Today would have been the 90th birthday of Víctor Jara: theater director, composer, singer, performer, and human rights champion. This text is excerpted from Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world.
His life and legacy remain an inspiration to Latin Americans as well as artists inspired by human rights. For Jara, art and artists could bring people together in ways that political speeches or marches alone could not.
His 1973 murder at the hands of Chile’s security forces hasn’t stopped his art from continuing to inspire future generations to work for human rights and the right to live in peace, the title to one of his most famous songs.
Jara was born to a poor farm family living outside Chile’s capital, Santiago. Like many Chileans, the Jaras were mestizo, with Indigenous Mapuche as well as Spanish heritage. His first memory was hearing his mother sing folk songs as she worked in their garden or cooked.
Jara drew on his childhood memories for his songs. “The Plow” (El Arado) describes his father’s back-breaking labor. At the same time, Jara saw beauty in the natural world. [lyric] Butterflies are flying/crickets are singing/my skin gets darker and darker/and the sun glares, glares and glares/Sweat furrows me, I make furrows in the earth, on and on.
This rendition of “El Arado” is by Inti Illimani, a Chilean folk group Jara performed with prior to his murder.
When Jara was 15, his mother died suddenly. Thinking he’d become a priest, he enrolled in seminary school and learned Gregorian chants. But he soon realized that he wasn’t a good fit for the priesthood. After completing his obligatory military service, he enrolled in the University of Chile’s theater school and began to direct plays.
In the 1960s, a growing progressive movement was mounting a challenge to Chile’s wealthy families and the multinational companies that controlled the country’s lucrative natural resources in copper, hydropower, and timber. Chileans were well aware of America’s military interventions in Iran, Cuba, and Guatemala, and feared the same for Chile.
At the same time, artists like Violeta Parra, also a musician, were rediscovering the rich musical legacy of Chile’s Indigenous and mestizo culture. Parra and her two children, Angel and Isabel, were part of a movement known as nueva canción, or new songs, a melding of folk tradition with new lyrics and tunes.
The Parra family opened a music club dedicated to nueva canción. One night, the crowd urged Jara to sing. The applause was thunderous. Jara believed deeply in the right of all Chileans to a decent life. ‘You don’t need charity,’ he once said. “‘You have the right to somewhere decent to live, to a doctor within reach when you are ill, to a good education for your children! What’s the use of a lampshade if you have no house to put it in?’”
Jara believed music gave voice to the poor and uncovered society’s injustices. To one journalist, he said:
“I am moved more and more by what I see around me, the poverty of my own country, of Latin America... But I have also seen what love can do, what real liberty can do, what the strength of a man who is happy can achieve. Because of all this, and because above all I desire peace, I need the wood and strings of my guitar to give vent to sadness or happiness, some verse which opens up the heart like a wound, some line which helps us all to turn from inside ourselves to look out and see the world with new eyes.”
Chileans loved his album, “La Población,” translated as “the Neighborhood.” Jara conducted interviews with the residents of a housing project built on wasteland in Santiago, then developed the interviews into songs. His music could be controversial. Often, he’d be singing at a rally when police would start arresting and beating the audience. One of Jara’s songs, “Móvil Oil Special” became an anti-American protest anthem, denouncing the US-based Mobile Oil and supporting student protest.
His family and friends became increasingly afraid for him. Jara received direct threats is he persisted in singing what some considered “subversive songs.”
But Jara never wavered. “There was no doubt that his commitment and his resolve were strengthened rather than weakened by it,” his wife, Joan Jara, a fellow artist, later wrote. “He took a step forward rather than backwards in the face of violence, taking the risk with his eyes open.”
In 1969, a human being was about to step on the moon. But in Chile, all eyes were on the 1970 presidential election. Some Chileans, inspired by revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia, took up arms. In response, right wing militants began attacking organized workers and farmers.
But support for candidate Salvador Allende, a physician and a Marxist, proved decisive. He was inaugurated on November 3, 1970. His political alliance, Popular Unity, moved to nationalize the copper mines and banks and guarantee medical care and housing. Every poor child, Allende promised, would have a glass of milk a day, a way to combat hunger.
At night, the telephone in the Jara’s home would ring with threatening calls. Yet Jara believed that Chile’s long tradition of democracy would stand against dictatorship.
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet ordered Chile’s Air Force to bomb the presidential palace. As news of a military coup spread, Jara left home to join his colleagues at the university. Later, police detained Jara and hundreds of professors and students and herded them into the city’s Chile Stadium, where Jara had once played for adoring crowds. An officer recognized him and began to beat him, especially his hands, so used to plucking the strings of his guitar. Despite the abuse, witnesses remember Jara singing a famous political song of the time, “Venceremos, “We Will Win.”
At one point, he asked a fellow detainee for a pen and paper to write what would be his last poem, “Estadio Chile.”
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror/ Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.
Days later, his wife collected her husband’s body from the morgue. Even in her grief, she considered herself among the lucky ones. Many families never received any information about their loved ones’ whereabouts. In case after case, Chile’s military, police, and intelligence services tortured and killed detainees, burying them in mass graves or dropping their bodies into the Pacific Ocean.
At the time of his murder, Jara was forty years old.
Jara’s music and his example continue to inspire Chileans. Every year, thousands of guitarists gather in Santiago’s Chile Stadium and around the country for the “Thousand Guitars” tribute. Here, thousands sing Jara’s “The right to live in Peace,” El derecho de Vivir en Paz.
For years, the Jara family searched for his killers. In 2018, a Chilean court sentenced eight retired Chilean military officers to 15 years in prison each for his murder. A ninth suspect was jailed for five years for his role in covering up the killings. In 2016, a US civil court jury found a US citizen and former Chilean military official liable for torturing and killing Jara. To date, the United States has refused to return him to Chile for trial.
Human Rights Heroes calendar
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Especially for teachers and librarians, this is very useful for planning special events and celebrations.
Reviews for Righting Wrongs
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