Authors: Héctor Tobar
The men of the A shift do not expect to be penniless anytime soon—in fact, they are well paid compared with most modern Chilean laborers. Even the lowest paid among them earns about $1,200 a month (almost triple Chile’s minimum wage), and with certain under-the-table bonuses thrown in, they earn even more. Rather than squandering their wages, they use them to build the semblance of a middle-class lifestyle, complete with consumer debt, business and property loans, alimony for their ex-wives, and tuition payments for their adult children in college. A few of the men of the A shift are evangelical teetotalers, and the mercurial Mario Sepúlveda is a Jehovah’s Witness who doesn’t drink either. But most allow themselves a sip or two after a day’s work: Whiskey, beer, and red wine are their preferred libations. A few certainly imbibe more than they should: In Copiapó, the final stop on the bus ride of the cross-country commuting southerners, one of their northern Chilean colleagues is currently drinking himself into a stupor that might keep him from going to work the next day. Working underground in modern Chile is still hard, physical labor that can leave men feeling like abused “beasts of burden,” and death haunts subterranean mining today, as it always has. When Darwin rode northward he came upon the funeral of a miner, a man being carried to his grave by four of his colleagues, the pallbearers dressed in strange “costumes” consisting of long, dark-colored woolen shirts, leather aprons, and bright-colored sashes. Mining men no longer wear such dress, but in recent years the men of the San José Mine have mourned the loss of colleagues who work there. They’ve also seen friends maimed by the sudden explosions of seemingly solid rock that are one of the most unpredictable causes of accidents in deep underground mining. Raúl Bustos, the mechanic from the port city of Talcahuano, is a relative newcomer to the San José. But he’s seen the shrine the men have built belowground to the mine’s victims: Now, on the bus, he’s carrying a rosary he will take with him into the mine when the workday begins.
On the last leg of their bus journey, the men enter the southern fringe of the Atacama Desert, a plain where Darwin struggled to find forage for his animals. In the Atacama, which may be the globe’s oldest desert in addition to being its driest, there are weather stations that have never received a drop of rain. From their bus windows, it looks as if God had decided to pull out all the trees, and then most of the bushes and shrubs, leaving only a few hardy plants to dot the pallid brown plain with specks of olive drab. The roadside slowly comes to life again when the buses enter the irrigated, mottled greenness of the valley of the Copiapó River. Pepper trees, ubiquitous in the desert cities of the United States, are native to this corner of Chile, and they begin to appear along the roadside, dripping thin leaves onto the ground as the buses arrive in the city of Copiapó. The last five hundred yards of their bus ride takes the men past Copiapó’s old public cemetery, where many generations of miners rest, including the father of one of the men of the A shift, a retired miner who drank himself to death and was buried a few days ago. After the cemetery the bus grinds quickly past a neighborhood of wood and tin hovels that is one of the poorest in the city, and then over the short bridge that crosses the channel of the Copiapó River.
The largest group of men who work at the San José live in Copiapó, the city closest to the mine. Many are veteran miners in their late forties, fifties, and early sixties, and they have pleasant memories of this riverbed. The Copiapó River was alive when they were boys, and they ran through its cooling, ankle-deep waters. Clover grew then in pools at the spot where Route 5 crosses the river, as it did when Darwin reached Copiapó and noted in his journal the pleasant aroma. A generation ago the Copiapó River began to die, and today it’s become a khaki-colored eyesore garnished with trash and prickly shrubs. The average annual rainfall in Copiapó is less than half an inch and water has not flowed inside the channel since the last big storm hit the city, thirteen years ago.
When the bus pulls into the terminal, the commuting men of the A shift step out into bus bays and unload their bags. They take a short ride across Copiapó in the city’s communal taxis to one of the two rooming houses where they will sleep for the next seven nights. In the last few hours before the workday begins on August 5, all the men of the A shift but one are in Copiapó or in its nearby working-class suburbs.
* * *
Geology was in its infancy when Darwin visited Chile in 1835: On his sailing journey to South America he had read one of the foundational texts of the new science, Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
. Once he reached Chile, Darwin witnessed a volcanic eruption in the Andes and noted the presence of seashells on ground a few hundred feet above sea level. He also lived through a two-minute-long earthquake while resting in a forest near the port of Valdivia. These experiences and observations led Darwin to deduce, more than a century before the theory of plate tectonics was formalized, that the ground upon which he was standing was gradually being pushed upward by the same forces that caused volcanic explosions. “We may confidently come to the conclusion that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical,” he wrote. Today geologists say that Chile sits on the “Ring of Fire,” that vast seam in the Earth where continent-size chunks of the planet’s crust meet. The Nazca Plate pushes underneath the South American Plate. Like a child squeezing into his bed and raising the covers into a lump, the Nazca lifted up South America to create the 20,000-foot peaks of the Andes, a process geologists call orogenesis.
The stone inside the mountains north of Copiapó was born of the magma deep inside the Earth, and is intersected with vast networks of speckled, mineral-bearing deposits. These veins were first created more than 140 million years ago, during the age of reptiles, about twenty million years after flowering plants first appeared on the planet but before the arrival of bees, and forty million years before the largest of the dinosaurs,
Argentinosaurus
, roamed the continent. A mineral-rich broth rose up through the Earth’s crust, squeezing through the fissures of the Atacama Fault System for more than 100 million years, from the end of the Jurassic period to the beginning of the Paleogene. Eventually, the broth took solid form as the 200-meter-tall (656-foot-tall) cylinders of ore-bearing rock known as “breccia pipes,” and also as the thin layers of interlocking veins that geologists call “stockwork.” These buried deposits of quartz, chalcopyrite, and other minerals run through the hills from the southwest to the northeast, leaving lines on a prospector’s map that are like an echo of the gigantic continental plates many miles farther below.
* * *
In Copiapó, two company minibuses known as
liebres
(hares) begin to pick up the men of the A shift from the two rooming houses, and from assorted stops in the city’s working-class neighborhoods. There are many such buses shuttling back and forth across Copiapó this morning because these are boom times in the city, the latest in a cycle of booms and busts dating back three hundred years. A gold rush and bust in the Copiapó of the 1700s was followed by a silver rush three years before Darwin arrived. By the end of the nineteenth century the silver had run out, but the invention of nitrate-based explosives led to a saltpeter mining boom farther north in the Atacama Desert. Chilean miners provided the essential ingredient by which Europeans waged war and killed themselves in large numbers: This bonanza, in turn, led Chile to invade the neighboring nitrate-rich lands of Bolivia and Peru, with Copiapó as a base of military operations. But victory in the War of the Pacific caused yet another decline in Copiapó’s economy when investment money flowed away from Copiapó into Chile’s newly conquered territories. The growing global demand for copper in the twentieth century led to a new boom, however, and the building of a local copper smelter in 1951. A series of Asian economic “miracles” in the late twentieth century brought more demand for Chilean minerals and more miners to Copiapó, especially after the opening of the Candelaria open-pit copper mine in 1994. This latest boom helped to drain and finally kill the Copiapó River, because both the growing city and modern mining methods required the use of voluminous amounts of water.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a fourfold increase in the price of gold (to $1,200 an ounce) and record copper prices sent men deeper into the otherwise-not-so-profitable San José Mine, and into other mines in the Copiapó River valley. Copiapó’s population grew to 150,000, and new and taller buildings were erected, including the tallest in the city, a fifteen-story luxury apartment building on Atacama Street, along with Copiapó’s first resort, the Antay Casino and Hotel, a building whose modernist touches include a crimson, fez-shaped dome. Rising mineral prices also put more money in the pockets of the men who toiled at the San José Mine, and in recent years and months the men of the A shift have celebrated their windfall by adding rooms to their homes and by organizing large parties, often for their children and grandchildren. Sometimes these family gatherings are organized at El Pretil public park, with its watered lawns and pepper and eucalyptus trees and a small zoo with llamas, owls, and two grungy lions in a cage painted lavender.
At the end of their previous seven-day workweek, about two dozen men of the A shift attended a postwork party at the home of Víctor Segovia, a hard-drinking jumbo operator with a musical bent. A large pot was filled with beef, chicken, pork, and fish, and the host cooked up the stew known locally as
cocimiento
, a dish that itself is a kind of celebration of abundance. A few days later, Víctor’s cousin Darío Segovia was planning a big birthday celebration for his baby girl on August 5, when word came that he would be needed for an overtime shift that same day (a day he was scheduled to be off). The money for this single day of work (90,000 Chilean pesos, or about $180) was too good to pass up, and he told the mother of his daughter, his companion, Jessica Chilla, that they would have to postpone the birthday party. Out of spite, Jessica refused to talk to him or to make him dinner the night before he went to work.
In the predawn hours before the shift begins, the couple have made up. At about 6:30 a.m. Darío kisses Jessica, walks down the steps that lead from his second-story living room to his front door, then stops and walks back up to wrap his arms around the woman he loves. He embraces Jessica for several seconds, a moment of gentleness and need from a brawny, callused forty-eight-year-old man. Holding her might just be his way of saying sorry, but it’s also a break in their domestic routine, and it leaves Jessica anxious after Darío walks out the door.
Luis Urzúa leaves from a middle-class neighborhood in Copiapó. He’s the supervisor of the A shift, and other men in his position are known to drive in their own vehicles to the mine, but Urzúa rides in with his underlings. He gets on the bus not far from another Copiapó bus stop, where he met his wife, Carmen Berríos, more than twenty-five years earlier. Urzúa is from a mining family and began working underground as a teenager, but when he met Carmen he had a prized surface job and would eventually earn a technical degree as a topographer. Carmen is a smart woman with a romantic bent, who writes poetry when the mood strikes her, and over the years she’s made the hardworking Luis Urzúa her project: Among other things, she tries to get him to speak more clearly, because he often mumbles with the diction of an impoverished miner. When he finishes work at 8:00 p.m., she’ll have dinner ready for him, and they’ll sit alongside their two grown children, both of whom are in college.
Outside, a thick morning fog has descended over the darkened city. In a place where it almost never rains, water hovers in the air and floats underneath streetlamps, and climbs up the ravines that cut through the city. The fog is an almost daily occurrence in this part of Chile and thus has a name—
la camanchaca
. Sometimes the fog is so thick vehicles can’t safely drive the highways that lead to the mine, and the start of work is delayed until it lifts, though today will not be one of those days. On street corners across Copiapó, men wait for the sound of the “hare” buses to emerge from the fog.
Each member of the A shift is, in one way or another, going to the San José this morning for the woman or women in his life: a wife, a girlfriend, a mother, a daughter. Jimmy Sánchez, who is eighteen and thus not legally allowed to work in the mine (you have to be twenty-one) has a girlfriend who is pregnant, a complication that led his relatives to beg the mine managers to give him a job. In the neighborhood named for Arturo Prat, a hero of the War of the Pacific, the smallish and handsome Alex Vega has just said goodbye to his wife, whose name is also Jessica. She’s refused to give him his usual workday kiss goodbye because she’s angry with him, though she will soon forget the reason. Half a mile away, in a neighborhood named for Pope John Paul II, a member of one of the crews that fortifies the mine’s inner passageways leaves the home of his girlfriend. Yonni Barrios is a paunchy, soft-spoken Romeo with scarred cheeks who lives with his latest girlfriend, unless he’s fighting with her, in which case he lives with his wife. Conveniently, the two women live less than a block apart, and as he walks to catch the bus he can see the door of his wife’s home. He took out a loan to pay for the small neighborhood store she runs from her front door, and repaying that loan (along with helping out his girlfriend with her home) is one of the reasons he is up early today, listening for the sound of the coming bus that will take him to work.
There are many superstitions about women and mines that are expressions of the male-dominated culture’s ambivalence about both women and underground labor. One legend has it that the mountain itself is a woman, and in a sense “you’re violating her every time you step inside her,” which explains why the mountain often tries to kill the men who’ve carved passageways from her stone body. Another has it that a woman working belowground is bad luck (although at least one miner has a sister who’s worked for decades in her own small mine), and women are almost never seen inside the caverns of the San José. The separation of the female-centered domestic world of the home and the city from the male-centered mine in the desert is so great, most of the wives and girlfriends of the A shift workers have never been to the San José and are unaware of its exact location.