The exclusive, official story of the survival, faith and family of Chile’s thirty-three trapped miners, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
When the San Jose mine collapsed outside of Copiapo, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for sixty-nine days. The entire world watched what transpired above ground during the gruelling and protracted rescue, but the saga of the miners’ experiences below the earth’s surface—and the lives that led them there—has never been heard, until now.
For Deep Down Dark, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hector Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales. These thirty-three men came to think of the mine, a cavern inflicting constant and thundering aural torment, as a kind of coffin, and as a church where they sought redemption through prayer. Even while still buried, they all agreed that if by some miracle any of them escaped alive, they would share their story only collectively. Hector Tobar was the person they chose to hear, and now to tell, that story.
The result is a masterwork of narrative journalism—a riveting, at times shocking, emotionally textured account of a singular human event. Deep Down Dark brings to haunting, tactile life the experience of being imprisoned inside a mountain of stone, the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and the spiritual and mystical elements that surrounded working in such a dangerous place. In its stirring final chapters, it captures the profound way in which the lives of everyone involved in the disaster were forever changed.