Race to find 5 miners still missing in Nicaragua cave-in

Rescuers in Nicaragua raced against the clock Saturday to locate five people still missing two days after a cave-in at an unlicensed gold mine following the overnight rescue of 20 of their colleagues.
"Hopefully we can find them in the coming hours," First Lady Rosario Murillo, the presidential spokeswoman, told reporters.
The search was under way after 20 miners were pulled out one at a time using a pulley system installed late Friday near the pit where they had been trapped.
"We give thanks to God our Lord and the Virgin Mary for having saved from death 20 artisanal miners," Murillo said, adding that President Daniel Ortega was aware of the efforts.
Most younger than 30, an AFP photographer described the survivors as "pretty tired, exhausted, dehydrated, muddy and dirty."
They were immediately embraced by family members and taken to the nearest hospital.
Pictures from the scene showed some of the miners, wrapped in blankets, lying on stretchers or the backs of trucks surrounded by ecstatic loved ones.   
The accident happened at a mine near the town of Bonanza, which is perched on the side of a hill in a region that is home to Nicaragua's biggest gold mines.
There had been 27 "guiriseros," or informal gold miners, working in the shaft when the mouth of the mine caved in because of a landslide triggered by heavy downpours, early Thursday morning.
Word of the collapse only emerged late Thursday because the site is so remote, local disaster official Martha Lagos said.
Two workers buried near the surface quickly managed to dig their way out after the collapse in the remote village of El Comal in northeastern Nicaragua, according to the local disaster prevention committee.
The group of 20 miners -- trapped in the mine shaft 800 meters (2,600 feet) underground -- could be heard screaming for help from under the rubble, said Omar Medina, a miner who helped with the rescue efforts.
"We heard the echo of their cries and answered," he said.
The five still missing may have fallen into a deep pit, said local authorities, explaining the rescue efforts were complex because the mine had been abandoned by companies and was being exploited anew by artisanal miners.
- Modern gold rush -
Business has boomed over the past decade for Nicaragua's "guiriseros" as the price of gold has risen from less than $400 an ounce to more than $1,200.
They descend into old shafts and look for remaining gold -- or dig even deeper to find new veins.
Informal gold mining is the main source of employment in Bonanza, where officials estimate there are 6,000 "guiriseros."
Many of them have migrated there from other parts of the country in a modern-day gold rush.
Bonanza's population has jumped in the past decade from around 8,000 to 40,000, according to a regional official.
Locals can earn $1,500 to $3,000 a month selling gold to foreign mining companies -- a relative fortune in Nicaragua.
Some informal miners work independently, while others are organized into officially authorized cooperatives.
Bonanza forms one point of the Central American country's so-called mining triangle in the remote Autonomous North Atlantic Region.
The latest accident comes four years after 33 workers were trapped deep inside Chile's San Jose copper and gold mine for more than two months, a drama that captured worldwide attention.
It took rescuers 17 days to drill a small shaft to establish contact, and more than two months of painstaking effort to open a passage wide enough to pull them out one by one.