The Chilean miners: Ready for fame?

“They have left a mine for what could be a minefield,” said Ken Herman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As the world watched the rescue last week of 33 Chilean miners who’d been trapped underground for 69 days, one had to wonder if they’re ready for what happens next. The miners—or “Los 33” as they’re now known in Chile—stepped straight from the rescue capsule into a blizzard of movie offers and interview requests and the kind of intrusive public curiosity usually experienced by Hollywood celebrities. Sudden fame and wealth can be disorienting for anyone. For simple men trying to piece their lives back together after a horrendous ordeal, “the perils are obvious. Happy endings don’t always last.”

Let’s just hope the miners don’t waste this golden marketing opportunity, said Linda Thaler in HuffingtonPost.com. When they stepped out of their long dark night to hug their children, wives, and, in one case, mistress, these guys became overnight “folk heroes.” The window of opportunity won’t last long, but right now each one of them “has as much branding and endorsement potential as LeBron James.” Celebrity does have its pressures, said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an editorial, but they don’t quite stack up to the pressures of a life spent working in a copper mine for $1 an hour. If Los 33 can stick together with the same brotherhood and smarts that got them through the past two terrible months, “handling their 15 minutes of fame should be a cinch.”

Unfortunately, that loyalty already “seems to be fraying,” said Alexei Barrionuevo in The New York Times. Before their rescue, the miners swore pacts not to discuss the awful first 17 days of their ordeal before rescuers found them, and to split equally any proceeds from their story. Already, though, individual miners are selling their stories for anywhere between $40 and $25,000—one explaining that “I have to think about myself.” They’ve denied rumors of miner-on-miner sex, but other rumors have surfaced, of fistfights and breakdowns in order as they argued over food and waited for death. “The men and their families will not escape our hunger for their story,” said Isabel Hilton in the London Independent. Once we learn the details of what happened down there—and we will—the men’s solidarity will be further fractured as we sort them into heroes, villains, leaders, and cowards, and the various other roles required of any “modern fairy tale.”

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