COPIAPO, Chile – Jose Ojeda can barely sleep without the comfort of a miner nearby to confide in when dreams shake him awake. Omar Reygadas, a great-grandfather more used to comforting than being comforted, cries easily. And Edison Pena, the miner who kept himself grounded by running kilometres underground most days, was hospitalized recently for emotional distress.
In October, viewers around the globe watched, captivated, as one by one the 33 miners trapped in the San Jose Mine near here were pulled from nearly .80 kilometres beneath the Atacama Desert. While the world has begun to move on, the men left behind are just starting to grapple with the enormousness of what happened to them.
They have, so far, remained mostly true to each other and the promises they made to speak only on their own terms.
Some details of the men’s ordeal have slowly slipped out, as many news organizations vied for their attention – flashing money or all-expense-paid trips to other countries to sit for interviews.
In interviews recently with The New York Times, four miners who agreed to speak without pay offered a view into the intense emotional struggles they faced underground, and now above.
Reygadas, 56 – the 17th miner to be rescued and one of the oldest to have been trapped – spoke the longest, for more than two hours.
He said he entered his first mine at 7, with his father, who was a miner.
He does not scare easily; he survived two previous collapses at the San Jose Mine and narrowly escaped a third that killed another miner. But in the first days after the latest cave-in in August, he said, he cried, rolling over on his damp cardboard bed to face the wall so no one could see.
“I’m not embarrassed to say I cried, but I cried from helplessness,” he said. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared too, but I knew how to keep it inside to avoid sparking fear in others.”
Reygadas said he was loading his truck just before going to lunch on August 5 when he felt what seemed like an explosion. The pressure from falling rock “almost blew out” his ears, he said. The next sound he heard was miners shouting. Another miner, Yonny Barrios, 50, said “his ears felt like they were being sucked from one side to the other.”
The men began to search for their friends. It would take eight hours before they knew no one had died.
But whatever relief they felt was short-lived. Within hours, the men were faced with a fateful choice. There was a way out, through a ventilation shaft. But after discovering that the ladder there was too short, they knew all they could do was wait.
Two days later, a boulder rolled into the shaft, sealing it for good.
This is where the narrative goes silent. Like the three other miners interviewed – and those who have spoken to other media – Ojeda, a 24-year-veteran of the mines, refuses to go into great detail over what happened in the next two weeks, as men wilted in the heat and shrank, their tiny rations of tuna and crackers too meagre to do much more than keep them alive.
The story picks up again on Day 17, when the rescuers’ drill bit pierced the roof of their refuge, starting the clock for their eventual freeing.
After that, the men say, there were many more light moments, despite the uncertainties of an unprecedented rescue plan. One day Mario Sepulveda, one of the group’s most extroverted figures, donned a makeshift blond wig and impersonated the millionaire philanthropist Leonardo Farkas offering to give the miners jobs, Reygadas said. (Farkas, in reality, gave each of the miners about $10,000.)
It was hot, about 30 degrees Celsius, and humid. The men tore the seats from their trucks for makeshift mattresses, but there were not enough to go around and some nights, Reygadas said, they simply had to sleep, shirtless in the heat, atop the rocks.
Some of the men focused on those waiting for them above. “Inside my heart, I thought of my family,” said Carlos Mamani, 24, of Bolivia, the lone immigrant in the group. “I talked to God.”
Psychologists treating the men through telephone and video links from the surface were worried enough about them that they began filtering virtually everything family members sent down a relief shaft. Cheery letters were all right; notes about troubles at home were not.
One thing the men were ready for: the lust for their story. They learned that lesson firsthand, from a group of Uruguayans who had survived a 1972 aeroplane accident in the Andes, depicted in the 1993 movie “Alive.” The group paid the miners a visit and chatted with them via the modified telephone, Reygadas said. He said they counselled the miners to “not give away too much,” as they felt they had.
Since the rescue, some men have been drinking heavily, according to Iturra and some of the miners. And several have shown signs of emotional distress.
At a dinner in their honour recently, Pena, the runner, broke down when addressing reporters. Sepulveda grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and neck and whispered something in his ear, but Pena refused to leave the stage. “Thank you for believing we were alive,” Pena said slowly, his voice cracking. “Thank you for believing we were alive.”
He was hospitalized the next day. (He has since been released.)
Iturra, the psychologist, placed part of the blame on the array of post-rescue options Pena was offered, including an invitation to run a marathon in New York City.
“These things demand a lot of strength, and this is generating a lot of anguish,” Iturra told a local radio station.
Pena may have had another fear as well – that when the men’s moment was over, they would find themselves forgotten and without work. He said as much, one day while surrounded by reporters.
“After all these interviews are over you can ask us what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re going to be selling candy in the plaza.”
Related Videos
