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Chile Miners Rescue: Mexico Rues Lack of 2006 Disaster Rescue
 Jo Tuckman - Guardian UK
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October 16, 2010
| | Chilean miner Samuel Avalos flashes the Chilean miner Samuel Avalos flashes the victory sign after being brought to the surface from the San Jose mine late this week. (Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images) | |
Anger and sorrow in Mexico as victims' families lament lack of willpower to save 65 men trapped and later killed in Pasta de Conchos methane explosion.
Mexico City - As the world revels in the successful rescue of the Chilean miners, the feelgood factor is tempered in Mexico by anger and sorrow that something similar was not tried when 65 miners were killed here in 2006.
"We've watched all the efforts and the will to return the miners to their families alive," relatives of the Mexicans wrote in a letter to the Chilean families this week. "We never saw that here."
The miners were trapped inside the Pasta de Conchos coalmine in northern Mexico after a methane explosion. They were thought to be about 150 metres below the surface, less than a quarter of the depth at which the Chilean miners survived for two months.
It took rescuers over two weeks to find the survivors in Chile. In Mexico the search lasted five days before it was called off on the grounds that the air inside the mine was intolerably toxic.
Rescue workers protested and the families were furious, but their campaign to at least get the bodies recovered soon faded from the news. Now the rescue of "Los 33" in Chile has brought attention back to "Los 65."
Mexico's human rights ombudsman Raul Plascencia said it was "regrettable that Mexico did not make the same effort." Others went further. Raul Vera, an outspoken Roman Catholic bishop from the area of the mine, believes there was a conspiracy to curtail the rescue effort in order to cover up how bad the safety conditions were.
"In Chile the government and the companies joined together to rescue the miners alive," he said. "In Mexico they joined together to bury them forever."
On Thursday the newspaper Reforma published a photograph of the families in Chile crying with joy next to an image of the desolation among families in Pasta de Conchos.
Francisco Salazar, the labour secretary who oversaw the rescue attempt, insisted everything that could be done was done. He said it was senseless to compare the rescue possibilities in the "inert" mine in Chile with the "explosive" mine in Mexico. |
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