“I sing, how bad you come out / when I have to sing I’m scared. / Scary as the one that lives, as the one that dies, scares”. The verses that Víctor Jara wrote when he was confined and tortured in the Chile Stadium are the best example of the terror and ignonym in which the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet was installed in Chile half a century ago.
Cultural ambassador of Chile, President Salvador Allende in his democratic transition towards socialism, prominent militant of the Chilean Communist Party and, above all, champion of the New Chilean Song after the death of Violeta Parra, the singer-songwriter was one of the most annoying for the coup plotters, who did not hesitate to end his life in cold blood after ending that of the president in the assault on the Palacio de la Moneda.
Víctor Jara was arrested along with other professors from the State Technical University in Santiago on the same day as the coup, September 11, 1971. In one of the cruelest episodes of the regime, which has remained unpunished for half a century, the activist was He was beaten and burned, his fingers were broken, his tongue was cut out and he was subjected to various mock firing squads. Until he ended his life on the 16th. His corpse was thrown with those of other victims of the repression – several of them still unidentified – next to one of the walls of the metropolitan cemetery. The body had 44 bullet wounds.
Already turned into a benchmark for protest songs in life, Jara always rejected this name, assuring that his song, committed, was nothing more than a reflection and evolution of Chilean popular song and, by extension, Latin American. This was made clear at the historic Latin American Music Meeting that was held at La Casa de las Américas in Havana in 1972 and from whose intervention we offer a fragment.
Unequivocally aligned with the Cuban regime, the singer-songwriter optimistically noted the steps being taken by the Popular Unity Government –the coalition of Chilean socialists and communists– and appealed for the internationalization of the popular struggle throughout the continent, lamenting cultural mercantilism installed in the region, which had even reached popular demonstrations.
“(…) This song spoke of other things and did not just say that we had a mountain range covered in snow and rivers that are very beautiful, etc., etc. And that our women were beautiful and that we were very happy. In this environment of picturesque banal singing, from a postcard, a song for the tourist, a harsh, rude, vital, tremendous voice suddenly emerges, which marked a path in Chile.
Violeta Parra is for us the popular artist par excellence. There are many songs, with an enormous amount of poetry and music. But I’m going to sing you one that she wrote on the occasion of a piece of news that she received from her brother, from one of her brothers, because she has several of hers, while she was in Paris. While she was there, in Chile things moved a lot, just like water in a raft, she was very moving.
We had a government, in the year 63, of the right, of course. And the one on duty, the president on duty, was called Don Jorge Alessandri. Son of Don Arturo Alessandri, a man who is in the history of our country for being a guy with a tremendous, powerful inner fire… he roared towards the masses and called him the lion, the lion of Tarapacá.
León, because he brought them as a speaker. From Tarapacá, well, I think it was because the province of Tarapacá, in Chile, belonged almost entirely to him. His son, Don Jorge, also wanted to roar loudly, but he did not have the fire that his father had and he pulled out his claws by creating a repressive police force like the students had never known before.
In this environment, Violeta writes this song called La carta:
They sent me a letter / by early mail / and in that letter they tell me / that my brother was arrested. / And without pity with crickets / they dragged him down the street, yes. / The letter says the reason / that Roberto has committed: / having supported the strike / that had already been resolved. / If this is a reason / dam I’m also going, sergeant, yes. / I am so far away, / waiting for news, / the letter comes to tell me / that in my country there is no justice. / The hungry ask for bread, / lead is given by the militia, yes. / In this pompous way / they want to keep their seats / those with fans and tails. / Without having merit / they come and go from church / and forget the commandments, yes. / Would you have seen insolence, / barbarism and treachery / of presenting the blunderbuss / and killing in cold blood / who has no defense? / With both empty hands, yes / The letter I have received / asks me for an answer. / I ask that it spread / throughout the population / that the lion is a bloodthirsty / in every generation, yes. / Luckily I have a guitar / to mourn my pain, / I also have nine brothers / apart from the one who shackled. / The nine are communists / with the favor of my God, yes.
This seems like a confession, but there is nothing more beautiful than confessing like this, saying what one feels so freely. Especially now, that we are so happy. I say now because that’s how Violeta sang these monstrous things that were happening in my country and that continue to happen in other countries.
Because in other places history seems to have stopped. The song, suddenly, can be a terrible weapon too. And for this reason, that the song industry, managed by large companies, none of them Latin American, of course, but with names in Spanish, seeing that a new song is emerging that is on the side of the fight, of the people’s fights, the industry, also ready, gives it a title: protest.
And you can find out there, in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile inclusive, Mexico… many popular or populace idols more like protest singers. Our song is not a protest song, it is a popular song, because it is intimately linked to the youth and the people, intimately in their most noble sentiments, in their fervent desire to be free and to live better. That’s why it’s popular.
