The last time someone saw Jorge Luis Martínez,
El Loco
, he was escaping at full speed through a tunnel sunk 60 meters into the bowels of Sabinas while shouting at his partner: "Here comes the water, run it!"
It was shortly after one in the afternoon on Wednesday, August 3, and a deep, dry rumble had just been heard around the Las Conchas mine.
As if the land of Coahuila were roaring and rebelling against the dozens of holes that pierce it mercilessly.
As if a bomb had just gone off at the bottom of the coal pit.
It wasn't a bomb.
It was something worse: hundreds of thousands of liters of water accumulated over 40 years of abandonment inside the Las Conchas mine.
El Loco (34 years old) extracted coal together with his companions in three clandestine wells opened at the beginning of 2022, just a few meters away from the old exploitation.
Now the water had just broken through the cracks in the subsoil.
It was like freeing a caged beast.
In a matter of seconds he flooded the tunnels, destroying everything in his path and imprisoning 10 miners underground, who are still trapped seven days later.
It is not known if alive or dead.
Portrait of Jorge Luis Martínez, 'El Loco', a miner trapped since last Wednesday in the collapse of a coal pit.
In his arms he holds his daughter Alison.
Emilio Espejel
The Fool and his companions ran to the iron (the bottom of the mouth of the well).
One of them was mounted on the boat used to go up and down the tunnels.
—Get on Loco, get on
"I'll catch up with you right now, go upstairs."
Fresh in his memory was the memory of a flood in which the miners died because too many men got on at once and the boat collapsed.
He planned to go up on the next trip, but a gust of water that dragged with it tools and wooden slats broke into the plank.
He hit hard and the boat tilted.
One of his companions grabbed one end and was able to get out.
The Fool stepped aside.
"I think he did it to protect himself, he saw that something big was coming towards them, so they just felt an impact of air, dust and water," explains Sergio Martínez, the older brother of the miner, who has been able to reconstruct those moments thanks to the testimony of two companions of El Loco who managed to escape.
The water quickly covered them, but an air bubble formed through which they were able to protrude part of their heads and breathe.
The Fool was yelling for them to stay calm, that the water level had to drop at some point.
Some say they prayed.
One of the miners — whose name has been withheld to preserve anonymity — got his leg caught between the wall and a piece of wood.
He managed to wriggle free and began frantically flailing around her.
At that moment something happened that he could only explain as a miracle —he told Martínez—: his hand touched a hose that rose to the surface.
He climbed up her.
When he got to the top and looked down, he realized that the entire well was flooded.
El Loco and nine other men did not go up.
mining town boys
Everyone knows Jorge Luis Martínez in Cloete, his hometown, as
El Loco
.
El Loco because he is pure nerve, with a
short fuse
but a big heart, one of those people who are incapable of being still.
"He had a laugh that you listen to and say: it's El Loco," says the mother of his children, Carolina Álvarez Oviedo (33 years old).
They have been separated for six years, but they are good friends.
She has spent almost every night in the mine, hoping that he will come out of the shaft alive.
She works as a welder in a maquila that manufactures parts for trains.
She charges 1,400 pesos a week (less than 70 euros).
Only rent goes 1,000.
Without El Loco's salary, that precarious income will be the only one in the family.
The red numbers threaten all the families of the 10 trapped workers.
In this land, the gender division makes men risk their lives in the wells and leads women to endless days in the misery of the maquilas, safer, but much worse paid.
Others work at home, taking care of their children and housework without receiving a salary in return.
When a miner dies in the pit, compensation becomes one more battle for his widows.
In the 2006 gas explosion in Pasta de Conchos, the wives of the 65 dead miners received, in exchange for the lives of their husbands, pensions of between 1,500 and 3,000 pesos (about 150 euros) a month.
Sergio Martínez has breakfast with his wife, Victoria Guajardo, and his sons Denver (2 years old) and Álex (16), before participating in the rescue work at the Las Conchas mine. Emilio Espejel
Cloete is a mining town.
Most of the population works, has worked or has a relative in the wells.
The neighborhoods are named after the old mines on which they were built.
The houses have cracked walls due to the instability of the holed ground.
The landscape is dotted with pits —open-cast mining— and towers.
Its streets could be the scene of a modern
western
: there are low houses with colors faded by dust, old men in cowboy hats sitting in the shade on their porches, stray dogs and cracked roads that have not been paved for a long time.
At Sergio Martínez's house, a humble one-story house that he built, like most of his neighbors, with his own hands, Monday dawns as he has the last week: with the omnipresent absence of his brother.
He has coffee and bread for breakfast with his wife, Victoria Guajardo, and his children, Álex (16 years old) and Denver (2).
Between the nail and the meat of his callused fingers of a manual worker he has traces of carbon.
In a corner rest the helmet and the vest that in a while he will wear in the rescue work of the 10 miners, but first, he wants to show the reporters of EL PAÍS that the whole place is, more than a town, a large mine. .
Martínez and Álex climb with agility up a dry hill from which you can see all of Cloete.
They walk between abandoned pits and exhausted wells that no one has bothered to close.
El Loco was in most of them.
Martínez tried several times to get his brother to work with him at a company that makes train cars, a job that requires enduring extreme temperatures under exposure to materials that can corrode the skin.
Hard, but well paid by the standards of the coal region of Coahuila.
And above all: away from the Russian roulette of the mines.
The Fool never wanted.
It is something common among his companions.
All have linked their lives to coal.
Like Jaime Montelongo who entered the mine at the age of 14 and at 61, already with a pension, he still hasn't left.
His life is in the wells and he wants to die there, says his sister Angelica.
Or Margarito Rodríguez, who never thought of looking for another job because in none of them could he earn enough to support two children and then three grandchildren that his father did not take care of.
Or the two José Rogelio Moreno, father and son who shared the name and luck in the coal pit, because in this land mining runs in the blood and is inherited from generation to generation.
Sergio Martínez and his son Álex look at the Cloete mine landscape, where his brother Jorge Luis 'El Loco' worked as a miner since he was a teenager.
Emilio Espejel
Martínez points a finger at a point on the horizon that is now covered by trees.
Years ago, there was a river in that place where he and his brother used to go as children to play.
A mining company drained it to be able to open a pit there.
The farm was abandoned a long time ago, completely stripped of coal.
The river never ran again.
The house in which El Loco lives with his mother, María del Rosario, is a white house made up by desert dust, with cracks in the walls, uneven cement floor and little light.
It has two rooms, a kitchen and a living room with a fireplace that the miner also uses as a workshop.
He lately he was learning carpentry.
The bathroom wall is dotted with black charcoal stains that give away its inhabitant.
It is the first time Martínez has entered since the accident.
He opens the drawers, looks at the clothes, runs his hand over the furniture.
On a table he finds his brother's sunglasses.
He brings them to his mouth.
He covers his face with his hat so his children don't see him cry.
Sergio Martínez at the gates of the house of his brother Jorge Luis 'El Loco', a miner trapped by the collapse of a coal pit since last Wednesday.
Emilio Espejel
Survive with 110 pesos per ton of coal
Martínez and Álvarez Oviedo asked El Loco a thousand times to leave the mine.
He always refused.
The region is poor and apart from mineral exploitation, the only work available is in the precarious maquilas or construction.
And he liked the feeling of being able to control his time.
In the wells, it is charged per ton of coal, there is no permanence requirement or established hours.
Sometimes, with three days' work, he earned enough for a week, twice as much as in the maquilas, but at the cost of devastating shifts that break the body, from which you never know if he is going to come back alive.
In the tunnels you always work in pairs.
A good day, that is to say, one in which the miners break their backs chopping coal for hours and hours, between the two of them they can extract 12 tons.
The ton of coal is paid at 110 pesos, but said like this, with the coldness of the figures, a perverse mathematics can be overlooked.
The brutality of this data is better understood if it is dissected: a ton is a thousand kilos;
110 pesos is just over five euros.
A thousand kilos is the weight of a small car.
Five euros more or less what two cokes cost.
At the end of a day, two men can extract enough coal to fill the trailer of a cargo truck, and in return, receive 1,320 pesos —about 63 euros— between the two of them.
Or what is the same: 10 miners can lose their lives for 30 euros a day.
View of an abandoned coal mine in Cloete, in the municipality of Sabinas, Coahuila.
Emilio Espejel
The wells in which El Loco and his colleagues work do not meet the most basic safety requirements and many of the workers do not have insurance.
“The conditions were terrible, that's why nobody even dares to say the official list of trapped miners.
That means miners don't matter.
If there isn't even something as basic as a registry [of which people go down to the mine], there is nothing else,” argues Cristina Auerbach, one of the region's leading mining experts.
According to the registry kept by the relatives of the victims, since coal extraction began at the end of the 19th century, more than 3,100 miners have died in Coahuila.
Their deaths come cheap.
They are a sacrifice that greases the monstrous entity of the common good: the drilling without quarter of the lands of Coahuila produces 99% of the coal that feeds the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the cornerstone of the electrical reform of the Mexican president , Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who aspires to dispense with private companies in the sector.
Some 3,000 families in the area depend directly on the exploitation of the mineral, and another 11,000 on indirect jobs.
They are the collateral damage to pay for achieving the coveted "energy sovereignty" to which the president aspires.
A month ago El Loco had an accident.
He was carrying a wheelbarrow full of coal through a tunnel.
The floor was covered with a layer of water that prevented him from seeing a wooden board with a nail sticking out.
He stepped on it.
The nail entered the sole of his foot and exited through the instep.
At the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), they did not want to serve him because he did not have insurance, although he ended up getting it.
A few days later he returned to the mine.
“Here you cannot give yourself the pleasure of stopping working,” says Martínez.
Peacock feathers, wooden swords and new clothes
One of the nightly vigils at the gates of the mine, as rescue teams work to rescue the miners, his family gathers and tells stories about him.
Nobody wants to go home.
There is his brother;
his sister Pearl of him;
his mother, María del Rosario;
his wife,
Álvarez Oviedo and his eldest daughter, Alison, 16.
His youngest son, Jorge Lionel, 10 years old, is not yet aware of the tragedy.
During the first days they hid it from him.
One of the psychologists who accompany the relatives of the trapped miners recommended Álvarez Oviedo to prepare him, in case his father died inside the well.
At the moment they have only told him that he has suffered an accident at work.
Alison, 16 years old, daughter of Jorge Luis Martínez, a miner trapped underground last Wednesday, is comforted by her mother Carolina, during the rescue work. Emilio Espejel
Alison pulls out a stuffed animal-shaped backpack for earrings decorated with peacock feathers that her father made for her.
She shows them by the light of the tall white spotlights that have been placed around the mine and puts them on.
Everyone laughs remembering how El Loco chased the animal to get the feathers.
The miner is good with his hands.
Since there was always little money in his house, he learned to make what he needed.
He built a wooden bunk bed to put in his room so that his children could sleep in it when they spent nights with him.
The boy looks forward to Fridays, the day he has to go with his father.
Since El Loco does not have the resources to take him camping, they went camping together in the middle of the desert, with tents and sleeping bags that he also made.
He invents games for his son, he carves wooden swords for her.
The boy idolizes his father.
“We were very humble, my mom always worked,” says Martínez.
Sometimes for lunch there was only a bowl of soup.
Martínez was left without him so that El Loco, two years younger, could feed himself.
“He is my spoiled brother, I will never leave him alone.
If it were up to me I would have already gone into the well for him.
It is a very special love.
We grew up together, we had a lot to talk about, we spent the whole night with a few beers and pure anecdotes”, he gets excited.
They haven't seen each other for six months.
Martínez was away from Coahuila for work, but he came running when he found out about the mine collapse.
He called out his name hole by hole, waiting for an answer that still hasn't come.
"I don't know how he's going to get out.
We are already preparing the mind more for bad possibilities than good ones.
Yes, I guarantee you that it will be sadder than right now.”
Martínez shows a happy memory on his mobile phone: the video of a Christmas they all spent together.
The Loco is seen dancing with a huge smile, his children dancing around him, his wife, his mother, the living room with the fireplace lit.
"It's a humble house", he justifies her when teaching it.
He looks at the screen and his face doesn't know if he wants to smile or cry: a broken expression, a broken gesture.
Martínez had bought new clothes that he planned to give to his brother when they saw each other again.
On Saturday morning, when he opened the closet to get dressed for his rescue shift at the mine, he found it there: folded, clean, still brand new.
She collapsed.
Sergio Martínez looks at a portrait of his brother Jorge Luis 'El Loco', a miner trapped since Wednesday by the collapse of a well.
Emilio Espejel
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