The 10 lives trapped in the well of Coahuila

The day the coal pit collapsed in Sabinas, its black stone galleries trapped 10 men who, in exchange for a day's wages, gamble for the future in an unprofitable bet and with a rigged deck.

More than 240 hours after the collapse on Wednesday, August 3, there is no trace of the workers: it is not known if they are alive or dead, although the lack of food and drinking water inside the flooded galleries submerged in the deepest darkness absolute 60 meters deep in the earth, makes the chances of them staying alive more a matter of faith than statistics.

That Wednesday, when an underground water leak flooded the galleries, the mine swallowed 10 people and opened a parenthesis of terror that still hasn't closed for families.

A spiral of absences and memories, of pain and hope, of exhaustion and willpower, while the rescue drags on and the chances of seeing them again run out.

These are some traces of the stories that are hidden behind the 10 trapped day laborers, the faces behind the latest collective tragedy that Coahuila has suffered, an area that leads men to seek their future inside wells since they were teenagers.

A land where the life of the miners is worth less than the coal that stains their hands.

The soldier in love who ended up in the wells

Margarito Rodriguez Palomares, 54 years old

Margarito Rodríguez fell in love with María del Refugio when they were still kids.

They grew up in the same neighborhood of Agujita.

He hung around the girl's house, but she didn't pay much attention to him.

She wanted to be a doctor and she had no time for boyfriends.

So Rodríguez enlisted in the Army and for three years he was away from his land.

He came back a couple of months with a permit and finally got, after so much time looking for him, that María del Refugio was interested in him.

By the second conversation she had already proposed to him.

She accepted.

They had a son who is now 23 years old and is a miner like his father, a daughter who has turned 23 and a 15-year-old teenager. The two men participate in the rescue efforts.

The vest is too big for the child's still child's body and his helmet dances when he leaves the perimeter of the mine stained with coal.

Rodríguez was still a soldier a couple of years after getting married.

The Army was going to transfer him to Toluca, but when the girl was born he abandoned his military career.

And at that moment, with two children in his care and without his salary, he was forced to do what so many other men in Coahuila do: descend into the coal pits.

“The danger was there, but he has never been afraid.

Sometimes he was beaten, but one well ran out and he looked for another one, ”says Elba Hernández (71 years old), the mother of María del Refugio.

Elba Hernández, the mother-in-law of Margarito Rodríguez Palomares, looks at the photograph of another miner, also trapped, on August 9. Emilio Espejel

Hernández and another of his daughters, Alicia, have been waiting for news of Rodríguez around the mine since Wednesday.

They have slept there most days.

Waiting in the open has swollen the woman's feet and she has had to bandage her thighs due to inflammation, but she is reluctant to leave.

She says that her son-in-law is an affectionate guy who treats her like a mother and that he is crazy about María del Refugio.

That when he's not working, all he wants to do with her is be with her at home.

Rodríguez has three grandchildren, aged seven, six and one, who depend on his salary as a miner.

The children's father never took care of them.

That's why he never thought of another job.

“They pay better here and I want the best for my family,” he told Hernández.

María del Refugio does not work.

All those mouths can be left without the only income they survive on.

Alicia Hernández gets angry with the world as she tells it, although her face is more one of resignation, of whom she is more than used to playing the game with bad cards.

And she proclaims to whoever can hear her: “That's why Mexico is not progressing!

That's why it's the way it is!"

“Give it back to us so we can continue singing”

Mario Alberto Cabriales Uresti, 45 years old

It is an old photograph that also has something of an amulet.

Time has given it a yellow veil, with the edges chewed and some scratches.

Mario Alberto Cabriales Uresti shows a laconic, lost look, as if he were looking for something beyond the photographer.

He has short hair and a mustache, sloping shoulders in a white plaid shirt with the top button undone, pointed-toe boots.

It does not seem like a happy portrait, but his sister María Guadalupe does not separate from him these days.

She carries it with her, she shows it, she caresses it.

She invokes her brother, conjures up her absence, claims what is hers from the well.

Cabriales Uresti entered the coal galleries when he came of age.

He only left them to try to earn a living in a maquila.

He lasted less than three months.

His salary was so low that he decided to risk his life scratching the black stone again.

And he returned to the depths of the earth.

She has an 18-year-old son who wants to go to college and a 16-year-old daughter. “My niece says that her father is alive, that she is not going to cry until she can hug him.

The boy does cry a lot”, narrates María Guadalupe.

The miner's wife, Hilda Alvarado, is diabetic.

She works as a seamstress in a maquila.

“They want to give their children everything,” says Cabriales Uresti's sister.

Relatives of Mario Alberto Cabriales waiting for news about the rescue, last Tuesday. Emilio Espejel

On the same day and at the same time of the collapse, María Guadalupe's granddaughter was born, a girl who has been called Mía Analí.

The woman has not yet been able to meet her because she does not want to be separated from the well.

“The day of the tragedy is her birthday,” says her friend, Elba Hernández.

Cabriales Uresti's father, an 81-year-old who says he wants to die working, repeatedly begged his son to leave the mine, although he had managed to avoid accidents so far.

“Once a pebble fell on him, but no more than a scratch.

In this well he had not complained [about the security conditions], in others he had.

But he said who was going to help support his family, ”continues the sister.

I would have left the mine if I had found another job.

“A matter of money, like everyone else”, synthesizes María Guadalupe.

Actually, what the miner likes the most is music, singing rancheras, corridos, banda, boleros.

They even hire him from time to time to entertain parties in the area.

The woman sends a plea—or a threat—to her God: "Give it back to us so we can keep singing."

"I have to go get people to tell them that the water is coming"

Jaime Montelongo Perez, 61 years old

Jaime Montelongo felt how the tunnels trembled.

He “he shouted: 'The water is coming!'

We ran to the boat and through the sheer cables we came, ”two of the miners who were able to escape the collapse thanks to Montelongo's warning told his relatives.

He ran with them, he already felt the air, he already saw the light above.

Then he stopped and retraced his steps, towards the interior of the galleries from which the water came: not to leave the rest of the companions alone.

"I have to go get people to tell them that the water is coming," he exclaimed.

And he couldn't climb anymore.

He, the oldest and veteran of the workers, was trapped.

"He knew the terrain very well and there are parts to which the workers could have been taken," his sister Angélica still confides.

Relatives of Jaime Montelongo Peréz wait in an improvised camp. Emilio Espejel

Montelongo entered the depths of the Coahuila land at the age of 14 to extract coal and never wanted to leave.

Now, at 61, he had been on a pension for a year, but still he refused to leave the galleries.

"My life is the wells, I can't sit at home, I'm just going to cripple," he justified himself before his sister.

He knows like everyone else, says Angélica, that the mine at some point collects the bill with interest, but he wants death to find him down there, his place in the world.

Montelongo comes from a lineage of miners.

His father was and his two sons, now in their thirties, are too.

The day of the collapse, they were going to relieve Montelongo on the second shift at the well.

“Very little children they got into coal like their dad,” says Angélica.

The mine has been cruel to the family.

This repeated tragedy has brought to mind another one, 16 years ago: one of the 65 workers who died in the gas explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine in 2006 was his cousin.

Her wife of more than 30 years, María Elena Chávez, is waiting for her husband inside the security perimeter set up by the Army.

Montelongo's veteran earned him the respect of his teammates.

“I taught all the people and helped the younger miners so they could get more money,” explains Angélica.

He says that he is a serious man, of few words but many friends.

In the camp where relatives are waiting, she has placed an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe with candles and photos of her brother: "Here we are, hoping that God will return him to us alive."

Shout your name well to well

Jorge Luis Martinez Valdez, 34 years old

Everyone calls Jorge Luis Martínez El Loco.

His relatives say that he is nervous and agile, hyperactive, like a big child who can never sit still.

The mother of his children, Carolina Álvarez Oviedo (33 years old) remembers above all the laughter.

Although they have been separated for six years, they are good friends.

His daughter Alison is 16 years old, the youngest, Jorge Lionel, 10. El Loco is skillful with his hands, he likes carpentry and making things, perhaps out of necessity, perhaps because what he cannot pay, he gets. build.

She made Alison some peacock feather earrings that the teenager always wears with her these days.

He carved wooden swords for the little one.

Martínez Valdez has always been a miner.

His life has been wandering around the wells that surround his house in the town of Cloete, municipality of Sabinas.

His older brother, Sergio (36 years old), and Álvarez Oviedo asked him dozens of times to give up coal, to try to find another job.

He never wanted to, he liked to maintain the false sense of autonomy that wells give, without closed schedules, charging in exchange for tons and not hours.

A month ago he had another accident, a nail went through his foot from side to side.

Within a few days he was working again.

Sergio Martínez, brother of Jorge Luis, in the living room of his house in Cloete, municipality of Sabinas, Coahuila. Emilio Espejel

Sergio Martínez tells stories about El Loco: playing as children in a river that a mining company drained to exploit it;

or when at home to eat sometimes there was only a bowl of soup and he gave his portion to his younger brother;

the thousand and one nights drinking beer, looking at the stars and telling each other stories;

the couple dances they went to with their wives when they were younger.

Sergio had been away from Coahuila for six months for work when the accident occurred.

He came running back, but now his head is a conditional constant: if he had called him, if he hadn't left... he has shouted his brother's name through all the wells, hoping to hear his voice again. the.

At the moment, no one responds.

Racing with wheelbarrows full of coal

Sergio Gabriel Cruz Gaitan, 41 years old

Sergio Gabriel Cruz Gaitán is athletic and sporty, so much so that his colleagues remember him running inside the tunnels with wheelbarrows full of coal.

"He is very skinny, he has never gained weight, but he is a good eater," says his father, who bears the same name.

Cruz Gaitán has spent more than 20 years looking for bread in the wells.

To fill in the salary holes, he sometimes cleans windows too.

His father was a miner all his life, but he always worked in regulated mines, safer than shafts, which lack the most basic safety conditions.

"My mother used to say that she didn't even go down to the wells," recalls Concha Cruz, the trapped miner's aunt.

“In the wells there is no security, but they come out at the time they want.

I don't know if my son was scared or not.

I say that, so as not to worry, he told me that everything was fine, ”says Sergio Gabriel Sr.

A relative of Sergio Gabriel Cruz Gaitán awaits news about the rescue. Emilio Espejel

Cruz Gaitán has two daughters, ages 10 and 15.

He is separated from his first wife and lives with his current partner in Florida.

The last time his father saw him was on July 10, the older girl's birthday.

Concha Cruz describes him as someone shy and somewhat shy.

She and her sister Cecilia de Ella live in Monterrey, but hitchhiked in Sabinas when they found out about the tragedy.

Since then they have not left the camp where relatives wait around the mine.

In their haste they could barely grab clothes.

They go down to the river to bathe and wash the few clothes they bring each day.

To the same river into which the coal-contaminated water that drains from the wells is dumped.

“We are very united, when a family member dies or something happens, we all go, like now,” says Concha Cruz.

She remembers family parties, the moments when everyone can get together, make stews, dance.

She saw her nephew for the last time, precisely, in one of those celebrations, on January 1, 2022. They laugh when talking about Cruz Gaitán, but they confess tired and without much hope.

The miner's father says that he can't take it anymore, that he wants the body of his son to be handed over to him now, even though he is dead.

"He has resigned himself," says Concha Cruz, "God is almighty, but now... just a miracle."

“We were united and poor”

Hugo Tijerina Amaya, 29 years old

Work in the wells grinds Hugo Tijerina's body.

He ends the days exhausted, wanting nothing more than to get home and rest with his family —says an aunt who prefers not to give his name—.

At the age of 15, he began to work in the coal galleries as a bonesetter —the one who sifts the ore from the stone— until he ended up as a charcoal burner, drilling the walls of the tunnel.

Hugo's brother, Raimundo, is one of the miners who was able to escape.

He got water in his lungs and was hospitalized.

As soon as he was discharged, he joined the rescue teams.

Laura Tijerina, Hugo's aunt, looks at the site where the rescue operation is taking place. LUIS CORTES (REUTERS)

Almost all the men in his family have ended up in the wells.

"They had no studies, they just had to look for work in the mines," explains his aunt.

Tijerina Amaya has three young children, two girls and a boy who appear in a Facebook photo of her posing next to a monument to the miners in the town of Barroterán.

In another of the images he appears, with a work helmet, covered in coal from head to toe.

In the first snapshot of him on social networks, it is the kid who wears the helmet, like a self-fulfilling prophecy: another life of the family destined to seek the future underground.

Tijerina Amaya is a family guy.

The week was spent in the mine, the weekend in housework.

"Even if he didn't like his job, he had to earn for the family," says his aunt.

He tried his luck in the maquilas, but a salary of 1,500 pesos a month is not enough to support three children.

He had to go back to the well.

"If we weren't humble, he would be somewhere else, but we were united and poor," the woman says.

“No salary is good enough to risk your life”

Jose Luis Mireles Arguijo, 46 ​​years old

José Luis Mireles started working in the well just two days before the collapse in exchange for the promise of a better salary.

"He grew up in the mines since he was 14, he had never considered leaving," explains one of his sons, Ronaldo, 24, before returning to rescue work.

“Their thing is coal.

They have always been there, it is what they know how to do”, expands Diana Flores (30 years old), one of the mothers-in-law of the miner.

Flores protects herself from the sun under a tent in the camp where relatives are waiting, whom the authorities do not allow to enter the security perimeter: cousins, aunts, mothers-in-law, sons-in-law... Mireles Argüijo knew about the dangers of the mine and He had had other accidents before.

He lived through floods, stones that crushed parts of his body, and on one occasion he was trapped with his father, who suffered "bursting of viscera, fractured pelvis, knee and ribs," according to

, and had to retire with a disability.

"[She works] more than anything for the salary, it's not much, but the way things are... Although I believe that no salary is good enough to risk one's life," the woman says.

Mireles Argüijo is called El Güicho.

He lives in Agujita and likes to play soccer.

He had three children, now ages 20, 24 and 29, from his first marriage.

He separated a long time ago and returned to have a child who is now three years old.

The three older ones participate as volunteers in the rescue work.

After the collapse, they arrived at the mine to help their father long before the authorities, cameras and police appeared on the scene.

Relatives of José Luis Mireles Argüijo, in the vicinity of the well where the miner is trapped. Emilio Espejel

carbon in the blood

Jose Rogelio Moreno Morales, 22 years old

José Rogelio Moreno Morales carries coal in his blood like an uncomfortable inheritance.

He shares the same name, the same job and the same destiny with his father: the two have been trapped underground since Wednesday, August 3.

He started working in the mine at just 17 years old, and now, at 22, at the age when other boys of his generation finish college, date or travel the world, he can meet an early death in a gallery as black as the mineral for which life is played.

He is the youngest of all the trapped miners.

In one of his photographs you can see a young man with soft and attractive features, disheveled bangs and an alert face who looks at the camera with a smile.

Although in the image that has become most popular since the collapse, Moreno Morales appears completely smudged with charcoal, wearing a basketball jersey as dirty as he is.

The only place on his body that doesn't appear to be charcoal is his lips.

You always go down into the tunnels and work in pairs, a safety measure as old as the trade.

The two José Rogelio, father and son, always work together, in this well and in the galleries in which they had had to dig before.

Vidala Morales, mother and wife, sums it up in an interview with NMás: "They are always partners."

The man who recorded the misery of the wells

Jose Rogelio Moreno Leija, 42 years old

The system of pulleys and ropes of the castle, just four rusty iron rods, creaks and growls as if it were about to give way.

José Rogelio Moreno Leija enters a precarious cabin in which only he and a wooden board that he brings with him fit.

All the safety he wears is a blue hard hat, a yellow raincoat, and knee-high black work boots.

A colleague supervises the scene and the boat in which the miner goes down into the shaft stumbles down.

Moreno Leija recorded his descent into the well on his mobile phone, some time before a flood caused the collapse that has trapped him underground since Wednesday, August 3.

His 22-year-old son also worked with him, who shares his name and his fate, as if in this region coal were a genetic component that is inherited with the blood and transmitted between generations.

The man had been in the mine since he was 12 years old, and when his son needed a job, he brought him with him.

Her other daughter, Yuliana, 25, denounced in an interview with the local press that they did not have the most basic security measures: "They took advantage of the need of my father, my brother and the other charcoal burners" .

President, I thank you for coming to take a picture with my pain.

Ramiro Torres Rodriguez, 24 years old

“Mr. President, I thank you for coming to take a photo with my pain, that of my family and the pain of each one of us who are here.

Thank you, and I hope your photographs will serve your policy."

Lucía Rodríguez made a video go viral last Sunday in which she rebuked the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for his short act of presence in the mine.

Her son, Ramiro Torres, has been trapped inside the well since August 3.

Lucía Rodríguez, the mother of the miner Ramiro Torres Rodríguez, in a screenshot of the viral video. Juana Moreno (RR. SS.)

Ramiro Torres started working on the landslide pit just two weeks ago.

His family says that since then there was presence of water and gas in the galleries.

“The miner will always be risking his life.

They don't know if they're going to come back today, if they're going to come back tomorrow.

But it is the livelihood of the house, ”said his sister, Sendy Jazmin, in an interview with the local press.

Torres Rodríguez has a nine-year-old daughter and had become a father again just a couple of weeks ago, this time with a boy.

His father and brother Aureliano are also miners.

Aureliano works with him in the wells, but the day of the accident he stayed home to rest.

The two participate in the rescue work as volunteers.

The family has not wanted to show photographs of Torres Rodríguez to preserve his privacy.

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