On September 11, 1973, around eleven in the morning, Víctor Jara arrived at the State Technical University (UTE), in whose National Secretariat of Extension and Communications he had worked since 1971. He did so after listening to the call to the workers of the President Salvador Allende from La Moneda, surrounded by the military coup plotters, and receive instructions from the leadership of the Communist Youth, to whose Central Committee he had belonged for a year.
That morning he was scheduled to perform his songs at an event at the UTE in which Allende was going to call the country to a plebiscite to resolve the political conflict.
The day passed at the university center with a certain normality, both in the development of classes and in administrative work, until around noon, although with a smaller influx of students, teachers and employees.
In the afternoon, after the bombing of La Moneda, where President Allende put an end to his life, Víctor Jara telephoned his wife again and they succinctly commented on the evolution of events. “He just said that at that moment he couldn't get home because of the curfew, that he would try to get home the next day. “He told me to take care of myself, that he loved me…” Joan Jara told the Spanish magazine Triunfo a year later.
Around six o'clock, a patrol of soldiers and police approached the UTE Headquarters, and informed the rector that, given the imminent start of the curfew, none of the almost a thousand people who were still there could leave the university campus. .
At that time, Víctor Jara was in the cafeteria of the School of Arts and Crafts, where he sang, for the last time, some of his best-known songs. The historian Augusto Samaniego was also there.
He and his wife, another couple of UTE officials and the singer-songwriter decided to spend the night in the offices of his work area, sheltered by large piles of newspapers, which also served as a mattress. During the night they heard the constant sound of shots coming from outside. At dawn, Víctor Jara and his companions managed to meet with the bulk of people who remained at the School of Arts and Crafts.
The military assault began around half past six in the morning. The machine gun fire towards the Headquarters, the Faculty of Engineering and other buildings was only interrupted when the military leaders demanded that those inside come out with their hands up.
Little by little the UTE was evicted. First, the students, teachers and employees who were in the building of the National Secretariat of Extension and Communications left. Later, a military truck demolished the metal gate of one of the entrances to the School of Arts and Crafts and the uniformed men entered, firing bursts of machine guns and rifles.
Hundreds of people, including Jara, were forced to remain lying, face down and with their hands behind their heads, in the patios or sports fields, while the military proceeded to search the premises like savages. Since the previous day, the Estadio Chile sports hall, as well as the National Stadium, had begun to prepare to function as a concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the Army.
Around three in the afternoon, the transfer of the UTE prisoners to the Chile Stadium, located just a kilometer and a half away, began. Formed in columns, they boarded the buses, where they were ordered to kneel on the ground, always with their hands behind their heads, while they were permanently guarded by eighteen-year-old youths who were doing their military service.
For Víctor Jara, that journey to the Chile Stadium meant, perhaps, evoking the memorable night of July 12, 1969, when there, accompanied by the Quilapayún ensemble, he premiered his song Plegaria a un labrador, winner of the First Festival of the New Chilean Song. But above all it was the beginning of a true viacrucis.
At that time, numerous buses were taking hundreds of detainees from different parts of the city to the Chile Stadium. As they descended, amid blows, butts and insults from the soldiers, they had to wait until they reached the registration point located in the lobby, where they showed their identity cards, and officials from the Investigative Police wrote down their information.
There all the “prisoners of war”, as they were already considered, had to hand over their watches, wallets, ties, shoelaces, belts, personal documents, money and even rings.
When Jara was about to enter the sports complex, he was identified by an officer. “They bring that wretch here to me,” he shouted. Two soldiers took him before him, and began to hit and kick him all over his body, one of them in the face, amid a torrent of insults and words full of hatred towards his songs and his political commitment.
“At one point he took out his gun and we all thought he was going to shoot him,” said lawyer Boris Navia, “but he just hits him in the head with the gun and his face fills with blood…” Afterwards, a soldier dragged him and he was taken to a nearby room, where he remained for several hours with twenty other prisoners.
Deprived of food and water, he was subsequently beaten, harassed and tortured by officers and soldiers, all dressed in combat uniforms, in one of the changing rooms in the first underground. A sergeant sent to attend to the detainees in the infirmary – who could only be administered vitamin C and a painkiller – received Víctor Jara, who “complained of pain in his abdomen and ribs.” The sergeant was struck by the state of his hands, visibly “swollen and inflamed,” as a result of the blows received.
The Chile Stadium already housed nearly five thousand detainees in an atmosphere of absolute terror. At any moment the soldiers would shoot without reason in different directions or hit them with the butts of their rifles. They were prohibited from moving from their assigned place and spotlights illuminated them permanently so that they could not sleep and lost track of time.
Beatings, mock executions, hangings, burns with cigarettes and the application of electricity, as well as sexual harassment and rape in the case of some detainees, are part of the testimonial accounts that numerous former prisoners have given over the years.
On Thursday the 13th, at four thirty in the afternoon, Joan Jara received a call from a young man, very nervous, who conveyed a message from her husband. “In this message, the last one I received from him, he told me that I was not going to be able to leave the Stadium, that I should take care of our daughters and that I should have courage and continue my fight,” she explained in 1974.
It was Hugo González, a member of the Communist Youth, who conveyed those words to him. He had met Jara that morning in a side hallway of the court, sitting and unattended, “with physical signs of having been badly beaten, the most noticeable being the wounds on his face.” He was able to talk to him for a few minutes and, since he had been detained only for violating curfew, he expressed that he believed he would be released soon.
Then Jara asked him, when that happened, to call his wife to inform her of his situation and tell her that he had left his car in the parking lot of the State Technical University. She confessed her fear of never seeing her family again and begged him not to create false expectations about a possible deadline for her freedom. And when a tear ran down her face and fell onto her shirt, she told him: “Hugo, tell them I'm fine. Don't mention the beatings, don't talk about what they're doing to me. "I don't want them to know."
That afternoon he was able to join a group of prisoners linked to the UTE and the Communist Youth. He was walking with great difficulty, he had some broken ribs and his face was bruised and bloody, as was his clothes. Then, solidarity “sprouted from every corner of the Chile Stadium,” recalled editor Carlos Orellana. “Pieces of bread, a cookie, a bandage, a jacket to keep warm. Victor was calmer now. He talked, he talked about his partner, his daughters, what could come in Chile.”
Throughout September 15, the venue became empty as the transfer of the “prisoners of war” to the National Stadium progressed. Almost at the last moment, Víctor Jara was separated from those ranks and taken to the underground, where, thanks to the confessions before the Chilean justice of several people who were doing their military service in 1973, we know that he was shot by officers of the Chilean army.
One of them, José Paredes, on guard in the subway, has stated: “I remember that Lieutenant Smith, Lieutenant Barrientos and other officers were in that place (…). After the interrogation, Lieutenant Barrientos decided to play Russian roulette with Víctor Jara, so he took out his handgun, approaching Víctor Jara, who was standing, with his hands behind his back, because he was handcuffed, spinning the gun. gun, putting it to the back of his head and shooting him, falling to the ground.”
Hours before, he had been able to deliver to his companions the poem Estadio Chile, which remained unfinished and which the Communist Party managed to remove from the country at the end of that month of September. In the final part he expressed: “I sing, how bad you come out / when I have to sing horror. / Horror like the one I live, / like the one I die, horror / to see myself among so many / moments of infinity / in which silence and screams are the goals / of this song. / What I never saw, / what I have felt and what I feel / will make the moment spring forth…”
The next day, several people saw the bodies of Víctor Jara, Littré Quiroga (former director general of Prisons and communist militant) and two other victims of the dictatorship lying next to the wall of the Metropolitan Cemetery, about twelve kilometers south of the Chile Stadium.
Around ten o'clock, those bodies were collected and transferred to the Legal Medical Service. The courage of Héctor Herrera, a young Civil Registry official, who confirmed the identity of Víctor Jara and notified Joan Jara, risking his life, allowed him to bury him on September 18 and saved his loved ones the infinite and eternal suffering of the relatives of the disappeared detainees.
They were days of mourning for the Chilean people, with the funeral of Pablo Neruda, on September 25, as the first public and collective expression of pain and also of the willingness to fight for the reconquest of democracy. On October 15, Joan Jara and her daughters, Manuela Bunster and Amanda Jara, went into exile in London. Very soon, Víctor Jara would become one of the universal symbols of the Chilean tragedy and his songs sheltered the immense international solidarity that it aroused.
In September 1978, Joan Jara filed the first complaint before the courts for his murder and thus began a long and complex judicial battle that ended last month, with the final ruling of the Supreme Court confirming the sentences handed down by Judge Miguel Vásquez in 2018 against nine former Army officers, ratified and increased by the Santiago Court of Appeals in 2021.
Furthermore, in June 2016, and after a civil trial, an Orlando court declared former Chilean army lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos, who was living free in the United States, guilty of the torture and murder of Víctor Jara, and ordered him to pay to his family of compensation for damages of twenty-eight million dollars, which he has not paid. A judge stripped Barrientos of his U.S. citizenship in July.
This text is part of an article published in number 662 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
