CHILE´S SPIRIT / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW & OUTLOOK ( VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

OCTOBER 14, 2010.

Chile's Spirit

Sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

It long ago became standard practice across the modern world to treat every disaster or near-disaster as an occasion for examining the lessons learned. The accident in a remote Chilean mine that left 33 men trapped a half-mile underground for 69 days will be no exception. We will learn soon enough about what steps could have been taken to prevent the accident, how the miners survived those precarious early days before they were reached by the world above, and how the relief effort—on the cusp of complete success as we went to press—was organized.


All such lessons have their value. But what the saga of the San Jose Mine is ultimately about is the power of the human spirit. That is most obviously true of the trapped miners, and of the example they set for resilience, cohesion and resourcefulness. But it is no less true of the people above-ground who believed (when the belief seemed improbable) that the miners had survived the accident, that their rescue was a matter of top national priority, and that the ingenuity of the world could be enlisted to make it happen.


And we do mean the world: Jeff Hart, the 40-year-old drill operator who broke through to the miners last weekend, is an American from Denver. NASA provided design requirements for the extraction capsule, while Japan, Germany and other nations provided crucial technology.


Particular credit belongs to Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. It was Mr. Piñera who insisted on an all-out rescue effort, ultimately involving three separate extraction methods, when a more cautious (or fatalistic) politician might have feared raising expectations that could easily have been dashed.


AFP/Getty Images

Chilean miner Jose Ojeda displays a Chilean national flag as he steps out of the Fenix capsule at the San Jose mine.

Commentators have described his decision as a calculated political gamble, but to us it seems more like genuine statesmanship. Chile has historically depended on mining for much of its wealth. To keep faith with the men who go deep down into the earth to extract that wealth, as Mr. Piñera has, can no more be subject to a cost-benefit analysis than an army's decision to rescue its wounded or fallen soldiers from the battlefield. Deeper things are at stake.

Coincidentally—or providentially—the rescue at the mine takes place almost exactly on Chile's bicentennial. We try not to abuse metaphors, but it does seem as if it is Chile itself that has risen into sunlight.


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