The Music Plays On — Victor Jara

Donato Cabrera
6 min readSep 19, 2020
Victor Jara

On September 12, 1973, the theater director, teacher, poet, and singer-songwriter, Victor Jara was taken prisoner at the university where he taught in Santiago, Chile, by soldiers of General Pinochet’s regime, who had staged a coup d’etat the day before by overthrowing the democratically elected government of president Salvador Allende. For the next four days, Jara was tortured in front of thousands of other prisoners in the Chile Stadium. The torture included smashing his hands with a hammer and then asking him to play the guitar. On September 16,1973, Jara was shot in the head by one of the guards and for many days his body was hung at the entrance of the stadium for other prisoners to see as they entered. This brutal murder and subsequent long road to justice has recently been shared in the excellent Netflix documentary, ReMastered: Massacre at the Stadium.

Jara’s popularity and influence cannot be overstated. His popularity while he was alive was such that, in the Latin world, he could’ve easily been compared to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie. This made his brutal murder all the more traumatic and shocking. In 2013, Springsteen sang Jara’s song Manifesto in Chile days before the 40th anniversary of the Jara’s murder.

Like most Americans, I didn’t know the gritty details of what happened in Chile until I started conducting there in 2008. Since then, Chile has become a home away from home and while I still have so much to learn, Jara’s story as well as many others have been revealed to me over time and I feel fortunate, as well as responsible, for sharing his story through sharing his music.

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