33 Men (13 page)

Barrios had one other important task. “We needed him to measure the men. We needed their circumference in order to find out if they would fit through the small rescue hole now being drilled,” said Dr. Devis Castro, a surgeon with advanced studies in nutrition.

Above ground Barrios had an even more complicated operation—keeping separation between his lover and his wife, both of whom were battling for him in public attacks that had the media in a frenzy. Below ground, the men never ceased to rib Barrios about the controversy. In the cloistered world of miners, jokes and humor continue nonstop. Nothing is sacred. Instead of respecting Barrios's delicate dilemma, the miners plumbed it for every ounce of laughter, teasing and taunting without malice—simply as part of the daily conversation.

DAY 24: SUNDAY, AUGUST 29

Six days after first contact via Pedro Gallo's rudimentary phone, now the main channel of communications with the miners, demands from below increased. The miners wanted, needed, pleaded to speak to their families. The rescue leaders scheduled very brief voice contact: each family would have sixty seconds with their loved one, as recommended by the psychologist Iturra.

The miners were indignant. After having spoken with President Piñera and Minister Golborne for well over an hour in total, now they would collectively receive just thirty-three minutes for what was their most important call to date? When the calls began, so, too, did a new round of problems.

“I was talking on the phone and Iturra was saying, ‘Cut, cut, cut' and I was like, what are you talking about? That is not even one minute. Then he said, ‘Cut or I cut you off.' I thought, what an asshole; that gave me an idea of his mentality.” Samuel Ávalos accused Iturra of being overly strict and possessive of the miners. “He wanted to impose his terms on the group. We were never going to accept that. . . . We were a group, for better or worse a family.”

Initially the miners agreed to a two-hour daily conference call in which Iturra and doctors peppered them with questions—an attempt to build a psychological profile of the group and its individual members. As the miners regained weight and strength, however, their antagonism to the daily sessions increased. “They say they are not sick and they do not want to talk to doctors or psychologists,” said Dr. Díaz.

The new level of communications also began to seed a crop of controversies and conflicts. Family feuds above ground threatened to spill into the letters and conversations with the miners. No one knew how much more mental stress the miners could take—one miner losing his mind had the potential to infect the entire group. Rescuers worried that panic attacks or violence could engulf the miners in a collective state where reason and order vanished.

With dozens of letters flowing in both directions every day, the psychological team led by Iturra instituted a strict policy. All letters from the miners would be read before being released to the families. Similarly, any letter intended for the miners would also be read by a team of psychologists who spent the days going through stacks of tightly folded, handwritten missives.

Nick Kanas, a longtime adviser to NASA, was critical of the censorship and Big Brother mentality. “I would not screen anything . . . otherwise you are setting up a basis for mistrust. The miners will then start asking, ‘What else are they hiding from us?' They will know they are not getting the full story and will want to know why.”

As it was, tensions rose quickly. José Ojeda did not believe that letters were lost or delayed, as government officials tried to explain. “This is like a jail; they censor everything,” he wrote. “We were better off before we had communications.” That letter was never shown to his family but was stashed away by the psychologists.

“Sometimes they would add words or they would rewrite the letters,” said the miner Carlos Barrios. “I know my grandmother's handwriting.” Barrios began to talk about a strike. The miners would present a united front to the invisible commanders above. For Barrios, the entire incident highlighted psychologist Iturra's patronizing attitude, an attitude that united the men. “They thought we were ignorant,” said Barrios. “They never understood us.”

DAY 26: TUESDAY, AUGUST 31

As the gray van threaded its way through the crowd of cameramen and photographers at Camp Hope, family members of the trapped miners lined the roadway and cheered. Inside the van, six specialists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stared out in wonder. Having been trained in the comparatively sterile and highly regimented bureaucracy of the U.S. space program, the sight of dozens of women shouting at them in Spanish while hundreds of journalists jostled to take their picture was like arriving on another planet.

The news of the miners' survival underground for seventeen days had stunned the world, as had the Chilean expertise in drilling holes and marshaling mining equipment that had led to contact being made with the trapped men. But now with the men beginning to receive meals and medicine, an entirely new challenge arose: maintaining their psychological health. Rescue leaders at all levels were floundering in uncharted regions of the human psyche. In acknowledgment of the unique characteristics of the San José mine disaster, President Piñera sent aides to find expert consultants with relevant experience. They came back to the president with two recommendations: astronauts and submariners.

Chile's space program was limited to one man, Klaus von Storch of the Chilean Air Force. Von Storch was a die-hard optimist who had patiently sat on NASA's standby astronaut list for more than a decade before giving up. Although the Atacama Desert placed Chile at the forefront of world astronomy, manned space flight was light-years away from the nation's fiscal reality. So with no local data to call upon, the Chilean embassy in Washington, D.C., contacted officials at NASA, who were delighted to share decades of studying human behavior in confined, stressful situations. The team at Camp Hope included Dr. Al Holland, a psychologist with vast experience in extreme living conditions ranging from the deep space of Apollo missions to deep-freeze environments in Antarctica.

The NASA specialists huddled with Chile's recently formed team, which included psychologists, nutritionists, mining engineers and Renato Navarro, a commander with the Chilean submarine fleet who had been brought in to share his experience of managing men in confined environments. “The submarine has water outside; the miners have a seven-hundred-meter [2,300-foot] high column of rock,” he said. “The sense of confinement is the same.”

Known to psychologists as “Situations of Extreme Confinement,” the living conditions of the thirty-three miners presented so many logistical and mental health issues that the support staff at the mine now swelled to include a total of three hundred professionals, including a physics professor, a mapmaker and an avalanche survivor. Also on staff was Edmundo Ram
í
rez, a chef brought in to prepare the meals sent down to the miners. The visiting dignitaries from NASA were the latest in a stream of foreign experts, but even with ten professionals for each trapped miner, many questions could not be answered.

“This is an unprecedented situation and effort,” said Michael Duncan, a NASA psychologist, speaking inside a tent at the San José mine. “To my knowledge, never before have this many men been found so deep underground. The fact that they were found such a long time after the collapse and found alive was remarkable.”

The NASA officials lauded the Chilean rescue effort and suggested minor changes to the protocol, including additional vitamin D and better artificial lighting to stimulate the body's reaction to the cycles of day and night. The NASA team also emphasized that simple daily activities like playing cards, reading and watching movies were crucial to avoiding a monotonous existence. NASA officials refused to release many details of their final five-hour briefing, but participants in that meeting with NASA said the U.S. space agency had vigorously promoted the importance of organizing the miners in a strict—almost corporate—hierarchy. Voting and group decision making had worked fine for seventeen days, but now, NASA stressed, the men needed to be prepared for a race with different stages—in the words of NASA, “a marathon.”

NASA officials also told the rescue leaders to prepare for a rebellion. “They said that during one of the Skylab missions, the astronauts had an argument with their commanders [and] became so upset that they cut off communications with the commanders,” recounted Dr. Jorge Diaz. “For a day the astronauts orbited [Earth] and no one could contact them.”

The Chilean psychiatrist Dr. Figueroa echoed this sentiment. “Following the euphoria of being discovered, the normal psychological reaction would be for the men to collapse in a combination of fatigue and stress,” he explained. Dr. Figueroa had been hired by the Chilean Ministry of the Interior to report on the mental health care being provided to the miners and their families. “There are approximately fifteen percent of the miners who could develop long-term psychological damage from this event. This is where the government is very dedicated to strongly supporting the people to prevent these long-term psychological problems. The most important thing is to open a channel of communications, a prescribed time when the miners can send messages.”

Letters had already proven to be a huge psychological boost to both the families and the miners. Among the first requests from the trapped men were pens and paper. The Chileans had also phased in a phone system with the miners; this was to be followed by a video conference system. But open communications also meant a loss of control. What if a wife decided to ask her miner husband for divorce? Was this really the time to fight over household bills and finances?

DAY 27: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

From a distance the rescue site at the San José copper mine looked like a construction site gone mad. Huge cranes rattled twenty-four hours a day, transporting metal tubes the length of a ship's mast with ease. Cement trucks, bulldozers, backhoes and robotic mine machines that looked like insects prowled the mountainside. Parking lots were filled with supplies ranging from a field of drill bits to twenty-eight pallets packed with charcoal. Placed in an oil drum and lit, the burning charcoal served as a night-light and heater for the estimated twenty policemen stationed as sentries along the hillside.

Shifts of helmeted men, their huge hands grubby and their faces slow to smile, were evidence of the arduous task that had gathered hundreds of rescue workers for the past four weeks. Inside the mess tent were men from Brazil, South Africa, the United States and Canada who joined hundreds of highly trained Chileans. These rescue workers had missed their children's birthdays and abandoned their families to fly to the Atacama Desert to help. They volunteered for twelve-hour shifts to try to save men they didn't know, men they might never meet.

Caravans of 4x4 pickups arrived with food, machinery and donations. “We are here to provide support to the families and the kids. Every four or five days we bring milk and yogurt to these one hundred and eighty people,” said Adolfo Duran, distribution supervisor for Soprole foods, pointing to stacks of yogurt cartons and crates of milk. “The feeling of fraternity has been augmented heavily this year; first we had the earthquake and now this. Personally, I feel like our nation has become much stronger this year.”

Down the mountain, below the police checkpoints, family feuds erupted and became part of the media circus. Hundreds of reporters trapped behind security lines had little to do but interview one another or speculate. How many of the married miners had lovers? Were the trapped men having sex? Was the operation really going as smoothly as the Piñera government was portraying it?

Despite the outpouring of support and help, Camp Hope was no superficial love fest. Family feuds erupted and tears flowed in disputes. “Yonni doesn't want to come out of the mine,” joked a doctor working at Camp Hope as he described sorting out the ongoing love triangle that continued to ensnare miner Yonni Barrios in a secondary net of entrapment. His longtime wife and his longtime lover continued to battle—even destroying the photos placed at his official shrine. In family after family, the story was the same: long-lost daughters and sons flocked to see the father who had never been a father, a painful and touching demonstration that the heart tugs at even long-frayed blood ties.

Local government officials realized that Camp Hope would continue to grow. The population was now five hundred and new “neighborhoods” sprouted weekly as journalism teams arrived to stake a claim to a piece of turf and a chance to find nuggets in a story the entire world was now watching. In 2000, when the
Kursk
, a Russian submarine with a crew of 118, sank to the bottom of the ocean, the world's media was fixated on the plight of the trapped sailors, who slowly died, their story measured by the ever fainter
“tap—tap tap,”
a Morse code message played out on the submarine's shell. A decade later, almost to the day, the Chilean mining drama became arguably the world's biggest ever multimedia tragedy. With the completion of a fiber-optic connection to the men, digital video cameras that were sent down
la paloma
as well as entertainment systems, including a video projector and MP3 players, allowed the thirty-three miners to quickly become among the most wired and media-savvy disaster victims in human history. Two months after the collapse, the number of hits on Google for “Chilean” and “miners” hit 21 million.

The drama of the Chilean miners was fast becoming a daily staple in the world's entertainment diet.

Camp Hope now had zones for children, community bulletin boards, and scheduled bus shuttle services to nearby cities as well as an evangelical preacher's stage with amplified prayer and scratchy speakers set up just 10 feet from the international press tent. While reporters and producers filed news reports, they were often serenaded by cries of faith, promises of salvation, and reminders not to forget the “thirty-fourth miner,” Jesus Christ.

While Chilean officials continued to caution that huge technical and logistical challenges lay ahead in removing the men from the mine, families laughed and prepared barbecues, at peace with the knowledge that the miners were alive. With bonfires and an abundance of positive energy, the camp felt less like a refugee camp and more like a scaled-down Chilean music festival. Live performances abounded. At the keyboards the famed Chilean pianist Roberto Bravo, surrounded by a ring of family, uncorked what he described as the performance of his lifetime.

“I can breathe easy now. There's no more doubt,” said Pedro Segovia, thirty-eight, brother of the miner Darío Segovia. “Before, we didn't know if the machinery could really find them at seven hundred meters [2,300 feet].” As he sucked on a lemon, dousing it regularly with salt, Segovia described the San José mine as a death trap. “I worked there for a year. It was always a dangerous place to work. All of us who went in there would wonder, Will we make it out? Once a piece of the roof, a one-hundred-kilo [220-pound] rock, fell on me. Luckily it shattered on a protective screen and only bruised my back.”

Pedro Segovia took shifts with family members and friends to stand watch in their family tent, where a solitary candle burned amid images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The family's vigilance was not for fear of robbery. Camp Hope was the kind of place where lost cell phones were cordially returned to grateful owners. The Segovia family kept one member awake out of respect for Darío. He was directly below them, trapped. How could they all be asleep?

Adjacent to the Segovia tent, a group of children played with the candles in the shrine to their grandfather, Mario Gómez. With pencils and crayons, they drew simple pictures of cars and solemnly stacked the drawings next to his photo before running to play in the rock piles that dot the otherwise barren hillside.

Camp Hope was now becoming a community. Although each family set up its individual home and daily routines, a common cause and purpose had given the crowded living conditions an air of civility. Among the family members there were few secrets. The combination of abundant free time and a common passion meant that news traveled briskly in the small camp.

Carolina Narváez, wife of Raúl Bustos, was becoming familiar with tragedy. Six months earlier, trapped at the epicenter of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake, Narváez and Bustos watched a tsunami destroy the shipyard where he worked. Working at the San José mine was always intended to be a temporary stint until Talcahuano, Bustos's hometown, 745 miles south, was rebuilt. “Nobody has ever lived this long underground. I can't be weaker than him,” said Narváez, sitting on a rock and smoking a cigarette. Behind her a poster showed Raúl, staring out, his face grim. Narváez held no illusions that they would survive the ordeal unscathed. “I know the Raúl who went in there is not the Raúl who will come out.”

In a nearby campsite, just 65 feet away, Nelly Bugueño was practically celebrating that her son Victor Zamora had been trapped. Always critical of her son for rushing and suffering day-to-day stress, Bugueño said the entrapment had forced Victor to look inward. She read and reread his letters with wonder. As a lifelong miner, Victor had never shown such a talent for bold, emotional writing. This was definitely not the same Victor she had first raised and then watched develop into a lifelong miner.

“He found his second self down there. He has discovered that he is a poet. Where did all these beautiful sentiments come from? Did they sprout?” Bugueño smiled, her petite stature overshadowed by her immense pride. “I don't want him working in mountains anymore. He should write songs, write poems.”

In a nation that produced the Nobel Prize–winning poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, it is not surprising that the men named Zamora the miners' official poet. Zamora's rhyming compositions were often one-page homilies to the rescue workers. His combination of hope, gratitude and humor quickly made them among the most-read messages from below. Even after multiple readings, Zamora's poems brought tears to the eyes of Pedro Campusano, a paramedic working at the
paloma
station. “When the first one came up, I read it and got halfway through; I couldn't—” Campusano's eyes filled with tears. “When I read it . . . it fills me with emotions.”