| Victor Jara - An
UnfinishedSong 
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“Song
is like the water that washes the stones,the wind
that cleans us,like the fire which joins us
together and it lives within us to make us better
people”Victor
Jara
The
life of Victor Jara became a symbol of one of the
most important experiences of the twentieth
century. This was the creation of a movement to
achieve the possibility of a new kind of
democracy, in which the poor could participate
fully to change their lives for the better.
Victor Jara’s music brought out the beauty
of that experience for Chile’s workers and
peasants. He is celebrated still with great
fervour in his home country.
Across the world there are people who
have found that he symbolises the vision that
they share with his compatriots, arising from
quite different national and cultural
experiences. That is the origin of this
festival on 22nd-24th July
2005 in Machynlleth at the heart of the Dyfi
Valley in Wales.
We have no doubt that people will enjoy
the music, dance, poetry and theatre of the
festival. Here we want to describe what we think
lies at the heart of the vision that inspired us
to organise it, so that we can share that too.
Why should a great theatre director,
songwriter, singer and musician be tortured and
cruelly executed by a military dictatorship
immediately on taking power? What kind of
terrorist was this? Why should the
government be supported in its actions by the
most powerful nation in the world, which has
always claimed to promote freedom and democracy?
It is because these questions are still relevant
today that the life and work of Victor Jara
should continue to be celebrated
He was born in a remote village, where
his father had a tied cottage as an inquelino, a
labourer on a latifundia or semi- feudal landed
estate. It was a life of poverty and marginality.
As so often in peasant families, only the efforts
of his mother, after his embittered father became
drunkenly violent and useless to the family,
opened up a different future for Victor. She took
her children to the slums of Santiago where her
sheer hard work enabled him to start an
education, whilst her own love of singing
traditional music inspired his interest. Among
the leading figures of the Chilean democratic
movement he was one who shared the origins of the
poor who supported it.
Victor’s artistic talents were
first recognised when he joined a semi-voluntary
theatre mime group. This led to training as an
actor and director in the theatre and his
innovative work in this field led to national and
international recognition. However from an early
stage in this period he became involved with
others who were collecting and learning peasant
folk music and re-interpreting it with increasing
popularity. Although his theatre work was
similarly informed it was as a singer and
musician that he developed his role as a voice of
the democratic movement, along with groups like
Inti Illimani and Quilapayun
In the late 1960’s the same
poverty, injustices and aspirations that led to
the Cuban revolution were apparent in other parts
of Latin America. Workers and peasants in Chile
had a history of political organisation and the
Chilean Popular Unity Movement chose the
democratic road to socialism. When Salvador
Allende, leader of the Socialist Party was
elected by its people Chile became a beacon of
freedom for the poor and dispossessed elsewhere.
Chile was showing the world that people might
choose socialism by a democratic process and not
just by military success against foreign rule or
dictatorship
Because this was a new culture of
democracy people combined political participation
with involvement in music, dance, theatre, and
the visual arts. The New Chilean Song movement of
Victor Jara and others, incorporating traditional
instruments and forms along with new music that
expressed peoples’ contemporary lives and
aspirations, replaced the products and promotions
of international record companies in the popular
charts. Popular culture lived up to the label
September 11th 1973 saw the
end of all this. A military coup led by General
Pinochet removed the democratically elected
government. The President Salvador Allende was
killed in the bombing of the Presidential palace.
Thousands of active supporters of the Popular
Unity government were arrested, imprisoned in the
National Stadium and in many cases tortured and
murdered. Among these was Victor Jara.
We have direct evidence of how he was cruelly
beaten, his hands mutilated as his tormenters
mocked that his days as a people’s musician
were over, and finally murdered. His death
silenced his voice but the manner of his death
also spoke eloquently for thousands of other
democrats tortured, killed and
“disappeared” under Pinochet
The role of the United States in this
other September 11th is one of the
reasons for keeping the memory alive.
Declassified material published and analysed by
Peter Kornbluh in 2004 has put US complicity
beyond any questioning. He concludes:
‘Beginning in the early 1960’s, U.S.
policy makers initiated more than a decade of
efforts to control Chile’s political life,
culminating in a massive covert effort to
“bring down”, as Richard Nixon and
members of his cabinet candidly discussed, the
duly elected Popular Unity government of Salvador
Allende. Within hours of realising that
goal on September 11th 1973, the White
House began transmitting secret messages
welcoming General Pinochet to power and
expressing a “desire to cooperate with the
military Junta and to assist in any appropriate
way.”
It is also clear that the U.S. was
standing by to contribute directly if the coup
had not succeeded. This episode was indeed a
classic example of the US doctrine ‘We
support democracy if it agrees with us’
which increasingly dominates world affairs.
Henry Kissinger actually said “we won’t
let Chile go communist because of the stupidity
of its own people.”
In Britain Margaret Thatcher was a close
friend of General Pinochet and leading
politicians supported him when he was awaiting
extradition to Chile for a proper trial. On the
other hand Chilean democrats applauded a British
Home Secretary who agreed to his extradition.
Others responsible for the regime’s
atrocities have recently been indicted including
the officer accused of Victor Jara’s torture
and murder.
It is to be hoped that the divisions and
suspicions in Chile can now be healed somewhat by
similar processes of reconciliation as in South
Africa after apartheid. Victor’s music and
songs are full of the generosity and warmth that
could bring about such reconciliation. But South
Africa created a Commission for Truth as well as
Reconciliation. There has to be a proper
understanding of the forces against democracy,
within Chile and outside, that killed Victor Jara
and his compatriots.
Today we see the same arguments for
interference in the affairs of other countries,
democratic or otherwise, by the US, its corporate
elites and its allies. The press highlights what
is happening in the Middle East but not in
Venezuela and Brazil where international
corporate interests backed by the USA make it
very difficult for democratic mandates on behalf
of the poor to be fulfilled. The life and
work of Victor Jara can inspire us to follow his
lead and not allow the language of freedom and
democracy to be taken over by the same kind of
interests that tried to silence him. He helps us
to remember the meaning of the other 9/11.
Keith
Jackson
Click HERE to hear Victor Jara
singing 'Luchin'
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