On April 7, 2026, a 42-year-old miner named Francisco Zapata was discovered alive after being trapped for 14 days at the far end of a three-kilometer-long tunnel full of sludge and water, 300 meters below the surface.
The dramatic story of how Zapata was found and rescued is told by Julio Saldaña, leader of the eight-man team that did it.
La Mina Santa Fe is located in a remote spot 70 kilometers southeast of Mazatlán. After extracting gold and silver from the mine, the operators were storing the liquified tailings in a dam, unwisely located directly above one of the tunnels leading into the mine. The “mud” in this pool consisted of finely ground silica, clay, and silt, possibly mixed with reagents like cyanide plus traces of arsenic, lead, zinc, and manganese, along with sulfide minerals.
On March 25, the floor of the tailings pool collapsed, and 17,500 cubic meters of toxic sludge poured into the mine. Most of the men inside managed to escape with their lives but, six days after the event, three men were still not accounted for.
A call for help went out to Mexico’s most experienced rescue teams, including Guadalajara’s elite Urban Search and Rescue (USAR or Búsqueda y Rescate Urbano) unit.
“At 8 p.m. on March 30, 40 of us set out from Guadalajara,” USAR commander Julio Saldaña told me. “We drove nonstop for 24 hours with 16 tons of equipment and two dogs. When we arrived, we found that the Army, the Navy, Protección Civil and the Red Cross were all present … and they were all frustrated.”
The new arrivals discovered that both of the mine’s entrance tunnels were filled with tailings mud.
“There was simply no way to proceed,” said Saldaña. “That stuff was not your ordinary mud. If you put your foot into it, you couldn’t pull it back out. The cohesion of that muck was unbelievable!”
The missing miners were at the end of three kilometers of this toxic sludge, and all the rescuers were trying to figure out how to reach them.
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