Bad Dreams

“I’d go crazy if I thought about it all the time,” says Claudio Acuna. One of the 33 miners trapped in Chile’s San José mine in 2010, he smiles and fidgets with the arm on his chair as he speaks. “But I still dream about it. If I talk about being in the mine, then I find I can’t sleep.” His interviewer’s eyes go wide as she asks, “So tonight you’ll sleep badly?” Acuna nods, smiling again. Here, the scene cuts to another miner, Jorge Galleguillos, also smiling, his face framed in an uncomfortably tight close-up. The shot cuts to his hands, fingers entwined and restlessly turning. Again, journalist Lucia Newman is both sympathetic and insistent, as she asks what he dreams about. “I dream about things I can’t talk about,” says Galleguillos.

The miners’ bad dreams are expected effects of the trauma they endured. Still, as the documentary Chilean Miners: Still Trapped? reveals, that trauma, so widely and sensationally exhibited at the time, has not led to positive changes for the survivors or for the mining industry in Chile.

The first of eight hour-long documentaries in a series called Al Jazeera Correspondent, Chilean Miners returns to the scene of what Newman calls “the agony and the eventual ecstasy of the miners’ rescue.” A montage of images shows the men deep inside the mine as well as the workers, family members, and reporters assembled above at “Camp Hope.” The film then turns to Newman at the same site, now an empty patch of land. She remembers the thrill of seeing the men emerge, as well as the flurry of activities that followed the rescue, which was dubbed Operación San Lorenzo, after the patron saint of miners. Their travels and commemorations include a visit to Jerusalem, which miner Mario Gomez remembers being “spiritual, it was tremendously important for us, as Catholics.” 

The celebrations over, many of the miners are now returned to Copiapó, where, the film reports, not everyone is pleased to see them. Acuna describes a ride in a cab when the driver complained about “those miners,” who had received “gifts and money.” Acuna says that when he told the man, “I’m one of ‘those miners,’” he asked him to get out of the taxi “and he didn’t want to charge me.” 

Acuna’s story alludes to the many difficulties facing the miners Newman interviews, including marital and family tensions, physical ailments (silicosis, dental and corneal problems), as well as ongoing psychological or financial troubles. (She also reports that many of them would not speak with her, some having contracted their stories with “Hollywood,” and others still too traumatized to talk about their experiences.) One miner is separated from his wife, more than one are unable to find sustained work, and are currently living with siblings. “I feel like vagabond,” says Galleguillos, his voice cracking.

Alongside these personal travails, the documentary also looks at ongoing problems regulating the mining industry. The camera watches a vehicle head off down a road in the Atacama desert—where mines “export more [copper] than any entire country”—passing signs that note the danger ahead. Javier Castillo of the Chilean Workers Union asserts, “The rescue turned the 33 into heroes when really they’re victims of a bad system. The rescue operation was excellent but the circumstances that led to it were an assault on the miners’ lives.”

The documentary illustrates this assault in some distractingly rudimentary, black and white reenactments and, more effectively, in a series of interviews with experts and authorities, including Dr. Alberta Iturra, the therapist “in charge of the miners’ mental health throughout the ordeal and rescue operation” (who describes miners’ accounts of seeing dead relatives in the mine, as well as God or the Devil), as well as Enrique Valdivieso, Director of the Mining Safety Authority, who laments that his agency is underfunded and understaffed (the staff of inspectors for 1500 mines in Atacama was recently doubled, Newman says, “from four to eight”). Such problems mean the companies don’t need to correct what’s wrong; indeed, it’s typically cheaper to pay (small) fines rather than improve working and safety conditions.

Newman says that the Compañía Minera San Esteban “took full advantage of the fault lines of health and safety rules,” illustrating the dangers facing workers in on-site scenes. In the dry, stark Atacama desert, she enters a piquinero, one of the, unsupervised small mines where many men toil alone. These literal holes in mountainside descend for hundreds of meters. “The feeling of claustrophobia is immediate,” Newman reports. The conditions are not only difficult, but also risky. Such mines operate without regulations, and in these as well as in larger enterprises, “On average, a miner is killed every 10 days in Chile.”

Such hardship is typical, still. “My father, when I was 15, he taught me mining,” remembers Acuna. “It was brutal work,” he adds, “There was no machinery, just a bag for the rocks on your shoulder.” The camera zooms in on a cracked photo of Acuna’s father, his face worn and tired. Conditions were not much improved by the time Acuna was working at the 121-year-old San José mine. As Still Trapped? reveals, the lives of Acuna and other “heroes” of the 2010 disaster remain unsettled. And Chile’s mining companies continue to reap profits.