Chile: Hope in depths of darkness

On the football pitch he was known as el Mortero Magico - the magic mortar.

Throughout the 1980s, Franklin Lobos had a glittering career in the Chilean premiership, playing for top side Cobresal and representing his country in its attempt to make it to the 1984 Olympics.

Fans in the dusty northern city of El Salvador, where Cobresal is based, remember a stocky midfielder with powerful free kicks and the ability to hurl the ball prodigious distances.

Now the 53-year-old is one of the 33 men trapped in the San Jose gold and copper mine, waiting to be brought back to the surface in an audacious rescue attempt that has captivated the world.

As a new video was released yesterday showing the 33 miners trapped almost 700m underground provided the best images yet of the conditions in the mine in northern Chile, emergency workers hoped to begin construction on a concrete platform which will soon house 28 tonnes of vital digging equipment.

Engineers will bore a shaft large enough to winch the men to safety.

Attention has shifted to the remarkable resilience and bravery shown by "los 33".

From the 63-year-old mining veteran who has finally started writing love letters to his wife after three decades of marriage, to the group leader who kept his men alive by rationing them to one tablespoon of canned tuna a day, the men's personal battles have kept Chileans glued to their television screens as they pray for their rescue.

Lobos' story is typical for a man born into a poor region of the world, where mining is one of the few regular forms of employment.

The San Jose mine lies within the Atacama Desert, a 103,600sq km plateau trapped by the Andes and Chile's coastal mountain range.

It is regarded as the driest place on Earth, with some Atacama weather stations yet to record a single drop of rain. The desert is an unforgiving place to live in, but what draws people to the area are the vast deposits of copper, gold and silver lying beneath the windswept landscape.

Although Chilean mines tend to have better safety records than their neighbours, scores of wildcat mining operations have sprung up as people cash in on the current high prices of metals such as copper and gold.

As a young man, Lobos avoided the mines, thanks to his football skills, spending most of the 1980s at Cobresol.

One of his teammates was Ivan Zamorano, who went on to become one of Chile's best-known strikers.

"When you played with [Lobos] he was mature, simple and humble," recalled Zamorano, who sent a note of support to his former teammate down the 15cm borehole that is the only link between the trapped miners and the surface.

"I am the grandson of a miner. My father was a miner and my uncles were too, so I know the suffering miners go through. I pray that Franklin and the other miners are well and can be rescued alive."

But playing for a Chilean team, even a premiership side that won the league, was no golden ticket to a guaranteed income for life. "The Cobresal team never paid huge salaries," said Manuel Rodrigo Araneda, a former technical director of Cobresal in the 1980s.

"The salary was about 100,000 pesos ($10,900) between 1983 and 1989 and [Lobos] would save all of it."

Many of the companies backing local football teams in northern Chile also own mines and it is not unusual for older players to be offered employment in the copper and gold industries once they are past their sporting peak.

Araneda said Lobos had agreed to work in the mine to help fund his daughters, Karina and Carolina, through university.

In a heartfelt note which was sent down the borehole, Carolina said joked about how her father could use his time underground to shape up for football.

Praise, meanwhile, has been lavished on Luis Urzua, the 54-year-old former football coach whose rationing system helped the men survive for 18 days.

- INDEPENDENT