Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  María Segovia has been bothering the people in Antofagasta City Hall for years for the various permits required to sell ice cream and stuffed empanadas on the street and by the beach, from baby carriages and from metal carts. If you don’t have the proper permits, the Carabineros can haul you away, and María knows what it’s like to be tossed into a jail cell for the crime of selling baked snacks. She’s in line to renew her permit to sell candies when her cell phone chimes with a call from the wife of her brother Patricio.

  “Hey, María, has Patricio called you?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know what happened to Arturo?” her sister-in-law asks, referring to Darío by his middle name.

  “No.”

  “I think you should call your brother.”

  A few moments later, Patricio breaks the news: Darío Arturo had an accident in the mine. He’s trapped.

  María gets off the phone and decides she needs to find out more, and fortunately there are computers in city hall for public use for her to search the Internet. She finds a news report about the accident, followed by Darío’s name on the list of trapped workers, and finally, and most disturbingly, his face there on the screen. Darío has been working in mines since he was very young, and standing there staring at his face, she thinks the accident must be a very serious one to leave him without the means of an easy escape—because Darío always manages to get away and come home.

  A few minutes later, María is walking out of the Antofagasta city hall, headed to the bus terminal for the long ride south. The bus takes several hours to cross the Atacama Desert. By 4:00 p.m. she’s arriving in Copiapó. She heads out to the hospital, where miners’ wives and children and girlfriends are all waiting for news, but of course there isn’t any. María decides she has to travel to the mine and get as close to her brother as she can, but one of the hospital employees tells her: “They’re not letting anyone go there. It’s all closed off. You have to wait here.” They say this again and again—“You have to wait here … You have to wait here”—but their insistence only makes her more determined to get closer to her brother. She calls her son Estebán, who lives in Copiapó.

  “Of course, Mami, I’ll take you there,” he says. But first he takes her to his home, and she prepares by getting a good strong coat and blankets, because her son says, “Mami, it gets cold out there where the mine is.” She takes a thermos of coffee and sandwiches, too, because she knows she’s going to have to wait, because more than likely she’ll have to face another trial of patience. That’s been the lesson of María Segovia’s life up to this moment: You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.

  Duly wrapped against the cold, María arrives with her son at the San José Mine at around midnight, almost thirty-six hours after the accident. She sees families gathered around bonfires, wandering about the dusty, dry ground, or sitting on piles of gray rocks the size and shape of bread loaves, the worry thick on their faces, staring into burning flames, standing with their hands in their pockets underneath posts where cones of weak light are swallowed by the immense blackness of the Atacama night. The mine presents an instant sense of collective tragedy, of loss that’s spread across the landscape like some kind of infection. “Un panorama horrible,” María Segovia says later. “I can still feel that sensation in my body, that grief, that feeling of being sick to my stomach, the worry that came from having my brother close to me, and having him be far away in this terribly deep place.”

  There are fire trucks present, and a few police officers, but no rescue taking place, not yet. She finds a major in the Carabineros, Rodrigo Berger, and he is very polite and respectful but has little information to offer. Everyone is waiting for a new rescue team to assemble and enter the mine. All have come and will come from other mines, because the San Esteban Mining Company itself has no rescue crew. Several dozen helmeted men linger before the mine opening, and all the nearby relatives can do is wait. Wait, wait, wait as each minute passes, living with a kind mourning, because the idea that the men may already be dead, or dying, is sitting there among them all, unspoken, the possibility they’ve learned to deny all their lives, suddenly here, so real in that mine mouth which even the hardened miner-rescuers seem reluctant to enter.

  Darío Segovia is down below in the Refuge, saying very little. On the surface, on this cold night, his big sister María feels that he is alive. Today, when they are both middle-aged, she will defend him, just as she did when they were children in San Félix, in a home that flooded when it rained hard. Soon she will begin speaking, telling everyone what she believes: Darío Arturo “Capacho” Segovia and the other thirty-two men are still alive, and they need their families to fight for them.

  * * *

  José Vega is a fit, wiry man of seventy with smoky brown skin and curling sideburns who began to work in mining when he was a teenager. All four of his sons have worked in mines, though by the time the August 5 collapse hits, three of those boys have mercifully quit that dangerous work. Only one, Alex, is still working underground.

  “We’re going to rescue him,” José tells his adult son Jonathan. “Let’s get our equipment and get ready to go inside.”

  José gathers the equipment he has left from his working days: a compass, a GPS receiver, a device to measure depth, an emergency oxygen device. Two of his sons will join him in the search for their brother, meaning that three Vega men who left mining are going back into a mine to save the one member of the family who was too stubborn and hard up for money to quit. When the Vegas arrive at the San José they find police officers, firemen, and groups of rescuers from many other mines. The rescuers are going to enter in groups of six. But suddenly someone announces: “We’re not going to let any relatives of these guys go in there.” When it’s his turn to sign in, José Vega gives a false name. They’re told they’re going to have to wait for several hours before entering, and since Jonathan looks very tired, his father says he should go home and take a nap: “We’ll send for you when it’s our turn to go in.” But when José gets word at 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon that he’ll soon be going in, he doesn’t call Jonathan’s house to have him woken up. “I already had one son in the mine,” José will say. “And now three more Vegas were going in. That’s too many Vegas in that mine.”

  Other rescue teams are coming out of the mine looking worried. José talks to a group of men who’ve come from the Michilla mine, three hundred miles away to the north, near Antofagasta. Tears well in their eyes as they describe what it’s like inside. The mountain is still alive, they say, slabs are breaking off from the walls down there, and there are huge cracks in the floor and ceiling of the Ramp. The head of the Michilla rescue team declares, “No one else should go in!” But the situation outside the mine is chaotic, it feels as if there’s no one in charge of the overall rescue, and no one tries to stop the next group of men, including Alex Vega’s father, from entering.

  Not long after passing through that gaping mouth that leads from afternoon sunshine to darkness, José Vega begins to realize exactly what he’s gotten himself into. “To be honest, it was very, very frightening.” They approach the blocked section of the Ramp that Carlos Pinilla and Pablo Ramirez reached a day earlier—the rumbling mountain has piled up stones on the roadway before it. José speaks with another member of the rescue team, a relative of the miner Jorge Galleguillos, and they agree to look for the nearest chimney. When they find one, a young, skinny miner agrees to climb down inside. After being lowered down and then pulled back up, the miner reports that he could see an open passageway at the bottom. It’s leading to another air duct and perhaps to a gallery where they can reach the men. But José says they don’t have permission to go any farther. They climb back up to report their findings to the team of professional rescuers preparing to enter the mine.

  * * *

  The minister of mini
ng, Laurence Golborne, arrives at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday. He, too, sees the men and women sitting by the bonfires and their expressions of confusion and sorrow. He’s still dressed in the business suit he was wearing the day before while on a state visit to Ecuador. Several family members corral him and repeat the rumors they’ve heard: “They’re dead already, aren’t they…” When you’re a government official in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, people believe it’s your nature to misinform or manipulate, that you somehow surrender your humanity and morals when you take office. The poorer someone is, the more likely they are to feel this way about their government. “Tell us the truth, Señor Ministro!” The truth is that the available information is spotty and inaccurate. According to one count given to Golborne as he arrives, the number of trapped miners is thirty-seven. Or maybe thirty-four. He is told (incorrectly) that the ranks of the miners include several illegal immigrants from Peru, or maybe from Bolivia.

  Not much in Golborne’s professional career up to this moment has prepared him for this. He’s a well-off executive and business owner with a degree in civil engineering and a minor in chemistry who’s never before held a government position. Upon taking office he was more familiar with the challenges in serving South American haute cuisine (he owns a restaurant in a tony district of Santiago) than in the complexities of the mining industry (his only experience in mining was as an administrator, a number cruncher, twenty years earlier). His journey to Copiapó has been a long and roundabout one after leaving the state visit with President Sebastián Piñera to Ecuador, flying coach on a commercial flight back to Santiago, and then in a Chilean air force jet to Copiapó. Golborne is part of the circle of businessmen, politicos, and thinkers now taking the reins of government after two decades of center-left rule, and at this moment his business attire isn’t the only thing that makes him stand out. He’s a top-ranking official of a conservative national government in a region that voted overwhelmingly for the left, and his presence at the mine is unusual because the federal goverment never takes a role in mining accidents—by tradition, it’s usually the mining companies that lead and organize their own rescue efforts.

  “The attitude among people there was, ‘Well, you’re here.’ They weren’t openly hostile, but they weren’t espeicially welcoming either,” Golborne will say later. He watches as the rescuers gather near the entrance to the mine; they are from Punta del Cobre, Escondida, and other mines. Just after midnight, they pass underneath the jagged gray teeth at the entrance and disappear inside.

  * * *

  The rescue team is composed of Carabinero police officers and a local mining rescue team lead by Pedro Rivero, a lifelong miner with a ponytail dyed blond and many years’ experience in mining rescues. Off duty, at home, Rivero is a transvestite, a fact widely known in the local and eminently macho mining community, where he is nevertheless respected for the undeniable manliness of his courage as a rescuer. His team includes one employee of the San José Mine, Pablo Ramirez, the night-shift supervisor and Florencio Avalos’s friend. They drive the 4.5 kilometers into the mine until they reach the flat granite wall that’s blocking the Ramp, then assemble their equipment for a descent into the deeper reaches of the mine, hoping to reach the Refuge, some 285 meters farther down. They bring ropes, pulleys, tackle blocks, and slabs of wood for building a platform over one of the chimney openings, each of which is 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide, and as much as 30 meters (100 feet) deep.

  Rivero, Ramirez, and five other rescuers descend through several chimneys from the spot where the Ramp is blocked at Level 320, down to Level 295. To Rivero, who’s never been in this mine before, the scene is increasingly “Dantesque” the deeper he goes, the more the temperature rises and debris fills the Ramp and cracks begin to appear in the structure of the stone. At each level they find the same perfect gray mass blocking the Ramp, and stop to yell downward, in the general direction of the trapped men, calling out with the usual insults with which mining men address one another: “¡Viejos culiados! ¿Dónde están?” With each level down, the sense of danger deepens. They are like a Himalayan expedition working in reverse, their goal to “assault” the center of a mountain instead of its peak, with the air getting thicker and hotter instead of colder and thinner, and at Level 295 they gather to make a kind of base camp. They assemble more ropes for the descent into the next chimney, which leads down to Level 268.

  Ramirez goes first, alone, and after a few meters he begins to notice something deeply disturbing: There are cracks in the walls of the chimney. The stone walls of the cavity are coming apart, being slowly squeezed by the weight of the skyscraper-size “mega-block” of stone that’s fallen from above. Once again he yells down below for the trapped men and listens for a reply that never comes. When he gets near the bottom of the chimney he can’t see the Ramp at Level 268; instead, there is a pile of debris, a hanging wall of rock that looks like it could collapse at any moment and seal the opening completely. “Anyone who passed through there,” Ramirez later says, “would be in danger of being stuck if all those rocks came tumbling down.” This isn’t going to work, we can’t go through here, he thinks, it’s going to crumble very soon. Ramirez makes this assessment in his thoughts, and feels suddenly defeated. He thinks about Mario Gómez, the truck driver, and the men in the mechanical crews, and like Pinilla he’s certain they got caught in this collapse, because it was the lunch hour and they had to be driving up the Ramp near this spot. But the rest of the men are probably alive down there, Ramirez thinks, because in the San José the main group of fortifiers and jumbo operators never took the lunch hour when they were supposed to, they were always late or early. “That’s the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate,” he says. “That’s what’s beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen.”

  Now the weird, mysterious thing is the mountain rumbling all around him, from rockfalls that may be distant or may be close. He yells up to Rivero at the top of the chimney.

  “¡Sácame, huevón, esto se fue a la cresta!” Pull me up, you bastard. This is going to hell!

  Rivero and the other rescuers at the top of the chimney also hear the sound of thunder rumbling from the stone around them. A huge slab of rock comes falling down from a great height, and it severs the cable linking their communication equipment to the top. It’s like hearing a bomb go off nearby. Rivero begins yelling: “Red alert! Red alert!”

  Rivero and the other rescuers pull up Ramirez, but the wall of the chimney is starting to crumble, and one or several slabs catch the loose ropes the rescuers have attached to their bodies to follow Ramirez down into the chimney. For a moment, it’s as if the mountain were trying to suck them down, because falling stone is pulling at the ropes, trying to drag them into the chimney, pulling so hard that Rivero loses his footing. He and his fellow rescuers fight to keep from being sucked into the chimney even as they struggle to pull up Ramirez. When Ramirez’s head emerges at the top, they grab his arms and lift him while another rescuer pulls a knife from his boot and cuts all the ropes. Only at that instant are they safe.

  The men begin their journey back to the top, with Rivero noting how disconsolate Ramirez looks, worried for his friends and coworkers below. Rivero thinks, This is over now. At 3:00 p.m., Rivero and Ramirez reach the top and walk out into the Atacama sunshine. Word of the collapse inside the mine has already spread to the rescuers gathered outside, including José Vega, Alex’s father. “There’s millions of tons of rock and it’s impossible that they’re alive,” one of the rescuers gathered nearby says.

  “It was total silence after he said that,” José will recall.

  Golborne is there waiting for the rescue team, too, and the minister is at once struck by the their defeated expressions, and by their reddened eyes and the paint of gray and black grit covering their faces, as if they’d gone inside the mountain and been fighting some beast that lived there. “Esto se acabó,” Rivero says, with an unavoidable sense of finality. There is nothing more Rivero
or any other “conventional” mining rescue team can do, and now it falls to Golborne to tell this to the waiting families.

  As the highest-ranking official present, Golborne has taken on the strange role of spokesman in the hours since arriving, even though he doesn’t have any legal authority at the mine (techinically, he’s trespassing on private property). But the mine owners aren’t talking to the media or the families, and the reporters drift to the handsome, educated official. The families have been waiting two hours to hear from him, and now he walks away from the mine entrance to an ambulance parked near the main gate. The minister stands on a chair placed next to the vehicle and uses its loudspeaker to address the crowd, television cameras transmitting his statement live to all of Chile.

  “The news is not auspicious,” he begins. The rescuers were trying to reach Level 238, he tells them, but there was another rockfall. The mountain has collapsed again, and the rescuers have had to flee. Several family members gasp at the news. “We’re trying to find other techniques, other mechanisms to reach them,” Golborne says, but as he utters these words he looks down and sees Carolina Lobos, the adult daughter of Franklin Lobos, the former soccer star. She is looking distraught, helpless, and her eyes are filled with tears, seemingly more tears than a pair of eyes could possibly hold (that’s how Golborne will remember the moment). At the sight of her tears he stops speaking and looks down and away from the crowd. He feels “this knot in my throat” but manages to resume speaking for a few seconds. “We will try to keep you informed…” he announces, but then he has to stop again, because it’s simply too much, to be the official to tell so many good people, so many daughters and wives, that the men they love are trapped and that he doesn’t know how or if he’ll be able to save them. “We have to take care of the rescuers’ lives,” he says, and a few words more, and finally he feels the emotion welling up again, and he turns away from the crowd completely, and gives up and puts the microphone down.