Write for God

Victor Jara, 1932-1973

In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet deposed and murdered Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected president. The Cold War was still hot then and Allende was the type of leftist leader who was supposed to threaten our hemisphere if he wasn’t stopped — even though his own voters had elected him.

Thousands of Allende supporters were arrested and brought to detention at Chile’s stadium after the coup on September 11, including theater director / singer-songwriter Victor Jara. Last week, 36 years after Jara’s death at the stadium, a former low-ranking enlisted man in Pinochet’s forces was charged with Jara’s murder.

The singer’s body was exhumed today to determine how many bullets killed him. Three dozen years later, someone may finally be brought to justice for Jara’s death. The singer’s corpse was dumped in a shantytown, where it was later found bullet-ridden and with the bones in the hands he had used to play his guitar smashed. Witnesses said that soldiers crushed his hands and then taunted him to play one of his populist songs.

I first heard of Victor Jara in “Washington Bullets,” one of the best songs on Sandinista!, the Clash’s 1980 three-record set. The song is critical of American intervention as well as that of other nations (”If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed / Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.”)

The death of Victor Jara has inspired other musicians and human-rights activists to press on. U2’s “One Tree Hill” also references Jara’s murder: 

“And in our world a heart of darkness / A fire zone where poets speak their hearts, then bleed for it / Jara sang his song, a weapon in the hands of love / You know his blood still cries from the ground.”

Jara’s life was short compared to Pinochet’s, who died at 91 and just missed standing trial for hundreds of charges related to the estimated 3,200 people his regime killed.

General Augusto Pinochet was indicted in 1998 by the Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, arrested in London and finally released by the UK government in 2000. Authorized to freely return to Chile, he was there first indicted by the judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, and charged of a number of crimes, before dying on 10 December 2006, without having been convicted in any case.

Two different lives, two different outcomes, each on different ends of the spectrum. Despite his crimes in Chile, Pinochet was indicted in Spain, where the nation’s principle of universal justice can be used to prosecute serious crimes, even if they were committed abroad.

If the name “Baltasar Garzon” sounds familiar it’s because the magistrate is now a judge who has recently set his sights on other human rights abusers:  In April, Judge Garzon opened an investigation into the Bush Administration’s torture program in Guantanamo.

Three decades later, there will be justice in Jara’s murder. Spanish wheels moved the indictment of Pinochet and we may yet see an indictment of torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.