Chile: Trapped Miners Get Brad Pitt, Censored News

They get laundry service, TV, three hot meals a day and even ice cream for dessert. Everyday life for the 33 miners trapped a half-mile underground now includes some of the comforts of home — at least those that can be lowered through narrow holes.

The miners are sleeping on cots that were sent down in pieces and reassembled, and each can look forward every weekend to eight minutes each of video chat time with his family using compact cameras and a phone that was disassembled to fit through the hole.

Settling in for the long wait, they have established a disciplined routine designed not only to keep them mentally and physically fit, but working together.

The plan, according to the rescue effort's lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is to leave them with "no possible alternative but to survive" until drillers finish rescue holes, which the government estimates will be done by early November.

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"Surviving means discipline, and keeping to a routine," Iturra said.

So when the miners do get moments to relax, they can watch television — 13 hours a day, mostly news programs and action movies or comedies, whatever is available that the support team decides won't be depressing. They've seen "Troy" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with Brad Pitt and Jim Carrey's "The Mask." But no intense dramas — "that would be mental cruelty," said Iturra.

The news the miners see — which in Chile includes frequent reports about the miners themselves — also is reviewed first by the team above, said Luis Felipe Mujica, the general manager of Micomo, the telecommunications subsidiary of Chile's state-owned Codelco mining company.

"Of course to do that you need to watch the news first and effectively limit access to certain types of information, or to put it vulgarly, censor it," said Mujica. "This is a rescue operation, not a reality show."

Though some miners have requested them, sending down personal music players with headphones and handheld video games have been ruled out, because those tend to isolate people from one another.