David Huerta hits the stone once, then again, again and again: wild, mechanical, defeated. As if he wasn’t holding an empty water bottle but a pickaxe and just found a cap. Maybe it’s an old habit, an involuntary reflex, the only way to relieve tension known to someone who’s spent 15 years scraping coal from the bowels of the earth. Or maybe it’s just his way of dealing with the nervousness, knowing that his brother-in-law, Sergio Cruz, was still in there, at the epicenter of the collapse: buried in shaft three, as of 12:30 Wednesday afternoon. Along with him, nine other companions who collapsed the tunnel at the Las Conchas mine in the town of Sabinas, Coahuila state: in the mining area.
“Here is a negligence of the boss,” he denies this Friday, sitting in the shade of a tree in the vicinity of the mine, which is now a makeshift camp with tents, machines, soldiers and rescue teams working against the current, to save lives The 10 workers trapped for three days. And it is repeated that there is no right that they should take part in the rescue work: the miners of the community, who know better than anyone the subsoil of this dry, poor, dusty land, punished by the ever-present desert sun, where nothing grows, where the only possible occupation is in the depths of the wells or in the misery of the maquilas.
— You only get moral support, what can you do? You get desperate, their hands are tied. I want to go in to help and they won’t let me. Perhaps the specialists know a lot, but they don’t know the terrain. They brought a gang from Torreón. How long does it take? It’s a waste of time, here’s a minute of pure gold.
David Huerta is awaiting information about his brother-in-law Sergio Cruz, one of the captured miners EMILIO ESPEJEL
The proximity of the Sabinas River was a time bomb about to explode. The mine’s main estuary was closed years ago because it was flooded. But just a few meters away, three new entrances were dug and earlier in the year work resumed under the control of Minera Río Sabinas SA de CV, which was sold to Compañía Minera El Pinabete in November 2012. As workers dug in search of coal this Wednesday, they hit water again, which, under the pent-up time pressure, brought everything down. Those in the two furthest tunnels were able to save themselves. Five were hospitalized, two of whom have already been discharged. The 10 who were in well three, which was closest to the abandoned exploit, didn’t have time to flee. “You know it’s thundering and forget it, the water is waiting for a hole to come out and it comes out”.
Cruz (41 years old), Huerta’s brother-in-law, has only been working at Shaft Three for four months but has been mining for a lifetime. He had had other accidents before. A loose rock cut off a piece of his ear a long time ago. But nothing equaled this collapse. Adding to the uncertainty is the desperation of feeling betrayed by the authorities. Huerta protests because they haven’t heard from their relatives for hours: “They don’t tell us anything, they’re just lies. If things go well, they go out and show their faces themselves. They have all day not to go out, it gives them a bad feeling.”
Huerta left the mine eight years ago, “Thank God,” he admits. Now he works on the manufacture of wagons. “It’s not the first accident I’ve seen, my relatives have left, recently a stone fell on a cousin that destroyed everything inside,” he says. He looks down with tired eyes, his face partially covered by a cap that helps him hide his emotions. He has hardly slept since Wednesday. His sister Marta María called him crying to tell him about the tragedy. Since then a nap, a ride home for a shower, but above all waiting for hours in the mine for news that hasn’t arrived. “There’s a possibility of finding them alive, there are cases of miners who stay trapped for eight or nine days and come out again, but they’re very rare,” he says resignedly.
“Is a job in the mine worth the risk?”
– It is very difficult. Nobody here graduated from high school. Necessity makes you. There are no good jobs, only pure maquiladora, but there is a crisis and well paid in the wells, 3,000 or 4,000 pesos a week (about 150, 200 dollars). You go in at seven in the morning and you’re home by one. So we take the risk.
Sergio Martinez receives his wife’s blessing while rescuing his brother trapped underground. EMILIO ESPEJEL
The ground around the mine is blackened with charcoal as evidence of the crime. Heaps of black mineral stones rest everywhere between the iron castles that mark the location of the three wells. The noise of the industrial machines digging up the earth and sucking out the water from within overwhelms everything: 18 specialized pumps that have traveled from all over the country. Before the rescue workers can drive into the tunnel, they have to pump out all the water. On Thursday, the liquid was still more than 30 meters high. Since then, the numbers have been dancing: no one knows exactly how much it has dropped or how long they have to wait.
Inside the mine, authorities only allow one family member for each trapped miner. The rest, like Huerta, wander around the security perimeter guarded by the army. They flee from the suffocating sun in white tents, stare wordlessly at the ground and silently chew on their powerlessness. Some relatives were allowed to volunteer to help with the rescue and work alongside the soldiers, with no safety precautions other than a helmet and safety vest.
The collapse was a tragedy foretold. Or rather repeated. The region produces 99% of the coal purchased by Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), one of the pillars of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s electrical reform. Around 3,000 families in the region depend directly on the mineral’s exploitation, and another 11,000 on indirect jobs. And miner deaths come cheap in an area that only makes headlines when a shaft collapses, only to be forgotten shortly afterwards. Seven workers died in June last year. In 2006, a gas explosion in Pasta de Conchos killed 65 workers in what was to date the largest mining tragedy in Mexican history. The families of the victims complain that they have not yet received justice.
A view of shaft three where the rescue operation for 10 trapped miners takes place. Emilio Espejel
Sergio Martínez (36 years old) has his brother Jorge Luis (36 years old) in the well, who had been working for four months in another well of the same exploitation and only a week ago moved into the collapse shaft in exchange for the promise of a higher one salary. His wife and two minor children are waiting for him outside. Martínez was outside of Sabinas when the collapse happened, but he left everything and came running. He’s been working as much as he can since Thursday morning at eight without sleeping or going home. “How are we going to rest? I want my brother back no matter what. We feel sad, nostalgic, helpless. There’s talk of hoping they might be lying in a bubble, hurt, beaten, but alive,” he says, covered in dust, with his helmet and flashlight in hand. He hugs his wife and goes back to work.
When he leaves, workers from the Sabinas town hall erect a wooden fence and cover it with a tarpaulin so that it cannot be seen what is happening in the mine. “Imagine, desperation and fear, that they don’t tell us anything and now tuck us in here,” says Beatriz Amaya, who watches over the absence of her nephew Hugo Tijerina Amaya in another tent. Hugo’s brother Raimundo is one of the miners who managed to escape. Water entered his lungs and he was hospitalized. He’s already been fired, “but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” says Amaya.
The breeze blows at six o’clock in the evening, kicking up dust that dances around groups of desperate relatives; by the community’s neighbors who come to bring water and food; of the soldiers trying to keep them away from the mine; the rescuers who, drenched in sweat, continue their work without stopping for a moment. The third night that 10 miners will spend under the collapse of shaft three is approaching on the horizon.
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