Victor Jara met his end in circumstances that have since become widely known. Following the military takeover, authorities detained him among many others targeted for their political affiliations and transported the group to the National Football Stadium, where guards subjected prisoners to beatings, torture, and executions. Even after soldiers shattered his hands—or, according to repeated accounts, severed them—he persisted in performing a tune that endorsed the deposed Popular Unity Party. Only after repeated, savage strikes did a machine-gun volley from an officer finally silence him. In the nearly thirty years that followed, politically engaged singers such as Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton have kept his compositions and his example alive. Arlo Guthrie adapted Adrian Mitchell’s lyrics into the ballad “Victor Jara” and included it on the album Amigo. Although authorities ended his life by force, his recordings have continued to circulate.
Born the youngest of four children to ploughman Manuel and semi-professional folksinger Amanda, Jara spent his childhood in extreme poverty on a feudal-style estate, subsisting on sacks of flour and occasional fruit earned through his father’s work. By six or seven he was already laboring alongside his father in the fields. Domestic life grew harsher as his father increasingly turned to drink to dull his hardships. After a pot of boiling water scalded his sister, Jara accompanied his mother to Santiago, the only city with a hospital able to treat the burns. There his mother found work at a food stall in an open-air market, yet in March 1950 Jara learned she had suffered a fatal stroke while on the job.
For the next three years he attended classes while staying in friends’ homes. At fifteen he abandoned school and joined the Redemptist Order in the village of San Bernardo south of Santiago, though his intention to enter the priesthood lasted only twelve months. In 1952 he departed the seminary and enlisted in the Chilean army, receiving an honorable discharge the following year. Theater and music soon took precedence. He enrolled in the University of Chile’s theater program, completed a degree in acting, and began studies in directing. During this period he met his future wife, Joan Turner, a teacher from Great Britain. His musical direction shifted decisively after an encounter with traditional singer and visual artist Violeta Parra, proprietor of a modest Santiago café. Under her guidance he performed there with growing frequency. His self-titled debut album appeared in 1966; four years later he abandoned theater to concentrate exclusively on music.
From the outset Jara channeled his songwriting into advocacy for Chile’s laborers and rural poor. An ardent supporter of the Communist Party, he welcomed the election of Dr. Salvador Allende, leader of the Popular Unity Coalition and the first socialist chosen to head a Latin American nation. Allende’s government proposed expanded educational resources, additional low-income housing, and universal socialized medical care. Those aspirations collapsed on 11 September 1973 when a military junta under Admiral Toribio Merino and Army General Augusto Pinochet, backed by the United States through the Central Intelligence Agency, toppled Allende and imposed a violent coup. Thousands of coalition supporters were detained, hundreds of them later killed. Jara was seized at the State Technical University, held for five days in a frigid, unsanitary cell without sufficient food or water, and then moved to the National Football Stadium. Although initially placed in a mass grave, his wife secured a proper burial. She subsequently fled Chile clandestinely, carrying numerous unreleased recordings of his work.
