COPIAPO, Chile, (Reuters) – Chile’s 33 miners had given up hope of being found alive and were prepared to die slowly of hunger but stopped short of taking their own lives in the days before they were found alive, one of the miners told Reuters.
“What we always wondered was why hadn’t we died, why we were alive,” Yonni Barrios, 50, said as he fought back tears in an interview late on Monday.
Barrios and his fellow miners were finally hoisted up by a cable from half a mile below the earth’s surface on Wednesday after more than 69 days deep inside a collapsed gold and copper mine. He said the men argued about how long help would take to reach them but never came to blows as tensions rose in the hot and humid tunnel shrouded in darkness.
Barrios, who wore sunglasses inside his home in a ramshackle neighborhood of poorly built houses on the outskirts of the mining town of Copiapo in Chile’s harsh Atacama desert, said he was still struggling to adjust to sunlight, which he said feels like needles being poked into his eyes.
Barrios and his co-workers were caught in a cave-in on Aug. 5 and survived on dwindling rations of food and water for 17 days until rescue crews drilled a tiny hole into the chamber where they had taken refuge. The miners had not been optimistic before contact came. “It seemed cruel that were alive down there and would have to die a slow death from malnourishment because we didn’t have food,” Barrios said.
“Hope was lost. When the perforation drill arrived we were all waiting to die.”
The first drill hole, the width of a grapefruit, became an umbilical cord to pass the miners water and packets of nutrition gels. Weeks later rescue crews made a wider hole slightly larger than a man’s shoulders and pulled them out.
Barrios, who has been working in Chile’s vast mining industry since he was 17, said he and his colleagues did not consider taking their own lives to end the agony.
“We never thought about that,” said Barrios, who is short and trim with gray hair.
“Everybody had accepted that if we weren’t rescued we were going to die. And that if we had to die, then we had to die, and that was all that remained,” he said.
Barrios, who was designated at the group’s doctor while underground to give injections and take blood samples, became the butt of jokes among the miners because he was known for having more than one woman in his life: an estranged wife and a girlfriend with whom he has lived for more than a decade, along with her children. At one point during the ordeal, both women appeared near the mouth of the mine, apparently to claim some of the money they thought would be paid out after the accident.
