DAY 41: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15
With hot food, clean clothes, cots that raised them off the floor and a miniature projector that brought them TV and movies, the men migrated from the harsh edges of physical survival to a more nebulous state—the monotony of waiting with no clear end point. A pipe with fresh water delivered 106 quarts of fresh water a day. Four thousand cubic feet of cooled, fresh air were pumped down to the men each hour, but the temperature inside the mine did not budge, stuck at a sweltering 90 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.
Twenty days after the arrival of food, the men had a new problem: “We had no garbage before that—quite the contrary, we were looking for garbage,” said Samuel Ávalos. Men filled barrels with rubbish, then used heavy machinery to dump the refuse at the lowest levels of the mine. The lack of proper bathroom facilities was also becoming more and more of a problem. A slight breeze from below began to fill their living quarters with the smell of stale urine. It became so unbearable that the men began to urinate in the empty plastic water bottles, screw the top back on, and then deposit the now refilled containers in the garbage barrel. The air improved dramatically.
While rescue engineers and psychologists worked overtime to keep the men occupied with tasks, the miners nonetheless began to slack off. Chores went unattended. Discipline was slipping away.
“What really screwed us up was the TV. When the TV arrived, it ruined the communications; it was a big problem,” said Sepúlveda. “Some of the guys would just stare at it; they were hypnotized and watched it all day.”
The miners began watching the nightly news and were starting to discover the global impact of their drama. Sepúlveda’s wildly heralded narration of the first video had won him millions of fans above ground, but deep in the mine this adulation ignited a simmering brew of jealousy. In order to escape the pressure, Sepúlveda began to disappear from the main living quarters. For hours he would wander the tunnels, stopping to pray.
“When we lost control or humility, I would go alone into the dark,” he said. “I would find my own spot. You have no idea what it is like to be alone in there. I felt at peace.”
Fights and arguments erupted from the constant battle over which channel to watch. Urzúa called up and complained that the TV was “destroying the organization” and asked for the broadcasts to be limited to news, some soccer and the occasional movie.
Many of the rituals the men had developed during the grueling first seventeen days were now fraying. With food and comforts arriving daily from above ground, the bonds of solidarity that had kept the men alive in the direst moments began to break. “During the different shifts, the men would go around and check on those who were asleep. They would put their hand on the chest of every sleeping man to make sure he was breathing. Because of carbon monoxide in the mine, they wanted to make sure he was alive,” said Pedro Gallo, the phone technician, who spoke with the men by telephone daily. “These were known as the ‘Guardian Angels.’ . . . They were vigilant in protecting the men who were asleep, but when the TV began, they stopped doing the rounds. . . . They preferred to watch television.”
Regular mail now reached the miners. Each man waited hopefully for a paloma delivery with his name on it and a letter inside. But it soon became clear that not all letters were being delivered in a timely manner. “There was no way to have a conversation; the answers were always four or five letters behind,” said the miner Claudio Yañez.
Family members began to wonder about the fate of letters that rescue officials described as “lost.” “Some of the letters were simply crumpled up and thrown out,” said Dr. Romagnoli, who was clear that he did not approve of the measure. “That was done in the building where the psychologists were working.”
The younger psychologists allegedly began to file letters with the Ministry of Health, in protest of what they saw as unethical censorship.
During phone calls with family members the miners accused the government of sabotaging family relationships. They began to fantasize about putting Iturra, the psychologist, in prison. “They asked me if there were any police up here at la paloma who could lock Iturra up. They said they would send the police rocks filled with gold, as a prize. I told them, ‘Sure, consider it done,’ ” said Dr. Romagnoli as he described the miners’ desperate attempt to eliminate Iturra from their lives. The miners believed their plan might work: “They sent up the rocks.”
Frustration over the days of delayed and lost letters finally reached a head when Alex Vega, one of the quieter and more reserved miners, exploded as he spoke to Iturra about the censorship. In a fit of swearing and insults, Vega threatened Iturra, telling him that in order to communicate with his family, he would climb out of the mine. To his colleagues below, Vega described how he was going to attempt to scale a series of cracks and narrow chambers in the mountainside that the men were convinced weaved and rose to the surface. It was a mission they all recognized meant almost certain death. But, in the end, without professional climbing equipment, food and long-term lighting, not even Vega was willing to follow through on his threat.
Above ground, despite the battles, Iturra continued with his controversial system of rewards and punishments. “They should not have been given TV, that should have been traded for something,” the bearded psychologist said with frustration in his voice. When the miners behaved well, they were given extra TV and mood music. Other treats—including live images of the topside world—were held in reserve. Should the miners deserve a reward or become unduly feisty, Iturra was ready with either a carrot or a stick. The miners began to rebel against what they saw as oppressive treatment. In a show of strength, they began to reject the daily psychological sessions.
When a set of personalized leather dice games was sent down, the men protested. Three of the games had typographical errors in their names. The men sent the dice and cups topside with an angry letter.
“The miners are like children,” said Dr. Díaz, the lead physician who said that after satisfying their primal needs, including hunger, the miners were moving up the food chain of requirements. “Now that they have food, water and sustenance, they are asking for clothing, and we are seeing them rise to a third level: demanding that the food have an enjoyable taste. The other day they sent back dessert—the peaches—because one of them didn’t like the taste.”
In response, Iturra’s team meted out more punishments. “When that happens, we have to say, okay, you don’t want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music—because we administer these things. And if they want magazines? Well, they have to speak to us. It is a daily arm wrestle,” said Dr. Díaz. “NASA told us that we have to receive the arrows so that they don’t start shooting the arrows at each other. So we are putting our chest forward; now they can target the doctors and psychologists.”
Openly critical of what he saw as a provocative strategy, Dr. Figueroa, the psychiatrist hired to watch the operation, accused the mental health team of treating the miners like laboratory rats. First they try out unusual protocols, he said, then they study the results as if it were an experiment. “It’s dangerous to implement psychological intervention without the consent of the miners,” said Figueroa. “They are meddling in their lives. . . . This is an attack on the dignity of the miners. . . . The fact that they can hold out doesn’t mean they are invincible or especially resistant. . . . They are very fragile.”
Iturra was undeterred by the rising criticism. “We removed the first page of the newspaper and the miners went crazy and were screaming,” he said, defending the censorship. The newspaper article described a mining accident in the Copiapó region where four mine workers had been blown to pieces by an accidental detonation of explosives. Iturra said, “One dead miner had the same last name as one of the miners down there; maybe he was a relative? I did not have time to check that out and we couldn’t let them find out that way—by reading the paper.”
“Disinformation and uncertainty are two of the worst psychological aggressions for humans,” wrote Figueroa in a blistering critique of the San José psychological team. “Accurate, timely, honest and realistic information is essential. The benefit of restricting information delivery because of concerns about giving them bad news is not supported by empirical evidence and can compromise confidence in rescuers.” But Figueroa also acknowledged that Iturra had a nearly impossible task. Miners were known to be among the groups least receptive to psychological counseling. They tended to hide their weaknesses, said Figueroa, who stressed the difficulty in bringing mental health to a group that was stubbornly opposed not just to Iturra but to everything he stood for.
At the miners’ video conference with their families, the joy of face-to-face contact was now clouded by a bitter sensation that the psychologists were preventing any semblance of normal communications. While family members assured Victor Zamora that they had written him fifteen letters, he had received only one, and he began to think his family was hiding something. “Victor is very upset they are not delivering the letters,” said Zamora’s nephew. “He is about to explode. This is all so disgusting. None of the letters are arriving.”
Inevitably the media began to question the censorship. During an interview with a Chilean broadcaster, Iturra defended the practice. “He said the opinion of the families did not matter, that the miners were ‘his children,’ ” said Pedro Gallo, paraphrasing the conversation.
Later that same evening, a group of twelve miners gathered to watch the nightly news. As usual, Pedro Gallo, the telecommunications inventor, sent the video feed down to the trapped men. He was also sitting in front of a monitor, keeping tabs on the underground world. He was stunned by their reaction to Iturra’s comments. “I saw their faces when the news came on and they heard Iturra. . . . Then the phone started ringing.”
Irate, Sepúlveda called up and demanded to speak to Iturra, who had gone home for the day. Gallo knew that a battle royal was imminent. “Mario didn’t say anything to me, but I could tell from his voice he was very upset.”
Gallo explained that Iturra had broken a sacred miner code: he insulted the family.
The unity of the miners was now strained by different individual priorities, sleeping and group work shifts. The miners continued their daily get-togethers including prayer and the noontime group meeting, but fewer men participated. The necessities of survival were now being tempered by the relative comforts provided by the rescue team. In crucial moments, however, like the rejection of censorship, the miners still spoke with a single voice.
DAY 42: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
In the morning, Sepúlveda called and asked to speak to Iturra. It was an urgent request. Iturra came on the line. Gallo again was front row and knew fireworks were about to explode. Sepúlveda accused Iturra of abusing the rights of the miners. After a halfhearted defense, Iturra became quiet. Sepúlveda went on the attack once more. “If you keep shitting inside our home, we will remove you. This is your last chance,” said Sepúlveda. He made it clear that he was going to report the incident to Mining Minister Golborne.
In a series of phone calls to political authorities throughout the rest of the day, the miners launched a counterattack. “He was treating us like little kids,” said miner Alex Vega. “Of course we had to protest against the censorship.”
Having just barely recovered their strength, the men now said they would not accept food or supplies. “We told them that if they didn’t stop the censorship, we were not going to receive la paloma and would stop eating the food,” said Barrios. “Everybody was against the psychologist; he did a terrible job. If he was not removed, we were not going to eat. We’d just leave the palomas filled with food,” said Samuel Ávalos. “Like good miners, we pulled a strike.”
After almost starving to death, the men were now threatening a hunger strike.
While the miners complained to the government, there was only so much the government could do. Iturra had been hired by the privately owned workers’ health insurance company, ACHS. “We tried to fire Iturra, to dump him,” said a high-ranking official in the Piñera government who asked not to be named. “But they threatened us, saying that if they did not control the psychological counseling, then they would not cover the medical parts of the rescue. We were trapped.”
For his part Iturra called the battle cathartic. “I told them that I was going to be their father, if they want to get angry at me, get angry, but I am going to be their father and I will not abandon them, I am here and I am trustworthy.”
Tensions with Iturra were becoming unmanageable. Dr. Díaz encouraged Iturra to take a break and suggested a week’s sabbatical from the intense routines. After more than a month at the site, Iturra, straining under the pressure from the miners, lack of sleep, and the responsibility for maintaining the sanity of the thirty-three lives on his watch, agreed and went to his home in Caldera, a fishing port less than an hour’s drive from the mine.
Claudio Ibañez, a psychologist from Santiago who had been assisting Iturra, took over the day-to-day counseling. With the miners rebellious and empowered, it was a tense time. With weeks—perhaps months—of captivity still ahead, it was crucial to keep the men healthy and calm. The rescue effort was dragging. The drills were advancing but hampered by technical difficulties. Ibañez, an easygoing man with an extensive background in what he calls “positive psychology,” upended the rules. There would be minimal censorship. La paloma would not be searched nor letters revised.
With the restrictions lifted, the families began to pack la paloma with secret gifts. For miner Samuel Ávalos, the change was a godsend. An avid reader, Ávalos was bored by the pamphlets from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the feel-good psychology texts sent by Iturra. Ávalos wanted drama, something so shocking it would transport him from the inside of the mine. “I read El Tila, a biography of a psychopath killer in La Dehesa [a wealthy neighborhood in Santiago]. It was fantastic. I read it three times,” said Ávalos.
“I think this was a mistake. I was in favor of control,” said Katty Valdivia, who is married to Mario Sepúlveda. “One woman snuck a letter to her secret lover inside the mine—one of the miners. She told him that she was pregnant,” said Valdivia. “Then the wife found out and it was very tense for everybody. That kind of message should not have been sent down.”
With the relaxation of the rules, more than just letters were making their way down to the miners. Valdivia described how the families “started inserting cigarettes, pills, even drugs into the paloma. It should not have been so free. Some miners became angry and bad feelings developed.” Amphetamines were reportedly sent to the men. According to Valdivia, some authorities were aware of the contraband but turned a blind eye. Meanwhile, chaos ensued below. “The opening of the gates created conflict below in the mine, among the men,” said Valdivia. “They went from strict controls to suddenly no controls.”
“Before we noticed, the families managed to smuggle contraband down there,” said Dr. Romagnoli. “The miners were not allowed to have candy because of all the dental problems, but still the families smuggled down chips, chocolate and candy.”
Even a simple infection, like Zamora’s inflamed tooth or a spike in insulin levels for Ojeda, the diabetic, could spiral quickly into a crisis. Doctors above ground were determined to avoid the most drastic scenario: having to guide Yonni Barrios in surgery. Yet the shadow of fear that Barrios might be forced to operate was always present. Delivery of unsanctioned food increased the odds.
Ávalos noticed that some of his colleagues were now acting suspicious. They were peeling away from the group in small cliques, wandering toward the bathroom—to smoke a joint, he suspected. “They never even offered me a toke,” said Ávalos. “When you saw five of them headed up to the bathroom, you knew what they were doing.” Ávalos was desperate for a quick hit, a high that would relieve the stress of nearly a month underground. “We went over to the area where the guys used bulldozers; we knew they smoked marijuana. They worked inside a plastic cab that protected them, and they could smoke a joint, then smoke a cigarette and no one would know. We looked everywhere for a colilla [stub of a marijuana cigarette].” They could not find one.
With group unity and long-term health key factors in the men’s ability to survive, the temptations of short-term pleasures—alcohol, cocaine, marijuana—were in direct conflict with the needs of the group. Having small amounts of drugs circulating in the community created more tension than it relieved, instigated jealousies and threatened to alter basic tenets of the communal living conditions. Officials from the Chilean government became so concerned that they discussed putting a drug-sniffing dog at the paloma station. “We’ll turn it into a border crossing,” said one official, only half in jest.
But the men’s greatest need would not fit down the tube: women. With physical health improving rapidly, sex became a topic of conversation both for the miners and for the rescue team. The men’s sexual impulses were surging back, though they were still far from normal. “I am sure they put something in our food, something that kept us from thinking about sex,” said Alex Vega. In fact, the medical team was working on another plan: how to appease the expected rise in sexual desires.
“There was a guy who offered inflatable dolls for the guys but he only had ten. I said thirty-three or none. Otherwise they would be fighting for inflatable dolls: Whose turn is it? Who was seen with whose fiancée? You are flirting with my inflatable doll,” said Dr. Romagnoli. “It was supposed to be a relaxation tool. . . . The miners had a special place where sex with the doll could take place and they asked us to send four or five dolls and condoms. They could take turns. It was all planned. If we had thirty-three dolls there was no problem and each could do as he wanted with his doll . . . but I couldn’t ask them to share.”
The dolls were never sent; instead the men received pornography and pinup posters from La Cuarta, a Chilean tabloid famous for its girls known as Bomba 4. When the miners felt the need for privacy, they would block the government camera by sticking one of the pinups on the camera lens.
DAY 44: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18
The Chilean Independence Day offered a welcome break from routines for rescuers, miners and families alike. This year September 18 was also the nation’s much-anticipated bicentennial. Instead of battling over censored letters or plastic dolls, the miners agreed to a government-staged event: they would hold a holiday ceremony, eat special foods and sing the national anthem.
Chile’s long-awaited bicentennial was overshadowed by Los 33. Above ground, Commander Navarro of the Chilean submarine fleet led a flag-raising ceremony on the flattened area used for the daily press conference in an effort to provide institutional symbolism to the historic date. Next to the flag, a banner with the men’s faces had been strung up.
Two thousand three hundred feet below, a simple ceremony was under way. Omar Reygadas pulled a string that hoisted a small Chilean flag. Inside the tunnel, Reygadas raised the flag as high as possible, barely 3 feet above his head. Then Sepúlveda began his unique rendition of la cueca. With his miner helmet in one hand, a white towel in the other, Sepúlveda began to dance. He spun with the gusto and pizzazz of a huaso, a Chilean cowboy. A traditional cueca is a dance of courtship in which the macho man with a wide-brim hat slams elaborate silver spurs to the ground while the woman spins, sending her long hair and skirt into a flirtatious whirl. She skips aside, not to dodge the man’s sexual offers but to encourage them. Sepúlveda’s cueca was a solitary show.
The miners had built a small stage; a plastic orange tarp was hung on the wall and covered with a crudely written copy of their motto: Estamos Bien En El Refugio los 33. A Chilean flag was taped to the middle of the tarp and from the ceiling hung a series of patriotic buntings the colors of the Chilean flag: blue, white and red. On the edge of the tarp was written the names of the three groups: El Refugio, La Rampa, 105. The barren cave was now garish in the bright lights, like a crude theater set. In rubber-soled shoes, long white socks and hairy legs, Sepúlveda jitter stepped on the sharp rocks as his compañeros watched with obvious boredom. On the final stanza, he dropped to his knees, opened his arms like a devout pilgrim in joyous rapture and sent his energy skyward, through a half mile of solid rock. “Thank you all—our close colleagues who are out there working for us! We are grateful for what’s been done and want to thank you.” Sepúlveda’s voice broke—a testament to the burdens of leadership. The camera panned the men—their faces impassive, showing few smiles and little interest. Instead of accident victims, the men were now beginning to feel like actors.
DAY 46: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
In his daily press conference, Mining Minister Golborne was optimistic. “The three plans are advancing as expected,” he said. Plan A—the first operation, which began on August 29—had reached 1,066 feet, nearly halfway to the men. Both Plan B and Plan C, said Golborne, were now advancing at the rate of 3 feet an hour.
As the media circus at Camp Hope mutated into a full-fledged zoo, media expert Alejandro Pino was designing a strategy to help the miners cope with their newfound status as celebrities. Pino, a lanky sixty-seven-year-old with five decades’ experience as a journalist and public speaker, conducted a five-hour class on media strategy for the men. The abbreviated course included interview techniques, marketing opportunities, how to handle tough questions and overall guidance on how to survive a pack of paparazzi.
As a longtime journalist and head of the regional division of the ACHS, Pino was neither paid nor obligated to provide media training but he felt a sense of responsibility for the men’s welfare. He had a strong desire to help them with the oncoming onslaught of microphones and cameras.
Pino’s early-afternoon classes were a welcome break from the technical talks about designing the rescue shaft or the much discredited psychological counseling. The miners gathered at their makeshift stage at the bottom of the mine. Pino, microphone in hand, worked out of a shipping container that had been outfitted with a white couch, some plants and a large TV screen on which he could see the miners down below.
Instead of warning the miners about the perils of media overexposure (as many people speculated), Pino went straight to the pocketbook. “If you do not look at the camera, if you give a boring interview, you will never be invited back for another interview,” Pino told the men. “This is an opportunity, and you must learn to use body language, to be excited.” An exuberant personality with a booming bass voice, Pino was practically evangelical in his effort to turn the shy and confused miners into media stars.
The miners gravitated to Pino’s daily lectures. Though many remained invisible to the camera, they continually chimed in with questions, ideas and comments as their confidence and rapport with Pino grew. Given their animosity toward and distrust of Iturra, some of the miners refused to accept Pino, including Samuel Ávalos. “After the bullshit with the psychologist, we did not want to talk to those kinds of people,” said Ávalos. “We did not like the idea.”
Other miners were practically desperate to talk; they adopted Pino as their de facto psychologist. In the middle of a talk on media strategies, one of the older miners went off topic and began to confess to Pino: “If there is anything I have learned down here, it is that the last twenty years of my life have been a waste. . . . When I come up, I am getting divorced.”
Divisions among the group also began to surge. Luis Urzúa was unhappy that some of the miners, including Victor Zamora, had acquired a video camera and were filming the others. And when a copy of Ya magazine arrived with an interview in which Sepúlveda bragged that he was “the leader” of the pack, further squabbles erupted.
“There were quarrels and little fights. They were getting very cocky and fighting verbally, but not fistfights. . . . No one lost their mind,” said Dr. Romagnoli, who said his biggest brawls were in confrontations with the engineers topside. “I had problems with the guys on the surface. They did not understand the importance of the health care operation. They could have their Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan whatever, but if the guys die? Then all those drilling plans are useless.”
DAY 47: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
For years Professor Nick Kanas had studied astronauts. He knows all too well the pattern of behavior when men are confined and stressed for long periods of time. In what he described as “third-quarter syndrome,” confined men become increasingly anxious and irritable toward the end of a mission—in this case the rescue day. “After six weeks, people tend to get territorial. There is often not a lot of joking and banter, although they try. They will start to form subgroups,” said Kanas, who works at the University of California, San Francisco, and has been a longtime consultant to NASA. “After six weeks, the situation turns sterile and confining. What was once quirky and fun—like the jokes of a colleague—becomes irritable and tiresome.”
The men had now been underground for forty-seven days. Whether it was footage of a miner unscrewing the paloma and pulling out food or footage taken as they raised the flag and sang the national anthem, their entrapment was being captured on video. TV reporters repeatedly attempted to smuggle cameras down the paloma so the miners could start producing an underground documentary.
When Chilean detectives working for the Polícia de Investigaciones de Chile (PDI) needed evidence to document details in the criminal case against the mine owners, they taught the miners the basics of crime scene photography. For a week the miners were like stars in CSI as they documented and filmed faulty security inside the mine. Florencio Ávalos went to the far corners of the mine to film cracked walls, rusty piping and the huge boulders strewn across what was once the main road inside the mine. An estimated forty hours of criminal evidence was filmed by the miners and then shipped above ground.
DAY 48: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22—THE DRILL FALLS DOWN
On September 22, the miners received a surprise delivery from above. When Plan B reached 280 feet, the bit snapped and one of the four drill heads went into free fall the length of the shaft and fell into the floor of the mine. No one was injured as the metal hammer plowed into the mud, but Plan B was halted.
Mario Sepúlveda called the rescuers. “Ah, I think we have something of yours down here,” he said in jest. “I believe that it is called a bit, a drill bit. But what is it doing here?”
Juan Illanes, one of the miners, hauled the bit out of the mud. The miners had vast experience with heavy machinery; the reality they lived every day was constantly fraught with broken parts, last-minute improvisations and setbacks. But this was unbearable. The frustrations began to boil up. “They are working to rescue you and you have this kind of failure? It was depressing,” said Samuel Ávalos. “It means two more days—five more days. We were receiving food from la paloma, but we were confined. Trapped! That was killing us.”
DAY 49: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
The tensions below continued to rise.
Ibañez, the psychologist, had a cordial relationship with the miners, and many of the men liked his relaxed and positive attitude. However, Ibañez was unable to keep control. The breakdown of authority, the constant TV, the drugs being smuggled in—all of this was seen by many miners as a grave error. The men stopped listening to advice from above ground and began inventing their own activities.
Edison Peña began to explore the tunnels. Before the accident, he had been an exercise enthusiast, riding his bike for an hour every day, followed by a long run. Now he began to jog a 3-mile circuit inside the tunnels. His stiff, above-the-ankle mining boots chafed his legs so he took a pair of wire cutters and chopped the boots down. The sharp rocks and uneven terrain aggravated his already damaged knee, but Peña kept running, as if he might escape either the terror of the tunnels or the nightmares in his head. Pablo Rojas, Mario Sepúlveda, Franklin Lobos and Carlos Mamani joined Peña. The men huffed and sweated then rested in the deepest part of the mine. With their white plastic protective suits, hoods and goggles, they looked like astronauts.
Games and books began to arrive via la paloma. Inside the refuge, the men organized marathon sessions of dominoes and card games. In many ways the cards were just an excuse for the ongoing banter and constant joking, monologues and double-entendre word games. Among the miners, the ability to talk down an opponent—at the card table or in the daily meeting—was fundamental in establishing respect. While arguments raged, fistfights were extremely rare—some miners say nonexistent.
“I had to club Ariel [Ticona] in the head with my head lamp,” admitted Sepúlveda, who stressed that the incident was an isolated case of physical violence among the men. Ticona had allegedly insulted Sepúlveda’s mother, explained one miner who witnessed the fight. “If we had let the violence disintegrate to that level, we would have ended up with a few guys dead.”
When Ibañez attempted to bring a reporter from a Chilean TV station into the video conference room to interview the miners, another firestorm erupted. The reporter was escorted into the small container high on the hill, an area off limits to anyone without a Rescue Team pass. Ibañez asked the miners if the journalist could conduct a few interviews with the trapped men. Urzúa, Sepúlveda and the other men went ballistic. Immediately, the phone above ground started ringing over and over. The miners were indignant. Gallo listened to the ensuing conversation.
Urzúa berated Ibañez, saying, “Hey, stop screwing around with us, okay? Why are you sticking a journalist in here? We don’t want any journalists here! We don’t want to be seen. We are suffering down here, so no interviews, and we are going to report this. We will report this.”
The miners called Rene Aguilar, the number-two man on the rescue team and Sougarret’s right-hand aide. A psychologist by profession and a ranking executive with Codelco, Aguilar had been in the front row for weeks. Now he was furious. “He came over to speak with Ibañez and his face was bright red. He was angry,” said Gallo, who witnessed the scene. “And that was the last time I saw Ibañez. He went to Santiago. We never saw him again.”
With Ibañez gone, the miners were quickly reunited with their former psychologist, Iturra. “This was Iturra version two-point-oh, the diet version,” said Gallo, whose job included monitoring the live video feed of the miners below. “He came in with a totally different attitude and offered his two-hour-a-day slot for psychological counseling to the men. He said they could use that time to speak with their families.”
With the miners now holding the upper hand on censorship, the missing censored letters suddenly appeared. “It was like a rain of letters. They sent down all of them—I would say three hundred letters, all at once,” said Gallo.