Up and coming
… There is the manmade moon, a glowing white globe emblazoned “Carabineros de Chile,” an absurd little art installation in this place that needs no police, where everything is free, where millions of dollars in TV equipment sits out all night unprotected, where everyone is focused on one thing.
The famous Atacama silence? Don’t talk to me about silence. Because I won’t hear you over the Chilean cumbia from the first camp by the bodega, the seven (countem!) gasoline-powered generators out back of the BBC camp and, audible for kilometers, Plans A, B and C, roaring and grinding and bashing bedrock to powder. This isn’t a place for silence. This is a working mine. The ore is not 8 grams per ton of gold nor 1% copper sulfate, but 33 bodies of living human flesh, walking and driving around a half mile under our little foggy village.
Setty Southam, “foreign press badge number 422”, reports on the media circus that is Camp Hope, Chile as we anticipate the imminent rescue of 32 trapped Chilean (and one Bolivian) miner.
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