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Miner Claudio Yanez applauds as he is carried away on a stretcher after being rescued from the collapsed San Jose mine where he had been trapped with 32 other miners for over two months in 2010 near Copiapo, Chile.
In the altiplano, the descendants of the region's pre-Columbian natives (mostly Aymara and Atacama Indians) herd llamas and alpacas and grow crops with water from snowmelt streams. To the far south, in the Chilean capital of Santiago, urbanites still consider the desert a wasteland, impervious to environmental damage. Rumors persist that in the mid-1980s the government proposed creating a dumpsite for the world's nuclear wastes in the Atacama, but backtracked to avoid a public relations disaster.