“There were fistfights”

Some of the men were so sure death was near that they simply climbed into cots in the cavern and would not get up. He described being overwhelmed with the dread of never again seeing his doting mother, Antonia Godoy, or meeting the boy his pregnant wife is carrying…

He said that the ever-present possibility of starving to death haunted the miners as their days disconnected from the world above stretched into one week, then two.

“We were getting eaten up,” he said, meaning that with little food, the miners were quickly losing weight and muscle mass. “We were moving but not eating well. We started to . . . get skinnier and skinnier.”

The dire situation would later lead to dark jokes about cannibalism, he said. “At that moment, no one talked about it,” he said. “But once it was over, it became a topic of joking, but only once it was over, once they found us.”