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Preaching at a thanksgiving Mass in Montevideo for the survivors and their families, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Eduardo Rodríguez said: "What happens to them will depend on us now, and on the love and understanding that we are capable of giving them." As a Chilean paper asked rhetorically in the headline of one story about the incident: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?
* The incident was reminiscent of the history of the Donner Party, a group of 87 pioneers who were trapped by early snow in the California mountains in 1846. When their food gave out,they resorted to cannibalism to survive. As George Keithley wrote in his narrative poem The Donner Party, "Men dug the dead out of the snow and took whatever would make a meal."