Canticles and Chronology: 16 September 1973 -- Murder of Víctor Jara

“Te Recuerdo Amanda” -- Victor Jara

“Victor Jara” -- Arlo Guthrie, Music, and Adrian Mitchell, Lyrics

On very infrequent occasions, revolutions so monumental and seminal as to shake the entire world change the course of human history for all time to come occur. Usually when we speak of revolutions, we think of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution, or any of a million other political upheavals. While no one could reasonably deny the historical importance of these revolutions, we must keep in mind that all governments are transitory and human attachment to political ideas fickle.

No, the revolutions of which I speak are much more enduring and universal that a change or dynasties or the drafting of a new constitution. These revolutions change the very nature of humanity, they make possible political revolutions, they possess the potential to shake the very foundations of the earth.

Once such revolution, the Agricultural Revolution begun about ten-thousand years ago when our distant ancestors first began to cultivate foods. This particular revolution played out over thousands of years, eventually transforming humanity from hunter and gatherer tribal groups into true communities united by common goals rather than family. The first cities appeared along the great rivers of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India because as labor intensive agriculture required not only a large population, but organization, laws, division of labor, currency, writing, and, of course, armed might to protect a hard-earned bounty from those who, lacking either the skills or will or resources to cultivate their own crops, sought to plunder that of their more industrious neighbors.

The Industrial Revolution is one whose title if not details is known to every high school student. The Industrial Revolution was driven by the profit derived from humanity’s attachment to clothing. To need for cheaper and quicker means of manufacturing cloth comes into to stark detail were we to exam wills of preindustrial Europe: The deceased would commonly list which articles of underwear fortunate survivors were to receive. Despite the many advantages gained -- not the least of which is fresh, unused underwear -- the Industrial Revolution was an awful time to enter the labor force. The work was dangerous and paid poorly. Because workers had to walk to work, families crowded into ghettos lacked clean water or waste disposal. Ruthless captains of industry quickly realized they could hire children to run the dangerous machines or labor in unsafe mines for the coal to power them. We are beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution, but it was a hellish time for the workers of that era. The most heart-breaking stories of those of child workers, horribly disfigured by backbreaking labor, industrial accidents, or the physical abuse of vicious foremen by the time they reach their mid-teens, and then confined to awful poor houses for the remainder of their unhappy lives, often subsisting on tasteless gruel and enduring mistreatment at the hands of those responsible for their care. Despite the remarkable innovations of that era, the lifespan of urban workers actually shorted, and there existed no laws requiring owners to take responsibility for the needs of injured employees.

In recent years, historians have wisely learn to avoid the very understandable desire to attach dates to any event of significant importance. After all, there is rarely any objective measure as to a revolution begins and ends. Indeed, there is even some question as to what properly constitutes a revolution. Generally, however, scholars agree that the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-18th Century, but when did it end? Some scholars see it as evolving, as revolutions are wont to do, into the vast national industrialization movements that began in Europe and the United States by the start of the 20th Century before quickly spreading across most the globe. Other knowledgeable voices see the mechanization of the textile industry as being so different from industrialization born from steel and railroads to be so radically distant as to constitute two related yet separate industrial revolutions. Not being among the mavens allowed to define such things, I view the varying opinions to be a question of perception not fact.

The baneful effects of industrialization were not confined to long-dead and rarely remembered textile workers. Two industrialized world wars have been fought. Water, air, and soil are contaminated with industrial waste, and fossil fuel pollution can threaten an entire community’s quality of life. Mechanization of agricultural labor and production has displaced millions of workers and their families. And there is the problem of nuclear weapons, technological terrorism, and global warming, and on and on.

There is also a political sin for which industrialization must atone. Homicidal tyrants has been a staple of society since the first tribal chieftain realized the stone weapons used to hunt food would be equally suited to oppressing his neighbors. Improved means of communication and distribution proved an able ally to authoritarian rulers seeking improved methods to oppress their populations. And the early 20th Century would witness the birth of a new political regime made possible by industrialization -- the totalitarian state.

There is an irony to be found here. We citizens of what Karl Popper famously called the “Open Society” enjoy more freedom and less repression than has any other people in the entire history of humanity, the benefit of living in industrial and postindustrial societies. But those people so unfortunate as to live in totalitarian or authoritarian nations are at the mercy of governments empowered by industrialization with tools of oppression far more efficient than anything the absolute monarchs of the past could ever imagine.

And that brings us to the story of Augusto Pinochet and Victor Jara.

In November of 1970, backed by a popular front of Chilean voters ranging from Communists to Christian-Democrats to Social Democrats, Salvador Allende won the plurality of votes in Chile’s hotly contested presidential elections. In elections in which no single candidate wins a majority of votes, that nation’s Constitution assigns the legislature the duty to select the next president from the two candidates receiving the largest number of votes. Congress, which resolved to elect the candidate receiving the largest number of votes, selected Allende as the new president. On 3 November Allende became the 30th president of Chile.

Was Allende a Marxist? I suspect so, but he certainly did not practice Communist orthodoxy despite his winning their endorsement: He had also won the backing of many labor, liberal, and Christian blocs. And Marxist or otherwise, he was most unquestionably a socialist. Allende also boasted a long and dangerous history of backing liberal causes. In his doctoral thesis, he confronted and dismissed the old canard that certain peoples and physiologies are predisposed to crime. As Minister of Health, he had introduced stronger worker safety laws, higher pensions for widows, and free school lunches for poor students. As a member of Congress, he had protested Hitler’s treatment of Jews and championed universal health care.

The United States viewed Allende’s rising star as a portent of worse things to come. In the early 1960s, the CIA secretly funneled over five and one-half million dollars into Chile, money used to blacken Allende’s reputation and fill the coffers of his political rivals. When Allende won the presidency, United States panic shifted into high gear. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger plotted with the CIA to remove Allende from office either by bribing the legislature or encouraging a military coup. On 9 September 1973, Chilean military officers informed their CIA contacts that a military coup was imminent. While the coup was not directly manufactured by the United States, the CIA certainly sought to ensure the overthrow of the democratically elected government. On 11 September, mutinous soldiers seized government offices and assaulted the presidential palace. Allende died in the fighting, most likely by his own hand to avoid capture, but the evidence remains unclear.

A military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet replaced Chile’s democratic government. Only one month before he betrayed his country, Pinochet had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Army by Allende himself. Pinochet’s authoritarian rule might be described as echo of fascist Spain. While certainly a ruthless and murderous man, Pinochet was no killer on the scale of, say, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or Francisco Macías Nguema. He is thought responsible for “only” three- to four-thousand political murders, but tens of thousands of his opponents were imprisoned and tortured. One of the more heinous practices of his regime was the method used, on thankfully rare occasions, to obtain children for childless military families in Pinochet’s regime. Young couples would vanish, buried in unknown and unmarked graves and their infant child given to the family of a loyal Pinochet supporter.

The most famous of Pinochet’s victims was the classical guitarist Victor Jara, an educator, theatre director, poet, and social activist. Jara was born to an illiterate and alcoholic peasant father who kept his children from school to work the fields. By the age of six, young was working the land to help support his family. While Jara was still a child, his father abandoned the family to seek work, leaving Jara and his siblings in the care of their mother. Breaking ranking with Jara’s father, Amanda Martínez insisted her children acquire a good education. Being a talented if self-taught musician, she introduced Jara to the path which would eventually led to both his success and his murder.

Martinez died when Jara was 15-year-old, leaving him to make his own way in the world. The young man would take a variety of jobs, even joining a seminary at one point, intending to enter the priesthood. Jara later served several years in the army. After leaving the service, Jara pursued a career in music, theatre, and education, all the while seeking to promote the cause of those still trapped in the horrible poverty he had escaped. His remarkable talents and international success made him an effective advocate for the poor.

Jara drew upon his own experiences to give a voice to disadvantaged and dispossessed. Consider “Te Recuerdo Amanda” (“I remember you, Amanda”), telling of his mother Amanda’s love for her simple husband Manuel, Jara’s father and the man who would eventually abandon both wife and son. The lyrics, translated into English, follow:

I remember you, Amanda

The wet street

running to the factory where Manuel worked

The wide smile, the rain in your hair,

nothing mattered

you were going to meet with him,

with him, with him, with him

They were five minutes

life is eternal

in five minutes

The whistle blew

to return to work

and you walking you lit up everything

those five minutes

made you blossom

I remember you, Amanda

The wet street

running to the factory where Manuel worked

The wide smile, the rain in your hair,

nothing mattered

you were going to meet with him,

with him, with him, with him

And he took to the mountains to fight

He had never hurt a fly

and in five minutes

it was all wiped out

The whistle blew

to return to work

many didn't go back

neither did Manuel

I remember you, Amanda

The wet street

running to the factory where Manuel worked

Jara would eventually join the progressive movement that would lead Allende to the presidency and the grave. Even had Jara not been such a potent campaigner for Allende, it is likely Jara unrelenting drive for improving the lot of the dispossessed would have earned him attention from the new dictatorship.

Shortly after the coup, Jara was arrested by the military and incarcerated in Estadio Nacional, Chile’s national stadium converted by the junta into a prison camp to torture and murder those they deemed dangerous to their dictatorship. Knowing he would never leave the stadium alive, Jara composed one final poem which he hid inside a friend's shoe. Translated from the Spanish, it reads:

There are five thousand of us here

in this small part of the city.

We are five thousand.

I wonder how many we are in all

in the cities and in the whole country?

...

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.

Pinochet’s executioners gave special attention to Jara. Before killing the poet, they smashed the hands which had played so much beautiful music. After overseeing the torture of Jara, an army officer by the name of Pedro Barrientos Núñez placed a single round in his revolver, pressed it against the helpless man’s head, and pulled the trigger. He repeated the procedure again and again until it fired. Jara was shot 44 times and his body unanimously dumped outside the stadium with those of other victims. Coup leaders sought to further silence Jara even then by destroying all master recordings of his songs. Fortunately for posterity, Jara’s widow Joan was able to flee Chile taking copies of his recordings with her.

As Pinochet’s grasp on power slipped between his fingers, Núñez was among those murderous criminals who fled abroad to escape the justice denied to their victims. He settled in Florida where he allegedly boasted of his murdering Jara. 42 years after Jara’s murder, Chile issued a warrant for Núñez and seven other officers responsible for killing Jara and several other political murders. Jara’s widow and daughters filed a civil suit against Núñez as well. A jury awarded them 28-million dollars in damages, money they will never see. But more important to the family is convincing the United State to extradite Núñez to Chile to face a criminal trial.

The life, music, and passion of Victor Jara has inspired tribute from numerous artists from around the earth. Selecting any single song as representative of the many which honor him would be an impossible task, so I will simply post one of my favorites.

Victor Jara of Chile

Lived like a shooting star

He fought for the people of Chile

With his songs and his guitar