On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour shift. They came out again 69 days later, to be greeted by the country’s president in front of a worldwide TV audience of around 1.2 billion. A group of workers who, in many cases, had never left the local area in their lives were now global heroes.
At the time, it was embarrassingly easy to see their rescue as simply the sort of good news that makes us all aware of our shared humanity. Héctor Tobar’s book, though, is a sharp reminder that the truth was a lot more complicated — and sombre — than that.
As their shift started, many of the men were already worried by the rumbling sounds coming from the mine, but were ordered to carry on anyway. Then, at around 2 p.m., the rumblings became a series of full-scale explosions that blocked their way out with a piece of rock twice as heavy as the Empire State Building. Despite the owners’ promises to the authorities, the chimneys that should have provided emergency exits were still missing their ladders. When the 33 gathered in the ‘Refuge’, a kind of staff room 2,000 feet below ground, they discovered food rations for two days. ‘Estamos cagados,’ said one man — which Tobar loosely translates as ‘We’re fucked.’
For the next 78 hours, they had no idea if anybody would even imagine they might be alive: the pessimists remembered a similar accident in Mexico, where the authorities snapped into action by placing a large stone in the mine’s entrance and making the whole thing a tomb. But then the sound of drilling reassured them that help was on the way — or at least it did at first.
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