Mexican miner found alive after 13 days underground, Santa Fe mine collapse in Sinaloa followed tailings dam failure, rescue turns into slow engineering job while two remain missing

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A miner in Mexico was found alive on Tuesday after spending 13 days trapped underground following the collapse of the Santa Fe mine in El Rosario, Sinaloa, according to BNO News. The man, 42-year-old Francisco Zapata Nájera, was located after more than 312 hours of rescue work triggered by a failure involving a tailings dam that sent muddy waste into the mine’s access points.

The collapse on 25 March illustrates a recurring problem in mining disasters: the event that injures workers is often not the initial cave-in but the secondary effects that rapidly remove escape routes. In this case, officials said waste slurry flowed through both the north and south entrances, blocking exits and isolating workers in the central part of the mine. Once access points are choked, rescuers are forced into slow, high-risk excavation and stabilization work where every meter dug must be balanced against the chance of further collapse and the need to keep air moving.

Zapata Nájera is the second miner rescued alive from the incident. BNO News reports that another worker, 44-year-old José Alejandro Cástulo Colín, was brought out five days after the collapse. In an interview with Mexican broadcaster N+, Cástulo described seeing the mud rush in, abandoning his machine, and climbing into a vertical shaft to wait out the flow—an improvised decision that likely reduced exposure to the slurry and bought time.

Survival stories can obscure the arithmetic of rescue operations. A mine filled with tailings is not just a confined space; it becomes a moving, settling mass that can harden, shift, and cut off oxygen pathways. The longer the operation runs, the more it becomes an engineering project—clearing spoil, shoring passages, monitoring gases—while families and employers wait for updates that depend on conditions underground rather than promises above ground.

Two miners were still missing as of publication, BNO News said. The discovery of Zapata Nájera alive changes the tempo of the operation but not its constraints: rescuers must now extract him safely through the same unstable environment that trapped him.

Rescuers found Francisco Zapata Nájera at about 1:50pm on Tuesday, 13 days after the Santa Fe mine’s entrances were blocked by tailings. Two of his co-workers remained unaccounted for.