Mexican Miner Rescued After 14 Days Underground

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio looks at the astonishing rescue of miner Francisco Zapata Nájera, after two weeks underground, and the dangers of mining across the region. 

Transcript

Rescuer 0:07

Muy bien Zapata, venimos a ayudarle. Muy bien, Zapata.

Jon Bonfiglio 0:25

That was the moment when Mexican military divers found Francisco Zapata Najera, 42 years old, alive and underground after two weeks trapped. Zapata was stuck in the Santa Fe mine in Sinaloa, 300 meters, nearly a thousand feet below ground after an embankment collapsed at the gold mine. The rescue was recorded live as it happened. Well, the arrival to see the man was recorded live as it happened. Underground, he was standing waist deep in water when the military divers, a rescue team arrived. The collapse was linked to a structural failure that caused water to flood the mine, trapping four men, while 21 others escaped. And the accident has raised questions, inevitably, once again about safety standards in Mexico's mining sector, where fatal incidents remain uh depressingly common in what is one of Mexico's most dangerous industries, with accidents, men trapped underground, and fatalities occurring regularly. Most recently in 2022, 10 miners died in the El Pinavete disaster in Coahuila, and the country's worst disaster on record took place in 2006 in the Pasta de Conchos mine, where an explosion killed 65 workers. And it's not just Mexico Specific, it is a Latin America-wide problem. In Brazil, for example, the collapse of the Fundao Tailings Dam in 2015 stands as the largest environmental disaster in the history of Latin America and the global mining industry. It was a catastrophic event which released around 62 million cubic meters of mining waste into the Dosce River basin. And uh in Chile, Chile also has its fair share of uh of renowned, well, sort of infamous issues and accidents, and then some renowned rescues. And there in 2010, a section of the San Jose mine collapsed, trapping 33 miners, a full 2,300 feet underneath the Atacama Desert. 17 days later, uh, a rescue team discovered that the miners had actually survived the initial accident, but were struggling to survive. And then the world's attention was on the mine for over two months until eventually, an incredible 69 days after the collapse, the 33 miners were brought back to the surface alive and well. Mining is really poorly regulated right across the region. Oftentimes it's illegal or at least unsanctioned, uh, done without permits, and there's no sort of uh best practice or protocol for uh for for mining in the in the area, and even less so for um rescue attempts that um that take place. An added complication as well is that there tends to be a pretty significant presence of um of organized crime in the in the sector. As we've said many times before, organized crime looks for anything which is which manages to turn round um money pretty quickly in significant amounts of it, and the mining sector really does uh has the capacity to to do that. And organized crime uh has an innate belief, of course, that people are expendable. So that's also a really significant feature and sort of uh problem that relates to to mining across the uh across the region. Those uh Chilean miners, um, by the way, are the longest surviving miners in a mine disaster in history, as far as we uh know, and were eventually rescued in a specially built capsule. Now, again, they would they survived 69 days, nothing else really comes comes close. There's some sort of tales of uh uh um people surviving for a couple of weeks, three weeks really maximum the 69 is is completely unprecedented. And um uh Mr. Zabata, who was found after 14 days, is definitely at the upper end of potential survival stories. Very few people survive underground for that length of time.