It was the dirty laundry that did him in.
Yonni Barrios was one of the 33 men who found themselves trapped at the bottom of a century-old mine in Chile. They were worried about air. They were worried about food. They were worried about survival.
Barrios was worried that his wife and mistress would kill each other.
“After 17 days, the miners were found alive and well, and we started to send provisions down to them through a tiny borehole,” Jean Romagnol, one of the doctors involved in the rescue operation, told the BBC. “They would send up their dirty laundry to be washed. The problem was they sent the washing to Yonni’s wife . . . but she refused to do it or to hand it over to his girlfriend.”
The situation got so out of hand that Barrios, then 50, was forced to beg Romagnol, through notes to the surface, to lend him some clothes.
‘Deep down dark’
The movie “The 33,” which opens Friday, retells the momentous story of survival and rescue of the miners. It stars Antonio Banderas as Mario Sepulveda, the miner who became the de facto leader 2,300 feet underground.
Juliette Binoche plays Maria Segovia, a street vendor whose brother was one of the trapped miners. Segovia became known as La Alcaldesa or the “mayoress” of the encampment set up by family members near the mine.
But it’s Barrios, played by Oscar Nuñez of “The Office,” who brings some levity to the drama — as perhaps the only guy who fears what’s waiting for him at the surface.
On Aug. 5, 2010, when the San Jose Mine underneath the Atacama Desert collapsed, the men were feared dead. For 17 days, nothing was heard from them even as rescuers frantically drilled into the mine to try to make contact.
Led by Sepulveda, the group became extremely disciplined in their determination to survive underground. Every day, Sepulveda divided up the few provisions that were stocked in the mine, lining up 33 plastic cups into which he would scoop one teaspoon of canned fish and some water. Each miner also received two cookies, although the rations were cut in half as their food began to run out. They ate once a day and gathered together for their meal. Before eating, they fell to their knees and prayed together, “begging God to rescue them,” writes journalist Hector Tobar, who chronicled the miners’ plight in his book “Deep Down Dark.” Tobar’s account is the basis for the Hollywood movie.
When their few liters of bottled water were finished in a day, the men began to drink from water that was kept in industrial tanks used to wash dirty miners’ gloves. After several days, their hunger was so intense that they scavenged through trash cans. Some of the men found discarded orange peels, wiping off the black soot before they ate them. They licked the insides of empty cans of tuna, and pressed their ears to the stone walls of the mine, listening constantly for the sound of rescuers.
On the 17th day of their ordeal, they could clearly hear the sound of a rescuer’s drill as it bore through an underground tunnel. When the drill returned to the surface, rescuers found a note attached.
“We are all OK in the refuge, the 33,” it read.
Triangle turns ugly
For the next seven weeks, the miners survived on provisions sent from rescue teams on the surface and were able to communicate with their loved ones, whose improvised encampment was dubbed Camp Hope.
Barrios’ other troubles came to light when mistress Susana Valenzuela, then 50, tried to take her place with the other miners’ family members.
Barrios was still officially married to Marta Salinas, then 58, and she wasn’t about to relinquish her status in front of the world’s TV cameras.
Barrios had met Valenzuela, a bubbly redhead, at the grocery store he used to run with Salinas. The affair began when he offered to construct a piece of furniture for the mother of three. When Salinas discovered that her husband was carrying on with Valenzuela, she promptly kicked him out of the house.
But even though the break occurred a decade before the mining disaster, the couple never divorced. Salinas, who maintained that Barrios still visited her on a regular basis, flew into a jealous rage when Barrios told medical and rescue teams on the surface to deal with his girlfriend instead of his wife. The situation led to confusion. Barrios’ sisters stepped in to back Salinas and bar Valenzuela from Camp Hope for reasons that are still unclear. The two women and Barrios’ sisters almost came to blows at the camp when Valenzuela tried to muscle in on the vigil.
“They kicked me out of the camp, and so I started to set up an altar for him in the house,” said Valenzuela in an interview with Chile’s El Mercurio. “Children would bring me candles at night and we would all pray together.”
Then to complicate matters even further, as the day of his rescue approached, Barrios asked that both of the women be present.
‘They kicked me out of the camp, and so I started to set up an altar for him in the house’
- Susana Valenzuela
The question of whether the mistress or the wife would be at the dramatic rescue played out like a soap opera as the world waited for the miners to surface.
“He is crazy and cocky to think that I would do such a thing,” said Salinas. “I have a sense of decency.”
In the end, Valenzuela was there to embrace her lover as he emerged from the narrow capsule that would haul each of the miners to the surface — an event that was broadcast live to a billion viewers.
Shortly after his rescue, Barrios was offered $100,000 to be a spokesman for the infidelity Web site Ashley Madison, provided he stayed married to his wife.
It was an offer he refused, although he and the other miners did accept all-expenses paid vacations to Orlando and Greece. Most of the miners had an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican last month, where they presented him with a rock from the collapsed gold and copper mine.
The aftermath
But five years after they made headlines around the world, most of the miners are suffering psychological trauma and other health problems.
Barrios, who suffers from silicosis, a lung disease, has trouble sleeping and still pays regular visits to a therapist to deal with the trauma of being trapped for 69 days.
Barrios continues to live with Valenzuela in a modest home in one of the worst shantytowns of Copiapo, the northern mining city where the drama unfolded. After the rescue, police had to keep away the hordes of neighbors who assembled outside his home wanting a glimpse of the celebrity Lothario.
Valenzuela and Barrios said they didn’t appreciate the emphasis in news reports about Barrios’ love life. Barrios, who had been nicknamed “the medic” in the mine, helped the miners with their health problems. He had used the knowledge he gained looking after his diabetic mother to help his comrades and report their conditions to medical teams on the surface.
After the rescue, Valenzuela and Barrios shut themselves away from the world, refusing to read newspapers or watch TV reports that portrayed Barrios, who is short, soft-spoken and rather timid, as a wild Latin lover.
Unable to work, Barrios spends most of his days cooking and doing odd jobs around the house. He also travels the country to do speaking engagements about the accident.
“Everyone talked about me as ‘the lover,’ ” said Valenzuela in an interview with a Chilean newspaper. “But it wasn’t quite that way. No one ever mentioned that Yonni was separated, that we had already lived together for years. It was laughable.”
The miners have yet to receive any compensation from the owners of the San Jose Mine. Following an investigation into the collapse, a Chilean prosecutor decided not to go after the mine owners, a decision that the country’s own minister of mining called “unbelievable.”
Last week, some of the miners — though not Barrios — sued their lawyers in Chile, alleging that they were badly advised over negotiating the rights to their story for the Hollywood film, TV series and books. The miners were hoping that their promised cut from the proceeds of the film would ease their lives.
“They feel like they have been treated with a lack of respect,” author Tobar told Reuters.
If the miners do eventually get any settlements or payouts from the movie, it may become a drama for Barrios all over again — as it’s unclear whether if his wife, or his mistress, would be his beneficiary.