33 Men (5 page)

Segura and Villegas were accustomed to gruesome scenes: bomb victims, car wrecks, bloated bodies bobbing at sea. This was another dimension, like a dungeon. The mine was a maze of underground tracks, each leading to deeper mysteries. The vast spaces and curved tunnels created the sensation that life or some living being was just around the corner—out of sight. Nets on the ceiling were filled with rocks, a pitiful attempt to catch loose boulders that now lay scattered across the rugged road.

They were seized by the sensation that they would die, that the mine was a Godzilla-sized monster that could crush them without notice.

“I knew we had to keep searching, but the sound of that mountain, it was like rocks screaming and crying,” said Segura, who together with a partner found a second
chimenea
and descended yet another level. At the bottom of the second chimney, as they searched, the two men paused and called out, “Estaaaaaaaaaaaan?!” (“Anyone theeeeere?!”) They listened for signs of life. The only response was the slosh of water flowing through newly formed channels and the rattle of collapsing rock. Stagnant deposits of water had ruptured with the collapse and the mine was now alive with a fresh flavor of dirt and debris mixed with 85 percent humidity. In miner lingo, the mine was
asentando
, still settling down.

“Every chimney has a wire mesh to keep the rocks from falling in,” explained Segura. “But this was such a huge collapse, debris overflowed the chimney. We were going down the final chimney and near the bottom it was filled with rocks.”

“We all were very anxious. We reached a lower level and we were a little upset that the tunnel was still blocked but that kept us going,” said Lieutenant Villegas, the GOPE commander. “We said, ‘No . . . the next one will be open.' . . . And we kept on going down, but each level was the same [sealed off].” As a second team of police commandos searched for a way to bypass the sealed ventilation shaft, the mine unleashed a shower of rocks. The effect was like a spit in the face. “While they were climbing down another landslide hit, blocking the ventilation shaft,” said Villegas. “After that, the entrance through the ventilation shaft was impossible.”

While the police commandos searched and explored the mine looking for the trapped men, word of the accident spread—a cave-in at San José, thirty-three men inside. Rumors flourished, including the version that twenty-two miners were crushed and dead. “I heard they found my father's truck, with blood inside it, and he was dead. I cried and cried all that day,” said Carolina Lobos, twenty-five, daughter of Franklin Lobos, the former soccer star trapped in the mine. “I had no more tears left, yet still I cried.”

Dr. Jorge Diaz, medical director for the Asociaci
ó
n Chilena de Seguridad (ACHS), was on call at a Copiapó medical clinic. Upon hearing of the San José mine collapse, he immediately cleared out the hospital beds, summoned his staff and prepared to treat the injured. No one ever arrived.

After her unsuccessful attempt to convince her husband, Mario Gómez, to stay in bed and not go to work that fateful morning, Lillian Ram
í
rez waited nervously at home. At 8
pm
, when she heard the sound of the truck that delivered her husband home, she put the dinner in the microwave. “It was very odd that my husband was taking so long to come in. So I opened the curtains and saw my husband's boss. . . . It was very strange. I put my hands to my face and said, ‘My God, something has happened.' ” The mining executive asked Ram
í
rez to come with him and said there had been a small accident that would be resolved the following day. He refused to provide details, provoking further panic for Lillian Ram
í
rez, who immediately sought out her nephew and drove up to the mine. It would be months before she returned home.

Surrounding the entrance to the San José mine, the golden brown desert was buried by acres of gray debris, sharp piles of rocks known to miners as “sterile material.” As they held no signs of the rich veins of gold or copper, these rocks were dumped in the desert, decades of detritus tossed in uneven waves across the landscape.

These “sterile” rocks were now windbreaks and refuge for the growing clan of families streaming up the hill. Tiny altars with a single photo and candles were now accompanied by signs such as
“Fuerza Mineros—Los Estaban Esperando”
(“Be Strong, Miners—We Are Waiting for You”). The individual face of Jimmy Sánchez, a grim photo taken from his job application, stared out mutely, a silent scream. On an adjacent rock an orange miner's helmet was propped up, sheltering two lit candles beneath it.

Dozens, then hundreds, of family members and friends of the trapped miners flocked to the San José mine on the evening of August 5 and the dawn of Friday, August 6. They brought sleeping bags, food and cigarettes, which they consumed incessantly as they gathered nervously near the mouth of the mine. “I know he can survive this, he once lived as a stowaway on a cargo ship and went twelve days without eating,” said Rossana Gómez, twenty-eight, as she proudly described her father, Mario Gómez, the oldest of the trapped men. “He survived
el
accidente
,” she said in a coded reference to a dynamite mistake that shredded her father's left hand years ago, splaying it throughout a mining camp. “I am sending him tranquility and comfort,” she added, confident that her father would be saved and comforted by her conviction that Dad's long-time desire to mentor a young son would be fulfilled.

Gómez—his lungs failing, his seven fingers proof that he was a veteran—was a survivor who could adapt to this dark dungeon of a life and might adopt the younger, weaker miners. Gómez could teach the young pups the art of survival on the job. Rossana proudly promoted her father, saying, “He provides strength to his mates.”

If anyone needed reinforcement, it was the Bolivian-born Carlos Mamani—the only non-Chilean in the group. August 5 was Mamani's first day of work, a single shift he had picked up as a moonlighter, an extra job to help defray the cost of caring for eleven-month-old Emili, his new baby. Now Mamani was trapped. Given the century-long animosity between Chile and Bolivia, living in a hole some 2,300 feet deep, surrounded by thirty-two Chileans was, for a Bolivian like Mamani, akin to being a Serb stuck in a Croat foxhole.

Of the thirty-three men, twenty-four lived in the nearest city, Copiapó, a mining town with a population of one hundred and twenty-five thousand, where an estimated 70 percent of the local economy relied on the mines. News of a mining accident surprised few of the locals, many of whom were third-generation miners. The local Copiapó newspaper,
El Atacame
ñ
o
,
regularly ran headlines about crushed and dismembered miners. Yet instantly this felt different. The depth at which the collapse had happened and the number of victims were noteworthy, even in a community fluent in the language of mining tragedies.

The desert mountains and salt flats of northern Chile are loaded with such riches that slightly over half of the Chilean export revenue comes from mining. In a good month, the nation exports nearly $4 billion in copper. Fully one-third of the world's copper comes from Chile, and the tale of the “green gold” has figured in the nation's economic success for the past two decades, a boom that has not included many of the communities in the mining area. With copper prices tripling from roughly $1.20 a pound to well over $3.00 over the past five years, old tailings and second-rate mines were reevaluated. What was junk at $1.20 a pound might well be profitable if copper prices remained above the $2.50 price level. Abandoned mines and older, more dangerous operations were suddenly valuable and viable.

The Atacama region is home to major mining operations but it also has the second highest unemployment rate in Chile. While copper companies in Chile earned an estimated $20 billion in profits in 2009, government statistics showed the area to have among the fastest rise in poverty in all of Chile. “In other words, one of the richest regions in the country is, at the same time, one of the poorest,” concluded an article in
The Clinic
, an alternative newsweekly based in Santiago.

As they gathered at the mine, the disparate families shared a common anger—the accident had been so widely predicted, it was overdue. Yessica Chilla, partner to Darío Segovia, forty-eight, one of the trapped men, remembered, “The day before the accident, he told me the mine was about to settle and that he didn't want to be on the shift when the collapse arrived. But we needed the money. His shift had ended, but then they offered him extra hours. No one refuses because they pay you double. That day he was going to earn ninety thousand pesos [$175]. But he wanted to leave this job to run a trucking business.”

Elvira Katty Valdivia didn't hear about the accident until many hours after the collapse: “A friend from college called me. ‘Katty, do you know about what happened? It seems Mario is on the list of those trapped inside the mine.' She told me to turn on the TV and I started watching and I saw the list. There was Mario Sepúlveda.” Valdivia's dark skin, straight black hair and penetrating gaze highlighted a beauty that had been sorely tested in recent weeks. With her laptop propped up inside a nearby tent, she attempted to maintain the clients for her accounting business. While she balanced the books, her life could not have been more off-kilter. A hole drilled from her feet, with precise luck, would have pierced the tunnel where her husband, Mario, fought, battled and prayed in his struggle to survive. “I feel very sorry for him. Me here, and him down there, seven hundred meters [2,300 feet] deep,” she said, indicating the ground. “I would like to be with him, be able to touch him, tell him that I love him very much.” Valdivia expressed bitterness toward the mine owners. “They never told me anything. They didn't tell anyone. They didn't tell us a member of our family was down there trapped in the
mine.”

Valdivia's employer—U.S. accounting firm Price Waterhouse—assured her her salary would be paid in full while she maintained a vigil on this remote outpost as she awaited news on the fate of her husband. With two teenage children, Scarlette, eighteen, and Francisco, thirteen, in tow, Valdivia began to organize her life from inside her temporary home at the mine site. With rumors of death and entrapment swirling in her head, Valdivia watched as her world disintegrated. “People were running everywhere and screaming,” she said. “My son was crying and I was trying to console him. It was a very difficult moment. . . . I couldn't sleep. I asked myself, Why me? Why me? Why is this happening to us?”

Chilean President Sebastian Piñera was in Quito, Ecuador, when he first heard of the mining tragedy. He could be excused for thinking the same as Katty Valdivia: “Why me? Why is this happening to us?” It was Piñera's second successive tragedy in his short tenure as president. When he took office just four months earlier, Piñera inherited a nation shattered by the February 27, 2010, earthquake. That quake left hundreds of thousands homeless and hundreds more dead when a tsunami crushed the coastline. Piñera's ambitious political agenda was also leveled by the 8.8 Richter scale quake, the fifth largest ever recorded. Instead of a fresh slate to highlight new ideas, Piñera's team was dealing with thousands of collapsed adobe structures, destroyed hospitals and the wreckage along an estimated 1,200 miles of Chile's modern highways.

“I was with President Correa in Ecuador,” said Piñera. “Our diagnosis that first evening was clear. We knew there were thirty-three men. They were trapped at seven hundred meters [almost half a mile] and after a diagnosis of the company, it was seen as a precarious situation. There was no possibility for them to respond. The option was thus very simple. The government would assume responsibility for the rescue or nobody would. It was much more simple than people think.”

Piñera ditched protocol, canceled a strategically important reunion with Juan Manuel Santos, the newly elected Colombian president, and rushed back to Chile. He ordered top aides to the scene that very night.

In an effort both caring and self-serving, the Piñera administration saw the crisis as a perfect stage to highlight the can-do attitude of the nation's first elected right-wing government in half a century. Piñera bet his dwindling political capital on the fate of thirty-three unknown miners. It was a gamble that would later reinforce the billionaire businessman's reputation as a brilliant short-term stock trader.

DAY 2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 7

The men had now been trapped for two full days, yet no sign of life had been found. Basic, primal fears began to haunt the rescuers. Did the men have air? Were they injured and dying slowly? How would they eat?

Below ground the rescue effort hit another setback. The rescue workers had been trying to find a route around the blocked ventilation shafts, but with the mine still shifting, the shafts began to collapse. The massive battleship-sized rock slipped a fraction, sending more small avalanches through the mine. Now the GOPE mission changed from rescuing trapped miners to evacuating the rescuers and avoiding a second entrapment. Without the tripod to guide the rope, the police rushed to extricate their colleagues who were being bombarded by rocks. If they pulled too fast or to one side, they risked slicing the rope and delivering a rescuer to his death. If they went too slow, the chance of a large rock knocking him unconscious grew by the second.

“We train for this. We have to study geology, and part of our curriculum is mine rescues,” said Hernan Puga, a GOPE member who mentioned that the local mountains housed an estimated two thousand small-scale mines. He compared the vertical descent and ascent to the type of training the police regularly carried out for special operations inside prisons.

When all the rescue workers had been pulled free, instead of celebrating their near escape from death, the police commandos were filled with frustration.