SAN JOSE MINE, Chile - 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, because of wounds created many years ago, and they've 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," Macias said. "And now she thinks the donations and help should go to her? No way."
The miners themselves passed the one-month mark underground on Sunday - apparently longer than any other trapped miners have ever had to endure - and they still face more weeks or months before rescue. The strain 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.
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The local government has been forced to institute several measures: The miners were asked to send up a note designating who could get their $1,600 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.
"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 some miners have skeletons in their unexpectedly opened closets.
Having to designate who gets their salary can put the men in a difficult situation, and limited communications give them little way to talk through the problems with squabbling relatives 2,300 feet above their heads.
Miner Claudio Yanez designated Cristina Nunez Macias, 26, his partner of 10 years and mother of their two daughters, an 8-year-old and a toddler.
Yanez's mother, Margarita, declined to be interviewed, but his brother, Carlos Yanez, 38, said the tensions had died down the last week, as the two women have had to make peace.
