by Héctor Tobar
Some of the girlfriends are having trouble getting into the camp anyway. Susana Valenzuela, Yonni Barrios’s girlfriend, says that not long after the Farkas money showed up, Yonni’s wife, Marta, “betrayed me” and the Carabinero police escorted her away from the new Camp Esperanza that’s been built to give family members privacy, away from the media. On August 28, the Associated Press photographs Susana outside the camp, holding a sign with large letters that read “The Courage to Be Present,” along with a picture of Yonni and much smaller letters that say: “For you, my love, your Chanita.” The caption that circulates around the world calls Susana Yonni’s “wife” but just a few days later the truth will come out, as social workers attached to the rescue effort realize that Yonni is in fact married to another woman at Camp Esperanza, and then learn from Yonni himself down below that he hasn’t been living with said wife (exclusively) for years. Marta is photographed in Camp Esperanza holding a poster covered with portraits of Yonni, and journalists will begin using their imaginations to deduce—and report as fact—that Marta first became aware of Susana when they met at Camp Esperanza after the accident. In truth, they’ve known about each other for quite a long time.
Susana is both determined and crafty, and to get into those parts of Camp Esperanza closed off to her, she resorts to a spy-like deception. She sees a load of fish and vegetables being delivered to the big kitchen that’s making food for the families and rescue workers. “I put on an apron, and grabbed a fish and an onion, and I walked right past the guards,” she says. “The journalists saw me inside and asked if I was a relative, and I said, ‘No, I’m just a cook.’” In this way, Susana will eventually work her way into that shack to talk to Yonni, despite the psychologist’s advice.
At any rate, the miners and their family members can’t talk about much in these first conversations, since Iturra will limit their first call to about fifteen seconds; their next call will last about one minute. Iturra is thinking about the mental marathon the miners will have to run and he believes that, as with the miners’ food, a smaller dose of family love at the start is better. “In fifteen to thirty seconds you can’t convey information—there is only the personal encounter. You’re present,” he says. “You say ‘I love you, you can count on me.’ And that’s it. You don’t have time to say, ‘Your father is sad, your grandmother is sick, your son isn’t going to school.’”
Iturra is following advice from NASA, but the thirty-three men aren’t astronauts, they didn’t volunteer to be trapped in a hole for months. After the too-short phone calls, the miners begin to feel, understandably, that they’re being treated like children. Let us talk to our wives, our kids, they say. We’re men: We’re not helpless. The paternalism of the psychologists is plain to see in a video, shot on the surface, in which one miner’s wife is speaking to her husband on the phone in that small shack.
“Hola, my love,” the young woman begins, in a weak voice.
Iturra is sitting nearby. The woman is about to be overcome with emotion, it seems, and he quickly snaps at her to cheer up. “¡Ánimo!”
“Everyone is fine,” the woman continues, sounding a bit more upbeat. She lists all his relatives, then says “I miss you” in a voice of hinting at despair.
“¡Ánimo!” the psychologist orders, and the young woman again tries to sound more cheerful, until a few seconds later the psychologist says, “Start wrapping it up.”
Even after the rescuers establish a permanent fiber-optic link with the surface—which will include a television feed and uninterrupted phone connection—the psychologist will continue to limit the contacts with the family to roughly eight to ten minutes a week, which is about the time NASA gives its astronauts. (Eventually, Víctor Zamora will lead a brief “strike” against the psychologist by turning his back to the camera and refusing to talk to his own family until the psychologist grants all the men longer time for the video chats.) Contact with the outside world “takes you out of your reality,” Iturra says. “It puts you in a world where you have no power.” Iturra is trying to protect the miners from the feeling of helplessness: They can do things below to aid with their own rescue, but they can’t be home to be good fathers or good sons. At home they are needed and they are rich, they are famous, and their kids need to be fed and protected. The men can’t be in that world, but even with Iturra trying to shield them, they are pulled into it, because, despite the miners’ many suspicions, no one is censoring or monitoring the letters that go down below. Via the “mail” that flows down the palomas, Zamora learns that his young son is being bullied in school: “Your dad is never going to get out! He got crushed under a rock!” Franklin Lobos learns that his ex-wife is up on the surface, and that his children are hoping he’ll make amends with her. Others learn that the women in their lives have heard the voice of God and have decided they should take the next step and just get married already. In one of the first letters Edison Peña receives, his girlfriend, Angelica Alvarez, brings up the topic of marriage, to which Edison answers: “I don’t understand why you’d want to marry me … I’ve had a lot of time to think about all the things I’ve destroyed, and about all you’ve suffered thanks to me … But I wouldn’t want you to be with anyone else either and I’d like to make you happy, even though I’ve never managed to do that.”
That letter finds its way, somehow, into the Madrid newspaper El País, and Edison’s confessional is soon circulating around the Spanish-speaking world. The miners may not be entirely powerless to help their families—they can now send instructions and keep tabs on things, at least, via the phone—but they are undeniably without protection against the media. Some reporters are willing to pay their families for a glimpse at the miners’ letters, but most simply charm them away, and soon the Chilean newspapers are reprinting many of the words written by the men below. Those letters then recirculate down into the mine, because despite the miners’ suspicions, Iturra and the other leaders of the rescue team on the surface have decided that they shouldn’t censor the newspapers either.
The Santiago newspapers are rolled up and stuffed into the palomas by workers at the regional governor’s office who are in charge of sending the men reading material. Opening these precious relics of the surface world for the first time, the men can see just how famous they’ve become, the way their pictures are covering all the front pages. Yes, some of the more prudish surface workers have cut out assorted photographs and advertisements featuring scantily clad women, but no one stops the August 28 edition of La Tercera, for example. It has a feature article about a miner whose newfound fame is leaping off the page, and it quotes from a letter he’s written from inside the mine. When thirty-two other miners read these words, they get an unexpected glimpse into the mind of Mario Sepúlveda.
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 ins
ide 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.