Victor Jara left his house for the Technical University on September 11, 1973, the day of the military coup in Chile. Two days later he was dead.

Arrested with many others Victor Jara was taken by the army to the Santiago boxing stadium. The prisoners were put in the stands; down below was the military. They focused strong lights on the prisoners. Suddenly, someone began to scream with terror. Immediately, machine guns were loosed against the section from where the scream came. Ten or twenty bodies fell from the high stands rolling over the bodies of prisoners who had thrown themselves to the ground to avoid the shots.

'I saw comrades who, in all the days they stayed there, never lifted their faces from the stone floor and afterwards had lost all capacity to move. The psychological shock was complete'. 'Victor wandered around among the prisoners, trying to calm them, to keep order among them. A fruitless attempt. The terror was limitless. It brought the prisoners to the lowest degree of human degredation'.

At one point Victor Jara went down to the arena and approached one of the doors through which new prisoners entered. Here he bumped into the commander of the prison camp. The commander looked at him, made a tiny gensture of someone playing a guitar. Victor nodded his head, smiling sadly and candidly. The military officer smiled to himself, as if congrat ulating himself for his discovery.

We are 5,000, here in this little corner of the city.
How many are we in all the cities of the world?
All of us, our eyes fixed on death.
How terrifying is the face of fascism!
For them, blood is a medal, carnage is a heroic gesture.
Song, I cannot sing you well when I must sing out of fear
When I am dying of fright.
When I find myself in these endless moments.
Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song."

—Poem composed by Jara shortly before his death.

He called four soldiers and ordered them to hold Victor. He ordered the table to be put in the centre of the stadium, so that everyone could see what was to happen. They took Victor to the table, laid his hands on it and with one single stroke of an axe the officer severed the fingers of Victor's left hand. With another stroke the fingers of the right hand were chopped off to fall trembling and still moving on the wooden floor.

Six thousand prisoners watched the officer throw himself on Victor Jara and hit him while shouting. 'Now sing, now sing'.

Victor Jara raised himself to his feet and blindly turned towards the stadium stands. His steps were faltering, knees trembling, his mutilated hands stretched forward like those of a sleepwalker, and And then his voice was heard crying, 'All right, comrades, let's do the commandante the favour'.

Lifting his bleeding hands, Victor Jara began to sing the anthem of the Unidad Popular, and everybody sang with him.

'As those six thousand voices rose into song, Victor marked the time with his mutilated hands. On his face was a smile—open and released—and his eyes shone as if possessed'.

This sight was too much for the military. A machine gun volley, and the body of Victor Jara, 27 years old, began to double over as if he were reverentially making a long and slow bow to his comrades. Then he fell down on his side and lay still.

More volleys followed, but these were directed into the stands against the people who had accompanied Victor's song.

An avalanche of bodies tumbled down riddled with bullets, rolling to the arena. The cries of the wounded were horrible. But Victor Jara did not hear them anymore. He was dead.

The Battle for a People's Art

Victor Jara was born the child of a poor family in southern Chile. He became a pupil of the famous Chilean singer, the late Violeta Parra. Jara also worked in theatre, becoming director of Theatre at the University of Chile in 1960.

In the late 1960's Victor began 'to convert into songs his feelings, his love for his people, his identification with them and their struggles for social justice. He began fighting the packaged, imported culture then invading Chile; he was engaged in establishing new values and accusing those guilty of maintaining misery and injustice.'

In 1970 Jara left theatre in order to devote himself to writing songs and singing for the people and the cause of President Allende's Popular Unity Government. He sang for the workers, in universities and at demonstrations.

During the 3 years of the Popular Unity there was a sort of cultural flowering in Chile 'you could call it an explosion, a real and massive participation of the people who had always been starved of any sort of cultural activity. New song groups, dance groups and theatre groups began to flourish, drab walls in Chile towns blossomed with colourful murals painted by the people.'

His widow, Joan Jara, described his music like this: 'He wanted to use the folklore as a base to develop new musical ideas and combine past and present. He wanted people to feel that folklore was a part of their lives, not an institution for museums, but a living thing that didn't stop growing.'

The Struggle Continues

One of Jara's fellow prisoners wrote: 'We were very conscious of the hatred that the reactionary forces had against Victor. Because of the personal attacks made in papers, because of gestures made in the street, because of all sorts of things. The worst thing that could happen to an artist or a singer at such a moment, he said, would be to stop risking one's life, to draw back—so he went on and on. It was That in Chile, to know that you were risking your life, because you felt what was there in the darkness.'