Free 33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Page B

promoted personal freedoms and signed free trade agreements with dozens of nations. The 2010 election of Piñera—a centrist politician from Renovación Nacional, a right-wing party—buried the ghost of Pinochet and ushered in a new kind of government: technocrats with something to prove. The Piñera inner circle knew that being seen as right wing in Chile meant being permanently on probation—that if they failed to lead Chile, it might well be another generation before any of them received a second chance.
    Inside La Moneda, Sougarret felt uncomfortable. He had dressed informally, in blue jeans. His miner’s helmet and knapsack were in contrast to the whirl of smartly dressed suit-
and-tie-clad men. A phalanx of journalists hovered in the halls, confirmation that something urgent was happening. Yet Sougarret was ever more confused; in two hours hardly a word had been spoken to him.
    Finally the message came—“Let’s go!”—and Sougarret was whisked to the basement garage where he boarded the presidential motorcade. Flanked by cars, each with Uzi-toting bodyguards, Sougarret crossed Santiago in a rush of protocol. Entering the airport, the convoy ignored the commercial gates and headed to Air Force Group 10, home base for the presidential jet. Sougarret still had had no briefing, no word on his mission or destination. Aboard the plane, President Piñera summoned Sougarret to his private cabin, pulled out a sketch pad and made a crude drawing of the mine and the safety shelter and issued a directive: get them out. Piñera told the still-baffled engineer to design the best possible rescue plan. Piñera emphasized that the operation was assured the full backing and resources of the government.
    Only then did Sougarret realize he had been drafted to lead the mission. Thirty-three lives were in his hands and no one had asked if he was available, willing or felt capable. Sougarret would later compare the experience to being kidnapped.
    Arriving at the darkened camp, Sougarret was further disoriented. He had never visited the San José mine, and again, without warning, his responsibilities grew. President Piñera announced to the gathered media that he had brought an “expert” who would take responsibility for the rescue.
    â€œOkay, I thought, this is getting complicated,” said Sougarret. “We then walked some steps toward the campsite where the family members were. I was struck by those anguished faces. . . . There were fifty people. I noticed many worried faces and, in some cases, desperation. And unease. I remember they said some nasty things to the president, because he had first gone to the press and then to them. That was a pledge we always fulfilled—to speak first with the families and then with the journalists. That stuck in my mind. Then the president explained that he came with these experts who would try and solve the problem, and would utilize all the possible resources. That was a key moment for me, the beginning of it all,” said Sougarret in an interview with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio . “I realized that I was in charge of the operation. The president left and I was there, alone.”
    Sougarret didn’t need distressed family members to hammer home the consequences of a mining disaster. El Teniente, where Sougarret was a top manager, was the site of Chile’s deadliest mining accident, known as the “Tragedia del Humo.” The 1945 “Smoke Tragedy” at El Teniente was sparked by a fire inside a storage bunker. Barrels of burning oil quickly trapped more than a thousand miners behind a cloud of impenetrable, thick smoke. The smoke filled the cracks and corners of Tunnel C. For hours the miners held wet cloths to their faces, a crude measure that soon proved ineffective as the men collapsed. The mine’s safety systems were substandard; emergency exits were not clearly marked.
    As clouds of billowing