This incident was yet another case where private action—markets, individual initiative, voluntary heroism—worked while government failed. The libertarian critique of the state’s monopoly on incarceration is not merely theoretical. I watched it unfold in real time, on my knees at my cell window, smelling the smoke and hearing the screams. The state locks men in cages, then cannot protect them when those cages become death traps. It claims authority it cannot exercise, responsibility it cannot fulfill, and competence it does not possess. If a private entity ran an institution this poorly—no fire drills, no emergency protocols, no functioning response system—it would be shut down and its operators prosecuted. But because the state operates the penitentiary, its failures are met not with accountability but with press releases claiming the brave gendarmes saved the day. They would never give Miami credit and admit that his cell door had been left unlocked, against regulations.

The Truth About Jorge

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear, but the evidence pointed in a disturbing direction. I observed one of two partially burnt foam slabs lying on the patio the next morning. Carlos had pulled out some wiring and a melted socket with partially bare wires attached to the base of an electric tea kettle, and a rubber-soled shoe fused to it. Perhaps Jorge had fallen asleep atop the shoe and kettle base, and the fire was an accident. But most people—including the two gendarme junior officers I spoke with inside Jorge’s blackened cell after all its contents had been removed—believed that the fire was intentional. The fact that he had allowed his crutches to burn led some to conclude that he might have been attempting suicide.

Jorge had his backpack on when Miami found him, and the sink water was left running as if, at the last minute, things had gotten out of hand and he was undertaking desperate measures to save his own life. He had made a scene several nights before. It was hard for the gunman to live alone, even with his amusing laughter marking his phone calls to his girlfriend every night. Rubén remarked that he was a hardened criminal and a drug addict, but that drugs were harder to come by in 118 than in other larger, cell blocks, and therefore Jorge was trying to get moved back among his kind in one of the general-population módulos in another facility, like Limache prison.

Some days later, seeing Jorge sitting alone in the bodega with just a towel wrapped around him—waiting to use the shower—I took the opportunity to speak with him directly. Both Rubén and Miami had told me the day before that approaching the man was unthinkable and likely dangerous. But I had simply been a decent enough fellow with the machucados—helped, no doubt, by being a Christian who always wore his faith on his sleeves—and that permitted me access to such an interview. My public gun use in self-defense and chess playing might also have helped. Like Miami, probably no one in prison who knew me thought I was a criminal, untrustworthy, or had foul intentions.

I asked Jorge how he was. He replied that he could not extend his stub below the knee due to severe pain. I expressed Christian concern for him, noting that I had heard the one-legged man was despondent and had tried to commit suicide by setting the fire in his cell. Jorge smiled and said that was not the case. I then pointed out that he had almost died, to which he replied with chilling candor: “What does it matter if five or six machucados get killed anyway? I was trying to get out of here.” I appreciated his openness, even as the words turned my stomach. Jorge thus confirmed that the fire was set intentionally and with a strategic purpose: to get transferred to the minimum-security Limache prison, half an hour inland from Vina del Mar, where he could get everything he wanted. So far, his tactic had not worked, but there might be other opportunities in the near future to make his plan effective.

“What does it matter if five or six machucados get killed?” This is the moral universe of a man without Christ—a universe in which other human beings are merely instruments or obstacles, in which the lives of cellmates and neighbors are expendable collateral in the pursuit of personal comfort. Jorge was not insane. He was lost. And in his lostness, he was willing to burn living men alive if it served his purpose. The depravity of the human heart, unregenerated by the Spirit of God, knows no floor.

At any rate, the report on the late-night news claiming the men in 118A/B were trying to escape was ridiculous. Thirteen of them were dominicales—inmates with early release benefits (Sundays at home) due to be fully paroled in a few months. Why would they try to escape and lose that benefit? The other five could hardly walk, much less scale a wall. Other than Miami and Luchito, all the reos in 118 were locked in their cells that night. Yet the pacos promoted the narrative that the arrival of the dutiful and brave gendarme night guards had foiled an attempted escape plan. No mention was made in the news of the night’s true hero—working on his knees in the dark, smoky passage—or of pill-loving Jorge’s possible selfish and reckless rationale. In reality, the feckless pacos had no plan, no idea what to do in an emergency, and did not “save the day.” The state’s version of events was, like so much else it produces, a lie.

The Aftermath

I watched the next morning anxiously as the 118A/B reos lined up to enter 118 for the night, noticing especially Mauricio’s baldness sticking out, along with Daniel and Delfín. Even if receiving one of the displaced men would qualify as a good work, there was no joy in the thought of having a machucado sprawled on the cell floor that night. My cell with Alexis had no third bunk for a refugee to sleep on. Sergio and the other mozos knew that fact and did not lodge one with us. Jorge stayed with Marino on the top floor in cell number seventeen—a fact which was hardly a comfort to the occupants of 118 who feared the self-centered fool might start another fire.

The following morning, Castro—now overtly claiming to head 118—peered into my cell and asked why I was living alone. I replied that ranchero Alexis lived with me and had left a couple of hours earlier, at six-thirty in the morning. Castro, a little befuddled, regrouped and pointed out that there was no third bunk, saying that one would have to be added. He just had to find something to hassle me about. Down on the patio, the still-bewildered men gathered and compared notes about the night’s events. Then Castro called everyone into a circular formation in the dining hall, where we numbered off. He tried to act like General Patton and warmly address “his men” about Jorge’s stupidity and the fact that he knew everyone had cell phones. He said he would not mind if men called to inform their loved ones in an emergency. Everyone stood at attention, but no one could take him seriously. Indeed, no reo was about to call Castro directly from his cell—even if the paco claimed he would not confiscate the phone.

Castro then ordered all men to clean up 118A after breakfast. Most of the men—as one would expect of Navy personnel—immediately started the heavier cleanup task. I ate breakfast in the dining hall with Rubén, Delfín, and Daniel, where once again the reos were given apples small enough to fit in one’s semi-closed palm—unsuitable for export but useful only to make juice or to feed to livestock and prisoners. After delivering breakfast, Miami washed the smoky clothes of some invalids in the pesebre so that they might have something to wear. The water depth had risen to about ten centimeters in the downstairs part of 118A, and many items were ruined. Workers threw wet clothes and curtains that Jorge had burnt out onto the patio. Then came the affected metal bunk frames and mattresses. I went out, grabbed some of the metal, and took it to the parking lot. With everyone chipping in, the main task was completed by eleven o’clock.

Providence and the Unlocked Door

I have thought a great deal about that night in the years since. What struck me most forcefully—what continues to strike me—is the sheer improbability of the circumstances that kept those men alive. If Luchito had not been working late. If the night-duty paco had made his rounds at the normal time. If Miami’s cell door had been locked as procedure required. If do-gooder Miami had been any other man—a man without emergency training, without the physical courage to crawl into a smoke-filled hallway on his hands and knees, without the presence of mind to cut the power and systematically open each padlocked door. If any single link in that chain had been different, men would have died that night. Jorge would certainly have perished. Sergio, Michael, and the others in the cell above might well have suffocated before the paco ever arrived.

The Reformed theological tradition, rooted in the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, affirms that “God hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass” (chapter 3, paragraph 1). This is not fatalism. It is the recognition that behind every seemingly random event—a worker staying late, a guard making early rounds, a cell door left unlocked contrary to protocol—there stands the sovereign, purposeful, all-wise God who governs every detail of His creation. The Westminster divines and their Baptist successors understood that Providence is not merely a doctrine to be affirmed in the study; it is a reality to be witnessed in the smoke-filled hallways of a burning prison.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?” our Lord asked in Matthew 10:29, “and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” If a sparrow does not fall without His will, then surely the unlocking of a cell door in a Chilean penitentiary on a Thursday night in February 2021 is not outside His governance. The Providence of God is the doctrine that makes sense of such moments—not by removing the terror, not by pretending that the suffering was pleasant, but by insisting that behind the chaos there is a Hand, and behind that Hand there is a purpose, and that purpose is always, ultimately, good.

Miami was, in my assessment, a picture of Christ-like self-sacrifice that night. He entered danger willingly to save men who could not save themselves. He crawled through darkness and poison to open doors for the imprisoned. He dragged an unconscious man to safety on his own back. I do not wish to overextend the analogy—Miami was no sinless Savior, and the men he rescued were not dead in trespasses—but the pattern is unmistakable. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Miami risked his life for men who were not even his friends—for invalids and machucados, he merely happened to occupy an adjacent building. That kind of courage, that kind of selfless action, is exceedingly rare in any context. In the context of a Chilean prison, where self-preservation is the governing ethic and trust is a commodity rarer than clean water, it was nothing short of extraordinary.