Authors: Héctor Tobar
Near the bottom of the form is a question included at the insistence of the psychologist Iturra. “
¿Quién la lleva?
” it asks, which translates loosely as “Who’s running things?”
“We very specifically didn’t ask, ‘Who’s the boss?’” Iturra says. Everyone already knew who the boss was down there, formally speaking. But was the “boss” really running things?
Juan Illanes looks at this question and is a bit perplexed. So are several other men. What do we put down here, a few miners ask him, because Illanes has been giving them these underground talks about the law and probably knows. Is Mario Sepúlveda running things? The third or fourth day after the collapse, Víctor Zamora had openly suggested that Mario be appointed leader in place of Luis Urzúa, only to be contradicted by Juan Carlos Aguilar. The contract mechanics follow the orders of Juan Carlos Aguilar: Should they write his name? Or maybe they should write Florencio Avalos, who’s earned the respect of everyone with his energy and his quiet confidence. Truly, if they think about it, no one person is running things, they all are. But Illanes tells the people who ask him: “Put down Luis Urzúa. He’s the boss.” Illanes says this even though “Don Lucho’s authority, at that moment, was hanging by a thread. If we [the contract mechanics] hadn’t stood behind him, Mario Sepúlveda would have pushed him aside.” Formal authority is a powerful concept in the life of a Chilean working man, and eventually most of the thirty-three men fill in the blank next to the question “
¿Quién la lleva?
” the same way: They write “Luis Urzúa.” (Juan Carlos Aguilar, however, answers: “Everyone.”)
As it happens, at that moment Luis Urzúa is beginning to take charge of one critical, technical aspect of the rescue. He’s sitting in the front seat of his pickup truck, which has always been a kind of moving office to him, writing notes on paper. He is preparing to guide more drillers down to their location, because he can hear at least one more drill coming toward them. The rescuers will need a good, accurate map of the now-broken mine to reach the trapped men, and making such a map will require a new set of precise measurements underground. Luis prepares this information for the rescuers, working efficiently and competently today and in the days to come without making a big deal about it. But he’s never been and cannot be the one and only “leader” who can corral and direct the egos and ids of thirty-two other workingmen trapped underground. That job would be tough for anyone, and it’s about to get substantially more complicated thanks to events unfolding that afternoon up on the surface, where a black Hummer is rolling toward the San José Mine.
* * *
Leonardo Farkas is a Chilean dandy, and when he arrives at the mine it’s in full sartorial splendor: stepping out from his Hummer in a long, double-breasted charcoal suit with a sky-blue tie and matching handkerchief, and stiff French cuffs with gleaming cuff links and assorted other jewelry that dangles and sparkles from his wrists as he speaks. He is a fit man, and his long blond hair dangles and catches the light, too, completing an odd and distinctive appearance, as if he were some Greek god reincarnated as a South American entrepreneur. Farkas is a multimillionaire whose investments include a nearby mine. He’s also a fixture on the Chilean television charity circuit and he’s come to the San José to dole out the kind of happiness only a carefree, wealthy man can provide: He’s donating 5 million Chilean pesos (about $10,000) to each and every miner. The arrival of Farkas’s black Hummer is covered live on Chilean TV. His subsequent conference with the miners’ family members is an ostensibly private affair, though Farkas will later post a video of it on his YouTube channel.
After his assistants have already passed out slips of paper with the magic figure, roughly equal to a year’s salary for the average Chilean laborer, Farkas takes to a small stage. A few family members start to chant his name. “Farkas! Farkas!” “I need the name of the person, the R.U.T., the bank account,” Farkas says. “Those of you who don’t have a bank account, the Bank of the State can open one for you for free.” His big gift is just the beginning, he says. “Let’s have every Chilean start contributing now. Each person can give one thousand pesos, five thousand, ten thousand.” Farkas often donates large sums to the annual Chilean telethon that raises money for children with cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities, and he talks about the trapped miners as if they, too, were needy children. His goal, he says, is to raise one million dollars for every one of the trapped thirty-three men. “Let’s dream big. I’ve always dreamed big since I was a kid. Let’s hope that before they get out, each one has a million dollars in their account.” Farkas is a man who clearly enjoys the mass love his money can buy him, and this afternoon a few of the many waves of the joy and good feeling flowing over the San José Mine will envelope him, too.
“¡Gracias, Señor Farkas!”
But almost immediately that enormous sum of money, along with smaller sums donated by other people, and the promise of millions more, causes problems for the trapped men and their families.
For some families there’s the problem that extra cash has always brought them when they’re lucky enough to have it: Who gets to spend it? Who gets the luxury of being the object of the miners’ monetary ministrations? There are several miners who are married and separated from their wives but not divorced. Chile was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce, just five years earlier, and most Chilean working stiffs haven’t yet learned that they can and should pay a lawyer to end their marriages. Now that the de facto divorced miner is suddenly a millionaire (in the local currency), will his legal but unloved wife take control of this newfound wealth while he’s trapped underground, or will it be his new domestic partner and their children?
Darío Segovia doesn’t yet know about his
millionario
windfall. If he did, he’d start planning for the future, or paying off bills. For the moment his partner, Jessica Chilla, has decided she doesn’t want anything to do with so much money: She asks Darío’s brother to handle the family’s Farkas cash. She can sense that the money is going to pit opposite sides of Darío’s family against each other. The truth is, even before Darío and the thirty-two others had been found alive, when many people in his extended family took Darío for dead, “a lot of people just saw the peso sign in all of this,” Jessica tells me. “The miners’ lives didn’t belong to them anymore, it was just about how much they were worth.” Before the miraculous note surfaced, a few family members were privately making the same calculations of death benefits and insurance payments on the surface that Juan Illanes was making below. Now that the men are alive, each with 5 million Farkas pesos in their name, all the need that surrounds the people they’ve loved and brought into the world can be expressed openly and directly.
Before he loved you, I suffered alongside him … I was his son before he even met you … Don’t we need to be taken care of, too?
“With all that money, the chicken coop [of relatives] gets all mixed up and the family gets warped,” Jessica says.
In the hours that follow, the family members of the thirty-three men begin to write their first letters to the men down below. Several, like Jessica Chilla, decide that the issue of money is something her husband doesn’t need to know about at the moment. Talking about money feels like tempting fate, or mocking God while their lives are in danger, trapped two thousand feet below the surface. But others, like Carlos Mamani’s wife, Veronica Quispe, can’t resist. They have two small children and in their lives as immigrants in Chile they’ve always struggled for money. Suddenly that cash burden has been lifted, that perpetual worry that sent the men into the mine in the first place. It’s happy news, so in one of her first letters to her husband she writes: Thank God, Carlos, you are alive. After many days here on the surface waiting for word about you, we are happy and well. And one more thing. Thanks to Leonardo Farkas, we’re millionaires.
* * *
Later that night of August 23, a second drill approaches the tunnels where the men are trapped. The rescuers on the surface have asked Urzúa to measure and map where the first drill broke through, but he already has that information available: It’s 7 meters from one of the survey markers in the mine, number A40. The next drill, they tell him, should hit within 1.5 meters (5 feet) of the second one. The rescuers also ask Urzúa for more details on the physical condition of the men. He says that there are some who are very skinny, and that they’re all very weak, but that there are no serious injuries. The doctors tell him to stop his men from drinking the dirty water down below—“we’ll send you all the clean water you need”—and not to eat from the two cans of tuna they have left. Sougarret tells him that the rescue will be through a third, man-size borehole, most likely aimed at the workshop farther up the mine. Urzúa is surprised: He’d expected to be supplied and kept alive through the two new shafts while rescuers tried to open a path through one of the chimneys. “I never would have thought they’d get us out lifting us up through a hole.”
Urzúa reports on these conversations to the other miners. A few are furious. “You can’t tell them we’re fine,” they say. We are not fine. We’re hungry, we’re tired, we want to get out of this infernal place, the men say. If you lead those government guys in charge of the rescue to believe we’re “fine” they’re going to take forever to get us out of here.
At about 6:00 p.m. the second drill breaks through, just 1.3 meters (4 feet) from the first. (Three days later, on August 26, a third drill hole reaches the interior of the mine, up at the workshop at Level 135; it will play a critical role in the rescue.) The second borehole will become a permanent “utility” tube where electrical and fiber-optic lines will be lowered; and the first borehole will be used to lower supplies in the plastic PVC tubes that come to be called
palomas
, or pigeons. Bottles of clean water arrive, medicines, more glucose gel to drink. To monitor the supply hole and work unloading the supplies (and to keep everyone down below busy) the miners agree to be divided into three eight-hour work shifts. One, composed mostly of the contract mechanics, chooses Raúl Bustos, the meticulous tsunami survivor, to be their leader; the second and third groups, made up of men who sleep in and near the Refuge, choose the twenty-seven-year-old miner Carlos Barrios and the former soccer star Franklin Lobos. The trapped men of the A shift have a new energy, and sense of purpose. After eighteen days of crisis, Luis Urzúa decides to start acting like a boss once more, symbolically putting back on his white helmet.
On August 23, together with a
paloma
shipment of toothpaste and toothbrushes, the miners receive their first letters from their families. Many hear the same message Mario Gómez receives, news that might seem odd in the context of being near death, but which helps keep the men calm: The bills are all being paid, we haven’t fallen behind on the rent or anything else, don’t worry. Jorge Galleguillos reads words of support from a son who’d been estranged from him; Edison Peña gets a marriage proposal from his girlfriend; Carlos Mamani hears that he’s a millionaire. Víctor Segovia hears from the daughters he’s been writing to in his journal for eighteen days. “I had to keep taking pauses while reading,” he writes in his journal afterward.
On the afternoon of the following day, August 24, a phone line is lowered back into the hole once more. Stand by, the voice says. We’re connecting you to La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago.
President Sebastián Piñera has returned to his office in Chile’s capital, and his long-distance call is patched into Pedro Gallo’s makeshift phone, and thence to Level 94 of the San José Mine. He speaks to Luis Urzúa, and through him he reassures all thirty-three men that the government is doing everything in its power to get them out. Among other things, the government is accepting help from many other countries around the world. The Spanish prime minister and President Obama have expressed their support, Piñera says. Remembering what the trapped men had told him earlier, Urzúa thanks the president for his efforts, but then very quickly asks when the rescuers are going to be able to get them out of “this hell.”
Este infierno
.
You won’t be out for September 18, the president answers, and that’s an immediate downer for the thirty-three men, because Independence Day is the biggest secular family gathering on the Chilean calendar. It’s a bit like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving wrapped into one, and this one was going to be an especially festive September 18, since it’s also Chile’s bicentennial.
But God willing, the president adds, we’ll have you out by Christmas.
Urzúa makes a joke with the president about having the rescuers send them down a bottle of wine to celebrate the bicentennial, but after the conversation is over and the phone line disappears up the shaft again, several of the men slip into a deep depression.
“They thought we were going to get out right away,” Urzúa says later. “Instead, we were going to be trapped maybe four more months.” Urzúa studies the faces inside that rocky cavern. Jimmy Sánchez, the youngest of the miners, the teenager who’s too young to work in a mine legally, appears especially stricken. Many of the men have regained just enough strength to rise to their feet, and the news of the wait to come returns grim and exhausted expressions to their sooty faces. The mine is still trembling and thundering around them, and at any moment a new collapse could destroy the life-giving 4.5- and 6-inch shafts that link them to the surface. A wait of four months in this oppressive heat and humidity might kill one, or two or three, of the weaker men.
“Four months!” Several of the men begin to shout at Urzúa. We can’t wait here until December, there’s no way, they say. We need to find our own way out of here. Through the Pit, someone says. As soon as we’re strong enough we can climb out. The air of incipient mutiny once again fills the space, until Mario Sepúlveda begins to speak.
“You think I don’t want to get out of here, too?” he says. “If I could, I’d grab on to the next thing that comes down that hole and pull myself through it. But I can’t, because I’m too big.” Perri speaks these words in the raspy, half-crazed, and ironic shout his companions know too well. It’s the voice of a possessed lover of life trapped in a dungeon, a man who can joke about death, about eating other men, and about squeezing into a six-inch borehole. No, the only alternative is to wait, Mario says, and soon the other strong, calm men among the trapped thirty-three are repeating his words.
“Tranquilos, niño
s
.”
It’s what you say to two guys who are about to get into a fight in a bar.
Tranquilo
. We have to stay patient and organized, says Juan Carlos Aguilar, who’s been saying that since August 5. We have to thank the Lord for the miracles that have already unfolded before our eyes, says José Henriquez. And we have to be prepared to live together in this hole until December if we have to, says Mario Sepúlveda.