Authors: Héctor Tobar
“All those bastards are alive! Alive! All of them!”
¡Están todos los huevones vivos!
A short while later the helicopter that is transporting the president from the Copiapó airport to the mine lands nearby. The families and the media gather before him, to once again hear officially what everyone on the mountain already knows. The president has the honor of showing José Ojeda’s note publicly for the first time, with its bold red letters as proof to any skeptics that the improbable is true, an image that when broadcast sets off celebrations across Chile. From the northern border town of Arica, where Víctor Zamora, the miner who is always hungry, lived in a children’s shelter, to the Patagonian towns halfway to Antarctica, where the soldier Juan Illanes passed through one Christmas, there are cheers and shouts as people run from their televisions to the streets and plazas. In Copiapó the discovery of the thirty-three men is celebrated with peals of church bells, each percussive collision of metal against metal sending sound waves racing through the Sunday winter air.
11
CHRISTMAS
A camera, speaker, and microphone are lowered into borehole 10B, as the president of Chile, Minister Golborne, and assorted officials watch. A psychologist, Alberto Iturra, is also present, and he’s deeply concerned about what condition the men will be in after seventeen days buried alive, since according to the government’s best (and private) statistical calculations, they should be dead. They are almost certainly suffering from some sort of state of altered consciousness, and Iturra is irritated because his advice to the leaders of the rescue team has been ignored. The psychologist thinks that the first voice the miners hear from the surface should be a familiar one, and he’s suggested that it be Pablo Ramirez, Florencio Avalos’s compadre and a friend to many of the thirty-three trapped men below. But the officials present have overruled the psychologist, because the president is there and wants to speak to the miners in the name of the Chilean people and who can say no to a president? The miners are safe and the whole world is tuning in to the great miracle of the San José Mine, and a few rays of the miracle’s holy glow are going to shine on the recently elected Piñera. Now that the story is a happy one, and not a tragedy, a bit more politics and vanity will mix with the undeniably abundant altruism and selflessness so far displayed by the rescuers and officials at the San José. “We started to have a lot of issues with egos and flags,” the psychologist Iturra says. Take, for example, the very camera, speaker, and microphone now descending toward the trapped men below. The Chilean navy and Codelco have just had a small bureaucratic kerfuffle over which arm of the government would send down that equipment and provide the operators to control it. The navy has some excellent cameras it uses for submarine rescues, but Codelco has its own technology, and in the end it’s clear that Codelco “owns” the hole, says Iturra, who adds wryly: “But Codelco didn’t own the miners: The miners belonged to the Chilean [social] security administration.” The middle-aged psychologist, who is a bit vain himself (he volunteers the fact that he was a math prodigy as a young man, and also an engineer), thinks that he should be there at the microphone, too, or nearby at least. But he’s in the background as the Codelco camera descends into the shaft, transmitting to a screen on the surface the image of an endless tube carved into the gray diorite, its edges looking moist and fleshy, as if the camera were probing the entrails of some great stone beast. The camera reaches the bottom and the image shifts out of focus and into darkness.
* * *
Darío Segovia, Pablo Rojas, and Ariel Ticona are keeping watch at the hole, babysitting the steady stream of water passing through the opening that leads to the surface. They are waiting to see what comes down next, and after a long time they finally see a gray electric light falling toward them, growing in intensity, and they begin to shout.
“Something’s coming! Hurry!”
All thirty-three men gather around the hole. They see a glass eye, on a kind of swivel. Luis Urzúa thinks it’s a mining scanner of the kind he’s seen used in exploration before, but then another miner says the obvious: “It’s a camera.”
“Lucho, you’re the boss, speak to it! Show yourself!”
Urzúa walks up close to the camera. He wonders if it has audio attached to it. (It does, but it isn’t working: Unbeknownst to Urzúa, the president of Chile is on the surface, speaking into a microphone.) “If you can hear me, move the camera up and down,” Urzúa says. The camera begins to move—in a circle. Urzúa follows it, doing a funny circle dance, until it catches his eyes and stops.
Up on the surface, the president, André Sougarret, and a team of officials and technicians look as two eyes stare back at them on a black-and-white screen, looking eerily neutral, dreamlike. The psychologist, Iturra, sees those eyes and a light above it, and then more lights attached to the helmets of men moving in the background. Seven lights in all. And he thinks:
Well, there are at least seven men down there who can help us take care of the other twenty-six if it comes to that
.
* * *
Down below, the joy of being found alive is starting to wear off quickly. “We are very hungry,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary. “The mountain cracks and rumbles a lot.” Several hours pass as the rescuers above work on the shaft. “There are a lot of arguments. The mood is very bad.” Mario Sepúlveda gets in an argument with Juan Carlos Aguilar’s contract mechanics: A “misunderstanding,” Segovia writes. All the miners start talking about what kind of food they’ll get first. A Coca-Cola, a chocolate bar, perhaps. What can fit in that tube? A beer! Many delicious and filling foods and beverages can fit in a tube 4.5 inches wide, but for the moment the orifice exudes nothing more than dripping, dirty water—there’s so much water, they’re going to have to fashion a gutter to drain it off. “What’s going on up there? Why are they taking so long to give us food?” Finally, at 2:30 p.m., more than thirty-two hours after the drill first broke through, and more than eighteen days since most of them have eaten a meal worthy of the name, another object comes down the hole. It’s an orange-colored PVC tube, sealed off with something inside, like some oversize and stretched-out plastic Easter egg. The tube has a wire dangling from it. “There’s a wire attached to this, get Edison,” someone yells, because Edison Peña is an electrician. Edison opens the tube, and he sees there’s a telephone wire inside, and a handset receiver.
* * *
There are all sorts of experts and technicians in the army of rescuers, and the Chilean government at this point is getting advice from around the world, including from NASA. But the phone that’s been lowered down into the tube is a secondhand instrument, fashioned from recycled phone parts by a thirty-eight-year-old Copiapó businessman. Pedro Gallo runs a communications company that serves the local mining industry, and he’s been hanging around the mining site since August 6. He’s been trying to volunteer his know-how, but to some he’s become a bit of a pest, and certain rescue officials with Codelco have told him he’s not allowed on the site. Gallo has no relatives inside the mine: He’s there, like dozens of others, because he senses that an epic story is unfolding on the windswept mountain. Gallo has stayed at the mine, hoping to play a role in the drama, even though his wife has been calling him to come home—she’s seven months pregnant. Finally, on the morning of August 23, he gets his chance. “We need you to make that phone line you’ve been talking about,” a Codelco official tells him. In forty-five minutes, using some old telephone components, a piece of plastic molding, and a few thousand feet of discarded wire, he’s put together a telephone receiver and transmitter.
At 12:45 p.m., with Minister Golborne and Carlos Barra and assorted other people watching, Gallo’s telephone is lowered down toward the trapped men. The wire attached to the receiver is composed of nine separate stretches of phone line linked together rather crudely, with knots and electrical tape, and at one point the minister asks: “What are those things, are they transmitters?” Gallo answers: “No, Señor Ministro, that’s where I patched the wires together.” After fifty minutes, the handset has been lowered 703 meters and has reached the bottom. Gallo connects the final stretch of wire to the kind of cheap phone set you can find in a million offices around the world.
Golborne lifts the receiver and speaks a few words of mining protocol suggested by the phone technician.
“Attention, mine shift,” the minister says. “The surface here.”
“Mine, here,” Edison Peña answers. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you,” the minister says, and when he does the two dozen men clustered around the telephone on the surface burst into cheers and applause.
Down at the bottom of the shaft, Edison can hear what’s happening on the surface with unexpected clarity, the earpiece filling with the robust, hopeful voices of living people in the outside world. “I could hear this collection of people. [
La colectividad de esta gente
]. And I heard this very firm voice … I broke down.” After eighteen days in darkness, after the hours of silence when he lived with death and the thought that no one was coming for him, Edison is overcome by emotion. The sound of those strangers’ voices makes him weep. “I just wasn’t capable of speaking.”
“This is the minister of mining,” the minister says.
Someone takes the phone from Edison and says they will pass it to the shift supervisor. “Yes, with the
jefe de turno
, that’s the right thing to do,” the minister says, and the minister turns on the speakerphone so that everyone around him on the surface can hear.
“It’s the shift supervisor, Luis Urzúa.”
“There are twenty of us here ready to provide you with immediate help,” the minister says. “How are you? How do you find yourselves?”
“Well. We are well. In good spirits, waiting for you to rescue us,” Urzúa answers, though his voice is hurried and uncertain.
The minister says the rescuers will soon be sending down drinking water, and some liquids with instructions from a doctor.
“We’ve been drinking some water,” Urzúa says. “But at this moment we’ve already eaten the little we had in the, the, the, the Refuge.”
The minister says he will soon put them in touch with a doctor who will be in charge of feeding them. The men below are excited, and desperate to get out, but no explanation of how and when they will be rescued takes place in this first conversation. Instead Golborne, swept up in the emotion of the moment, feels the need to give the miners a sense of how much their survival has meant to the Chilean people. “I want to tell you the entire country has been following you these last seventeen days. The entire country has participated in this rescue,” the minister says. “Yesterday all of Chile celebrated. In all of the plazas, in all the corners of this country, people celebrated that we’d made contact with you.”
Now it’s the miners down below who start cheering, the sound of their yells and their applause tinny on the speakerphone. For men who are, at this moment, living half-naked and half-starved underground, this bit of news from the minister carries the aura of the fantastic. While they were inside this rocky tomb, alone in the darkness, an entire country was out there praying for them, thinking about them, working to get them out. It’s as if they’ve stepped out from a dark grave into the magical glow of a fairy tale.
As the cheering dies down several miners begin gesturing at Urzúa. They want the shift supervisor to ask about Raúl Villegas, the driver who was headed out at the moment of the collapse.
“Can I ask a question?” Urzúa says into the telephone.
“
Sí
,” the minister answers.
“We had a colleague who was headed outside. A driver,” Urzúa says. “We don’t know if he made it out.”
“Everyone made it out unharmed,” the minister says. “There is not one injury or death to lament.”
The thirty-three men begin cheering again. Another element of the miracle of the San José Mine has fallen into place, and now the minister reveals one more. “There’s a camp out here with all your families,” the minister says. Their families have been waiting and praying for them, the minister adds, and for the thirty-three men it’s as if a veil of solitude and hurt has been lifted: The people who’ve loved them are on the surface, directly above them, gathered around the hole they entered to work eighteen days earlier.
A bit later, the rescue leader, André Sougarret, comes on the phone and tells the miners to stay away from the rock that’s blocking the Ramp and the chimneys to the surface. “Because it could keep falling,” Urzúa says. “Correct,” Sougarret says. Cristián Barra, the president’s fixer, comes on the line to say: “I send you a greeting from the president. He’s been here four times already.” Not long ago they were nobodies, but now the president is sending them
saludos
. Finally the first phone call between the trapped miners and the surface ends with the miners singing the national anthem. A government video captures the rescuers listening to their singing voices on the speakerphone. Later that day the video is released to the global media, along with the telegenic image of Minister Laurence Golborne, in his official red jacket, beaming as he listens to the voice of Luis Urzúa. On many newscasts around the world, a photograph of Urzúa accompanies the sound of his voice, and he’s identified as the miners’ “leader.” But who is really in charge down below? Iturra, the psychologist, prepares to ask each miner that question privately, even as the rescuers begin to lower down the first sustenance to the trapped thirty-three men.
* * *
What arrives in the next tube lowered down to the men is not a feast, or even anything that can be chewed. Instead the men receive thirty-three clear bottles with a few ounces of glucose gel. Not everyone is strong enough, at first, to help unload this precious cargo. “They’d go off to sleep, because they were so weak,” Yonni Barrios remembers. Yonni unloads the tube with Claudio Acuña, José Ojeda, and Florencio Avalos. The rescuers have also included a set of instructions warning the men not to drink the gel too quickly, but of course almost all the men swallow it in one gulp, and several soon begin to feel their stomachs cramping painfully. When is the real food coming, the men want to know. Another tube comes down, but it doesn’t have food either, but instead a form to fill out. The Chilean government wants each of the trapped men to provide his vital statistics (height, weight, age, shoe size, previous illnesses) and also to answer a series of questions about his current physical state: “When was the last time you ate? Are you urinating?” Most important, the bureaucracy in whose care the men have now fallen—and Chile’s bureaucracy is the most relentlessly efficient in Latin America—asks that the men provide their R.U.T. number, the tax identification number that also serves as each Chilean’s national identity number from birth. “Of course we had to give them our R.U.T.,” Juan Illanes observes wryly. “They had to make sure it was really us down there.” Without an R.U.T. you don’t exist in Chile, and even Mamani the Bolivian immigrant has one.