Amid celebrations, Chile miners struggle with new-found fame

Chile’s miners plunged into a weekend of neighbourhood barbecues and welcome home celebrations yesterday, trying to regain a more normal footing but hounded by their fame as survivors.

“This isn’t right,” miner Victor Segovia said when he went home to find a crowd of camera-toting news crews waiting, according to an account in the newspaper La Tercera.

“We are nobodies. We are only simple people who survived,” he was quoted as saying.

After being pronounced in good health, all but two of the 33 miners rescued this week after nearly 10 weeks deep underground in a collapsed gold and copper mine were back home.

Regional health director Paola Neumann said the two remaining miners, who were not named, had been transferred to other clinics for more treatment, one for dental surgery, the other suffering from spells of vertigo.

A group of 28 miners were driven discreetly from the hospital in the northern mining town of Copiapo last Friday without stopping to speak to the horde of journalists camped outside hoping for interviews.

“What they are facing in the week to come is very difficult,” said Health Minister Jaime Manalich.

Nevertheless, the gritty mining town of Copiapo erupted into wild celebration as neighbours and relatives popped champagne corks and threw confetti to welcome back Juan Illanes, Edison Pena, and the sole Bolivian, Carlos Mamani.

As he worked his way through the crowd at the hospital entrance, Pena, a self-confessed Elvis fan who ran miles every day in the mine gallery to stay fit, said: “We are not pop stars or anything, we’re just ordinary people.”

But for these tough men a new world of opportunity awaits and a chance to turn their fear and despair into profit, perhaps even riches beyond their wildest dreams, if book deals and Hollywood film rights come.

Some could take up immediate offers to holiday in Greece or visit top European football clubs. Pena has been invited to tour Elvis’s Graceland home, but Illanes had another destination in mind.

“I want to achieve my dream of going to Miami,” the 52-year-old mechanic and former soldier told AFP, before giving brief insights into his experience trapped in the bowels of the dark, dank San Jose mine.

“The confinement was terrible,” he said. “The first 17 days were a nightmare. Then everything changed. But the hardest thing was to be down there. Buried for two months.”

The men were trapped on August 5 by a huge rock collapse inside the mine and they had been almost given up for dead before a probe sent down through a narrow borehole struck lucky on August 22.

In that agonising interim, when each man had to make do with a tiny spoonful of tinned tuna or salmon each day, they faced the mounting terror they would die in the mine.

“We were waiting for death,” miner Richard Villarroel said as he was interviewed by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, TheWashington Post and local Chilean media.

“We were wasting away. We were so skinny. I lost about 26 pounds. I was afraid of not meeting my baby, who is on the way. That was what I was mostwaiting for.”

Once the rescue effort began, the men could finally joke about some of their darkest fears, including cannibalism, Villarroel said.