33 Men (2 page)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 7 AM

The fifty-minute commute to the San José mine was more beautiful than ever. Fields of tiny purple flowers painted the hills in sensual curves, bringing thousands of tourists flocking to view the “flowering desert.” Few of the workers aboard the bus noticed; many were asleep as the bus careened around the curves up to the San José mine—a nondescript hill so packed with gold and copper that for more than a century, miners had burrowed like badgers, leaving zigzag tunnels that chased the valuable veins of minerals that laced the mountain innards like blood vessels through a body.

Inside the bus, Mario Gómez could not sleep. The cell phone alarm that had awakened him at 6
am
had been so early and annoying he had asked his wife, “Should I go?” “Skip work,” his wife, Lillian, urged. She had long been encouraging her sixty-three-year-old husband to file his retirement papers. Gómez did not need much convincing. He had begun life in the mines when he was twelve years old, a Dickens-like experience, and over the next fifty-one years he had learned every possible permutation of how to die underground. His left hand was a reminder of one way: a dynamite charge had exploded too close and ripped two of his fingers clean off. His thumb was torn away above the knuckle.

From the window of the bus, Gómez watched a desert that offered not a shrub or a tree yet felt full of life compared with the underground world the drowsy men were about to enter. The San José mine was the most dangerous mine in the region and one that not coincidentally paid abnormally high wages. Where else could a
cargador de tiro—
who spent the day cramming sticks of dynamite into recently drilled holes—earn such a succulent salary? The paycheck explained why the men (who called themselves “The Kamikazes”) maintained loyalty to their job despite the mine's fearsome reputation. Every worker had come to the same conclusion after completing the cold calculation of danger vs. cash. The cash always won.

As the bus sped along the serpentine road, it passed a row of small altars (
animitas
), each a shrine to a tragic, violent and sudden death. In local lore, an accidental death leaves the dead person's soul in limbo between heaven and earth. By building these shrines, family and friends sought to expedite their loved one's journey skyward, which explains why the lonely temples had lit candles, fresh flowers and crisp photos of the victim. Days later, this same route would have dozens more.

Many of the men carried a hearty lunch. While the mine owners calculated that two sandwiches and a carton of milk were sufficient energy for the twelve-hour shift, the men often brought reinforcements—a bar of chocolate, a Thermos of soup, a neatly wrapped steak and tomato sandwich. And water. Bottles, canteens, even 500cc (2 cups) in plastic bags sold at the Unimarc supermarket. Inside the mine, the temperature rarely dipped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the men guzzled three liters (about 3 quarts) of fresh water a day, yet still lived on the fragile border of dehydration. Humidity was so thick that their cigarettes would routinely droop in submission to the elements.

At the entrance to the mine, the men changed into their work clothes: work pants, T-shirt, helmet and head lamp. A simple metal card holder marked their presence—and often their absence. With seven days of work, then seven days of rest, the men were living the ultimate boom and bust cycle—sweating like animals for a week then whirling in the pleasures of instant excess during the “down week.” When the men missed work on Monday they would jokingly say they were paying homage to the god of hangovers, locally known as “Saint Monday.”

Company BBQs were frequent, and the owners were known to look the other way when workers showed up hours late. Working on a barren hill, the estimated 250 workers of San Esteban Primera (the holding company for several mines in the region, including San José) had no cell phone coverage, few safety features, frequent accidents, and a near total absence of women. Though it was 2010, in many ways the men lived a frontier existence. The countryside is pockmarked with signs that this is mining country—ranging from the all-night brothels ($40 a shag), to the rows of rugged pickups at Antay, a recently inaugurated casino helping the miners indulge what appeared to be a genetic predisposition to squander a month's salary in a single binge.

The northern deserts of Chile are the world's largest producer of copper, and most Chilean miners work in modern copper mines under the supervision of highly professional multinational companies including Anglo American and BHP Billiton.

With more than 50 percent of the nation's export earnings coming from mining, Chile has long been a world leader in both mining technology and mining operations. Chuquicamata, the world's largest open-pit mine, is run by the Chilean government copper company known as Codelco.

Mining jobs are highly coveted as both lucrative and safe—considering that “safety” in the world of mining is relative. Combine the risks of young men driving truckloads of ammonium nitrate explosives, hundreds of miners setting dynamite charges inside caves every day, and all of this taking place in Chile, a nation known to have the world's biggest earthquakes, and accidents are almost a certainty. Factor in a Chilean party culture fueled by massive quantities of cheap yet head-poundingly strong grape brandy known as
pisco
, and the equation was known to every emergency room nurse in the region: dead miners.

The men entering the San José mine worked not at the safe modern mines but instead belonged to the most risky subculture of this entire industry—low-tech, rustic miners known locally as “Los Pirquineros.” While the classic Chilean
pirquinero
had equipment no more sophisticated than a donkey and a pickax, the men at the San José mine called themselves “mechanized
pirquineros
,” meaning they operated modern machinery inside the rickety infrastructure of a classically dangerous operation. Unlike other mines that had rats and insects, the San José mine was sterile—except for the occasional scorpion. Inside the mine, the daily routine was akin to the lifestyle of a California forty-niner searching for gold in the days of Abraham Lincoln. These miners were regularly crushed—“ironed flat” in local lingo—by thousand-pound blocks of rock that unlatched from the roof with terrifying regularity. The rocks inside the San José mine were so sharp that the miners knew that even brushing up against the wall was like scraping a razor across their skin.

A stark reminder of the potential risks came on July 5, 2010. The miners of San José had watched first the rescue operation, then the disappearing pickup that hauled away what was left of Gino Cortés. A block of rock that weighed the equivalent of twenty refrigerators let loose as Gino passed underneath. His leg had been severed clean off. For a moment he looked at his amputated leg in wonder. The cut was so swift he initially felt no pain. A coworker had gingerly brought the leg, wrapped in a shirt, along with Cortés to the emergency room. As he reflected on the accident from his hospital bed in Santiago, Cortés repeated, “I am lucky,” as he thanked God for having intact both his right leg and his life. Yet there is no mistaking the crude violence—his now mutilated left leg is sewn neatly into a sausage-like knot below the knee.

If they are not ironed flat,
pirquineros
slowly die from lung problems. Just two months before, miner Alex Vega had been walking in the mine when his legs gave way and he collapsed. Toxic gases from the exhaust of the machinery had stripped his body of oxygen. An ambulance rushed Vega to the local Copiapó hospital, where he was kept for the better part of a week.

Long-term exposure to the gases and grit led to silicosis—caused by breathing toxic silica particles, which clog the lungs. Year after year, these miners inhale clouds of tiny rock fragments, making the lungs ever less efficient. In advanced cases, known as Potter's Rot (in reference to the use of silica in pottery making), the victim lacks oxygen and his skin takes on a blue tint. Mario Gómez, the oldest man on the shift, had collected so much dust and debris in his lungs that after fifty-one years as a miner, he was often short of breath and used a bronchial dilator to maximize the portions of his lungs that still functioned. With silicosis, miners like Gómez are slowly starved of oxygen—essentially the same process that would happen to a pickup truck if it were driven through this desert for twenty years with never a change of air filter.

A
pirquinero
devotes his life to mining for a week, sometimes a solid month, as he breaks his back in solitary battle with the mountain and, for some, then soothes his loneliness with impromptu sexual escapes that a local doctor described as a “
Brokeback Mountain
situation.” A Chilean psychiatrist working with these miners described the phenomenon as “transitory homosexuality,” which, he noted, is a centuries-old practice among sailors, what he called “a practical solution to the ever more desperate lack of female companionship.” When the miners returned to town, they indulged heavily in alcohol, women and a blast of instant pleasures that guaranteed they would soon need another paycheck. Local cocaine—at $15 a gram—was also for many on the list of temptations.

Samuel Ávalos had spent the past twenty-four hours scrambling to earn 16,000 Chilean pesos ($32) to take the bus to Copiapó. Ávalos, a round-faced, hardened man, lived in Rancagua, a mining town just south of Santiago, home to “El Teniente,” the world's largest underground mine. Despite the plethora of mining jobs in the area, Ávalos had little experience underground. His job was as a street vendor—his specialty, pirated music CDs. The police harassed him often, sometimes confiscating his stash. But the last day had been lucky—he'd made just enough money to board the last bus with an empty seat to Copiapó. Only later would he realize that José Henríquez, a fellow miner, was on the same bus.

During the bus ride, Ávalos drank. He transferred to the shuttle bus to the mine still in a daze. “The drinks had their effect. Getting down, stepping off the bus, I practically fell,” said Ávalos. “Then it was very strange. I don't know what you would call it, but a spirit passed by. My mother. She's deceased. I asked her, ‘Mom, what are you saying? What do you want?' I didn't figure it out. Later I had lots of time to think about that last warning.”

Ávalos typically stuffed his jacket with chocolates, cakes, cookies, milk, and juice. With his jacket bulging, he constantly battled to hide the contraband from Luis Urzúa, the foreman who was never happy to see his workers with food. He considered it a distraction.

“That day I left my food above. I didn't bring even a single chocolate,” said Ávalos. It was another moment he would relive again and again in the coming weeks.

As the incoming shift changed clothes and prepared for work, forty-two-year-old paramedic Hugo Araya exited the mine, his shift complete. Even after six years in San José, Araya never felt comfortable inside the mine. The sagging entrance with that rusted sign about safety always seemed a bit of a joke, considering the constant flow of accidents, cave-ins and fainting miners. But then Araya, who worked as lead emergency medical technician in the mine, was the kind of guy you called in when problems arose. Most of all, he hated the mine's smell. “Like something decomposing. Like rotten meat,” he'd say.

With carbon monoxide from the vehicles, gases emanating from the dynamite charges and the men smoking cigarettes nonstop, Araya received the emergency call so often it rarely felt like an emergency anymore. He would then drive the twenty-five-minute, four-mile journey down switchbacks and tunnels, deep to the bottom of the cavern where he'd find a pair of miners sucking on oxygen masks, ready for evacuation. Usually the men could go home that night. At worst, after a day or two in the local clinic they'd be back at the job, hacking, dynamiting, sucking up dust and rarely complaining.

After his full night's shift, Araya was coated with a fine layer of coffee-gray dust, an oily mixture that did not easily wash away. That morning as he showered and scrubbed at his home an hour away in Copiapó, Araya felt a deep unease. The mountain had “cried” all night. Eerie creaking groans and sharp reports had left all the men on edge. When a mine like San José cries, the tears tend to be the size of boulders.

More than a century of picks, dynamite and drills had riddled the mountain with so many holes and tunnels that new workers would wonder aloud how the roof did not fall down on the many passageways. Araya had no way of recognizing that after 111 years of operation, after millions in gold and copper ore had been wrenched from every corner of the now labyrinthine tunnels, the mine had also been stripped of its support structure. Like a house of cards, the mine was now delicately balanced.

Deep inside the San José mine, the miners stripped to the basic necessities—helmet with lamp, water bottle, shorts and MP3 player with a customized dose of Mexican
rancheras,
emotional ballads that chronicle the loves, sacrifice and nobility of the working class. “A lot of times you would see the men working in their boots and their underwear,” said Luis Rojas, who worked in the San José mine. “It was just too hot to wear many clothes.”

Darío Segovia spent the morning of August 5 attaching metal nets to the roof of the mine—a rustic system to catch falling rocks and prevent men and machines from being crushed. Known as “fortification,” Segovia
'
s job was extremely dangerous. He was like a firefighter inside an inferno, attacking small blazes while he was aware the battle was lost. “Before eleven
am
, I knew the mine would fall, but they sent us to place the reinforcement nets. We knew the roof was all bad and it would fall. To pass the time we drove the pickup to gather some water at the tanks. It was dangerous; the roof was so fragile.”