by Héctor Tobar
“As you can see, the minister broke down, visibly shaken,” the announcer on Chile’s TVN news network says in a grim tone. A sense of shock and mourning spreads across Chile, because ministers don’t cry like that on live television, and seeing one do so makes the moment all the more real and extraordinary for the millions watching. Something very tragic, very human must be happening for a powerful man to cry like that.
Golborne steps down into a crush of reporters. They’re asking him questions, and he gives them only vague responses about studying “options” and other “techniques,” and as he speaks the microphones pick up the sound of a woman, or many, weeping very loudly. The “short-term” solution of going through the chimney won’t work, Golborne says, almost mumbling now.
In response a man nearby shouts: “Señor Ministro. We can see it in your face. Tell us the truth! Can you get them out? We’re all in the dark! We’ve been waiting here fifty hours. Fifty hours!”
Golborne says that “hopes have to be realistic … We can’t transmit an optimism that doesn’t exist.”
Hearing this, a relative and miner from Cerro Negro shouts: “David took on Goliath! And he used the weapons that he had!”
“You can’t break down like that!” a woman tells him. “You’re a minister. You’re the authority here. You have to show you’re in charge!”
Golborne is up to this point in his career a Stanford and Northwestern alumnus with a stellar corporate résumé, but he’s never been someone who’s had to think of himself as a man of the people. He’s never had to make the concerns of the poor his own, and he’s never known what it’s like to be the public servant of people who want him to be strong and who are deeply suspicious of him at the same time.
* * *
María Segovia remembers what happens in the minutes and hours that follow this way: She and the other family members watch, in the fading afternoon light, as rescue-team members walk away with their helmets underneath their arms and fire trucks drive away from the mine entrance. She feels abandoned, and so do most of the family members around her. They’re weeping, she’s weeping, but finally María stops and thinks: We’re not going to get anywhere with tears. Eventually she finds a young reporter for CNN Chile, and she tells him, “No, this can’t be this way.” She describes seeing the rescuers leave, and speaks of her outrage and hurt. “These men are not dogs that are buried here,” she says. “They’re human beings. And for that reason we need help. Because they have to be rescued.” Call the president, she says, call other countries, bring help to get these men out of here.
In the days to come María Segovia and the other women who’ve come to the San José Mine will often feel the need to speak and protest. The police tell them to move away from their spot near the mine entrance and force them back down the hill, outside and past the front gate: “We retreated like dogs with our tails between our legs,” one woman remembers. When María and the other family members don’t get information, they walk back up to the front gate and start banging pots and pans. It’s the only way. They’ll block the road and the entrance to the mine if they have to, and they do so more than once. Each time they stage these impromptu protests, they face off with several police officers lined up there to keep them off the mine property. “We want information!” the women yell. “Come down here and tell us what’s going on!” A short time later a government official comes down and talks to them. Carmen Berríos, Luis Urzúa’s wife, sees Alejandro Bohn, one of the mine owners, walk past, and confronts him: “You don’t have a secretary to call us about the accident! I had to find out on a miserable bus!” He mutters something back and walks away.
María Segovia quickly realizes that the most important thing she can do to help her brother is to simply stay there, at the mine. “We’re going to have to live here,” she tells the other women, the mothers and girlfriends and daughters. “We’re going to have to stay here until the bitter end.” Hasta las últimas consecuencias. María sets up her tent closest to the gate, and as the camp of family members around her grows it soon comes to have a name: Campo Esperanza. This Camp Hope becomes a draw to charities and well-meaning people from across Chile and beyond. People begin to drive into the moonscape desert with donations for the miners’ families. More firewood. Tarps. Food. The regional government in Copiapó brings tents. A small chapel goes up. Eventually, the government will even provide a school for the children who are living there with their parents.
María Segovia is not the only one taking charge, she’s not the only one who’s decided to live at the San José Mine, but she’s the one closest to the gate, the one who most often answers questions. A truck arrives with more firewood and the driver asks, “Where do we put this?” “Over there,” María says. “We’ll make sure everyone gets some.” The government officials who go down to talk to the families very often encounter María first, and they are moved by her determination, by her love for her brother, her unflagging defense of the dignity and humanity of the men trapped down there. Soon this woman who sells ice cream and candies and empanadas from a cart at the beach will be on a first-name basis with some of the most powerful men in Chile. “Don’t forget my brother, don’t let those men die down there,” she tells them. As the community of relatives and rescue workers grows around her, María speaks so much that this new community will finally give her a nickname: “La Alcaldesa.” María Segovia will become the “mayor” of Camp Esperanza.
But much of that will happen in the days to come. In the short term, a day or so after the families of thirty-three buried men first began to bang pots and pans, after they first made the minister of mining weep, something very important happens. María Segovia and the other family members stand before their camp at the entrance to the San José Mine and see a strange vehicle come rumbling toward them.
6
“WE HAVE SINNED”
Six hundred meters below the fires of Camp Esperanza, in the damaged mine down by the Refuge, Víctor Zamora and a few of his companions walk out onto the Ramp and begin to look for Víctor’s missing teeth. The beams of their headlamps pan over the gravelly ground. They are surrounded by the complete and, yes, terrifying darkness of the mine, and they’re starting to think about the batteries in the lamps going out: They begin each shift fully charged, but already a few of the miners can see the beams dimming. Turning on their precious lights, they look, briefly, thinking the pearl-colored beads of Víctor’s teeth will catch the light if they’re here. But they find nothing.
A bit higher up the mine, Luis Urzúa, Florencio Avalos, and the mechanics Juan Carlos Aguilar, Raúl Bustos, and others travel back through the black tunnels uphill in Urzúa’s truck, driving up to the rock wall that’s blocking the way out. They listen for a sign that rescuers are near, or headed toward them. In the darkness every sound and sensation is amplified: The faint circulation of the air through the mine starts to feel more like a breeze, the breathing of the man next to them sounds like the rustling of an unseen animal or a passing vehicle. But they hear no sound that is clearly that of a rescuer.
Urzúa has surrendered the authority of his white helmet, but he’s still making suggestions, responding to the ideas of the other men, who collectively are trying to take charge and keep busy. Juan Carlos Aguilar, Mario Sepúlveda, Alex Vega, Raúl Bustos, Carlos Barrios, and Florencio Avalos: They all want to do something besides wait. Ideas are suggested, the men debate, and Urzúa and Avalos share what they know about the mine, and together supervisors and underlings reach a decision that makes the most sense. It’s not the way things are done during a regular workday but in the absence of a single man taking charge it’s what seems best. At the base of the chimney where Mario and Raúl climbed to seek a way out, they set fire to a small tire from a wheelbarrow, and also to an oil-soaked air filter from one of the machines, hoping the smoke will drift up and reach the surface, sending a sign that there are living men below. But the smoke simply gathers around them in the Ramp in a useless cloud. There are hour
s when, for reasons no one can explain, the very faint breeze at the workshop by the Pit shifts, and so they try again when the air is circulating upward into the cavern, though the movement of the smoke is slow. They watch a wispy cloud disappear into the cavern beyond the short reach of their beams and are not hopeful it will reach the top. Next they stuff a detonating cord inside one of the rubber tubes that run inside a chimney and set it alight. These tubes carry phone lines and electricity and compressed air, and in theory it should be possible for the pungent smoke produced by the burning cord to travel up that tube to the surface; any miner who detects that scent will know what it is, and know it’s a message from men who are alive below. Of course, the tube was more than likely cut somewhere by the same collapse of stone that’s trapped them, but the men decide to try anyway, and the smoke does seem to stay inside the tube and drift upward, though it’s impossible to know how high it reaches. They go to one of the galleries filled with rocks, because some of the miners think that if they clear that space there might be a way to climb to another opening that leads upward. Mario uses the big scoop of a front loader to lift out the rocks, but it’s a Sisyphean task, because more rocks fall from the top of the pile to take the place of those he clears out. “I practically destroyed that loader,” Mario will remember. They consider building a ladder to climb the chimney, using rubber hoses and pieces of rebar, but realize it likely won’t hold a man’s weight and that the one saw they have won’t be able to cut more than a few pieces of rebar anyway. Later they bring up one of the vehicles to the stone guillotine blocking the Ramp and honk its horn, and they use one of the jumbo machines and pound its arm against the stone wall. Then they stop and turn off their lamps and listen to the quiet, again, to see if they can hear a reply coming from the blackness around them: a honk, a clank, a banging, perhaps. But there is nothing, just the stone blocking their way, their ears turned toward it.
While a dozen or so men are doing this work, the majority of the miners remain below in the Refuge. “They weren’t bothering anyone, and that was good,” Urzúa later says. “As far as I could tell, they weren’t fighting.” But the men are already being divided into “doers” and “waiters.” The doers will do anything to fight the idea that they’re trapped and dead, and they believe the waiters are afraid, and that they won’t leave the Refuge because they’re paralyzed by the memory of running for their lives with the mountain falling around them.
There isn’t much that makes the small space of the Refuge safer than the rest of the crumbling mountain around it: There’s the steel door, and strands of chain-link fencing covering the stone walls inside, a kind of steel net that’s supposed to keep the rocks from crushing the men inside if the rest of the mountain crumbles. The Refuge is inside the same mountain as the Ramp and the rest of the broken mine, but it does have a blue-and-white sign outside with the words REFUGIO DE EMERGENCIA. Inside there’s the locker with their remaining food supplies, a first-aid kit on the wall, and a single picture of a naked woman ripped from a magazine. For the first few hours after the disaster the Refuge stays as neat as Franklin Lobos left it for his boss, Carlos Pinilla, to inspect, and los niños respect the blue signs telling people to throw their trash in the bins. A small digital thermometer displays the temperature, 29.6° Celsius (85.3° Fahrenheit).
At noon on the second day, all thirty-three men are present as Mario Sepúlveda divides and distributes their daily “meal.” He lines up thirty-three plastic cups in rows and spoons one teaspoon of canned fish into each cup, then pours in some water, making a bit of broth. He passes out two cookies to each man. “Enjoy your meal,” he says. “This is delicious stuff. Make it last.” The men linger about, a few form a kind of makeshift line. That single meal, at noon, likely contains fewer than 300 calories and is meant to hold them all until the next noon.
Several times during those first few days trapped underground, the mountain rumbles as if it’s going to explode again and more people decide to sleep in the Refuge, or just outside. “I tried to stay outside, but outside I always slept with one eye open, and when the mountain made noises I’d go running back inside,” Lobos says. Soon there are twenty prone men sweating in a space the size of a large American living room. A few of the men take the plastic stretchers that were stacked neatly inside and use them as beds, others toss cardboard onto the floor, and find boxes to use as nightstands. It was always a struggle for Lobos to keep that place clean, because the men would come in there to rest, to lie down on the floor with soot-covered bodies; now they sweat all day long and their moist bodies are painting the room’s white tile floors with the gray grit and black soot that’s clinging to them. The Refuge starts to fill with the smell of their sweating, unbathed, manly bodies—“we didn’t have water we could spare to clean our private parts,” as one miner puts it—and in a space where there is no longer any ventilation, the fetid scent begins to gather and cook, transforming the air into a stew of body odor. “I’ve smelled corpses before, and after a while, it smelled worse than that,” one miner says later.
Men who sweat crave water. The few liters of bottled water in the emergency supplies in the Refuge were devoured in a day, so now they drink some of the thousands of gallons of water stored inside the mine to cool off the drilling machines. This water came down from the surface in hoses that led to a series of underground tanks, all the way to the deepest reaches of the mine. On the second day after the accident a few of the men open one of the spigots to wash themselves off but the water is too precious to use that way now—to conserve their limited supply, Juan Carlos Aguilar tells Juan Illanes to cut the hose from a holding tank on a higher level and seal it off so that no one can take a bath farther below.
Now the men fill plastic barrels at this tank. Mario Sepúlveda organizes them in teams of three, to drive one of their vehicles every two days to the tank and fill up a 60-liter (16-gallon) barrel with water. They put this water in their plastic bottles and look at the dirty liquid inside, and think about how it’s keeping them alive. Before the collapse, the men would wash off their dirty gloves in this water. Sepúlveda used to jump into the water tanks to take a bath, in his irrepressible, impulsive way, and a few men come to the disgusting and comical realization that they’re all drinking Mario’s bathwater. When they shine their weakening lamps on the water in their bottles they can see a thin, black-orange film and small drops of motor oil. One of the miners thinks the water tastes the way a pond smells when ducks defecate all over it. As disgusting as it is, however, a few sips can make their hunger go away.
The hunger hits them worst these first few days. It creeps up on them. Suddenly they can’t even go to the bathroom to defecate, even though their bodies seem to be telling them to try, because for many the emptiness in their stomachs is like a fist pushing the emptiness downward. Franklin Lobos used to be a professional athlete, attuned to the state of his own body, and perhaps for this reason as he sits in the Refuge he begins to assess the state of the men’s health. Mario Gómez, the truck driver with two fingers missing, is clearly the worst off. He’s got that silicosis cough that won’t stop. You hear that cough and you hear history, as if the cough were something passed down from his miner grandfathers. Is this viejo going to make it? Lobos wonders. The “old man” can’t possibly make it. José Ojeda is diabetic: Is two cookies a day going to be enough to keep him from going into shock? After a day or two, Víctor Segovia breaks into a rash all over his body. Is it the heat, or nerves, or both? Jimmy Sánchez, the youngest of the miners, is acting like an old man: He simply won’t get up, he’s defeated by an emotional and physical lethargy that quickly spreads to other men.
The thing to keep the men from feeling hopeless is to talk, make jokes, tell stories, imagine what the rescuers are doing. Yonni Barrios fills the silence by explaining the structure of the mine to some of the younger, more inexperienced guys, including Mamani and Sánchez, drawing a map on a piece of paper for them. “Look, here we are at Level 90,” he tells them, “and
we can walk up to 190, and from there there’s a passageway to 230, and then to 300, and then to 400.”
“So we’re free!” Víctor Zamora, the former “gypsy” from Arica, calls out happily in the darkness. “We can just climb out of here!” His wide, childlike face now brightens with a crazy comedian’s grin that’s framed with a head of matted, wavy hair—he’s egging Yonni on, though Yonni doesn’t realize it.
Víctor, who led the raid on the emergency food supply the first night, has become calmer and more composed than just about anyone around him. “We’re going to get out of here,” he’s been telling the men. “Don’t worry, they’re coming for us.” During an ordinary working day, the men of the A shift would be teasing one another mercilessly, and teasing Yonni is Víctor’s way of trying to keep the men around him loose. “We’re saved!” he calls out with a big, toothy smile. “We can just climb up to 400 and then walk out of here!”
