Chile miners: Rescued foreman Luis Urzúa's first interview

Luis Urzúa stands with Chile's president Sebastián Piñera
Speaking from a hospital bed at the San José mine, shift foreman Luis Urzúa – the man who kept the Chilean miners alive for two months – said his secret for keeping the men bonded and focused on survival was majority decision-making.

"You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy," said Urzúa, his eyes hidden behind black glasses.

As nurses, doctors and psychologists rushed around him in a chaotic scene, the world's most famous foreman sat in bed, his arms folded across a thick chest, and spoke about making tough decisions 700 metres below ground when all hope seemed lost. "Everything was voted on ... We were 33 men, so 16 plus one was a majority."

However, as the first accounts of life for the trapped miners emerge, a complicated picture of squabbles, disagreements and even physical confrontations suggests that the official version may be rather sanitised.

Like a ship's captain, 54-year-old Urzúa was the last to leave after 70 days trapped below the Atacama desert. He was winched to the surface shortly before 10pm local time yesterday, amid extraordinary scenes of emotion and celebration across Chile.

President Sebastián Piñera greeted him with tears in his eyes. "You're not the same after this and neither are we," Piñera told him. "We will never forget this."

The government hailed the men as models of solidarity, but in a separate interview with the Guardian, Richard Villaroel, another member of "los 33", said the truth was not so simple. There was the waiting for death, the hopelessness, the petty squabbles and the nagging, unspoken fear of cannibalism.

Villaroel painted a more complex picture of the drama than the official version which has dominated media coverage. "We were waiting for death. We were consuming ourselves – we were so skinny."

Speaking as the men were whisked to a hospital in the nearby town of Copiapó, the 23-year-old mechanic said the mood inside the collapsed mine had swung wildly from despair and division to euphoria and unity.

The first 17 days were the worst – before a probe from the surface punched through to their cavern, as the miners prepared for a lonely, drawn-out death by starvation.

Villaroel thought he would never see his unborn child. "I was afraid of not meeting my baby, who is on the way."

Some men were so despairing that they climbed into bed and would not get out.

Immediately after the collapse at the mine at lunchtime on 5 August, Urzúa sent men to investigate. Some drove a pickup, inching up a ramp. With clouds of dust limiting visibility to less than a metre, they were unable to see the path and crashed. "We were trying to find out what we could do and what we could not," said Urzúa. "Then we had to figure out the food."

The daily food ration from the meagre stocks was about half a spoonful of tuna or salmon. Villaroel said: "We talked about it at the first meeting we had when we were trapped. We all agreed that we would all share the food that was there. You just had to rough it. Every 24 hours eat a small piece of tuna. Nothing else."

Their bodies shrivelled. Villaroel lost 12kg. "We were getting eaten up, as we were working. We were moving, but not eating well. We started to eat ourselves up and get skinnier and skinnier. That is called cannibalism, a sailor down there said. My body was eating itself up."

Did the men fear cannibalism of the other type? Villaroel paused. "At that moment no one talked about it. But once [help came] it became a topic of joking, but only once it was over, once they found us. But at the time there was no talk of cannibalism."

The water in the mine the men were forced to drink was polluted. "It had a bad taste. It had lots of oil, from the machines, but you had to drink it."

Urzúa tried to instil a philosophical acceptance of fate. "Every day [he] told us to have strength. If they find us they find us, if not, that's that. Because the probes [drilling towards the men] were so far away so we had no hope. Strength came by itself. I had never prayed before, but I learned to pray, to get close to God."

Villaroel said the men divided up into work groups. "We the mechanics were part of one group, we took care of the trucks. Other people organised the food, rationed it."

When the probe finally reached the men, euphoria swept them. "It was huge happiness for us all. We sang the national anthem as soon as the tube arrived. We painted it. With so much adrenaline in that moment we could not think."

Once the miners realised they would be saved they signed a "blood pact" to not reveal all that happened beneath the Atacama desert, he said.

In a video-conference with relatives last week, Dario Segovia, a 48-year-old drill operator, made a not-so-cryptic allusion to troubles: "What happens in the mine, stays in the mine."

One secret, it seems, is the division that plagued the group for a time. Despite the pact, there are several cracks in the official version of steadfast unity and solidarity between "los 33".

The earliest suggestion of divisions came in the first video the miners sent up: only 28 featured. The other five – Juan Aguilar, Raúl Bustos, José Henriquez, Juan Illanes and Villaroel – were nowhere to be seen.

Where were they? The authorities offered no explanation. José Villaroel, Richard's father, said the mechanic had been upset at colleagues who "showed off" for the camera. When relatives sent down cameras for each miner, Villaroel was among a small group who sent them back up.

Another miner, Osman Araya, told his brother Rodrigo that three groups had formed and that there were squabbles over space and work practices. Daniel Sanderson, a miner on the surface, said he received a letter from one of the trapped men describing disagreements which escalated into physical confrontations. "They broke into three groups because they were fighting. There were fist fights," said Sanderson, who ended his night shift and left the mine just hours before the collapse. Asked to describe the nature of the conflicts, Sanderson, replied: "That's part of the pact".

The Spanish newspaper El País reported that the five missing from the video had been working for a separate sub-contractor and had formed their own group dynamic – living apart from the others and plotting their own escape strategy involving tunnels. The division ended when the sub-contractor boss, who was on the surface, ordered the five to integrate.

An early test of the "pact" will be whether the men equally share income from the interview fees, book royalties, movie rights and gifts that are likely to flood in.

They have reportedly agreed to sign a legal contract promising to pool the bonanza. With some men likely to earn far more than others – notably Urzúa and Mario Sepúlveda, a natural showman – there may be temptation and pressure from families to make individual deals.

The men, in dressing gowns and slippers, got a glimpse of the attention their story has generated by peering out of their hospital windows and seeing throngs of journalists below. An estimated 1 billion people around the world watched the televised rescue.

Some of the men were expected to go home as early as today. Three required dental surgery and one was recovering from pneumonia, but otherwise the miners were in good shape, said Jorge Montes, the hospital's deputy director.

President Piñera visited the men and promised to review labour rights and health and safety laws.

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