Free 33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Page A

youthful rock music on his iPhone. His blithe answer to their concerns did little to encourage them; in response to the question of how he would overcome his inexperience, Golborne had quipped, “I’m a fast learner.”
    Piñera and Golborne collectively had only a superficial understanding of the mechanics of subterranean mining; their knowledge of how to organize a rescue of men trapped underground was even more minimal. The men turned to Codelco, the state-run mining conglomerate that produces 11 percent of the world’s copper supply. On August 9, after a barrage of phone calls and hastily arranged conference calls at the highest levels of Codelco and the government, Piñera found his general manager for the rescue. But no one bothered to tell the unwitting candidate.
    When the call finally arrived late at night on August 9, André Sougarret was in bed, ready to sleep. “The board of directors has decided, get yourself and a team . . . to help the people who are in charge of the rescue,” said his boss at Codelco. Sougarret, a calm, forty-six-year-old engineer with the hint of a smile never far away, listened attentively, but was not particularly moved by the message. He mentioned the call to his wife, then went to sleep at his home in Rancagua, Chile.
    Sougarret had been in mining since he was in his mid-twenties and never failed to make friends as he worked his way up the Chilean mining industry’s chain of command. With a specialty in underground mines, he was currently manager of mines at El Teniente, the world’s largest underground mine with 1,500 miles of tunnels and a workforce of 15,000. In 2009, this mine produced 400,000 tons of copper. If El Tenientewere an independent country, it would rank twelfth in the world for copper output.
    Sougarret was aware of the collapse at the San José mine but never considered it an affair of the state-run copper giant. The accident had occurred at a privately owned mine about 600 miles north—a disaster, yes, but someone else’s disaster.
    DAY 4: MONDAY, AUGUST 9
    At 10 am , Sougarret received another call, an urgent order: come to the presidential palace immediately. “I thought, this must be a mistake,” said Sougarret. “Why would they call me to La Moneda—the presidential palace?” Sougarret packed a tiny knapsack, grabbed his miner’s helmet and drove ninety minutes to La Moneda. He had passed by the building hundreds of times but never entered it. Ushered to the second floor—home to the office of the president and his top strategists—
Sougarret was told nothing, just asked towait.
    La Moneda is pockmarked with history and had he looked, Sougarret would have noticed the walls speckled with hundreds of now-patched bullet holes, a lingering testament to the September 11, 1973, military coup d’état, which blasted then-president Salvador Allende from this seat of power. Allende, an aristocratic physician with a deep allegiance to his socialist revolution, resisted the army attack, firing back from a second-story window with a machine gun, allegedly a gift from Fidel Castro. Allende’s body was found after the siege, with a single bullet hole in his head. Most historians agree it was suicide. For the next seventeen years General Augusto Pinochet ran Chile with a combination of Spanish Inquisition torture techniques and highly modern economic reform. Three thousand Chileans died at the hands of the military, but the steady economic growth established Chile as Latin America’s most stable economy—a juxtaposition that for the subsequent decades spawned zealous foes and fanatical fans of the now-deceased general.
    Following Pinochet’s rule, bloody memories of torture and execution convinced a generation of Chileans to boycott right-wing politicians. From 1990 to 2009, the country was run by a series of progressive presidents who attacked poverty, invested in infrastructure,