Trapped miner Luis Urzua (C) stands with Chile's President Sebastian Pinera after reaching the surface and emerging from the "Phoenix" rescue capsule to become the last to be rescued from the San Jose mine in Copiapo.
Jimmy Sánchez, 19, the youngest miner, is a talented soccer forward, but he doesn't score all that many goals because his first (and fairly admirable) instinct when he senses an opposing counterattack is to drop back and help out on defense. Mario Gómez, 63, the oldest, has silicosis, a common lung ailment among miners, but he's kept at the job because he wants to augment the support of his seven grandchildren, the youngest of whom turned seven months the day before he was rescued.
The first to emerge, Florencio Avalos, 31, is so shy he volunteered to be the cameraman to video-monitor the other miners' health for officials at the surface so he didn't have to be filmed himself. The last to emerge, Luis Urzúa, 54, is an avuncular foreman whose firm but calm discipline — not to mention his judicious rationing of paltry supplies of canned tuna and oily water — held his 32 crew members together during the two weeks before help arrived, even when it must have seemed to many of them that they were doomed to die 2,000 feet underground.
One of the quieter is Darío Segovia, 48, who's been mining since he was eight-years old and had already been through so many on-the-job accidents, his mother Margarita told me, that even during this ordeal he felt "like a cat who has at least three or four lives left." One of the more gregarious is Mario Sepúlveda, 40, who played the emcee on the first video of the miners sent up after they were discovered huddled in their 538-sq-ft subterranean shelter — and who joked with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, even leading Piñera's cabinet members in rowdy cheers, as soon as he stepped out of the rescue capsule early Wednesday morning.
When books are written about the 70-day saga of the 33 miners who were all pulled alive from the bowels of Chile's collapsed San José Mine this past week — and six- if not seven-figure publishing deals are already being negotiated — they'll no doubt muse at length about what kind of character it takes to survive as extraordinarily as these ordinary men did. But as their profiles suggest, there is no easy answer to that question, and there may be no answer at all. The presence of the shy, steady Avalos helped keep things tranquil below; but the garrulous, cheerful Sepúlveda played just as important a role in keeping the group buoyed (and at times annoyed). Officials above designated both los más hábiles — the most able — and so brought them up in the ultra-claustrophic rescue capsule's first and riskiest ascents.
That's why the world responded so passionately to Los 33: not because their heroism revealed itself via scripted type, but because it seemed as unexpected in them as it would in ourselves. And no one exulted more than Latin Americans, who see in the miners a hopeful reminder that their countries don't have to be defined by the corrupt egomaniacs who so often run them. The term for "underdogs" in Spanish is los de abajo — which literally means "those below" — and it's never sounded more gallant to this continent than it does now.
The question is whether the miners can summon the heroism they'll need going forward — namely, not succumbing to either the post-traumatic stress that psychologists say awaits them as surely as the first sunrises they're seeing since the Aug. 5 mine collapse, or to the corrosive effects of the money and fame already rising around their ankles. A Chilean tycoon has sent each of them checks for more than $10,000; Greek islands want them and their families to come luxuriate in the Aegean, and powerhouse European soccer clubs want them to stand on their sidelines. One of the miners, Elvis Presley fan Edison Peña, has been offered a lifetime pass to Graceland. A Chilean TV bombshell has even offered to give each miner a lapdance.
So far they're handling the daylight circus with the same aplomb they displayed in their shadowy tomb. They've agreed to profit from their miraculous story collectively and as evenly as possible. And most of them — like Esteban Rojas, whose most important wish at this point is to give his wife Jessica next month the formal church wedding they never had — seem to be focusing less on the lucre ahead of them than on the human riches they ached for underground. (Although for some even that will be a complicated challenge — especially Yonni Barrios, 50, who escaped the mine this week only to fall into a thorny love triangle between him, his wife and his mistress, who turned out to be the woman waiting for him when he emerged.)
This weekend, most if not all the remarkably healthy miners will leave the hospital in Copiapó where they've been under observation. Their families, along with the international media horde, will dismantle Camp Hope, the dusty tent city that grew up alongside the San José mine in the northern Chilean desert during the two-month vigil. It was a symbol of both the religious innocence and carnival cynicism that surrounded this drama, and which promise to follow the miners for months if not years. The best the rest of us can do is embrace the traits that helped them survive — which, as they proved, aren't much more "heroic" than the simple qualities that make us good people — long after the last tent at Camp Hope has been carried away.