Vol. 74/No. 35      September 20, 2010

The copper and gold miners have been trapped 2,300 feet underground since August 5. The nonunion San José mine employs 140 workers and is owned by the San Esteban Mining Company.

Chile is the world’s top copper producer, accounting for 35 percent of global production.

It took rescuers eight attempts to drill a bore-hole to the miners. “All 33 of us are fine in the shelter,” wrote one of the miners 17 days later. Due to the depth of the mine, estimates are that it will take at least three months to rescue them. The miners are trapped in a 650-foot-square space.

San Esteban Mining said that it was thanks to company safety regulations that the miners were found alive. The comment outraged families of the trapped miners.

The mine is notorious for its unsafe working conditions. The most serious is the fact that there was no escape route out of the mine. After the cave-in, miners tried to escape up the emergency ladder in a ventilation shaft, but only got a third of the way because the mine owners never finished constructing the ladder to the top.

In 2004 a miner was killed by a cave-in. Two years later a truck driver was killed. That same year 182 workers were reported injured, 56 of them seriously. Following the 2007 death of a geologist in a mining accident, the mine was ordered shut by the government.

Despite the trail of fatalities, injuries, and safety violations, the mine was reopened in 2008, even though the company had not corrected many unsafe working conditions, like completing the escape route.

After communication was reestablished with the trapped miners, they reported that the company did not maintain the safety refuge. With the use of a small camera that had been lowered down the bore-hole, miners “showed their living conditions and took turns greeting their loved ones,” reported the GlobalPost.

The paper wrote, “‘This is the famous refuge,’ said miner Mario Sepulveda in the video, as he pointed to the shabby sign with ‘Refuge’ stamped on it. ‘It was supposed to be in conditions to shelter us, but when we got here, the energy was cut off and there was no ventilation,’ he said bitterly.”

In response to the disaster, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera dismissed the national director of Sernageomin, a government agency responsible for miner safety, and created a work safety commission that does not include any miners. Piñera is also calling for increasing the number of inspectors from 18 to 45—a paltry figure for a country with 4,500 mines. Thirty-one miners have died in accidents so far this year.

One of the miners’ families has filed a criminal lawsuit accusing both company owners and government officials of negligence by allowing the mine to be reopened in 2008. In response, San Esteban said it is considering filing bankruptcy to protect its profits. However, many of the miners’ families successfully petitioned a Chilean judge, who froze $1.8 million of the mining company’s assets as a “precaution.”
 
 
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