Furious relatives of 45 soldiers feared frozen to death in the Chilean Andes raged at military officers on Saturday for leading dozens of ill-equipped teenage recruits into a blizzard.

Twenty-three bodies were recovered from snow-bound Antuco volcano near the Argentine border and an estimated 22 soldiers were missing when rescuers with snow plows and dogs ended their fourth day of searching. Army officials told they took seven bodies off the mountain on Saturday.

?My son and his companions were abandoned . They were coming down together and people were falling. The officer just let 28 kids fall and went on to the shelter?, sobbed Gloria Bastias, whose son Jonathan is believed dead in the tragedy that struck on Wednesday.

Most of the victims are teenage recruits from poor families, who enlisted just a month ago and whose regiment went on a mountain training exercise without proper gear for an early-winter storm that blinded and disoriented the group. ?These are the heroes. The miserable villains are the officers that lived?, Edmundo Vivanco, uncle of 18-year-old Guillermo Foncea, shouted at a wake with 13 flag-draped coffins at an army base in this city in southern Chile.

Army Commander in Chief Juan Cheyre also blamed the officers who led the soldiers on a march into danger instead of riding out the storm in a mountain shelter. There were no officers among the missing or the dead. Local media said it was the worst peacetime military disaster ever in Chile. ?I?ve come to send a big hug from millions of Chileans who share your pain?, President Lagos told families at a religious service at the base. Earlier he declared three days of national mourning. Candidates running in this year?s presidential election also attended the service.

While families mourned or waited for news, others were overjoyed when they were reunited with 112 soldiers and officers evacuated by helicopter from a shelter where they had been trapped. ?I asked God to save him?, told the mother of 18-year-old David Figueroa as she and her son cried and embraced. ?Only by a miracle will we find any alive?, Cheyre said of those missing. He dismissed the regiment?s three top officers and ordered an internal military investigation as well as a civilian one. ?There was negligence?, he said.

The search began shortly after more than 400 members of the regiment were hit by the storm. Low temperatures and limited visibility in falling snow hampered 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. ?They need to put more responsible people in charge?, one survivor?s father told Chilean radio.

Ivan ALVARADO