SPEAKING FROM a hospital bed at the San Jose mine, shift foreman Luis Urzua – the man who kept the Chilean miners alive for two months – said his secret for keeping the men bonded and focused on survival was majority decision-making.
“You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy,” said Urzua, his eyes hidden behind black glasses.
As nurses, doctors and psychologists rushed around him in a chaotic scene, the world’s most famous foreman sat in bed, his arms folded across a thick chest, and spoke about making tough decisions 700 metres below ground when all hope seemed lost.
“Everything was voted on . . . We were 33 men, so 16 plus one was a majority.”
However, as the first accounts of life for the trapped miners emerge, a complicated picture of squabbles, disagreements and even physical confrontations suggests that the official version may be rather sanitised.
The government has hailed the men as models of solidarity, but in a separate interview, Richard Villaroel, another member of “los 33”, said the truth was not so simple. There was the waiting for death, the hopelessness, the petty squabbles and the nagging, unspoken fear of cannibalism.
Speaking as the men were whisked to a hospital in the nearby town of Copiapo, the 23-year-old mechanic said the mood inside the collapsed mine had swung wildly from despair and division to euphoria and unity.
The first 17 days were the worst – before a probe from the surface punched through to their cavern, as the miners prepared for a lonely, drawn-out death by starvation. Villaroel thought he would never see his unborn child. “I was afraid of not meeting my baby, who is on the way.” Some men were so despairing that they climbed into bed and would not get out.
Villaroel himself lost 12kg. “We were getting eaten up, as we were working. We were moving, but not eating well. We started to eat ourselves up and get skinnier and skinnier. That is called cannibalism, a sailor down there said. My body was eating itself up.”
Did the men fear cannibalism of the other type? Villaroel paused. “At that moment no one talked about it. But once [help came] it became a topic of joking, but only once it was over, once they found us. But at the time there was no talk of cannibalism.”
Urzua had tried to instil a philosophical acceptance of fate. “Every day [the foreman] told us to have strength. If they find us they find us, if not, that’s that. Because the probes [drilling towards the men] were so far away so we had no hope. Strength came by itself. I had never prayed before, but I learned to pray, to get close to God.”
When the probe finally reached the men, euphoria swept them. “It was huge happiness for us all. We sang the national anthem as soon as the tube arrived. We painted it. With so much adrenaline in that moment we could not think.” Once the miners realised they would be saved they signed a “blood pact” to not reveal all that happened beneath the Atacama desert, he said.
In a video-conference with relatives last week, Dario Segovia, a 48-year-old drill operator, made a not-so-cryptic allusion to troubles: “What happens in the mine stays in the mine.”
One secret, it seems, is the division that plagued the group for a time. Despite the pact, there are several cracks in the official version of steadfast unity and solidarity between “los 33”.
One of the miners, Osman Araya, told his brother Rodrigo that three groups had formed, and there were squabbles over space and work practices. Daniel Sanderson, a miner on the surface, said he received a letter from one of the trapped men describing disagreements which escalated into physical confrontations. “They broke into three groups because they were fighting. There were fist fights,” said Sanderson, who ended his night shift and left the mine hours before the collapse.
Asked to describe the nature of the conflicts, Sanderson replied: “That’s part of the pact.” – (Guardian service)