Lost Chile Troops Presumed Dead

President Ricardo Lagos said Friday night that patrols searching for 41 soldiers lost in an Andes blizzard were returning with “13 bodies,” hours after the army’s top commander said all of the missing were “most probably dead.”

Survivors spoke tearfully of leaving behind comrades who were too exhausted to make it out of the storm, which dumped 6 feet of snow.

The missing soldiers -- one officer and the rest young draftees -- haven’t been seen since Wednesday, when the worst storm the area has seen in decades slammed into a training march through the mountains.

Lagos declared a three-day mourning period.

The weather cleared enough Friday for 14 patrols to search for the missing, but not enough for helicopters to help. The army chief, Gen. Emilio Cheyre, joined the search, and later said the missing were probably dead.

“But we will continue to work hard to bring them, dead or alive, to us and to their families,” he said.

Cheyre fired the top three commanders of the regiment to which the soldiers belonged and ordered an investigation.

“The march should not have been started, never, under those weather conditions,” he said.

Dozens of soldiers were earlier found alive, and many were recovering at regiment headquarters in Los Angeles, about 300 miles south of Santiago.

Relatives of the missing huddled together in the gymnasium of Mountain Regiment 17, the base for the 485-soldier battalion that was caught in the storm.

Army Pvt. Juan Millar, 18, recounted that he was blinded by the swirling snow and couldn’t stand straight when his lieutenant ordered the unit to drop their heavy backpacks and make their way to safety any way they could.

But most of the soldiers were teenagers who had begun their service last month, and had little experience. Millar is haunted by the idea that some of the colleagues he saw fall never got up.

“They just stayed in the snow. The corporals had to abandon them to save their own lives.”