Chile mine disaster exposes old family feuds

While a fire warms their campsite, the icy feeling between Cristina Nunez Macias and her mother-in-law is as palpable as the cold Atacama desert.

Both women are here to support the same man, 34-year-old Claudio Yanez, one of the 33 trapped miners in Northern Chile. But they barely acknowledge each other, thanks to wounds created many years ago, and have been fighting over who should get Yanez's salary and donations that have come from all over Chile.

"We have barely spoken in six years," said Macias. "And now she thinks the donations and help should go to her? No way."

The disaster that will likely keep the miners underground for months also has shaken the fault lines in their families above. Some squabble over who should get the miners' August wage, who should share in the donated food.

The local government has been forced to institute several measures: The miners were asked to send up a note designating who could get their 800,000 peso ($NZ2200) salary for August. There are separate bank accounts for each miner, which no family member can touch.

Social workers have been brought in to sort out who gets boxes of food, household cleaners and clothes donated by unions, companies and individuals -- helping settle disputes among relatives of about half the families of the trapped men, said Pamela Leiva, the head social worker at the camp of relatives waiting near the mine.

"For each miner, sometimes there are as many as three families to consider," she said. "And to understand them, we have had to dig into the lives of the miners before the accident."

Those lives, just like lives the world over, can be complicated.

There are men who have been living with a partner for years while still formally married to a woman from whom they separated long ago, the result of a rigid divorce law. In a few cases, the legal wife of a miner has come forward looking for donations, said Leiva.

There are brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers on both sides of a miner who don't get along, or who depended on his salary to survive, meaning they can't just wait long months for their loved one to be rescued.

And of course, some miners have skeletons in their unexpectedly opened closets.

Leiva confirmed a story told by other witnesses: One miner's wife and lover were both keeping vigil at the camp. When the two realized they were both praying for the same man, they had a very public argument, and the wife tore down a poster with the miner's photo that the mistress had set up.

The mistress taped her poster back up, and beneath several poems and prayers she had dedicated to him, she added, as if defiantly: "Tu Senora," or "your wife."