by Héctor Tobar
Raúl Bustos can hear Sepúlveda breathing heavily above him, and climbs after him until he knocks loose a huge slab of rock—Bustos can feel the slab moving, and he keeps it from falling by pinning it against the chimney wall with his shoulder. He yells to the two men below him: “Go down! Go down!” He pushes his hands, feet, and head against the stone as Avalos and Barrios scurry to the bottom, and when they’ve reached safety he groans and lets it fall. It hits the sides of the chimney several times as it crashes downward, finally landing on the Ramp below, hurting no one.
Up above, Sepúlveda reaches the top of the chimney and sweeps the beam of his flashlight across the blackness: more rocks are scattered on the floor of the Ramp here than on the level below. He stands up, and when Bustos finally reaches the top they begin to walk, following the Ramp upward, with the faint hope that after the next curve in the spiral the route to the top will be open. Instead their light beams strike a shiny, smooth surface: a curtain of diorite identical to the one blocking the Ramp down below. Mario can feel the hope draining from his body, and in its absence he is left with a clear, cold vision of what is happening to him. He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. “At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it,” he says later. They walk downhill, past the chimney opening they’ve just scaled, and go around another curve to find the same gray “guillotine” blocking their path again. When they look for the next chimney opening, the one that might take them up to a higher level, their flashlights reveal that in this one there is no ladder at all, but instead just a cable dangling inside.
“This way isn’t going to work,” Sepúlveda tells Bustos. “What are we going to tell los niños?”
“It’s hard,” Bustos says. “But let’s tell them the truth.”
Down at the bottom of the chimney, Sepúlveda and Bustos deliver the news to the small group waiting there. The Ramp is blocked on other levels, too. There’s no way out.
Collectively the men around them think: Now what? Their eyes settle on the man in charge, Urzúa. The shift supervisor says nothing. He’s usually the most relaxed and upbeat of bosses, but at this moment he looks drained and defeated. His green eyes drift nervously: They look away from his underlings, who get the sense he wishes he’d never been appointed shift supervisor, and that he could just fade into the background and be one of the guys. Many of the miners, especially the oldest ones, come to believe that “the shift supervisor disappeared on us” in these first hours following the accident. It’s especially grating to the older men because they believe mining hierarchies have a purpose, especially in a crisis. To be trapped in an underground mine is like being on a ship in a storm: The captain has to take charge. Instead, a few hours later, according to several miners, Urzúa will slip away from the group and go off to his pickup truck and lie down in the front seat, alone.
Urzúa explains his actions this way. He’s a trained topographer, and thus carries a map of the mine in his head; that map tells him there’s nothing to be done. “My problem as the jefe de turno was I knew we were screwed,” he says later. “Florencio and I knew this, but we couldn’t tell that to anyone. You practically had your hands tied from doing anything. And you start imagining things that are part of the reality of mining.” The reality of mining is that sometimes men are buried alive and eventually die of starvation, with only a small chance that their bodies will be recovered later. An even harsher reality of Chilean mining is that after six or seven days, if the rescuers don’t find you, they give up. Urzúa knows this, and also knows he’d sow a panic if he were to speak these hard truths. That was the most important lesson he learned from a recent course he took, “Responding to Critical Mining Situations”: Stay calm. The only thing to do is wait—most likely for some sort of attempt to reach them by drilling from the top, which is really their only hope. But how can he inspire men to wait, to do nothing? He cannot. That’s how Urzúa sees things. Already he’s doing the math in his head and realizes that a rescue from the top will require a feat of drilling never before seen in the annals of mining. He’d like to say something to give the men hope, but he cannot, for the simple reason that he refuses to lie. Instead he says nothing. If his job is to get the men out safely, the only thing he can do, really, is to keep them from doing anything stupid or rash: like, for example, trying to climb out through the caverns of loose, constantly falling rock in the Pit. Waiting is the better option. Just keep calm, he tells himself, working hard not to show his underlings the desperation he’s feeling.
Later, in a moment of quiet, when they’re waiting for a rescue that may or may not reach them, Sepúlveda will tell the shift supervisor how much he admires his steadiness under pressure. “Lucho Urzúa has a problem with speaking, with a lack of passion,” Sepúlveda later says. “But he’s very smart and wise.” Urzúa has decided that when he reaches the Refuge and has all the men of the morning A shift before him, he’s going to announce that he’s no longer their boss. They’re all stuck together, and they should make decisions together, he thinks.
Sepúlveda’s response to the grim situation in which the men find themselves is entirely different. He summarizes his attitude at this moment with a vulgar Chilean phrase: tomar la hueva, which can be loosely translated as “gripping the bull by the balls.” His life, up to and including this moment, has been one struggle for survival after another, and in a certain sense fighting to stay alive is when he most feels like himself.
Mario’s mother died delivering him, and Mario believes he was born fighting. He grew up in the southern city of Parral (the poet Pablo Neruda’s birthplace) with ten brothers and sisters, the son of a peasant father who scarred his sons with his drinking and his discipline, directing much of his anger at the self-described “hyperkinetic” Mario. “When I was twelve years old I was so hyper I frightened people. None of my relatives wanted to take care of me.” Today such a boy might be given an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription to deal with his expansive energy. Back then, his father tried to beat it out of him. Against the routine administration of doses of swinging leather, there was the calm and dignified presence of Mario’s grandfather, a huaso who imparted the country ethic of hard work, respect, and personal integrity. Mario started working in and around Parral at thirteen, then left at nineteen for Santiago. He had to leave behind his younger brothers—born to his stepmother—unprotected against their father’s rage. “I will be back for you,” he told José, David, Pablo, and Fabián, and he kept his promise. He found a job as a barrendero, or sweeper, with a Santiago company, and settled in a barrio where his neighbors came to know him as a brash street pugilist whose ferociousness could quickly give way to a charming provincial formality. During the day he swept floors and at night he’d dress in suits and flared pants inspired by John Travolta and Saturday Night Fever. He fell in love with a young woman named Elvira who favored the glam-rock-inspired stylings of early Madonna and Sheila E. She remembers the young Mario as a man of shifting moods, quick to anger, but quick to forgive. He was also sentimental and open about his feelings, a rare quality for hot-blooded men. In sum, he was possessed of a rough-hewn nobility. One Chilean expression describes the way he lived his life then and now, and Mario uses it a lot: tirar para arriba, which literally means “to toss upward,” but which is most often translated as “to overcome adversity.” Moving ever upward, Mario added new skills to his résumé, including the operation of heavy machinery, and never failed to provide for Elvira and their two children, even if it meant going to opposite ends of Chile in search of work: from the Atacama Desert in the north to the southern port of Puerto Montt, the gateway to Chilean Patagonia and the Strait of Magellan.
In his Santiago neighborhood, Mario’s short-cropped hair has earned him the nickname “Kiwi”; but that same hair, over the intense stare of his brown eyes, can give him the menacing appearance of a man on the brink. To his fellow miners in the San José, “Perri” Sepúlveda often lo
oks like a man possessed—even during an ordinary workday. Now, despite his lack of standing in the mining-shift hierarchy, the possessed Perri is going to try to take control of his own fate and the men around him with his optimism, his raspy voice, and his stray-dog sense of survival and loyalty to the people close to him.
“Yo lo único que hago es vivir,” he says. The only thing I do is live.
He and the other members of the failed escape expedition head back down to the Refuge. Unbeknownst to them, a pathetic drama is unfolding there. The hour when the A shift should have ended has long since passed, and some of the twenty-five men down there are very hungry.
* * *
“We have to break it open!” one of the men calls out. “We’re hungry.”
“¡Tenemos hambre!”
The cabinet around which they are gathered is supposed to contain enough food to keep twenty-five men alive for forty-eight hours in the event of an emergency. Many of the men haven’t eaten since dinner the night before, to avoid the vomiting caused by working underground in intense heat, humidity, and dust-filled air. At about this time, they would be home, sitting at dinner tables while wives, girlfriends, and mothers serve them. A few say they should wait until the foreman and the others come back. In his low, gentle voice, Yonni Barrios says as much: “We need to wait, because we don’t know how long we’ll be down here.” Some of the men have started to strip off their overalls against the heat. Half-undressed and sweating profusely, they begin to examine the sealed box.
The mild-mannered Yonni can see that stopping this hungry group of men will be impossible. “There were just too many of them,” he later says, though none of his fellow workers remembers Yonni saying much of anything at this moment, as Víctor Zamora and another man try taking a screwdriver to the box’s hinges, and also to the three metal strips wrapped around the boxes, sealing them like aluminum chastity bands.
Zamora seems most determined to eat: Getting hit in the mouth and losing teeth during the collapse has only worsened his mood. “¡Siempre ando con hambre!” he shouts as he tries to open the cabinet. I’m always hungry.
For many reasons, it is not surprising that Zamora is leading the assault on the food supply. He is a perpetual outsider, with tattoos on his forearms that serve as announcements of his status. One is a portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the militant saint of the Latin American poor, and another proclaims a single, meaningful word: “ARICA.” Zamora was born and raised in that city, which Chile took from Peru in the nineteenth-century War of the Pacific, and he possesses coloring and features that some might call Incan. A few news reports have already incorrectly identified him as Peruvian. One of his fellow miners, who doesn’t like or trust Zamora, disparagingly calls him “el peruanito,” the little Peruvian guy, even though he knows Zamora is as Chilean as he is.
Zamora’s father died when he was eight months old, and his mother abandoned him, “because she preferred to be with her new boyfriend instead.” He was raised by his mother’s sister, but at the age of nine she sent him to an Arica home for street children, where he lived off and on until he was sixteen. “From the time I was small I wanted to have a family, but I never had one. I could see that everything was for everyone else and that I would get what was left behind, to live on the streets, sleep under bridges, die of hunger.” This hard, lonely boyhood gave Víctor great cunning—and also an appreciation for the power of love. He labored his way out of poverty and into a confident adulthood where his growing sense of self-worth was defined by a slow ascent through the strata of unskilled jobs available to him (picking grapes out in the sun, raising up beams at construction sites), and also by his ability to hold on to the affections of Jessica Segovia, the mother of his son, Arturo. He met Jessica at a neighborhood fiesta when he was a wandering young man, “gitiando,” he says, living like a gypsy. At the San José, he’s a fortifier, drilling steel anchors into stone walls. Víctor’s temperament is suited to this work, which is exhausting enough to take a bit of the monster out of him each time he goes in, making him less likely to lose his patience with Jessica when he gets home.
Home is in Tierra Amarilla, just outside Copiapó, in a few rooms with low ceilings and pink plaster walls with a crack or two, where a couch and table are squeezed into a small dining/living room. Víctor will raise his voice to his family and fill that small room with the ugly thoughts, suddenly liberated and expressed, that can enter a man’s head when he feels trapped rather than nurtured by family and its obligations. He is explosively angry, and then hates himself for being this way. He fights with his brother, too, who often wounds Víctor with the most cutting words he can speak: “You’re not really my brother and my mother isn’t even your mother,” which is true, of course, because Víctor’s “mother” is really his aunt and his “brother” is really his cousin. With his poetic sensibility, Víctor boils down his personality to a few well-selected words: His personality is “polvorilla,” resembling the combustible qualities of gunpowder; at home, he’s inflicted “descontroles” on his family, moments when he lost control of himself and his emotion. “A family isn’t just all happiness,” he says.
Víctor Zamora loves his mining family as much as he loves his real family, but at this moment, as he tries to open the box with the emergency provisions, he isn’t really thinking about how his actions might hurt his underground brothers. Instead, when the screwdriver doesn’t work, Zamora does something that he might have done when he was a young man trying to survive on the streets of Arica: He retrieves a bolt cutter (the same tool he was using earlier to cut rebar for his fortifying crew), steps forward, and snaps the metal bands on the box containing the emergency supplies.
He’s about to break the locks, too, when the driver Franklin Lobos steps forward and says, “Wait, I have the key.”
Lobos is taller and bulkier than just about anyone else trapped in the mine. His height is a reminder of the athleticism that intimidated people on the soccer field, and sometimes he uses his size to assert himself, suddenly dropping his unassuming air to give voice to some grievance, or to express annoyance at the fucked-up nature of this workplace. But at this moment Lobos decides that giving in to the hungry men is his only recourse. “I wasn’t going to fight five or six of them. In the state that we were in, fighting didn’t make any sense.” This same idea will soon be repeated, often, in the thoughts of many of the trapped men as more conflicts and disagreements simmer between them: I really want to punch this idiot, this huevón, but I don’t want to be stuck underground taking care of a miner with a broken jaw, or a bleeding wound either.
Lobos opens the cabinet and the rebellious miners’ main object of desire is revealed: packages of cookies with the brand name Cartoons. They’re really children’s snacks, chocolate- and lemon-flavored sandwich creams, the kind you can split in half easily, several dozen packages in all. “It didn’t seem like there were that many,” Zamora will remember. Outside, in the surface world, you can buy these packages for 100 Chilean pesos each, or less than a quarter. There are four cookies in each package—several of which are quickly dispensed to those who will take them, though many miners refuse. Zamora will say later that he didn’t think much about what he was doing. “I was just hungry. It was time to eat. I didn’t give it much importance.”
They open some of the milk boxes they find, too. About ten of the two dozen men present in the Refuge partake of this food, getting one or more precious packages of cookies each, sharing two liters of milk.
“It was the northerners that did it,” one of the southerners later says. “They only thought of saving themselves at that moment. Fresh guys. They wanted everything. They never thought that we’d be trapped so long.”
Later, one of the miners will remember listening to the looters of the food box eat in the darkness, sitting in a corner of the Refuge with their headlamps off, as if they were ashamed of their own hunger, and yet unable to keep the crackle of crumpling plastic and the moist crunch of their chewing fro
m filling the small space, to be heard by men who did not take any food at all.
* * *
When Luis Urzúa and the party of men involved in the failed escape expedition arrive at the Refuge, they find a scene of disarray. They discover the unlocked cabinet, its severed aluminum bands. Gathering the discarded packages of cookies, they count ten. “With what you guys just ate, we all could have survived three days down here,” Florencio Avalos says. “Well, whoever ate that food, let them get something out of it … May it serve them well.”
