Authors: Héctor Tobar
13
ABSOLUTE LEADER
Despite its name,
La Tercera
is the second-most influential newspaper in Chile. Its August 28 edition carries a big spread on Mario Sepúlveda, reported and written in the hours after the miner’s stellar appearance on Chilean and global television. The story says Mario’s picture has been on the front page of
The New York Times
,
The Guardian
of London, and
El País
of Madrid. It quotes his speech from the August 26 video and interviews his wife, Elvira. “She is not surprised by the qualities of a natural leader her husband possesses,” the writer says. The story quotes from a letter Mario has sent to his family in which he describes how the miners are getting along. “I am the absolute leader,” it begins. “I organize things, give orders, and, as always, I avoid losing my temper. But the most beautiful thing is that I am respected and nothing is done without me knowing about it.” Elvira says that a social worker from the governor’s office stole the letter from her and gave it to the newspaper, but many of the miners’ families doubt this. Stuffed into a
paloma
along with many other newspapers, this story reaches the men below and is quickly passed around. They read about themselves under the gray glow of artificial light, holding a page in which Mario is looking back at them from inside the very cave in which they are all trapped.
Fairly or not, to the trapped men the news story smacks of self-promotion. Mario was one of the first people to mention how rich they might become from telling their story, and this article suggests to some that he’s trying to concentrate the media spotlight on himself, with his wife setting him up to be a media star when he reaches the surface. The men find his statements both amusing and insulting. Here they thought they were thirty-three men making decisions together, but the rest of the world is being led to believe that Mario is their “absolute leader.” At this point, they’ve been stuck underground for nearly four weeks, each man struggling to keep his sanity, several trying to find a way out, all of them concerned for the welfare of the others. Yes, more than once Mario has stepped forward to do something that’s helped save them, but always working with other men: When he climbed up the chimney to try to find a way out, Raúl Bustos was there with him; when he issued his angry call to prayer it was José Henríquez and Osman Araya who actually led the prayers. And for every time Mario spoke up and lifted someone’s spirits with his pleading voice, there was another time when he broke down in tears and despair and his coworkers lifted
him
up. But in this story, in a newspaper that reaches every corner of Chile, Mario Sepúlveda is claiming to be their captain, their hero.
Several men, and especially the mechanics, see the letter and the newspaper story as evidence of Mario’s manic need to be the center of everything, and they grow more suspicious of him than they are already. Raúl Bustos begins to mercilessly tease Mario about his boasting every chance he gets.
“Raúl Bustos started to call me out and make fun of me and laugh at me,” Mario says. “He’d say, ‘You’re never going to be anyone’s boss. Who do you think you are?’ José Aguilar did, too.”
Mario explains to his angry coworkers that he wrote that letter to keep up the spirits of his son, the boy he desperately needs to protect: He made himself into the one and only leader because he wanted Francisco to believe his father was his “Braveheart,” his Mel Gibson leading men into battle. But Mario’s explanations can’t undo the damage to his underground reputation, and his letter sharpens the divisions among the thirty-three men.
Those who’ve slept in and near the Refuge continue to support the man with the heart of a dog. “The leader we had inside was Mario Sepúlveda,” Omar Reygadas later says. “He kept us going. We can’t deny that to anyone, and I’ll never deny it, because I’m not an ingrate.” Franklin Lobos will listen to Bustos’s digs at Mario and accuse Bustos of “deliberately dividing the group.” Mario himself believes his enemies are working to “
mariconear
” him, a Chilean idiom that means to conspire against someone, and which is derived from a slur for homosexuals. Never one to sit by while others work against him, Mario decides to “put my cards on the table” and marches up to Level 105 to confront them.
“Luis Urzúa was there, Juan Illanes, Jorge Galleguillos, all of them. I went in, and I said, ‘Look, you motherfuckers,
1
let me make this clear. I am not the boss. But the boss, assholes, is that idiot who’s worrying twenty-four hours a day about these guys, about the guy whose belly is hurting and needs help. The boss is the
huevón
who keeps everything clean, and the boss is the idiot who has to tell the guys to clean their work area. The boss is the
huevón
who just came from Level 120 and put gloves on to clean the shit these guys left all over the place where we all go to the bathroom, and because one idiot took his own shit and covered the door with it. And do you know which
huevón
is the
huevón
who does all that? It’s me, you motherfuckers.’”
Later, Mario gets on the phone to the surface and chews out the psychologist, who he blames (with no evidence) for the release of his letter to the press. “Motherfucker,” he begins. “What kind of professional are you, asshole, to allow a letter to be passed on like that?”
Even as Mario tries to sort out the mess he’s created, some take note that he’s monopolizing the phone link to the surface, and isn’t subject to the time limits that the other miners have. Even people who like Mario believe that his sudden fame is going to his head. Víctor Segovia describes in his diary how Mario is pacing back and forth, frustrated, because he’s become a celebrity but he’s still stuck in a hole and can’t do anything with his new fame. Among those who don’t trust Mario, it’s Raúl Bustos who is most willing to speak out about his suspicions and fears of the man with the heart of a dog. He believes Mario is a common street fighter, the kind of guy whose brawling might have easily landed him in jail. Since the drill broke through, Bustos has been listening to Mario and Víctor Zamora make disturbingly violent jokes about the days in the very recent past when they were all starving to death. “They said they had a pocket knife and they were going to use it to slaughter people [
faenar
]. That they would have eaten certain people, or the first person to fall. They said it was a joke, but those are things you shouldn’t joke about … I took the measure of them. I could see that they had this cruel streak.” Bustos believes, rightly or wrongly, that the mechanics’ sense of rectitude has kept the shift supervisor, Luis Urzúa, from being overwhelmed by Mario Sepúlveda and his “clan” in the Refuge. He’s concerned about his personal safety, especially now that he’s earned Mario’s hostility, and he reveals this to his wife in his letters. “Raúl said he never slept well,” Carola Bustos says. “Because he always slept with one eye open.”
Several miners have spoken to the psychologist, Iturra, about the perceived bullying from other miners. “You can’t even talk, because there’s people controlling what you say,” one tells him in one of the many individual phone sessions the psychologist has with the men. “I’m afraid.”
“Get close to someone who can take care of you,” the psychologist counsels.
The verbal jousting continues and every day Víctor Segovia details a new argument in his journal. One night, Claudio Yáñez gets in a loud disagreement with Franklin Lobos—Franklin has been “really moody,” Víctor writes—and Claudio goes to bed with a pipe next to his cot because Franklin has threatened to hit him. “During the twenty days that we were starving and in despair we were always united,” Segovia writes, “but as soon as the food started arriving and things got a little better, their claws came out and they want to prove who is tougher.”
For the psychologist, it’s obvious that the men are divided and that the fear among them is a natural product of the “crisis of authority” down below. He’s learning about the conflicts from his phone conversations with the miners, and from his consultations with family members who’ve received troubling letters from the men. Urzúa is a “passive leader,” and in the absence of a strong authority figure, “there were some people taking authority for themselves, and others doing whatever they wanted,” the psychologist says. “Down there, if anyone got out of line,” one of the miners will reveal to Iturra afterward, “a group of five or six of us would stare him down, and we would impose ourselves [
hacíamos fuerza
].” As some of the men try to sleep on the new cots provided by the rescuers, their thoughts are unsettled by this new fear: The idea that they’re trapped in the mine not just with brothers in suffering but also with men who don’t respect them, or who might attack them in their sleep, or who might betray the group and take the riches that await on the surface.
“I think it’s because of fear that we’re all bickering,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary on August 31. Víctor also believes that money waiting outside is causing some of the men to lose their heads, and he’s grateful that his family never mentions money in their letters to him. On that same day, the topic of the arguments among the men comes up in the daily prayer at Level 90. “We prayed and asked that everyone keep their cool and that we stop arguing so much,” Víctor writes in his diary. A few days later, thirty-three crucifixes arrive in a
paloma
. They’ve come from Rome and have been blessed, the men are told, by Pope Benedict himself. Víctor hangs one up on a box over his new inflatable bed and prays for peace among his brothers.
* * *
The thirty-three men are certainly not proud of the conflicts that have divided them in this, their fourth week of captivity. But it’s hard to believe any other group of thirty-three people would have done much better under the circumstances. Imagine being sealed up in a hot and humid cave, subjected to about three weeks of deprivation and hunger, followed by a global media circus that you must endure while remaining confined in a mountain whose innards rumble routinely, suggesting that the whole story might just end with you dead and buried anyway. Imagine being famous and wealthier than you’ve ever been—but also dependent on strangers who decide what and when you eat and how long you can talk to your family. And imagine the pressure that comes with having an entire nation look upon you as a symbol of courage and all that’s good and resilient about mining, a craft that’s at the heart of your country’s identity.
The men can see what their story means to the Chilean people in all the newspapers reaching them, and they feel the responsibility of what they’ve come to symbolize: endurance, faith, brotherhood. That’s why, despite the many harsh words between them, most don’t give up trying to be the proud and united Chilean workingmen the outside world believes them to be. In a certain sense, that’s the way it always is in a mine, where being confined in a life-threatening situation with other men who insult and mock you is part of everyday work life. “In a mine, when you can treat someone poorly, and he’s still there the next day, without holding resentments, when you sense he just wants to move on—all that generates trust,” Iturra says. “You think:
This guy’s not going to let go of me
.” As long as the men can keep busy, as long as they can still feel like miners, they should be able to keep at least a semblance of unity.
In fact, the men do fall into a work rhythm, one that’s completely different from the routine in the mine before August 5. They unload supplies, medicines, and personal packages coming from the surface around the clock, and also maintain the communications link to the top and keep the lights going. Unloading the
palomas
brings all sorts of interesting things. Cowboy novels, pocket-size Bibles, and an MP3 player for one miner who has been complaining so much about everything, the other miners give it to him just so that he’ll keep quiet. But then some of the other miners complain about the one miner with an MP3 player, and soon they all have one. For group entertainment, a Samsung SP-H03 Pico portable projector arrives. It fits in the palm of a hand, and the men will soon use it to watch videos, movies, and live television images projected onto a white sheet. But best of all, the
palomas
are starting to bring real food. The daily intake supplied to the men has increased from 500 to 1,000 calories now, and soon it will be 1,500. And the men are getting real meals, prepared by a kitchen up on the surface, including rice, meatballs, bread, chicken, pasta, potatoes, and pears, all in small but delicious portions.
After a few days in which the men heartily and thankfully devour this real food, the rescue team on the surface finds an uneaten pastry inside what should be an empty
paloma
sent back from the bottom. One of the men down below has returned that day’s dessert. This thing you gave us, an attached note says, it isn’t very good. Do you have anything else? The rejected dessert is an unequivocally good sign: The men are no longer so desperate they’ll eat anything you give them.
* * *
On August 30, a day before the men pray for peace at Level 90, the rescue teams begin drilling the first hole designed to bring the men out. The Strata 950 raise borer is a machine so large and elaborate, many different metaphors are required to describe it. At nearly three stories tall, its general structure is that of a monument, or a gazebo, with six stainless-steel pillars, each about two stories tall, holding up a large white metal roof that itself has four additional white columns protruding from the top. This edifice rests upon a floor of recently poured and freshly set concrete, and it houses a series of hydraulic levers and shafts designed to guide man-size drill bits into the earth. The Strata 950 will begin by excavating a 15-inch pilot hole, and once that’s completed, a second drill bit will widen it to 28 inches for the rescue cage. The first, smaller drill bit is composed of a series of interlocking beaded discs, and these begin to grind into the stone, creating a hole that is filled with 9.5 gallons of water per second to reduce friction. The Strata 950 crushes and sloshes its way downward into the diorite mountain as men in yellow overalls tend to it, working in teams to lift, turn, align, and lower a variety of heavy steel components, each man doing something different, as if they were working at a rock-crushing assembly line. The noise the machine makes, however, is similar in volume and pitch to that of a jet engine taxiing on a runway. The bit turns at the sedate but steady speed of about 20 rpm, working under the sun and then into the night, the site illuminated by white lamps that leave the work crews looking like extras in a sci-fi movie. The rescuers toil in a bubble of light, working to reach a group of no-longer-hungry but deeply irritated miner-astronauts waiting to be liberated, 2,100 feet below.