Authors: Héctor Tobar
* * *
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 and asking, “Can we talk?”
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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.”
A few days later, Ariel Ticona finds himself in a Madrid studio with his wife and new daughter, Esperanza, answering questions from a talk-show host for a Spanish television show. We have a gift for you, the host says, and on cue a young woman in a form-hugging dress emerges from offstage, pushing a brand-new stroller. Ariel’s next stop in Spain is the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, that temple of world sport that the Real Madrid soccer team calls home. Along with three other miners, Ariel gets a VIP tour that includes a walk on the field itself—with a television camera in tow. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve begun to experience,” Ariel says as he stares up at eighty-five thousand empty seats through his Oakley sunglasses. There’s something magically innocent about the way Ariel smiles and his face widens as he turns to take it all in.
In the first weeks after emerging from the dark corridors of the San José Mine, the thirty-three survivors are standing in an arena of public adulation, while also living with the private memory of their humble backgrounds and the ten weeks they spent at the mountain’s mercy. Edison Peña is soaking up as much media attention and praise as anyone—a man who jogged and sang “Heartbreak Hotel” underground, after all, seems to represent the epitome of the strength and joyfulness of the human spirit. But after surviving inside a thundering mine, Edison can see there is something cruel about being on the surface, watching people go about their “normal” lives. Edison’s mind has lagged behind his body: It’s still in that mountain that’s falling on top of him over and over again; it’s still trapped behind the stone guillotine. The mountain stays with him as he travels the world as an ambassador of Chile, and of mining and jogging culture, visiting Tokyo and Tupelo, Mississippi, and many other places in between. It especially haunts him back home in Santiago. “All the evenness of life, the ‘light’ part of it, really stunned me,” Edison says. “It shocked me to see people walking around, living normally. It shocked me because I would say ‘Hey, where I come from isn’t like that. I come from a place where we were fighting desperately to live.’ I came out to life and I found this shit called peace. It threw me off. It threw a lot of us off.” In the mine Edison ran to forget where he was, and now on the surface he runs to forget where he is. On October 24, eleven days after the rescue, Edison Peña participates in one leg of a triathlon in Santiago, running 10.5 kilometers. “The doctors, the psychologists, they have me on a strict regimen I have to follow,” he tells a television reporter at the race. “I feel sort of abnormal.” Edison confesses to other people, privately and publicly, to feeling unstable, but that doesn’t stop him from accepting an invitation to watch the New York City Marathon. In New York, he sings an Elvis tune on the David Letterman show, and answers questions at a press conference before the race. Why did he run in the mine, someone asks. “I was saying to the mine, ‘I can outrun you, I am going to beat back destiny,’” Edison answers. Edison was more of a cyclist before the accident than a jogger, but he decides he’ll not just be a spectator at the New York City Marathon, he’ll run it, too, and try to finish. A doctor and members of the local running club that invited him tell him that entering a marathon without having trained for it is a foolhardy thing to do, but Edison is determined. Sure enough, his knees start to give out after an hour or so, and he ends up walking about ten miles of the race, but he finishes (with a time of 5 hours, 40 minutes, and 51 seconds), thanks in part to two Mexican immigrant restaurant workers and running-club members who escort him along the entire route. “In this marathon I struggled,” Edison tells the press afterward. “I struggled with myself. And I struggled with my pain.” Several of his colleagues in the mine will say afterward that New York was bad for Edison Peña: It was there he started to fall deeper into alcohol addiction. “If we had really been united, as thirty-three men, we would have looked after Edison and he wouldn’t have had the collapse that he did,” says the young miner Pedro Cortez. In New York, Edison starts to get in arguments with his girlfriend over whether he should be traveling, but he can’t say no when he’s offered another trip. “You start to become a puppet. We became puppets. We’re going here, we’re going there. ‘Stand like this. Over here, over there, under the lights.’ We wanted to go out and bite the world. We had been born again and aaahhh … That first year … I wouldn’t know how to explain it, but it was rough. Pack your luggage, stand in line. Do this, do that. Do! I think, looking at it honestly—it’s like we lost our lives.” Edison is falling deeper into the spiral when he reaches Memphis and Graceland in January, just in time for Elvis’s birthday. At another press conference, Edison sings a few lines from “The Wonder of You,” in an accented but swooning baritone. “When everything I do is wrong / You give me hope and consolation.” He gives his Graceland audience the heartfelt rendition of a man who’s living inside the bluesy world of the song, and several of his listeners, who have no way of knowing what’s tormenting Edison, scream with approval even before he finishes.
* * *
For the first few weeks, the miners talk to psychologists and therapists. “My girlfriend says I wake up yelling in the middle of the night,” Carlos Bugueño tells a psychologist, and he later gets pills that help him sleep. “At night, all the memories come back,” Pedro Cortez says. During the day, long silences are haunting, and so are loud, cracking noises. Pedro gets into a van with a group of five mine survivors, and he and the others all fall to the floor at the sound of a motorcycle’s backfire. Bugueño and Cortez join a large number of the survivors at a clinic of the Chilean social security administration in Copiapó for a group therapy session. When the therapist closes the door, for privacy, several of the men stand up to leave. “You have us locked in here,” one says. “Don’t shut us in!” The sight of the closed door, combined with the familiar faces of the men with whom they were trapped, sends several of the men back to their underground emotional state. “We went to the windows and opened all of them,” Cortez says. “They couldn’t have a meeting with all of us together, because the stress was just too much.” They will continue with individual visits to therapists, but most will last only a few weeks.