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| Ingrid Betancourt on Kidnapping and Freedom The former Colombian hostage has written a book about her searing experience. In an interview with TIME, she opens up about life in captivity feedproxy.google.com |
Two million US PCs hijacked The US leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of networks of hijacked home computers, reveals a report. bbc.co.uk |
When the miners' leader met the president, two sides of Chile embraced. Has a miracle rescue laid Pinochet's ghost to rest? In August Chile's president took a huge political gamble on the rescue of 33 trapped miners. As a PR exercise, it was a breathtaking success. But will the tide of goodwill and breaking of social boundaries translate into genuine reform?It was the moment two worlds united in a bear hug. Luis Urzúa, the miners' foreman, stepped from the rescue capsule and embraced President Sebastián Piñera. It was the climax to an extraordinary tale of survival that had mesmerised millions. As the two men embraced church bells tolled across Chile and TV viewers cried.Even in this moment of high drama, with wellwishers flooding into the frame, you could see, etched on the faces of the two men, a story within the story. There was Urzúa, black curly hair, stubble, calloused hands: a miner. Alongside him Piñera, silky locks, smooth chin, movie-star smile: a billionaire.One laboured below ground in hellish, dangerous conditions for £900 a month. Another sat in boardrooms finding ways to add another few million dollars to his fortune before moving effortlessly into the presidential palace."You have been a very good boss and leader of this group," Piñera said to Urzúa, tears welling up. Urzúa, his eyes invisible behind dark glasses, nodded and smiled. "Thank you very much to all the rescuers and everybody here. I am proud of being a Chilean. I want to thank everybody." Holding helmets over their hearts they led the throng at San José mine – and a nation following it all on TV – in the national anthem.For a country still in the shadow of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship it was a unique and perhaps fleeting moment of solidarity. A conservative president, scion of the elite, side by side with a humble miner, representative of a tradition associated with leftwing activism and socialist values.To appreciate the symbolism consider the title of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's classic text, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which has influenced generations of thinkers across the continent. Published in 1971, it has been reprinted dozens of times and was Hugo Chávez's gift to Barack Obama at a regional summit.It is an eloquent, impassioned screed about Euro-descended elites sucking mineral wealth out of the soil in cahoots with western accomplices, a vampire capitalism which exploits darker-skinned compatriots and stunts the continent's development. The opening line gives a taste: "Our part of the world has specialised in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilisations."Here at San José mine, euphoria notwithstanding, you could see traces of that familiar plotline. Brown-skinned men with poor education and little alternative to working in a dangerous mine which flouted safety regulations. Above them, literally and figuratively, a white-skinned businessman who made a fortune in credit cards, airlines, stock deals and TV before being elected president and taking residence in La Moneda, the colonial mint-turned-palace in Santiago.But Chile is not the rest of Latin America, and things were not quite so simple. The physical contrast between Urzúa and Piñera was obvious – especially, when you got up close, their teeth and nails – but when you looked into their life stories surprising similarities emerged. Each man is educated, self-made, upwardly mobile and a natural leader. They may be from two different worlds but they orbit the same way.Urzúa, 54, grew up in a family that was of modest means and scarred by tragedy. His father died when he was still a boy. Murdered by Pinochet's security forces, neighbours told reporters, but Urzúa's mother, Nelly Iribarren, said he had died of a kidney disease. There is no doubt, however, about the fate of Urzúa's step-father, Benito Tapia. A member of the youth socialist party and leader of a copper mine trade union, he was abducted on 17 September 1973 by the "caravana de la muerte" – the caravan of death – run by the army and secret police. He was brought to Copiapó, tortured, killed and dumped in an unmarked grave.Urzúa, who was said to be close to his stepfather, was 17 years old at the time. He has not spoken about the death, so its impact can only be imagined, but it is known that as the eldest of six siblings he became a de facto father figure while still in his teens. He helped to raise the family, his mother told local media. "Since my husband died when they were still small it was Luis who kept order between the children. He became the man of the house. My son has always been very disciplined."He married young and has a daughter aged 25 and son aged 22. Passionate about football, he trained a local team in Tierra Amarilla, a town in the Atacama region near the fateful mine. "I could visualise him down there rationing food, giving orders, because he's like that, bossy but organised," said his mother. A miner for 31 years, Urzúa worked his way up to be a topographer, a highly technical job requiring an ability to read maps and survey instruments and calculate distances and angles. Promoted to shift superviser, Don Lucho, as he is known to friends, started working at the San José mine relatively recently but swiftly won the confidence of colleagues.From an admittedly very different origins Piñera, 60, has followed a similar trajectory. Born in Santiago to parents of Spanish descent, the third of six children, he grew up in Europe and New York where his father was Chile's ambassador to Belgium and the UN.He was a star student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and went on to an MA and PhD in economics at Harvard. He returned to Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s and taught at universities before moving into business. The apparent silver spoon was made of tin: his family's businesses were in debt.Piñera, a married father of four, proved a brilliant – and controversial – businessman. His forays into credit cards, the airline LAN and the TV network Chilevisión, as well as short-term stock exchange trades, racked up a fortune which Forbes magazine last year estimated at $1bn. Don Tatán, as he is known to friends, was fined for insider trading and accused of violating banking laws. Colleagues describe him as a driven taskmaster who expects others to work as hard as he does.Piñera said he voted against Pinochet in a 1989 referendum which eased the old dictator out of power but he showed rightwing instincts by becoming a senator for the National Renewal party. After spending a chunk of his fortune on the campaign he won the presidency in January this year, overturning two decades of leftwing rule, and was inaugurated in March.Inheriting a country with a sound economy but traumatised by February's earthquake, the new president cast himself as a post-ideological pragmatist who would imbue Chile with a "young spirit". The continent's leftwing leaders remained suspicious of what some critics called South America's answer to Silvio Berlusconi. Piñera's honeymoon with Chileans was brief: his ratings dropped soon after taking power.And then, on 5 August, a remote mine in the Atacama desert collapsed on 33 men, changing everything. Piñera rejected advice from officials to keep his distance from the crisis and summoned André Sougarret, a young engineer who ran a subterranean mine for the state-owned copper company Codelco, to his office. His instructions were simple: find the miners and get them out. The mission was unprecedented. No one knew if there miners were alive, no one knew where they were, no one had ever drilled so far in such an operation.Sougarret flew to the site and got to work, assembling a 300-strong team which drew experts from all over the world. The square-jawed president wove himself into the drama. He told how, after 17 increasingly desperate days of searching at San José, he visited his dying father-in-law at a Santiago hospital. "Don't give up," the old man told him. "Keep working to rescue the miners."The president said his wife, Cecilia Morel, urged him to fly north to the mine as a tribute to her dead father. Piñera did so, immediately, and upon his arrival the miracle happened. Rescuers thought they heard tapping on a drill about 700m below. They withdrew it and there, attached to the metal, was a note in red ink which has since become immortalised: "Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33" – "We are well in the refuge, the 33." Piñera, euphoria engraved on his craggy features, brandished the note to a disbelieving nation. He said he believed that God had intervened.When a phone line reached the trapped men Urzúa implored Piñera not to let him and his men down. "Don't leave us alone." Sixty-nine days later, after a huge government-led operation costing an estimated $18m, a steel capsule painted in the red, white and blue of Chile's flag was poised to descend into the blackness of the rescue shaft. The drama was ready for its climax.It emerged yesterday that advisers warned the president not to greet every miner personally lest some proved hostile or unpredictable upon surfacing. Some advisers also urged against broadcasting the drama live. The former CEO and stock market raider ignored them and staked, yet again, his reputation on the rescue.It was, as 1bn TV viewers around the world would bear witness, a triumph. A flawless operation in which every member of "los 33" emerged from the capsule grinning and only too delighted to hug the head of state. After 22 hours it was the turn of Urzúa, the last miner, to be winched up through a canyon of rock. Those who watched the moment he embraced Piñera will not forget it.The miners had experienced a "new life, a rebirth", said the president, and so had Chile. "We aren't the same as we were before the collapse on 5 August. Today Chile is a country much more unified, stronger and much more respected and loved in the entire world." In any other context it would have been vainglorious but, on that freezing night, with the nation exploding in joy and pride and everyone from the pope to Barack Obama heaping praise, it caught the mood.The writer Isabel Allende, a chronicler of Chile's tragedies and divisions, called it a "historic" night. "Without a doubt this rescue has been an odyssey of solidarity." Here, after all, was a country once notorious for polarisation, pitting right against left, soldiers against democrats, rich against poor. Over the past two decades that legacy has faded as Chile quietly set about becoming a Latin American success story: balanced budgets, anti-poverty campaigns, public health provision, a guaranteed minimum income for the elderly.When Piñera hugged Urzúa it was a sign of how far Chile has come, and how far it still had to go. The foreman, like many Chileans, had got an education and moved up the ladder. But for want of alternatives he and 32 others still ended up working in a perilous mine, a reminder that inequality and unemployment still plague South America's answer to Germany. The plight of Mapuche Indians, locked in conflict with the state over land, is another sore."Demands will be higher now that we all know that the government can do incredible things when they want", said Marta Lagos, founder of a Santiago-based polling firm. Saving "los 33" had underlined state accountability but not banished entrenched social divisions. "This rescue is somehow something that the elite 'owed' the workers. The largest reward will come not to unity but to democracy."Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean-American playwright, noted that by a coincidence of history the 33 miners were buried as statistics showed the percentage of Chileans living in poverty had, for the first time since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, gone drastically up rather than down. "Is it too much to hope that the ordeal these men have gone through will trouble the conscience of Chile? Now that would be a real miracle."ChileAugusto PinochetRory Carrollguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Mexican student made police chief A 20-year-old female criminology student has been made police chief for a Mexican town in a region plagued by drug-related crime. bbc.co.uk |
Karzai Delays Ban on Security Firms Afghanistan will extend a deadline for private security firms to disband through early next year, the president said Wednesday, in a face-saving compromise that could preserve foreign reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars. online.wsj.com |