Deep Down Dark (12 page)

Other rescue teams are coming out of the mine looking worried. José talks to a group of men who’ve come from the Michilla mine, three hundred miles away to the north, near Antofagasta. Tears well in their eyes as they describe what it’s like inside. The mountain is still alive, they say, slabs are breaking off from the walls down there, and there are huge cracks in the floor and ceiling of the Ramp. The head of the Michilla rescue team declares, “No one else should go in!” But the situation outside the mine is chaotic, it feels as if there’s no one in charge of the overall rescue, and no one tries to stop the next group of men, including Alex Vega’s father, from entering.

Not long after passing through that gaping mouth that leads from afternoon sunshine to darkness, José Vega begins to realize exactly what he’s gotten himself into. “To be honest, it was very, very frightening.” They approach the blocked section of the Ramp that Carlos Pinilla and Pablo Ramirez reached a day earlier—the rumbling mountain has piled up stones on the roadway before it. José speaks with another member of the rescue team, a relative of the miner Jorge Galleguillos, and they agree to look for the nearest chimney. When they find one, a young, skinny miner agrees to climb down inside. After being lowered down and then pulled back up, the miner reports that he could see an open passageway at the bottom. It’s leading to another air duct and perhaps to a gallery where they can reach the men. But José says they don’t have permission to go any farther. They climb back up to report their findings to the team of professional rescuers preparing to enter the mine.

*   *   *

The minister of mining, Laurence Golborne, arrives at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday. He, too, sees the men and women sitting by the bonfires and their expressions of confusion and sorrow. He’s still dressed in the business suit he was wearing the day before while on a state visit to Ecuador. Several family members corral him and repeat the rumors they’ve heard: “They’re dead already, aren’t they…” When you’re a government official in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, people believe it’s your nature to misinform or manipulate, that you somehow surrender your humanity and morals when you take office. The poorer someone is, the more likely they are to feel this way about their government. “Tell us the truth, Señor Ministro!” The truth is that the available information is spotty and inaccurate. According to one count given to Golborne as he arrives, the number of trapped miners is thirty-seven. Or maybe thirty-four. He is told (incorrectly) that the ranks of the miners include several illegal immigrants from Peru, or maybe from Bolivia.

Not much in Golborne’s professional career up to this moment has prepared him for this. He’s a well-off executive and business owner with a degree in civil engineering and a minor in chemistry who’s never before held a government position. Upon taking office he was more familiar with the challenges in serving South American haute cuisine (he owns a restaurant in a tony district of Santiago) than in the complexities of the mining industry (his only experience in mining was as an administrator, a number cruncher, twenty years earlier). His journey to Copiapó has been a long and roundabout one after leaving the state visit with President Sebastián Piñera to Ecuador, flying coach on a commercial flight back to Santiago, and then in a Chilean air force jet to Copiapó. Golborne is part of the circle of businessmen, politicos, and thinkers now taking the reins of government after two decades of center-left rule, and at this moment his business attire isn’t the only thing that makes him stand out. He’s a top-ranking official of a conservative national government in a region that voted overwhelmingly for the left, and his presence at the mine is unusual because the federal goverment never takes a role in mining accidents—by tradition, it’s usually the mining companies that lead and organize their own rescue efforts.

“The attitude among people there was, ‘Well, you’re here.’ They weren’t openly hostile, but they weren’t espeicially welcoming either,” Golborne will say later. He watches as the rescuers gather near the entrance to the mine; they are from Punta del Cobre, Escondida, and other mines. Just after midnight, they pass underneath the jagged gray teeth at the entrance and disappear inside.

*   *   *

The rescue team is composed of Carabinero police officers and a local mining rescue team lead by Pedro Rivero, a lifelong miner with a ponytail dyed blond and many years’ experience in mining rescues. Off duty, at home, Rivero is a transvestite, a fact widely known in the local and eminently macho mining community, where he is nevertheless respected for the undeniable manliness of his courage as a rescuer. His team includes one employee of the San José Mine, Pablo Ramirez, the night-shift supervisor and Florencio Avalos’s friend. They drive the 4.5 kilometers into the mine until they reach the flat granite wall that’s blocking the Ramp, then assemble their equipment for a descent into the deeper reaches of the mine, hoping to reach the Refuge, some 285 meters farther down. They bring ropes, pulleys, tackle blocks, and slabs of wood for building a platform over one of the chimney openings, each of which is 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide, and as much as 30 meters (100 feet) deep.

Rivero, Ramirez, and five other rescuers descend through several chimneys from the spot where the Ramp is blocked at Level 320, down to Level 295. To Rivero, who’s never been in this mine before, the scene is increasingly “Dantesque” the deeper he goes, the more the temperature rises and debris fills the Ramp and cracks begin to appear in the structure of the stone. At each level they find the same perfect gray mass blocking the Ramp, and stop to yell downward, in the general direction of the trapped men, calling out with the usual insults with which mining men address one another: “
¡Viejos culiados! ¿Dónde están?
” With each level down, the sense of danger deepens. They are like a Himalayan expedition working in reverse, their goal to “assault” the center of a mountain instead of its peak, with the air getting thicker and hotter instead of colder and thinner, and at Level 295 they gather to make a kind of base camp. They assemble more ropes for the descent into the next chimney, which leads down to Level 268.

Ramirez goes first, alone, and after a few meters he begins to notice something deeply disturbing: There are cracks in the walls of the chimney. The stone walls of the cavity are coming apart, being slowly squeezed by the weight of the skyscraper-size “mega-block” of stone that’s fallen from above. Once again he yells down below for the trapped men and listens for a reply that never comes. When he gets near the bottom of the chimney he can’t see the Ramp at Level 268; instead, there is a pile of debris, a hanging wall of rock that looks like it could collapse at any moment and seal the opening completely. “Anyone who passed through there,” Ramirez later says, “would be in danger of being stuck if all those rocks came tumbling down.” This isn’t going to work, we can’t go through here, he thinks, it’s going to crumble very soon. Ramirez makes this assessment in his thoughts, and feels suddenly defeated. He thinks about Mario Gómez, the truck driver, and the men in the mechanical crews, and like Pinilla he’s certain they got caught in this collapse, because it was the lunch hour and they had to be driving up the Ramp near this spot. But the rest of the men are probably alive down there, Ramirez thinks, because in the San José the main group of fortifiers and jumbo operators never took the lunch hour when they were supposed to, they were always late or early. “That’s the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate,” he says. “That’s what’s beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen.”

Now the weird, mysterious thing is the mountain rumbling all around him, from rockfalls that may be distant or may be close. He yells up to Rivero at the top of the chimney.

“
¡Sácame, huevón, esto se fue a la cresta!
” Pull me up, you bastard. This is going to hell!

Rivero and the other rescuers at the top of the chimney also hear the sound of thunder rumbling from the stone around them. A huge slab of rock comes falling down from a great height, and it severs the cable linking their communication equipment to the top. It’s like hearing a bomb go off nearby. Rivero begins yelling: “Red alert! Red alert!”

Rivero and the other rescuers pull up Ramirez, but the wall of the chimney is starting to crumble, and one or several slabs catch the loose ropes the rescuers have attached to their bodies to follow Ramirez down into the chimney. For a moment, it’s as if the mountain were trying to suck them down, because falling stone is pulling at the ropes, trying to drag them into the chimney, pulling so hard that Rivero loses his footing. He and his fellow rescuers fight to keep from being sucked into the chimney even as they struggle to pull up Ramirez. When Ramirez’s head emerges at the top, they grab his arms and lift him while another rescuer pulls a knife from his boot and cuts all the ropes. Only at that instant are they safe.

The men begin their journey back to the top, with Rivero noting how disconsolate Ramirez looks, worried for his friends and coworkers below. Rivero thinks,
This is over now
. At 3:00 p.m., Rivero and Ramirez reach the top and walk out into the Atacama sunshine. Word of the collapse inside the mine has already spread to the rescuers gathered outside, including José Vega, Alex’s father. “There’s millions of tons of rock and it’s impossible that they’re alive,” one of the rescuers gathered nearby says.

“It was total silence after he said that,” José will recall.

Golborne is there waiting for the rescue team, too, and the minister is at once struck by the their defeated expressions, and by their reddened eyes and the paint of gray and black grit covering their faces, as if they’d gone inside the mountain and been fighting some beast that lived there. “
Esto se acabó
,” Rivero says, with an unavoidable sense of finality. There is nothing more Rivero or any other “conventional” mining rescue team can do, and now it falls to Golborne to tell this to the waiting families.

As the highest-ranking official present, Golborne has taken on the strange role of spokesman in the hours since arriving, even though he doesn’t have any legal authority at the mine (techinically, he’s trespassing on private property). But the mine owners aren’t talking to the media or the families, and the reporters drift to the handsome, educated official. The families have been waiting two hours to hear from him, and now he walks away from the mine entrance to an ambulance parked near the main gate. The minister stands on a chair placed next to the vehicle and uses its loudspeaker to address the crowd, television cameras transmitting his statement live to all of Chile.

“The news is not auspicious,” he begins. The rescuers were trying to reach Level 238, he tells them, but there was another rockfall. The mountain has collapsed again, and the rescuers have had to flee. Several family members gasp at the news. “We’re trying to find other techniques, other mechanisms to reach them,” Golborne says, but as he utters these words he looks down and sees Carolina Lobos, the adult daughter of Franklin Lobos, the former soccer star. She is looking distraught, helpless, and her eyes are filled with tears, seemingly more tears than a pair of eyes could possibly hold (that’s how Golborne will remember the moment). At the sight of her tears he stops speaking and looks down and away from the crowd. He feels “this knot in my throat” but manages to resume speaking for a few seconds. “We will try to keep you informed…” he announces, but then he has to stop again, because it’s simply too much, to be the official to tell so many good people, so many daughters and wives, that the men they love are trapped and that he doesn’t know how or if he’ll be able to save them. “We have to take care of the rescuers’ lives,” he says, and a few words more, and finally he feels the emotion welling up again, and he turns away from the crowd completely, and gives up and puts the microphone down.

“As you can see, the minister broke down, visibly shaken,” the announcer on Chile’s TVN news network says in a grim tone. A sense of shock and mourning spreads across Chile, because ministers don’t cry like that on live television, and seeing one do so makes the moment all the more real and extraordinary for the millions watching. Something very tragic, very human must be happening for a powerful man to cry like that.

Golborne steps down into a crush of reporters. They’re asking him questions, and he gives them only vague responses about studying “options” and other “techniques,” and as he speaks the microphones pick up the sound of a woman, or many, weeping very loudly. The “short-term” solution of going through the chimney won’t work, Golborne says, almost mumbling now.

In response a man nearby shouts: “Señor Ministro. We can see it in your face. Tell us the truth! Can you get them out? We’re all in the dark! We’ve been waiting here fifty hours. Fifty hours!”

Golborne says that “hopes have to be realistic … We can’t transmit an optimism that doesn’t exist.”

Hearing this, a relative and miner from Cerro Negro shouts: “David took on Goliath! And he used the weapons that he had!”

“You can’t break down like that!” a woman tells him. “You’re a minister. You’re the authority here. You have to show you’re in charge!”

Golborne is up to this point in his career a Stanford and Northwestern alumnus with a stellar corporate résumé, but he’s never been someone who’s had to think of himself as a man of the people. He’s never had to make the concerns of the poor his own, and he’s never known what it’s like to be the public servant of people who want him to be strong and who are deeply suspicious of him at the same time.

*   *   *

María Segovia remembers what happens in the minutes and hours that follow this way: She and the other family members watch, in the fading afternoon light, as rescue-team members walk away with their helmets underneath their arms and fire trucks drive away from the mine entrance. She feels abandoned, and so do most of the family members around her. They’re weeping, she’s weeping, but finally María stops and thinks:
We’re not going to get anywhere with tears.
Eventually she finds a young reporter for CNN Chile, and she tells him, “No, this can’t be this way.” She describes seeing the rescuers leave, and speaks of her outrage and hurt. “These men are not dogs that are buried here,” she says. “They’re human beings. And for that reason we need help. Because they have to be rescued.” Call the president, she says, call other countries, bring help to get these men out of here.