountainside. For Argentine football he was a figure of real stature - a player who had worn the national shirt on the world stage - and his loss in a foreign country, among adopted teammates, gave the tragedy a reach across the Andes that it has never lost.

Rescuers reached the high country a week after the crash. On 10 April they found the tail of the aircraft and a few human remains, enough to confirm what everyone feared but not enough to tell the full story. It was, at the time, the worst aviation disaster in Chilean history, and the country grieved as one. On 17 April, a mass burial was held at Santiago's General Cemetery, attended by thousands - club officials, rival athletes, ordinary mourners - as the government declared a day of national mourning for the lost sportsmen. The impact and the fire that followed had destroyed most of the evidence on the mountain. Early accounts even disagreed about exactly where the plane had come down, scattering the location across different hills and ranges. The families buried what little could be recovered and lived for decades with the mountain's incomplete answer.

Then, in February 2015, a small group of Chilean mountaineers climbing in the same range came upon the fuselage - the main body of the plane that had eluded everyone for fifty-four years. "So this story is getting a rewrite," one of the climbers said, because the wreck did not lie where the original reports had placed it. They chose not to publish exact coordinates, leaving the site to the mountain and to the memory of the dead. The find was consistent with the terrain and altitude of Cerro Lástimas, the peak that had held the secret since 1961, and it brought a measure of closure to relatives who had grown old without knowing where their fathers and brothers truly rested.