And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh. (Jude 1:23)

There are nights in prison that blur together into a gray monotony of cold concrete, distant television noise, and the rattle of locks turning at prescribed hours. And then there are nights that sear themselves into your memory with such ferocity that you can still smell the smoke years later, can still hear the screaming, can still feel the helplessness of standing behind a locked door while men are dying thirty meters away. The night of February 4, 2021, was the second kind.

The Fire

As it turned out, módulo 118 had its own tremendous trouble that Thursday evening. A fire broke out in one-legged Jorge’s cell in building 118A just as Valentin and I were preparing to start our Historic Baptists Zoomcast at ten o’clock at night. I had my laptop open on my bunk, my notes arranged, a handful of faithful attendees waiting on the other end of the video call. What should have been a quiet evening of Reformed Baptist teaching became instead the most harrowing forty minutes of live commentary I have ever delivered in my life, as I saw black smoke pouring out of the open-grate door of 118A.

The first thing I heard was the screaming. Not the ordinary prison shouting that one learns to tune out after months of incarceration, but raw, animal terror—the sound of men who believe they are about to die. Then came the banging, massive and rhythmic, as trapped prisoners hurled themselves against their steel cell doors. The noise was deafening even from my position in the main 118 building. Then the smoke billow thickened—not wisps, not a haze, but thick billows of black, acrid smoke pouring out through the recently opened first-floor door of 118A like the exhalation of some infernal furnace. For the first forty minutes of the Zoomcast program, I found myself giving live commentary from the scene as the chaos unfolded outside my window and down on the patio below. The attendees on the call heard everything—the cries, the banging, the shouted orders that no one seemed to follow.

The loudest yelping and door-pounding came from upstairs, from the cell directly above Jorge’s, where Sergio, Michael, and others were housed. Smoke was pouring in through their window, filling the cell from below. These men were caged animals in the most literal sense—locked behind steel doors with padlocks on the outside, iron bars on the windows, and no means of egress whatsoever. They could do nothing but scream and pound and pray that someone, anyone, would come to open their door before the smoke rendered them unconscious.

Miami: Into the Dark

In the providential design of God, there was one man in 118A whose cell door had been left unlocked that night. Miami—a former flight engineer trained in emergency procedures—was awake and mobile when the fire broke out. The reason his door was unsecured constitutes one of the most extraordinary examples of divine Providence that I witnessed in my entire imprisonment.

Luchito, who served as a quasi-slave working with computers in the gendarme officers’ administrative section, had been working late that evening dismantling and washing the dust off the gendarmeria’s computer equipment. The night-duty paco—the gendarme guard—had made his rounds early, before Luchito had returned to the cell. Finding that Luchito was not yet back, the paco left Miami’s cell door unlocked. This was technically a violation of gendarme procedure, a bureaucratic glitch, the sort of minor institutional failure that happens routinely in an undisciplined system. But that glitch—that seemingly random convergence of a guard’s laziness and a worker’s tardiness—ended up saving the lives of several reos that night.

When the fire erupted, Miami did not hesitate. He burst out of his unlocked cell, ran downstairs to the guard’s open office where the cell keys were hanging, and opened the first-floor door to 118A, releasing the initial large wave of smoke that I was still reporting as billowing across the patio. Then he dropped to his hands and knees—the smoke overhead was so dense that standing upright meant instant asphyxiation—and crawled through the dark hallway toward the locked cells. Coming out for a moment, he told Pentecostal pedophile Luchito (who had since returned) to cut the power to the building, ensuring that any ongoing electrical fire source was severed. This was the trained response of a man who had drilled for emergencies a thousand times in his previous career. Most men, confronted with a pitch-black corridor filled with poisonous smoke, would have fled to the safety of the open patio. Miami crawled deeper into the danger.

Luchito was a bundle of nerves. He fumbled with the keys in the smoke and darkness, hands shaking, eyes streaming, managing to get only two of the five second-floor doors open before Miami arrived and, working on his knees in the suffocating blackness, opened two more. The fifth door—Sergio and Michael’s—had to wait for the night-duty paco, who finally arrived at his own leisurely pace. The fact that those men survived the additional minutes of waiting for that slow-moving guard is itself a testimony to God’s sustaining hand in an act of common grace.

Meanwhile, Miami had reached the last cell on the first floor—Jorge’s, the source of the fire. He found the one-legged man unconscious on the floor, already asphyxiated by the smoke filling his own cell. Miami grabbed him and dragged him—dead weight, a grown, chubby man with one leg—ten meters down the hallway through the smoke and darkness, then out onto the patio, where he laid him out on the concrete. Then, without pausing, Miami went back inside to retrieve the other three invalids—machucados who could barely walk under normal conditions, much less navigate a smoke-filled building in total darkness.

Unknown to Miami at that moment, a fifth invalid—Moroni—had just returned from dialysis, waiting in the infirmary, and was not in his cell at all. This provoked great worry among those of us watching the pandemonium unfold. Were there five invalids trapped, or four? Was Moroni suffocating behind a locked door at that very instant? The confusion was agonizing until Chuncoco—Sergio—yelled out from his third-story window overlooking the patio: “Thirteen upstairs, four below, and Moroni in the hospital!” That single shouted sentence, cutting through the smoke and chaos, accounted for every soul in 118A and 118B. Every man was alive.

The Failure of the State

A number of men would have likely been dead had they been forced to await the arrival of the slow-moving paco that night. Let the reader absorb that fact. The state of Chile—which claims an absolute monopoly on the incarceration of human beings, which takes men from their families and locks them in concrete cages under the supposed guarantee of basic custodial care—could not manage to arrive on time when those men were choking to death on smoke. The gendarmes had no plan. They had conducted no emergency training. No fire drills had ever occurred in the Valparaiso penitentiary—not once, in all the months I was there. The guards simply did not know what to do. When they finally arrived, some of them feared that the reos had set the fire in order to escape, with one paco scolding another for not making the prisoners line up and count off. Count off! Men were standing or lying in shock on the concrete, smoke was still seeping from the building, and the gendarmes’ first instinct was bureaucratic—verify the head count, ensure no one has fled.

Indeed, in the ensuing chaos, it became abundantly clear that Miami alone was prepared to act in an emergency while the pacos were paralyzed by incompetence and confusion. Miami, Luchito, and the freed machucados eventually got a hose out and doused the flames with water long before the five external firefighters finally arrived. Sergio—Chuncoco—was himself a trained firefighter, but like every other reo in 118, he was locked in his cell and could do nothing more than gawk from his barred window overlooking the chaotic scene on the patio below. The very system that claims to protect inmates had rendered one of its most capable men utterly useless.