Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  Ninety minutes later, Sougarret is entering La Moneda, Chile’s equivalent of the White House, for the first time in his life, dressed in jeans and carrying a mining helmet under his arm. He’s directed to an office where he waits for a meeting that never takes place. Two hours later, an official tells him to go down to the basement. “I had no idea what was happening,” he later says. Finally, he’s told: “You’re going to Copiapó.” He becomes a passenger in a caravan of cars headed to the air force base adjacent to Santiago’s international airport. When he arrives at the base, Sougarret sees, to his surprise, that he’s getting on a plane with President Piñera. A bit after takeoff, a crew member serves Sougarret lunch, and when he’s finished eating the president and the first lady emerge from their private cabin and sit next to him. The president pulls out a notepad and sketches a drawing that shows what he, the president, knows about the San José Mine and where the men are trapped. The president says something to the effect of “Well, that’s the situation. If I give you absolutely any resource you need to rescue them, what’s the probability of getting them out alive?”

  Sougarret can’t answer, and neither can another engineer sitting next to him. “Then he asked us if we knew of any other kinds of rescue, something that might work in this situation,” Sougarret says. “We told him that, in general, you can’t really predict if a rescue will work—and that, generally speaking, there are more negative outcomes than positive ones.”

  When the presidential plane arrives in Copiapó a little after 4:00 p.m., it’s very cold. Sougarret gets into the backseat of a van that takes the president to the mine, and there they join Golborne for a brief press conference in which the president announces the government has brought in the country’s top mining-rescue expert to lead the effort to find the trapped thirty-three men—he then names Sougarret, though he mispronounces his name. To his great relief, Sougarret manages to escape the press before they can ask him what, exactly, he plans to do.

  One of the first men Sougarret meets at the San José Mine is the general manager, Carlos Pinilla. “Hey, remember me?” Pinilla says. “I met you at La Serena.” Decades earlier, Sougarret was an intern at that mine when Pinilla was the boss there. Pinilla and the other managers provide Sougarret with information that gives him some hope. He learns that there are likely several thousand gallons of water stored in tanks inside the mine, which means the trapped men, if they’re alive, won’t immediately die of dehydration. The San José is more than a century old and thus has many forgotten passageways that allow air to seep in and out. In fact, as he stands on the Ramp near the entrance, Sougarret can feel air flowing into the mountain: Any men trapped inside will likely not die from suffocation. Going deeper, Sougarret also verifies that “it was a very good mine, in terms of the rock that was holding it together.” This is at once reassuring and disturbing: The hard diorite shouldn’t have caved in, but it did, which means that the essential structure of the mountain must have failed. Whatever is blocking the many passageways leading to the men must be a very large obstacle indeed, as is soon verified by a group of geologists who estimate the skyscraper-size “mega-block.” It would take a year to excavate a new tunnel around that obstacle to reach the men.

  From the medical personnel who have arrived at the mine, Sougarret learns that a healthy man can last thirty to forty days without food. However, if there’s a man debilitated with a lung disease such as silicosis (and they’ll soon find out there is, as Chilean health officials round up the medical records of the men), he’ll survive perhaps half as long; and a man with a broken limb or some other serious injury might survive as little as a week or two. Four days have already passed. They have to try every possible rescue strategy, and Sougarret decides to send one team to fortify the passageways below so that a second team can try to reach the men by clearing the chimneys. Many among the dozen or so mining professionals who have come to the site to offer guidance and expertise believe that this sort of “traditional” rescue through the chimneys and other passageways is the best hope.

  The “nontraditional” effort consists of nine drills working independently—in effect, the rescuers are firing nine bullets at the same target and hoping one will hit. Hurtado, like the other drillers, knows all of Chile is watching. After three days of drilling, the Terraservice borehole reaches a depth of 370 meters: Hurtado’s team stops and pulls out the drill so that a topographer can use instruments to check on its progress. The report back is not good: The hole has bent in the wrong direction. Can he make it bend back the right way, someone asks? “Impossible,” he answers. “It was as if we had set off for Caldera, but ended up on the road to Vallenar instead,” Hurtado later says, naming two towns that are on opposite ends of the Pan-American Highway as it runs through Copiapó. Among his drill team, one man looks especially beaten down by this setback: the man who called them all together to hold hands at the start. “Our feelings were heavy,” Hurtado says. “This wasn’t an ordinary hole anymore.” They begin to drill again, the geologist Sandra Jara checking their progress every 200 meters with a device that Hurtado’s team lowers into the 4.5-inch-diameter borehole. It contains a gyroscope that uses the Earth’s rotation and some basic principles of physics to establish true north. This hole, unlike the first one, seems to be bending in the right direction, and teams working in six more twelve-hour shifts push it down to 400 meters, then to 500, working with a combination of urgency, altruism, and pessimism, because beyond the likelihood that they will miss their target, there is also the distinct possibility that if they do find anyone that person will be dead. The possibility of finding corpses is real enough that Barra and the Ministry of the Interior have put a special protocol in place in case the drill breaks through: Sougarret will supervise a team that will lower a camera down the hole, but only he, the minister of mining, and the camera operator will be allowed to see the monitor, because it might reveal the macabre image of a dead man, or several dead men, or even thirty-three dead men. If the men are dead it will fall to the minister, and only the minister, to tell the families.

  The drilling proceeds for a fourth, fifth, and sixth day, each night ending for Hurtado as he travels to Copiapó to sleep. One day he’s driving back and he spots a woman with coffee-colored skin and indigenous features standing at the crossroads that links Route C-351 to the spur that leads to the mine. She looks not much older than a teenager, and as she turns to face his pickup truck she sticks out her thumb: She’s one of the miners’ relatives, hitchhiking to Camp Esperanza. Hurtado isn’t supposed to talk to the families—another of the many rules Barra and his team have established—but he stops to give her a ride anyway. She introduces herself as Veronica Quispe, the wife of the trapped Bolivian miner Carlos Mamani. They exchange a few pleasantries and she mentions how the water was recently cut off to her Copiapó neighborhood, a common-enough indignity in the type of informal campamento settlement where Bolivian immigrants and other poor people live. He leaves her at the gate. In the days to come he sees her several times more, waving as he passes through the gate: She’s sitting under an umbrella and doesn’t have a tent like many of the other women do. Then he returns to the drill and wonders if it really is bending in the direction of Veronica Quispe’s husband.

  * * *

  A week after the accident, President Sebastián Piñera announces the resignation of the head of Chile’s mining regulatory agency, the National Geology and Mining Service, and two other top agency officials, for their failure to monitor the San José Mine. The rescue effort is a potential public relations disaster for the Piñera government, and also a potential bonanza. The president’s advisers, mindful of their responsibility to lay out the risks and benefits of any decision to their boss, conduct a public opinion poll about the personalities linked to the disaster and rescue, according to Carlos Vergara Ehrenberg’s account of the disaster and rescue, Operación San Lorenzo. Piñera and Golborne score very well, while the mine’s owners have become among the most unpopular people in C
hile.

  The mine owners, Bohn and Kemeny, live in Santiago, but they return to Copiapó on August 12 to grant interviews to two of Chile’s biggest newspapers. They don’t take any responsibility for the accident and suggest the miners themselves might be to blame. Even worse, from the Chilean government’s point of view, they dress in the same red jackets as the government officials working at the rescue site. “Those idiots screwed us,” says the president’s fixer, Barra. “Why did they have to wear those red jackets?” A few days later, Golborne commits a much more serious faux pas: He tells a television interviewer that he believes there’s little chance the men are still alive. Golborne quickly retracts this statement, but the truth is the government is already preparing, privately, for the worst, according to Vergara Ehrenberg. If the men can’t be found, the government will seal off the San José and declare it a “sacred place” that can never be mined again.

  * * *

  When men were still extracting ore from the San José, women were told to stay away from the mine. A woman in a mine is said to be bad luck, but now a growing group of girlfriends, daughters, sisters, and wives occupy the entrance to the San Esteban Mining Company property. Watching the first rays of sun burn through the fog to illuminate that windswept patch of ground is an eye-opening experience for many of these women, especially those such as Carola Bustos who have come from Santiago and other cities to the south. In the light of day it is immediately apparent how far removed the mine is from civilization. There is the sadness of the narrow, crumbling asphalt strip that leads from the main highway to the front gate: Driving it feels like watching the opening scene of a movie about a remote and hopeless place. They see how small and dilapidated the mine company buildings are; and when they look at their cell phones they see their husbands and boyfriends were speaking the truth when they said there’s no signal here. Some of the women are angry with their men for taking a job at such a remote, forgotten, and patently dangerous place—because now they can see and feel how crude and simple the mine is, how it’s just this hole carved into a mountain and not the safe and orderly work site they imagined or hoped it was. Their men said it paid well, after all, better than any other job they could get, but evidently little of the enormous wealth created by this mine was put back into it. All these men working here: They were just looting this mountain, weren’t they? Rushing in to get out as much gold, literally, as they could, before the very stone into which they were tunneling came tumbling down upon them. Some of the wives and girlfriends are angry with themselves for allowing themselves to be fooled, despite the now-obvious clues that the tough guy who slept next to them was trying to give about what the San José was really like. But now they’re here, once again forced to keep home and family together after men have messed everything up. Of course, it isn’t their man who’s to blame for this particular mess, but rather the men who own the mine. It’s up to each woman to fight for her man, because his kids, their kids, need him back home, with all his hard-drinking, wandering-eye flaws, and his mal genio moodiness.

  The mothers, especially, feel their instincts and emotions pulling them in different directions. When Mario Sepúlveda’s wife, Elvira Valdivia, arrives in Copiapó, she travels immediately to the mine with her children, Francisco, age twelve, and Scarlette, age eighteen. But after a short while amid the weeping wives and the shouting mothers at the mine entrance, and the mine officials and the Carabineros yelling at the women to get away from the front gate, Elvira realizes she can’t spend the night there with her children. Scarlette is looking more like a girl than a woman suddenly, she’s relapsed into a state of frightened helplessness, and Elvira speaks to a doctor who gets her a prescription to help Scarlette sleep. Elvira also forces the company to pay for a hotel room facing the plaza in downtown Copiapó. At night, in that room with Francisco and Scarlette, she reaches deep into her feminine soul and calls upon the strength she needs to protect them from even the idea of death and loss. A mother’s instinct tells you your children need you to make them believe they will see their father again, but this isn’t an easy thing to do when you’ve seen the rocky mountain that’s swallowed him up.

  Still, for those first days, the notion that Mario isn’t like most other men makes it easier to believe he’ll come out of the mine. “I knew that Mario wasn’t going to let himself die,” Elvira later says. “No, Mario is the type of person who will eat someone to survive if it comes to that. And if he had to eat mud to survive, he’d eat that, too.” For these first few days Elvira is certain Mario is alive. “If I had thought there wasn’t any hope I would have turned around and left and gone home because I’m cold-blooded when it comes to those things.” She worries, however, about his not taking the medication that keeps his emotional pendulum from swinging too wildly. Elvira has spent two decades enduring the mood shifts of the man with “the heart of a dog” and the series of never-permanent jobs that took him from one end of Chile to the other. The lesson of all those years is that Mario always comes back, he pulls himself out of unemployment or depression and finds a way back home to make Scarlette laugh, to be Francisco’s hero. Every night, she gathers her children in the hotel room to pray.

  Mónica Avalos, on the other hand, plants herself at the mine entrance and doesn’t leave. For the first few days and nights she barely sleeps at all. Mónica is, by her own account, falling apart: She’s even lost track of her seven-year-old son, Bayron. She’s at the mine when she realizes she doesn’t have him—her husband’s friend Isaías tells her that his wife is taking care of the boy. “Don’t worry, la Nati has him. He hasn’t got any clothes, but they’re going to get some for him.” Mónica’s teenage son, César Alexis, tells her she needs to go home and bathe and sleep, but she won’t. “I didn’t care about taking a bath, I didn’t care about eating. I didn’t care about anything. Nothing. Nothing. People would tell me, ‘Mónica, you have to be strong,’ but no, no, I couldn’t be.” She spends her first night at the mine sleeping for a few minutes while sitting on a slate-colored rock; the second night she finds a wooden pallet, and curls up on that for a short while, still dressed in the sweatpants she was wearing when she was making Florencio the soup he never ate. Another night she’s awake standing on the mountain under the stars; she sits down on one of the brick-shaped blocks of stone, closes her eyes, and falls asleep, and when she opens her eyes again she’s awake at another spot far away. She’s been sleepwalking over the mountain where her husband is trapped, a sonámbula whose subconscious is pulling her over the gritty surface of the ground, one step after another.

  Her teenage son, César, meanwhile, is channeling Florencio and trying to be brave and responsible: Among other things, he’s going to school every day while also traveling to and from the mine. He’s in the third year of high school; at 5:00 p.m. he gets out of class—a little earlier sometimes, if he asks for permission—and gets a ride to the mine, sometimes on the bus the Copiapó city government has set up for the family members. If he misses the bus, he hitchhikes. At his school no one knows for the first few days that César’s father is trapped, but then the school’s administrators find out. Take a month off school if you want, they say. “But I didn’t want to be absent, because I was going to fall behind in class and my exams might not go well.” So César Alexis Avalos, son of the trapped foreman Florencio Avalos, goes to class all day. When the final bell sounds, he heads to the mine to check on his mother and see if there’s any news, and then he hitchhikes back to Copiapó if he has to, so that he can be at school the next morning. “The only thing my father wanted,” he later explains, “was for me to go to school.” César plans to honor his father’s wishes, and to stick to the rituals of responsibility and hard work his parents built into each day, perhaps because doing so is a kind of unspoken acknowledgment that his father is still alive.

  At this point, it takes a certain stubbornness to believe the thirty-three men are alive and that they will one day walk, or be carried, out of the mine. A newspaper in Santiago
has put the chances of their successful rescue at less than 2 percent. Other media outlets report that the men can survive a mere seventy-two hours underground, and now they’ve spent nearly twice as long trapped. Carmen, the articulate, poetry-writing, and deeply religious wife of the shift supervisor, Luis Urzúa, has heard people declare her husband dead already. “The jefe de turno, he was with Mr. Lobos, in the personnel truck, and they were coming out when the mine collapsed,” someone tells her not long after she arrives at the mine. “The truck was crushed. They’re both dead.” Carmen refuses to believe this and snaps back: “If he was dead they would have brought out his body already through the chimney!” But it’s deeply unsettling, because the verbs and the adjectives of death are there, hovering over the mine entrance. “Están muertos.” They’re dead. “Murierion.” They died. Officials at the hospital have repeated these words, too: “They’re dead,” one told Alex Vega’s wife, Jessica, causing her to faint. The fear of death is threatening to consume the women around Carmen, women like the sleepwalking Mónica Avalos, with her swollen eyes and frizzy hair. No, sisters, don’t believe what they’re saying, Carmen says. Hold on to your faith. “We need to pray.” Carmen teaches catechism classes at her church, and she takes her silver rosary—“I always carry it with me”—and begins to pray on a cold night, forming a circle with a few other women. A few days later she spots a small plaster statue of the Virgin of Candelaria: a replica of the one that resides in a chapel in Copiapó, itself found in the eighteenth century in the nearby Andes, the figure of a woman said to have appeared miraculously in a palm-size stone. These plaster figures are ubiquitous in the mining north, and now Carmen and the other women decide to build a shrine in Camp Esperanza with this humble representation of the mother of Christ at its center. By now the local government has put up a tented field kitchen to feed the relatives gathered in the camp; the women build their shrine nearby, next to the spot where the government passes out bread. They place a few stones around the plaster figurine, then put the statue inside a cardboard box so that the wind won’t blow out their votive candles. “We made a small place where people could go and let go of their pain, where they could pray for the miners, and start to forget that they might be dead,” Carmen says. They kneel before the image of the Virgin Mary, in thick wool sweaters and big parkas, underneath winter caps and hats, and they recite the prayers of the Rosary, an Apostles’ Creed followed by repetitions of the Our Father and the Hail Mary, its “blessed art thou among women” whispered in chorus.