One year after the mine collapse in Coahuila, Mexico: The interminable wait to locate the bodies of the 10 miners buried 197 feet underground

On August 3, 2022, 10 miners were buried underground when the Pinabete coal shaft in Sabinas, Coahuila, Mexico, collapsed. A year later, their bodies remain there. In the first days after the collapse, the mission was a frantic and desperate struggle to rescue the workers alive, but now the sole objective is to recover the remains. The miners’ relatives are experiencing an interminable deferred mourning period, and the goal is to find the dead so that their families can finally bury them in graves marked with names and surnames, where they can mourn the dead, bring flowers, and get some closure after the traumatic experience.

Recovering the bodies has been a slow process. After four months of apparent inactivity, last December the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) began to use dynamite at the Pinabete mine. The objective was to open a huge pit to access the miners’ remains, which are about 197 feet (60 meters) underground. The main obstacle to doing so is that the tunnels were flooded with water as a result of their proximity to the Sabinas River.

Now, the salvage teams are a little closer to achieving their goal. Family members hope to recover the bodies in one or two months. In February, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador estimated that the bodies would be found in December, but official estimates have already been wrong more than once: at the end of August, after weeks of insisting that the rescue was imminent, Civil Protection gave a proposed time frame of between six and 11 months.

“It has been a difficult process, [one that’s involved] going to appointments with psychologists. My children aren’t getting over it; it is very different when they tell you that ‘a person died’ and you see him, he is in a casket, you bury him, you know where he is buried. We know where he is, but we don’t have access to that part of the pit,” explains Carolina Álvarez, the widow of Jorge Luis Martínez, one of the buried miners. “[Recovering the bodies] is something we all need to be at peace, calm. There are moments of anguish, of loneliness, when you start to think about many things, and you want it to be over. Not because of the fatigue of going [to work] every day; it’s not that. It’s no longer the heart [that aches]; it’s the soul that hurts so much. More so for my children, it seems to me that they need [closure] to be at peace.”

From hope to anger

Last August, the area around the El Pinabete mine was an adrenaline-filled scene of soldiers, rescue teams, family members refusing to go home and neighbors dropping off supplies. Despite the unlikelihood of rescuing the miners, there was a certain hope in the air, a belief that the 10 men would be seen alive again. Every minute was important, each small piece of news was seen as an opportunity for progress. But time went by, and hope gave way to a state of agony, frustration and anger.

On August 29, Andrés Manuel López Obrador subtly declared that the miners were dead. In his daily morning speech, which at the time was plagued with questions about the condition of the 10 men, he stopped talking about a “rescue” effort and referred to the response to the tragedy as an operation to “recover the bodies.” The news did not go over well with the men’s relatives, who grudgingly had to accept the obvious: that no human being can survive for a month in a cave 196 feet underground without drinking water or food, in absolute darkness.

It would be inaccurate to call the collapse an accident. Rather, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. The Pinabete mine was unusual in that the shafts through which the precarious elevator that the miners used to descend barely fit. It lacked even the most basic safety conditions, such as a list of who had entered and exited the mine. Pinabete was also located next to the old Las Conchas mine, which was abandoned decades ago. The Sabinas River, just a few hundred meters away, had flooded the abandoned Las Conchas tunnels for years.

On August 3, a deep, dry rumble shook the ground around the Pinabete mine as the miners were working in the shafts. The cause was the accumulated water at Las Conchas, which had finally made its way through the cracks in the subsoil and was sweeping through the tunnels, where the workers were cutting, at full speed. A few miners managed to escape. The 10 unluckiest ones remained below.

This Thursday, the victims’ relatives will hold a mass where the shafts used to be to honor the miners. The widows have continued to check that the operations are continuing. “We despaired because we saw no progress. Our hands are tied, and we can only wait for them to do their work, but for a few months now, we have been seeing progress. That has calmed us down; [it’s] not like [it was] at the beginning when we saw so much water everywhere,” says Álvarez.

She says that Civil Protection (PC) has promised to tour the pit on the 15th: “There is very little water left; they hope that there won’t be any water left over the next few days to begin the rescue.” A team of forensic anthropologists will begin to search the terrain to exhume the remains. This newspaper contacted Laura Velázquez, the PC coordinator in charge of dealing with the relatives, but there was no response before this article was published.

Compensation and arrests

A two-pronged struggle began for the families in August. On the one hand, they were mourning the death of a loved one. On the other, they were fighting for compensation. The government provided each widow with 4.7 million pesos (about $250,000). Alvarez explains that, in her case, she has also been receiving a widow’s pension and an orphan’s pension for her two children, a total of 12,000 pesos ($700) a month. The El Pinabete mining company responsible for the extraction has declared bankruptcy. After the mine collapsed, the company started to pay the wives their husbands’ salaries — or at least a percentage of it — until the miners’ remains were recovered. At first, the company provided a salary of about 4,000 pesos ($23.11) a week, but the money stopped coming in October and has not resumed.

For the moment, two people have been arrested for the collapse. The first was Cristian Solís Saavedra, a sort of foreman, who was arrested in September. The families consider him to be a mere figurehead who only appeared in the contracts as the legal representative in case there were any problems. In May, Luis Rafael García Luna Acuña, one of the presumed owners of the company, was also arrested and charged with the “crime of illicit exploitation of an asset belonging to the nation.” A third person, Arnulfo Garza Cárdenas, is at large, and Interpol has issued an international warrant for his arrest.

The Attorney General’s Office believes that García Luna Acuña, Solís Saavedra and Garza Cárdenas “incurred criminal liability by allowing coal mining activities to be illegally carried out in the shaft.” However, the El Pinabete company had a contract with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) for 75 million pesos ( around $4.3 million). According to an investigation by the Animal Político website, the CFE described the extraction as “safe” and agreed to purchase all minerals extracted between 2020 and 2024.

Mining experts and the victims’ families point to CFE as another culprit in this tragedy. The agency is the key player in López Obrador’s electricity reform, and 99% of the coal it buys comes from the Coahuila coal region.

But since the collapse, the mining company has not adopted new safety measures; the activity in Coahuila’s mines continues as usual. This July, two men died in another shaft accident, also in Sabinas. Year after year, victims continue to mount. According to the records kept by the victims’ families, over 3,100 miners have died in this region since coal mining began at the end of the 19th century.

Coahuila is a poor area, and the only employment opportunities are in the mines or in the maquilas, the factories, which are safer but far more precarious. Experts warn that if new economic outlets are not provided and safety conditions in the mines are not regulated, more miners will die in Coahuila.

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