Víctor Jara

Early life

Víctor Jara was born in 1932 in Lonquén, near Santiago, to two peasants, Manuel Jara and Amanda Martínez. His father was illiterate and encouraged his children to work from an early age to help the family survive, rather than attend school. By the age of 6, Jara was already working on the land. His father could not support the family on his earnings as a peasant at the Ruiz-Tagle estate, nor was he able to find stable work. He took to drinking and became increasingly violent. His relationship with his wife deteriorated, and he left the family to look for work when Víctor was still a child.

Jara's mother raised him and his siblings, and insisted that they get a good education. A mestiza with deep Araucanian roots in southern Chile, she was self-taught, and played the guitar and the piano. She also performed as a singer, with a repertory of traditional folk songs that she used for local functions like weddings and funerals.

She died when Jara was 15, leaving him to make his own way. He began to study to be an accountant, but soon moved into a seminary, where he studied for the priesthood. After a couple of years, however, he became disillusioned with the Catholic Church and left the seminary. Subsequently, he spent several years in army service before returning to his hometown to pursue interests in folk music and theater.

Artistic work

After joining the choir at the University of Chile in Santiago, Jara was convinced by a choir-mate to pursue a career in theater. He subsequently joined the university's theater program and earned a scholarship for talent. He appeared in several of the university's plays, gravitating toward those with social themes, such as Russian playwright Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths, a depiction of the hardships of lower-class life.

In 1957, he met Violeta Parra, a singer who had steered folk music in Chile away from the rote reproduction of rural materials toward modern song composition rooted in traditional forms, and who had established musical community centers called peñas to incorporate folk music into the everyday life of modern Chileans. Jara absorbed these lessons and began singing with a group called Cuncumén, with whom he continued his explorations of Chile's traditional music. He was deeply influenced by the folk music of Chile and other Latin American countries, and by artists such as Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and the poet Pablo Neruda.

In the 1960s, Jara started specializing in folk music and sang at Santiago's La Peña de Los Parra, owned by Ángel Parra. Through these activities, he became involved in the Nueva Canción movement of Latin American folk music. He released his first album, Canto a lo humano, in 1966, and by 1970, he had left his theater work in favor of a career in music. His songs were inspired by a combination of traditional folk music and left-wing political activism. From this period, some of his best-known songs are "Plegaria a un Labrador" ("Prayer to a Worker") and "Te Recuerdo Amanda" ("I Remember You Amanda").

Political activism

Early in his recording career, Jara showed a knack for antagonizing conservative Chileans, releasing a traditional comic song called "La beata" that depicted a religious woman with a crush on the priest to whom she goes for confession. The song was banned on radio stations and removed from record shops, but the controversy only added to Jara's reputation among young and progressive Chileans. More serious in the eyes of the Chilean right wing was Jara's growing identification with the leftist social movement led by Salvador Allende. After visits to Cuba and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Jara had joined the Communist Party. The personal met the political in his songs about the poverty he had experienced firsthand.

Jara's songs spread outside Chile and were performed by American folk artists. His popularity was due not only to his songwriting skills but also to his exceptional power as a performer. He took a decisive turn toward political confrontation with his 1969 song "Preguntas por Puerto Montt" ("Questions About Puerto Montt"), which took direct aim at a government official who had ordered police to attack squatters in the town of Puerto Montt. The Chilean political situation deteriorated after the official was assassinated, and right-wing thugs beat up Jara on one occasion.

In 1970, Jara supported Allende, the Popular Unity coalition candidate for president, volunteering for political work and playing free concerts. He composed "Venceremos" ("We Will Triumph"), the theme song of Allende's Popular Unity movement, and welcomed Allende's election to the Chilean presidency in 1970. After the election, Jara continued to speak in support of Allende and played an important role in the new administration's efforts to reorient Chilean culture.

He and his wife, Joan Jara, were key participants in a cultural renaissance that swept Chile, organizing cultural events that supported the country's new socialist government. He set poems by Pablo Neruda to music and performed at a ceremony honoring him after Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. Throughout rumblings of a right-wing coup, Jara held on to his teaching job at Chile's Technical University. His popular success during this time, as both a musician and a Communist, earned him a concert in Moscow. So successful was he that the Soviet Union tried to latch onto his popularity, claiming in their media that his vocal prowess was the result of surgery he had undergone while in Moscow.

Backed by the United States, which opposed Allende's socialist politics, the Chilean right wing staged a coup d'état on September 11, 1973, resulting in the death of Allende and the installation of Augusto Pinochet as dictator. At the moment of the coup, Jara was on his way to the Technical University (today the Universidad de Santiago). That night, he slept at the university along with other teachers and students, and sang to raise morale.

Torture and murder

After the coup, Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up Chileans who were believed to be involved with leftist groups, including Allende’s Popular Unity party. On the morning of 12 September 1973, Jara was taken prisoner, along with thousands of others, and interned in Chile Stadium. The guards there tortured him, smashing his hands and fingers, and then mocked him by asking him to play the guitar. Soon after, he was killed with a gunshot to the head, and his body was riddled with more than 40 bullets.

After his murder, Jara's body was displayed at the entrance of Chile Stadium for other prisoners to see. It was later discarded outside the stadium along with the bodies of other civilian prisoners who had been killed by the Chilean Army. His body was found by civil servants and brought to a morgue, where a civil servant identified him and contacted his wife, Joan. She took his body and gave him a quick and clandestine burial in the general cemetery before she fled the country into exile.

Forty-two years later, former Chilean military officers were charged with his murder.

Legal actions

On 16 May 2008, retired colonel Mario Manríquez Bravo, who was the chief of security at Chile Stadium as the coup was carried out, was the first to be convicted in Jara's death. Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes, who oversaw Bravo's conviction, then decided to close the case, a decision Jara's family soon appealed. In June 2008, Judge Fuentes re-opened the investigation and said he would examine 40 new pieces of evidence provided by Jara's family.

On 28 May 2009, José Adolfo Paredes Márquez, a 54-year-old former Army conscript arrested the previous week in San Sebastián, Chile, was formally charged with Jara's murder. Following his arrest, on 1 June 2009, the police investigation identified the officer who had shot Jara in the head. The officer played Russian roulette with Jara by placing a single round in his revolver, spinning the cylinder, placing the muzzle against Jara's head, and pulling the trigger. The officer repeated this a couple of times until a shot fired and Jara fell to the ground. The officer then ordered two conscripts (one of them Paredes) to finish the job by firing into Jara's body. A judge ordered Jara's body to be exhumed in an effort to gather more information about his death.

On 3 December 2009, Jara was reburied after a massive funeral in the Galpón Víctor Jara, across from Santiago's Plaza Brasil.

On 28 December 2012, a judge in Chile ordered the arrest of eight former army officers for alleged involvement in Jara's murder. He issued an international arrest warrant for one of them, Pedro Barrientos Núñez, the man accused of shooting Jara in the head during a torture session.

On 4 September 2013, Chadbourne & Parke attorneys Mark D. Beckett and Christian Urrutia, with the assistance of the Center for Justice and Accountability, filed suit in a United States court against Barrientos, who lives in Florida, on behalf of Jara's widow and children. The suit accused Barrientos of arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; extrajudicial killing; and crimes against humanity under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), and of torture and extrajudicial killing under the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA). It alleged that Barrientos was liable for Jara's death as a direct perpetrator and as a commander.

The specific claims were that:

On 15 April 2015, a US judge ordered Barrientos to stand trial in Florida. On 27 June 2016, he was found liable for Jara's killing, and the jury awarded Jara's family $28 million.

Legacy

Joan Jara currently lives in Chile and runs the Víctor Jara Foundation, which was established on 4 October 1994 with the goal of promoting and continuing Jara's work. She publicized a poem that Jara wrote before his death about the conditions of the prisoners in the stadium. The poem, written on a piece of paper that was hidden inside the shoe of a friend, was never named, but it is commonly known as "Estadio Chile". (Chile Stadium, now known as Víctor Jara Stadium, is often confused with the Estadio Nacional, or National Stadium.)

Joan also distributed recordings of her husband's music, which became known worldwide. His music began to resurface in Chile in 1981. Nearly 800 cassettes of early, nonpolitical Jara songs were confiscated on the "grounds that they violated an internal security law". The importer was given jail time but released six months later. By 1982, Jara’s records were being openly sold throughout Santiago.

Jara is one of many desaparecidos (people who vanished under the Pinochet government and were most likely tortured and killed) whose families are still struggling to get justice. Thirty-six years after his first burial, he received a full funeral on 3 December 2009 in Santiago. Thousands of Chileans attended his reburial, after his body was exhumed, to pay their respects. President Michelle Bachelet—also a victim of the Pinochet regime, having spent years in exile—said: "Finally, after 36 years, Victor can rest in peace. He is a hero for the left, and he is known worldwide, even though he continues buried in the general cemetery where his widow originally buried him."

Jara has been commemorated not only by Latin American artists, but also by global bands such as U2 and The Clash. U2 has given concerts at Chile Stadium in homage not only to Jara, but also to the many others who suffered under the Pinochet dictatorship.

Although most of the master recordings of Jara's music were burned under Pinochet's military dictatorship, his wife managed to get recordings out of Chile, which were later copied and distributed worldwide. She later wrote an account of Jara's life and music titled Víctor: An Unfinished Song.

Since his death, Jara has been honored in numerous ways:

In popular culture

The blood of Victor Jara

Will never wash away
It just keeps on turning
A little redder every day
As anger turns to hatred
And hatred turns to guns
Children lose their fathers

"The Junta took the fingers from Victor Jara's hands.
Said to the gentle poet 'play your guitar now if you can.'
Well Victor started singing until they shot his body down.
You can kill a man, but not a song when it's sung the whole world round."

"My voice is weak, just a whisper
My hands are broken
But I have written a letter
To remind my love
That she was born and raised
With her Back against the wall"

Theater work

Live albums

Compilations

Tribute albums

Documentaries and films

The following are films or documentaries about and/or featuring Víctor Jara: