by Héctor Tobar
Inside the capsule Florencio is awake for this birth, watching as a small light illuminates walls of carved stone that pass before his eyes. He’s wearing the same faded red helmet he put on when he entered the mine on August 5. It’s a few minutes before midnight and on his slow journey upward, October 12 becomes October 13. He can hear only the rattling of the capsule: It sounds as if he were riding an old roller coaster. He feels the swaying back and forth, but Florencio stays calm for the thirty-minute journey, because his long ordeal inside the mountain is nearly over. He is alone, but on the surface an audience of 1.2 billion people is waiting for him, their eyes focused on a cylinder jutting out of the mountain.
Florencio begins to remember the events that unfolded inside this mountain and then other memories come, from his life outside: the day he met the woman who would become the mother of his children, the days those boys were born, the days his sons headed off to school. He’s had a good life, he realizes, and today he’s been blessed again, rising from the stone caverns of the mine in a capsule, being pulled up by men and women he cannot see. He feels the air turn thinner and lighter. His ears plug up, and then they pop. A breeze from the surface flows into the capsule as it enters the final section of the shaft, and for a few moments he is surrounded by steel walls and the rattling sound disappears, replaced by an eerie quiet. The radio squawks to life, and he hears people, the shouts of men calling out instructions to him and to one another, voices on the surface floating above his head. There is a sudden burst of applause. With the Fénix still slowly rising, light and color flood in from the outside, and Florencio looks up to see a sunburned man in a white helmet peering at him through the steel mesh of the capsule door.
PART III
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
18
IN A BETTER COUNTRY
On the night of August 5, Bayron Avalos pronounced his father, Florencio, dead, but on October 13, he sees him resurrected from the rumbling mountain just a few minutes after midnight. With the world’s cameras trained on him, Bayron breaks into tears and begins to bawl uncontrollably. The First Lady of Chile, who is standing alongside him, tries to comfort him. Florencio Avalos emerges from the Fénix capsule and falls into a silent embrace with his wife and son, and clasps the hands of the president, Minister Golborne, and the other leaders of the rescue team. While hundreds of reporters and anchors from around the world watching the events comment on the rescue unfolding before their eyes with breathless enthusiasm, the scene around the capsule itself is subdued and sadly quiet—especially compared with what will come about one hour later, when Mario Sepúlveda rises toward the surface. The man with the heart of a dog can be heard yelling when he is still twenty meters from the top. “¡Vamos!” he cries, with a disembodied caveman’s shout that spills forth from the top of the cylinder jutting out from the shaft. “¡Vamos!” he shouts again, causing the rescuers and his wife to laugh, and when the Fénix finally rises up out of the shaft, he gives an animal screech that causes everyone to laugh more. The door opens and Mario quickly embraces his wife, then reaches down into a bag he’s brought from the interior of the mine. He passes out slate-colored rocks from Level 90 as souvenirs to Minister Golborne and the leaders of the rescue team and to President Piñera, and he takes off his helmet, like a gentleman or knight errant, and bows his head to greet the First Lady. Moments later he’s embracing a group of rescue workers with shouts of “¡Huevón!” and then he leads everyone present in a “Mineros de Chile!” chant, raising his arms with liberated, frenetic energy until one of the rescue workers finally stops him and tells him to take off his harness, please—there are, after all, other guys down below waiting to be rescued. Finally Mario is lowered onto a stretcher and carried away to a nearby triage room, and will later be flown (as will all his other colleagues) to a hospital in Copiapó.
Juan Illanes is the third man out, followed by Carlos Mamani, who is greeted at the top of the shaft by the president of Chile, and later at the hospital by President Evo Morales of Bolivia. He is followed by the teenager Jimmy Sánchez, who is met by his father, and then Osman Araya, who led so many prayer sessions, and José Ojeda, who crafted the famous note about “Los 33.” Claudio Yáñez, who looked so weak he was like a newly born colt, emerges with his chiseled young features in the soft, muted light of an overcast morning, and clasps his girlfriend and the mother of his children in a rocking embrace. He’s followed by Mario Gómez, the truck driver who went back down to make a few more pesos from an extra load and who now insists on taking a few moments to fall to his knees in prayer before the capsule. When the tenth miner comes out, the sun has burned through the morning overcast, and the men and women at the top of the shaft call down to Alex Vega: “Put your sunglasses on!” Alex once wondered if the darkness in the mine would make him blind, but now it’s the potential damage caused by desert sunshine he has to worry about, and he has his sunglasses dutifully on as the capsule emerges. His wife, Jessica, who refused to kiss him goodbye on the morning of August 5, gives him a kiss and a hug of cinematic passion and length, and filled with so much longing and sorrow that all the people around them stop applauding and the sound of Jessica’s tears can be heard by everyone present.
“Don’t cry,” Alex says. No llorís. “It’s over now.”
* * *
Jorge Galleguillos ascends next, followed by Edison Peña, who comes out saying: “Thank you for believing we were alive. Thank you for believing we were alive.” He repeats these words a few times more, even as he falls into the arms of the woman who’s asked him to marry her. (He will not.) A short time later word will come from Memphis that Edison has been invited to Graceland. Carlos Barrios, who joined a pair of expeditions seeking a way out of the mine, is greeted by his wailing father: “Tranquilo, ya,” Carlos says. Next comes Víctor Zamora, the poet. The psychologist, Iturra, has made good on his promise to deputize Zamora’s son Arturo as a “junior rescuer,” and the boy is wearing a white helmet with a Carabinero police symbol on the front, and unlike the other children at the site, he’s allowed to walk up to the capsule itself and help open it. Just after noon Víctor Segovia emerges, the precious diary still in his possession, followed by the tall, quiet truck driver Daniel Herrera, and Omar Reygadas, the man who took a flame to the bottom of the mine. The eighteenth and nineteenth men out are the cousins Esteban Rojas and Pablo “the Cat” Rojas, who was in the mine doing makeup work because he had missed time for his father’s funeral. It’s midafternoon by the time Darío Segovia emerges. His sister María, the Mayor, is not present (she’s remained in Camp Esperanza below), and he’s greeted instead by his partner, Jessica Chilla. She holds his face, and touches his limbs, something she will do again and again when she sees him at the hospital, like a mother checking on the health of her newborn baby. “I wanted to see if he was whole,” she says. “I don’t think he was aware of what was happening, he was so nervous.” The magical and surreal sense that she’s witnessed the birthing of a middle-aged man colors those first hours Darío is back with her. “It was like he was starting a life he never thought he would live.”
* * *
Yonni Barrios hears cries of “Doctor!” when he reaches the top. He doesn’t see his girlfriend, Susana Valenzuela, right away, but she’s there, standing next to the minister of mining, following several days of private family drama, a few elements of which have played out in the world media. Yonni told Susana in their final videoconference not to worry, that he would make sure she was there to greet him on the surface. He will be like Tarzan, king of the jungle, he said: He will simply speak and all the animals in the jungle will work his will. And so it is. The rescue team tells Yonni’s legal, estranged wife, Marta Salinas, that Yonni wants his live-in girlfriend to have the honor of greeting him. Marta is left to make statements to the press lamenting her husband’s choice. “She’s welcome to him … I’m happy for him.” On the morning of Yonni’s rescue, Susana finishes her work at the camp kitchen frying up fish, changes into fresh clo
thes, and gets a police escort up to the rescue site.
Susana watches Yonni step out of the capsule, noticeably thinner. He’s taking off his harness, and has his back to her when she calls out to him, in a low voice: “Hey, Tarzan.”
* * *
Samuel “CD” Avalos is the twenty-second miner out, followed by the young Carlos Bugueño, and then José Henríquez, the Pastor, who is greeted by his wife of thirty-three years, Blanca Hettiz Berríos. It’s late afternoon and the rescue site is in shadows when Florencio’s brother Renán Avalos reaches the top next, followed by Claudio Acuña, who emerges to the sound of his infant girl crying loudly. Next is Franklin Lobos, the soccer player, who hugs the twenty-five-year-old daughter whose tears helped bring the federal government into the rescue. She gives him a soccer ball signed by his family members, and Franklin takes a moment to juggle it with his feet. Night falls over the site as the final miners come out: Richard Villarroel, who will not leave his soon-to-be-born son to grow up fatherless, as he did; Juan Carlos Aguilar, the head of the mechanics crew; Raúl Bustos, the man from Talcahuano; and then Pedro Cortez, who notes how sweet and fresh the air tastes, up here where people are meant to live. The thirty-second man out is Ariel Ticona, who will have to wait just a short while longer before meeting his baby daughter for the first time. Luis Urzúa is the last man of the A shift to leave. On August 5, he went deeper into the crumbling mine to make sure all the men in his shift were accounted for, and tonight he’s completed an everyday supervisor’s ritual: He’s left his work site only after all the men in his shift are out of the mine and accounted for. His arrival at the surface is greeted by horns and sirens that echo across the mountain. Urzúa is embraced by his son, and then by the president, and he begins to speak to Piñera in a low, exhausted voice that the nearby microphones struggle to capture. “As the jefe, I hand over the shift to you,” he tells the president. “Like a good jefe,” the president says. With those words, the public ordeal of the thirty-three men of the A shift of the San José Mine comes to an end.
* * *
The rescuer Manuel González is the last man left inside the mine. When the Fénix capsule descends to take him out, he faces the remote camera that’s broadcasting to the surface and takes a bow. González enters the capsule and rides up to the top, where he is greeted by President Piñera. The president helps roll a steel cover over the top of the Plan B shaft and delivers a speech in which he praises the courage and tenacity of the miners and their rescuers. “Today Chile is not the same country it was sixty-nine days ago,” he says. “The miners are not the same men who were trapped on August fifth. They have come out stronger and have taught us a lesson … Chile today is more united and stronger than ever.” President Piñera will never again be as popular as he is at that moment.
At Camp Esperanza, the several thousand journalists, rescuers, and family members begin to pack up and leave. The tents, the small school, the kitchens, the altars, and even the flags disappear. The mine is already taking on the desolate, lonely appearance of a desert archaeological site as María “the Mayor” and the other siblings of the rescued miner Darío Segovia putter about and make sure everything is cleaned up and in order. “We were the last people to go, there was nobody there,” María says. Only some police officers remain, as guards of the empty property. At four in the afternoon on Day 74, “We closed the camp, as a family.” Darío is in the hospital in Copiapó, and then he’s busy with his immediate family, and María decides she’ll allow him the space he needs to get his life in order, and she takes the bus back to Antofagasta without ever seeing the brother she worked for ten weeks to free. “I left the camp happy, because we had won, we had won his life, but I was sad because I couldn’t see him. That marked me.” In the weeks to come, María returns to selling pastries on the beach from a cart, under the hot sun, and at home she watches on television as Darío becomes a “magnate,” traveling the world and accepting honors. They speak on the telephone, but a year passes without the two siblings seeing each other. One day, however, María receives a letter from her brother in the mail. “I’m very proud of you, Madame Mayor,” it begins.
19
THE TALLEST TOWER
On October 16, at a meeting hall of the Chilean social security administration in Copiapó, Juan Illanes leads six of his fellow miners in their first official press conference. The men sit behind a cluster of microphones, their skin still a sickly gray after ten weeks underground. Thirty-two of the miners have been released from the hospital—only Víctor Zamora, suffering from rotting teeth, remains under medical supervision—and clusters of reporters have shown up at their homes. Mario Sepúlveda was escorted away from the hospital in secret, his head covered with a blanket to avoid the media throngs seeking to speak to him. Now Illanes asks the press to respect their privacy. “Leave us enough room so that we can learn how to deal with you all,” he says. He asks the media to refrain from trying to “destroy the image” of the miners as a group, and especially of men like Yonni Barrios, who has become the target of many mean-spirited stories, “complete with nicknames,” that make fun of his amorous entanglements. “Please consider his emotional state of mind,” Illanes says. In Latin America, as elsewhere, the media builds up heroes and then takes delight in destroying them, especially when they choose not to cooperate with the machinery of celebrity, and Illanes can feel how quickly this pack of questioners might turn on him. He answers some surprisingly skeptical questions about why anyone would want to work in such a dangerous mine in the first place—“I needed the money,” he says. But he declines to talk about how the men survived for the seventeen days before they made contact with the outside world. The men have a pact of silence, and an agreement to share in the proceeds of a book and movie, and they won’t be talking about those seventeen days, Illanes says. In the questions the reporters ask at this press conference and while staking out the miners’ homes there is a suggestion of the sublime and ridiculous stories that the media imagines must being waiting, unspoken, on the lips of these pale men. Did you fight among yourselves? Did you ever think about sex? Did you see the face of God? Did you consider cannibalism? Already, the Chilean media is hinting that all might not be what it seems among the heroes of the San José Mine. Clearly the men were divided, and some outlets have reported what a rescuer overheard a group of men say when Mario Sepúlveda was leaving the mine in the Fénix capsule: “We’re lucky we’re getting rid of that guy!”
Reporters are surrounding Víctor Segovia’s house on Chalcopyrite Street in the Los Minerales neighborhood, and when he passes through one media phalanx to get to his front door, he finds more reporters who’ve talked their way inside, including one of the more famous media personalities in Chile, Santiago Pavlovic, the eye-patch-wearing host of the show Informe Especial. There’s another reporter in his kitchen talking to Víctor’s mother, and a reporter from Asia. Víctor wants to go to his backyard and have a beer, but there’s another reporter there, too. His relatives are telling him: “Please talk to these reporters so that they leave.” While all of this is happening, Víctor is trying to comfort his seventy-seven-year-old father. The elder Segovia is ill and losing his memory, and when he casts eyes on his miner son for the first time in ten weeks he begins to weep. “Never, never had I seen him cry before,” Víctor says. “He was always a hard man.” Above all, Víctor is confused by the way everyone is treating him, here in his own home, as if he were a celebrity, as if he were rich, with a mixture of awe and resentment. They are impatient with him, they want to see him smile, they want to hear what his plans are now that he doesn’t have to work anymore, because everyone in Chile knows that one of the country’s richest men said Víctor and the other thirty-two miners would be millionaires. Even Víctor’s ex-wife, who dumped him years ago, suddenly wants to make amends and is asking for forgiveness, and it’s all as strange and dreamlike as that bearded man with the eye patch, somehow transported from the television into Víctor’s living room, staring at him an
d asking, “Can we talk?”
* * *
The media loves the thirty-three—and the media is starting to resent them. Chile’s newest national heroes are a bunch of ordinary working stiffs who have the temerity to ignore the media’s most pressing questions, because they’ve got plans to make storytelling money all on their own—not in Santiago, but rather in Hollywood and New York. A few sell small parts of their story for sums big and small—“he charged us fifty dollars but it felt like he was holding something back,” says a Japanese reporter after visiting one of the men. If the Chilean media won’t be allowed to make them heroes, they can very easily tear them down and make them to objects of populist scorn. For starters, several media outlets begin to point out, there’s the price the country paid to rescue them: at least $20 million, the government estimates, including airfare for technicians brought to the site, $69,000 on the Fénix capsules built by the navy, and close to $1 million spent by the national oil company on fuel for various drilling machines and trucks. On October 19, the tabloid La Segunda runs a story that adds up the cost of all the gifts the miners have received: more than $38,000 each (or about 19 million pesos) in “vacations, clothing, and donations,” the paper reports, including Oakley sunglasses worth $400 each and the newest version of the iPod touch, donated by Apple, and planned trips to Britain, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Israel, and Greece (the miners having been invited to visit those places by assorted officials and entrepreneurs). In the end, not all those trips will come off, and only a handful of miners will travel on most of them. But Luis Urzúa can sense a shift in attitudes. “After that story in La Segunda, people started to think we were getting rich. They looked at us differently.” In the short term, however, people are falling over themselves to give the men gifts. A few days after La Segunda’s tally comes out, Kawasaki Chile announces it’s giving a new motorcycle to each of the thirty-three men. This is our most expensive model, says the general manager (they cost 3.9 million pesos each). “Above all, the miners deserve it,” the executive tells a television reporter, while also managing to link the Kawasaki brand to the miners: “These men represent hard work, sacrifice, tenacity, the ability to overcome obstacles—qualities that are also represented by Kawasaki, one of the most important companies in Japan.” Franklin Lobos accepts the gift on behalf of his colleagues, and says something the men have repeated again and again since coming up from the surface. “We are not heroes, like people say. We’re just victims. We’re not movie stars, or Hollywood stars.”