65 Miners Declared Dead

"We have to leave here now. We console each other because it is all God's will," said Juanita Artiaga, the sister of one of the missing miners as she and other family members went home on Saturday night.

No bodies have yet been found because rockfalls blocked the tunnels and some men were 1.5 miles underground.

Even as almost all the other families packed up their things and headed home, a few insisted they were staying.

Maria Guadalupe Hernandez, a 38-year-old mother of six whose husband of 22 years, Jose Alfredo Silva, was among the missing miners, said she was not giving up just because company officials and rescue workers said all the men were dead.

"Whatever they say, they are nobodies. For me, only God can have the final word on whether he takes him away or leaves him with me," she said at the mine entrance as two of her children slept under blankets on the ground.

"All the others can go, but I'm not leaving until they give him to me, dead or alive, however long it takes."

SHRINE

Around her, skinny dogs scrabbled for food in the dirt. Candles stood at a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's most revered Catholic symbol. In all, it was a desolate scene.

Army troops deployed at the mine all week left overnight, as did many volunteers who had made meals for the families.

Efforts to recover the bodies will begin as soon as experts clear lethal levels of methane gas over the next two days."

I have been to Nuevo Rosita and Sabinas where some of those mines are. What I like about going to those parts of Mexico, besides the beauty, is the character of the people.

The miners make $67 per week. They are trapped by their circumstances just like the miners in West Virginia are to a large extent.

Mexican coal in those parts can be extremely wet and nasty, with a sulfur content as high as 3.5%; it produces a huge amount of methane. The coal is used to run their large electric plants Carbon I and II. Mexico only exports about 1/3 of their coal. Ironically, the mines produce enough methane to run all of those plants in purpetuity. They don't have to mine a single rock. Mexico does this, evidently, because mining the coal is cheaper than converting to methane.