At least 45 feared dead in Chile army tragedy in Andes

Furious relatives of soldiers among the 45 feared frozen to death in the Chilean Andes have raged at military officers for leaving dozens of ill-equipped teenage recruits out in a blizzard.

While rescuers looked for 29 still missing, grieving and angry families identified 16 bodies recovered on the slopes of the Antuco volcano near the border with Argentina and taken to the army base in Los Angeles in southern Chile.

"My son and his companions were abandoned by the officers. They were coming down together in a group and people were falling. The officer just let 28 kids fall and went on to the shelter," said sobbing Gloria Bastias, whose son Jonathan Bustos died in the tragedy on Wednesday.

Most of the dead and missing were teenage draftees who enlisted just one month ago and went into the mountains on a basic training exercise without gear for the early-winter snow storm that blinded and disoriented the group.

"I'm convinced they are dead. Only by a miracle will we find any alive," Army Commander in Chief Juan Cheyre said.

He dismissed a handful of officers over the incident and ordered an internal military investigation as well as a civilian one.

Army officials said the latest toll was 16 dead and 29 missing. An earlier official list put the total of dead and missing at 41.

The search began on Wednesday after more than 400 members of a regiment from the Army base in Los Angeles were hit by the storm. Hundreds were able to hike out or reach different mountain shelters on Wednesday and Thursday, but low temperatures and limited visibility in falling snow hampered the search for the dozens who fell and froze to death.

Soldiers' families have been huddled since Wednesday in the gymnasium of the Los Angeles base, desperately awaiting news from the search.

Bastias said she talked to a survivor who saw her son fall into the snow and described a struggle between recruits and officers in the disorienting snowstorm, as officers insisted on pushing on instead of keeping the group together.

The army's published list of dead and missing includes one sergeant. The rest are conscripts. All of the officers on the mountain apparently survived, which enraged families of the young soldiers.

"They need to put more responsible people in charge. I've lost all confidence in the army," a father of one of the survivors told Radio Bio Bio.

However, he said he was ecstatic to see his son among 112 soldiers and officers evacuated on Saturday by helicopter from a mountain shelter where they had been trapped since Wednesday. The army said it would give the evacuees a medical check-up and then reunite them with their families.

President Ricardo Lagos declared three days of national mourning and was scheduled to travel to Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon.

Cheyre, who went partway up the mountain some 600km southeast of Santiago to bring down the first body, blamed the tragedy on officers who ordered hundreds of soldiers on an annual mountain drill to leave shelter during the storm.

"There was negligence and imprudence," Cheyre told reporters. He said the army has performed the exercise at this time of year for decades and never been hit by a big storm.

Lagos told a news conference on Friday night: "All Chileans in this moment of pain want the families, fathers, mothers and brothers to feel we are giving them comfort, to feel the human warmth of a country living a tragedy."

Defence Minister Jaime Ravinet said only one company in the regiment had enough protective gear for a storm.

Families of the missing and local media questioned whether the army had heeded weather reports before the exercise at the beginning of the Southern Hemisphere winter.

- REUTERS