Mining and Undervelopment: A Dangerous Cocktail

For sixty long days, the international gaze was fixed expectantly on the San José mine, located 45 kilometers from the Chilean city Copiapó: the site where 33 miners had been trapped at a depth of 700 meters by a collapse that blocked the entrance to the copper deposit belonging to the mining company San Esteban.
The unexpected event was resolved when the miners emerged to the surface alive in a capsule named Fénix 2, after an immense operation organized by the Chilean government.
In front of the lenses of television cameras from around the world this was, without a doubt, a miracle that was celebrated with joy and happiness- and even with jokes alluding to the miners' long stay below ground or the fact that for one miner, an amorous conflict involving his wife and lover awaited him at the surface.
What the major media sources left out while they filmed emotional reports about the survivors' lives, the efficiency of the rescue, and the genius of the Chilean authorities, were the enormous irregularities in the San José miners' safety regulations.
In fact, Juan Illanes, one of the survivors, declared that after the operators inspected the mine the same day of the collapse, they asked permission to return to the surface. The company ultimately refused their request.
These declarations were corroborated by two more miners, Jimmy Sánchez and Omar Reygadas, but the company refuted the survivor's versions, claiming in a press release that nobody commented about unusual noises or explosions in the premises that day.
Faced with irrefutable evidence of anomalies in the field of mining, the national government began a purge of various bodies such as the National Service of Geology and Mining of Chile, relieving the director Alejandro Vío from his post on August 10, five days after the disaster.
Also, on August 23, the Commission of Experts for Job Security was created. On the 27th of the same month the creation of an office of mining supervision was announced; both measures came a little too late to prevent the grave incident caused by irregularities in workforce safety in a sector of great importance to the national economy.
But Chile is not alien and isolated in the international context; in fact, incidents of this magnitude (many of which could be described as true catastrophes) can be observed in the daily world news cycle.
Even as the news of the rescue of the miners of Copiapó was still fresh in collective memory, a series of tragic events around the world occurred. These were little mentioned but show us the precarity of the safety conditions of the miners of the world, particularly in underdeveloped or developing countries.
In Ecuador, on October 14, a gold mine collapsed in the south of the country; four operators died.
Just a few hours later there was another collapse in a coal bed in Colombia. Again four men passed away.
The next day in China, 37 people were killed by a gas explosion in a coal mine in the province of Henan.
On October 28, also in China, 12 operators died when a coal mine flooded.
Eleven miners were buried by a serious accident in the African country of Rwanda on October 31. The majority were illegal workers.
South America, Asia, Africa: three continents where precarious work conditions and infractions are systematic. This is particularly notable in this field of raw material production that handles millions of dollars each year, where renowned multi-national companies are literally countries in which the national (and supra-national) law does not apply, where the royalties paid to local governments are paltry in comparison with the colossal earnings that the companies take home in the form of minerals to be refined.
It even reaches the absurd point that, according to a report published conjointly by various NGOs (Christina Aid, Third World Network Africa, Tax Justice Network Africa and Southern Africa Resource Watch), the principal mining companies evade more than 68 million Euros in taxes in various African countries through fraudulent mechanisms such as the falsification of accounts.
If there's anything clear in all this, it is that the increasing precarity of mining safety not only threatens the workers' integrity and exposes them to unnecessary risks, but can also save these same companies (that refuse to pay taxes in Africa) huge sums of money at the expense of their employees.
Facing all of this are the workers, the miners and mine operators, the people that make the industry work and that risk their health and their lives every day. Without them the industry could not advance; the materials for cell phones, cars, train tracks and daily energy would remain in the heart of the earth.

-SOME CONCLUSIONS -
It is of the utmost importance that developing countries and underdeveloped countries put their foot down regarding work security in order to avoid the despotism of these stateless companies that do not recognize the superiority of human life over capital gain. No state can permit an economic sector to violate the safety and health of its workers.
The struggle is not simple, as interests in the sphere of politics and business are easily entangled. However, it is of utmost importance that these companies, if they want to continue working in the field, radically modify their work conditions. Whether their employees live in England or Bangladesh, in Canada or Bolivia, the conditions should be the same: optimal conditions of safety and well-being. If this is not achieved, the experience of those 33 men in the pits of hell will only serve to fill newspapers.