In 1973, Victor Jara was Chile's leading singer/songwriter, the local equivalent of Bob Dylan and more.
His songs mixed idealism, empathy, and hope, all in support of the popular movement that brought Salvador Allende to office -- and in defiance of the growing and often explicitly fascist opposition.
When the coup came -- September 11th, 1973 -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet's men arrested tens of thousands of people considered threats to the regime -- activists, union organizers, teachers, playwrights, and many who had nothing to do with politics at all but were just rounded up by mistake -- and turned the country's biggest football stadium into a giant internment camp.
The locker rooms and corridors were used for systematic torture and murder.
On this football field, thousands of people were held, awaiting their own turn to be taken away into the locker rooms, possibly never to return -- all for their own country's "security."
According to witnesses, every morning the blood stains would be washed away with hoses.
Outside, guards would pick through a pile of leftover shoes worn by victims of the previous night.
A 2003 official investigation identified a minimum 28,459 victims of political imprisonment and torture. 176 of these were children 12 years and younger.
Perhaps 100,000 people were eventually arrested nationwide. At least 3200 were murdered or "disappeared." A death squad known as the Caravan of Death even flew around the country by helicopter, executing people from town to town.
US citizens should know (as the world does) that the CIA and White House covertly supported Pinochet, even helping the regime track down dissidents who fled the country. To this day, Henry Kissinger cannot travel to several countries for fear of arrest.
In fact, on September 11, 2001, a criminal case against Kissinger, Pinochet, and several others was opened in Chile; this barely reached US newspapers, which were properly concerned with much more immediate horrors. But in Chile, September 11th still refers to the date of the coup. The main avenue through upscale Providencia was renamed by Pinochet's government to commemorate themselves. The memorial remains in this wealthy area even now.
Less than 24 hours into the coup, Victor Jara was arrested in a mass round-up at the university where he was working. He was taken not to the football stadium, but to a smaller boxing arena, where he was recognized by the guards and kept in a group of prisoners considered of special interest.
Jara had often played concerts in this very arena, leading thousands of people in song.
There, for three days, he was held captive and tortured, while around him fellow prisoners were beaten, deprived of food and sleep, and sometimes simply gunned down in fits of madness. Given the army's interest in him, Jara must have known he would never leave the building alive.
But to the end, Jara defied his captors, who at one point broke his hands, mocking him with orders to play his guitar. And still, Jara tried to rally his fellow captives' spirits -- at least once by singing, in full voice, from deep in the locker rooms turned into torture chambers, loud enough for other prisoners in the crowded arena to hear, still giving them heart with his voice.
On September 15th, he wrote what would become his last words, knowing he was soon to die, and that his loved ones were facing years of danger. Even after Pinochet's men had broken the bones in his hands, Jara still found the strength to write one last poem, hoping that someday he might share even this, telling us that these things do happen, warning us, crying on our shoulders, communicating with people whose faces he would never see. The words are desperate and despairing. But writing them... was a final act of hope. For all of us.
Jara's final words:
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much and so many moments of infinity
In which silence and screams are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment…
And just as his poem turned toward renewal -- even now, turning toward hope -- Jara was picked out by guards. As he was taken away, he shuffled the scraps paper to another prisoner, who eventually smuggled the words out in his shoe. Jara was machine-gunned to death moments later.
Pinochet's men dumped his body with several others in a rail yard, from which it was picked up by a van that was already making frequent runs between the arena and the morgue, so numerous were the dead. From there, Jara would have been thrown in a mass grave -- becoming one of the thousands of "disappeared," fate unknown -- if morgue workers hadn't recognized his corpse among hundreds and quietly fetched Jara's wife.
Joan Jara claimed the body -- this itself was an act of courage, given how many people were being killed, for so little reason -- and brought it to the General Cemetery, where bureaucrats allotted a tiny slot along the cemetery's farthest back wall, almost a mile from the entrance, where 35 years later Jara's fans and mourners still come with fresh flowers to pay their respect, often festooning the site with graffiti, stickers, and slogans lifted from his lyrics.
The sticker excerpts one of Jara's last songs, begun shortly before his death while walking his daughter Violeta on a beach, looking for a place for his family to hide should the worst occur. Its final words (cancion nueva, "new song") play on the name of the artistic and political movement he gave his life to.
I don't sing for the love of singing or because I have a good voice.
I sing because my guitar has both feeling and reason.
It has a love of earth and the wings of a dove,
It is like holy water, blessing joy and grief.
My song has found a purpose, as Violeta would say.
A working-class guitar, but with a smell of spring.
My guitar is not for the rich, no, nothing like that.
My song is of the ladders we use to reach for the stars.
For a song has meaning when it beats in the veins of a man
Who will die singing, truthfully singing his song,
Not for fleeting praise, nor to gain foreign fame,
But for this narrow land, and to the depths of this earth.
There, where everything comes to rest and everything begins,
Song which has been brave will forever be new song.
Listen to it here:
The dictatorship ultimately banned Jara's music. They even banned some of the folk instruments often used to play it.
That day is over.
The boxing arena where he was murdered is now called Victor Jara Stadium.
Almost thirty-five years later, and nearly two decades after the end of the dictatorship, a Chilean court has found a retired colonel, Mario Manriquez Bravo, guilty in the murder of Victor Jara.
Unfortunately, they also closed the case, despite the clear involvement of numerous others. The Jara family's attorneys believe that the court is still protecting the rest for political reasons. Now come appeals.
In any case, the names of Jara's killers will be forgotten by history.
Jara's memory will live on.
When one puts one's heart, reason, and will to work at the service of the people, one feels the happiness of being reborn.
-- Victor Jara, August 1973, a month before his death
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