The Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to declare `subversive' even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor's name, they banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song Movement.
It was a mystery to me how Victor was remembered. Since the coup his very name had been censored, his records prohibited. But in spite of that I heard his songs being sung in poor community centres, in church halls, football clubs and universities, with whole audiences of young people joining in the singing as though his songs had become part of Chilean folklore (from Joan Jara, Victor, An Unfinished Song, Bloomsbury, London, 1998).
Victor Jara, The Voice of the People
In a powerful biography of the life of Victor Jara, his wife captures the deep political and cultural roots her husband planted in the soil of the working people of Chile. He committed his life to celebrating and popularizing the songs and stories of the Chilean people, recognizing that his cultural project had to be intimately connected to the political project of Salvador Allende's socialist and democratic Popular Unity coalition. Allende in October, 1970, was the first elected socialist president of a Latin American country.
The Nixon Administration and the Chilean military found the people's choice unacceptable and set about undermining Allende's government. On September 11, 1973 the military launched a coup, killed Allende, rounded up thousands of his supporters, and brought them to a huge soccer stadium, and tortured and shot their cultural icon, Victor Jara.
The United States Crushes Revolution in Chile
The United States had supported the Christian Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA financing since the 1950s. The Christian Democratic candidate in 1970 was opposed by Marxist Salvador Allende, who, as the head of a coalition of six left parties, won a plurality of votes.
From the time of the election in October, 1970, until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup toppled Allende, the United States did everything it could to destabilize the elected government. First, the United States pressured Chilean legislators to reject the election result. When that failed, energy and resources were used to damage the Chilean economy and build a network of ties with military personnel ready to carry out a coup.
Allende developed policies to redistribute land, nationalized the vital copper industry, and established diplomatic relations with the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Popular culture stimulated by artists such as Victor Jara flowered and grew. All these moves exacerbated tensions with the United States, since its investments in copper, iron, nitrates, iodine, and salt were large.
The Nixon administration formed a secret committee, "the 40 committee," headed by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to develop a long-term plan to destabilize and overthrow the Allende government. The CEO of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, a major foreign influence in Chile, was enthusiastic about the Nixon plan.
Among the policies utilized by Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile, termination of aid and loans, International Monetary Fund pressure on the government to carry out anti-worker policies, the engineering of a substantial decline in the price of copper on the world market, fomenting dissent in the military, and funding opposition groups and newspapers, particularly the influential Santiago daily, El Mercurio. Despite growing economic crisis and protests by the rightwing spurred by U.S. covert operations, the Allende-led left coalition scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in March, 1973.
Since Nixon's directive to make Chile's "economy scream" had not led to Allende's rejection at the ballot box, the Kissinger committee and the right-wing generals decided to act. On September 11, 1973 the military carried out a coup that ousted the Allende government, assassinated him in the Presidential Palace, and established brutal rule under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet. A year after the coup, Amnesty International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners had been taken. The new regime banned all political parties, abolished trade unions, and initiated programs to assassinate pro-Allende emigres, including former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was blown up in an automobile in Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.
The spirit of the brutal U.S. policy in Chile was expressed by Kissinger in 1970 when he declared: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." One year after the coup President Ford (who replaced the discredited Richard Nixon) defended the it as being in the "best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in the best interests of the United States." A different assessment was provided by a distinguished diplomatic historian, Alexander De Conde who wrote that the United States "had a hand in the destruction of a moderate left-wing government that allowed democratic freedoms to its people and to its replacement by a friendly right-wing government that crushed such freedoms with torture and other police-state repressions."
Chile is one example of the way the United States has sought to control and influence the internal affairs of nations. But the spirit of resistance planted in so many different ways in so many places by cultural performers and revolutionaries such as Victor Jara lives on.
As long as we sing his songs,
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.
Pete Seeger
"Singout Magazine" 1975
I awoke one day it was early September
A prisoner in my own land
For fighting against the war that my country
Was waging against Vietnam
How sad I remember it came over the news
Jangling the bars to my cell
That Chile had fallen, the great eagle's talons
Had gauged out its insides, 10,000 slaughtered
And Chile, O Chile fell to the fascists
Socialist Chile fell.
I leaped from my bunk to the bars like a madman
Desperate to bend them escape
Riverhead prison had hold of my body
But my heart Santiago did take
As Pinochet swept through the gray streets at dawn
And murdered all who'd protest
"I protest. I protest, you bastards let me out"
I screamed and a guard sneered: "You're next."
And the corpses piled high
In the weeks that followed
Rats feasted on bodies
That lined every block
Allende had stood strong defending his people
Pistol in hand, so cowardly shot.
And who to hoe the ungrown rice
The painted murals, bulletproof dreams?
Kissinger crashes the gates of Eden
CIA toasts the success of his schemes.
Chile, O Chile
They're murdering your soul
If only the muse had whispered to Allende
"Arm yourselves, Arise."
My four months ended I flew like a demon
Out of that prison as dynamite's wings
Blasted ITT's Park Avenue office
For Chile, serve notice, prove freedom still rings.
Chile, O Chile
They're murdering your soul
If only the muse had whispered to Allende
Arm yourselves, Arise.
"We are 5,000 this noon," Victor Jara sang
In the Estadio Naçional
They smacked his guitar till it was in ruins
No resistance songs they'd allow!
Yet vibrant and powerful verse sprung from his throat
His hands beat the rhythmic sounds;
On Pinochet's orders the evil sword flashed
And Victor's hands fell to the ground,
His severed hands fell to the ground.
"Sing now, Victor Jara," wrists shattered and torn,
"Sing now, we have chopped off your hands!"
An icy wind rattled the stadium's bones
Shivering through every land.
Song, I can't sing you when I sing out of fear
When I am dying of fright
Eternal silence screams out from my heart,
Fascism's sirens the night.
Victor stared at his hands in the dirt,
Fingers like snakes, once wandered in Joan's hair,
Palms, now dead, that so often stroked her face,
Those bleeding stumps where his hands once did hang
"Don't let them defeat you," her voice sliced through his pain
And Victor opened his heart and he sang!
His song for the people, for Chile, for love
For freedom he sang out the words
Pinochet's darkness recedes with the decades
While Victor's songs are new blossoms, are heard
So sing, Victor Jara,
The rice has matured
And the words bubble out of your tomb
Now a million are marching
On Pinochet's jail
All humming Victor's last tune!
Sing, Victor Jara,
Your song's on every lip
The workers are rising again!
Rise up! Rise up! Throw the fascists aside,
Nothing to lose but your chains -
And a world to regain, to win.
One Hand, one heart
Chile, O Chile
We've learned our lessons well
Today the torturer stands trial for his crimes
And Pinochet's sentenced to hell,
Let Pinochet rot in his hell.
I awoke one day it was early September
A prisoner in my own land
For fighting against the war that my country
Was waging against Vietnam
How sad I remember it came over the news
Jangling the bars to my cell
That Chile had fallen, the great eagle's talons
Had gauged out its insides, 10,000 slaughtered
And Chile, O Chile fell to the fascists
Socialist Chile fell.
by Mitchell Cohen
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