Victor Jara

Victor Jara was a very famous folk singer and writer in Chile, known all over the world after being killed during the coup in which Salvador Allende died and Pinochet took over. He was caught by the military forces inside the university where he taught, along with several other socialist students and professors, and taken to the national stadium, where they were all held. From here, I've read and heard different versions. The most heroic is that he was playing his guitar in the stadium and an officer ordered him to stop. He kept playing and singing and they cut one of his hands off. As he kept playing with just one hand, they cut the other as well. Uncapable of playing, he kept singing and they shot him... The true facts are that he was shot to death and his body was found with both hands cut. His murder file, together with many more crimes perpetrated during Pinochet's dictatorship, is now being opened again, for trial.

Last week, I went to a bar to hear some live music. There was this one guy with just a guitar, who played several south american songs, not just chilean, which had in common this political resistance message. He played some songs from Victor Jara and Violeta Parra (soon a post about her as well), who were both characters of Chilean's regime. The bar was not big, but was full, full with normal and different people, who all had in common the fact that they would know all the songs, all the lyrics (even when the singer did not) and would suggest other similar songs for him to play. The atmosphere inside was full of feeling, powerful, like flesh wounds still to heal. Pinochet was in power until 1990, meaning that the dictatorship and its effects are still recent for chileans. All the people in that bar were born in the regime and their feeling about it, their value of democracy, is way more present than in Portugal.

© Image from Wikipedia