Joan Jara
It took me months, even years, to piece together something of what happened to Víctor during the week that for me he was “missing.” Many people could not even speak about their experiences, were afraid to testify, could not bear to remember. Under such horrendous pressure and suffering people lost their sense of time and even of which day of the week events occurred. But gradually, by collecting evidence from Chilean refugees in exile who shared experiences with Víctor, were with him at given moments, I have managed to reconstruct, roughly, what he endured while I waited for him at home.
When he reached Plaza Italia on the morning of September 11, Víctor found that the center of Santiago had been sealed off by the military, so he turned south down Vicuña McKenna and then west again along Avenida Matta, thus making a wide detour to reach the campus of the Technical University on the far side of the city. He saw the movement of tanks and troops, heard the shooting and explosions, but managed to get through. When he arrived at the Communications Department he learnt that the radio station of the university had been attacked and taken off the air very early that morning by a contingent of armed men from the nearby naval radio station in the Quinta Normal. He must have arrived just about the time that the Moneda Palace was being bombed. From the university buildings it was possible to see the Hawker Hunter jets, to hear the rockets explode as they landed on the Moneda Palace where Allende was holding out and to see the smoke rising from the ruins as the building was destroyed by fire. Soon afterwards, Víctor managed to get his turn on an overworked telephone to tell me that he had arrived safely and to ask how we were getting on.
There were about 600 students and teachers gathered in the Technical University that morning. At the opening ceremony, President Allende was to have made an important speech announcing his decision to hold a national plebiscite to resolve by democratic means the conflict threatening the country.
As the first military bandos threatened that people on the streets were in danger of being shot and killed and that a curfew was to be enforced from the early hours of the afternoon, Dr. Enrique Kirberg, the rector of the university, negotiated with the military for the people gathered there to stay put all night for their own safety, until the curfew was lifted the next day. This was agreed upon and orders were given for everyone to remain within the university buildings. It was then that Víctor must have phoned me for the second time. He didn’t tell me that the whole campus was surrounded by tanks and troops.
Through the long hours of the evening, listening to the explosions and heavy machine gun fire all around the neighborhood, they tell me that Víctor tried to raise the spirits of the people around him. He sang and got them to sing with him. They had no arms to defend themselves. Then in the staff room of the old building of the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, Víctor tried to get some sleep. All night long the machine gun fire continued. Some people who tried to get out of the university under cover of darkness were shot outright, but it was not until early next morning that the assault began in earnest, with the tanks firing their heavy guns against the buildings, damaging the structure of some, shattering windows and destroying laboratories, equipment, books. There was no answering fire, because there were no guns inside.
After the tanks had crashed into the university precincts, the troops proceeded to herd all the people, including the rector, out into a large courtyard normally used for sport. Using rifle butts and boots to kick and beat people, they forced everyone to lie on the ground, hands on the backs of their heads. Víctor was there with the others; perhaps it was on the way out of the building that he had got rid of his identity card in the hope that he might not be recognized.
After lying there for more than an hour, they were made to get into single file and trot, still with their hands on their heads, to the Estadio Chile, about six blocks away, subjected to insults, kicks and blows on the way. It was when they were lining up outside the stadium that Víctor was first recognized by one of the noncommissioned officers. “You’re that fucking singer, aren’t you?” and he hit Víctor on the head, felling him, then kicking him in the stomach and ribs. Víctor was separated from the others as they entered the building and put into a special gallery, reserved for “important” or “dangerous” prisoners. His friends saw him from afar, remembered the wide smile that he flashed at them from across the horror that they were witnessing, in spite of a bloody face and a wound in his head. Later they saw him curl up across the seats, his hands tucked beneath his armpits against the penetrating cold.
Some time next morning, Víctor evidently decided to try to leave his isolated position and join the other prisoners. Another witness, who was waiting in the passageway outside, saw the following scene. As Víctor pushed the swing doors to come out into the passageway, he almost bumped into an army officer who seemed to be the second-in-command of the stadium. He had been very busy shouting over the microphone, giving orders, screaming threats. He was tall, blond and rather handsome and was obviously enjoying the role he was playing as he strutted about. Some of the prisoners had already nicknamed him “the Prince.”
As Víctor came face to face with him, he gave a sign of recognition and smiled sarcastically. Mimicking playing a guitar, he giggled and then quickly drew his finger across his throat. Víctor remained calm and made some gesture in reply, but then the officer shouted, “What is this bastard doing here?” He called the guards who were following him and said, “Don’t let him move from here. This one is reserved for me!”
Later, Víctor was transferred to the basement where there are glimpses of him in a passageway, there where he had so often prepared to sing, now lying, covered in blood, on a floor running with urine and excrement overflowing from the toilet.
In the evening he was brought back into the main part of the stadium to join the other prisoners. He could scarcely walk, his head and his face were bloody and bruised, one of his ribs seemed to be broken and he was in pain where he had been kicked in the stomach. His friends wiped his face and tried to make him more comfortable. One of them had a small jar of jam and some biscuits. They shared the food between three or four of them, dipping their fingers into the jam one after the other and licking every vestige of it.
The next day, Friday, September 14, the prisoners were divided into groups of about 200, ready to be transferred to the National Stadium. It was then that Víctor, slightly recovered, asked his friends if anyone had a pencil and paper and he began to write his last poem. Some of the worst horrors of the military coup took place in the Estadio Chile in those first days before it was visited by the Red Cross, Amnesty International or representatives of foreign embassies. (In spite of legal proceedings and inquiries by lawyers, I have never been able to discover the names of the officers who were in command of the Estadio Chile.)
Thousands of prisoners were kept for days, with virtually no food or water; glaring spotlights were focused on them constantly so that they lost all sense of time and even of day and night; machine guns were set up all around the stadium and were fired intermittently either at the ceiling or over the heads the prisoners; orders and threats were blared over loudspeakers. The commanding officer was a corpulent man and only his silhouette could be seen as he warned that the machine guns we nicknamed “Hitler’s saws” because they could cut a man in half... and would do so as necessary. Prisoners were called out one by one, made to move from one part of the stadium to another. It was impossible to rest. People were mercilessly beaten with whips and rifle butts. One man who could no longer bear it threw himself over the balcony and plunged to his death among the prisoners below. Others had attacks of madness and were gunned down in full view of everybody.
As Víctor scribbled, he was trying to record, for the world to know, something of the horror that had been let loose in Chile. He could only testify to his “small corner of the city,” where 5,000 people were imprisoned, could only imagine what must be happening in the rest of his country. He must have realized the monstrous scale of the military operation, the precision with which it had been prepared. In those last hours of his life, deep roots of his peasant childhood made him see the military as “midwives,” whose coming was the signal for screams and what had seemed to him, as a child, unbearable suffering. Now these visions became confused with the torture and the sadistic smile of “the Prince.” But even then, Víctor still had hope for the future, confidence that people were stronger, in the end, than bombs and machine guns... and as he came to the last verses, for which he already had music inside him—“How hard it is to sing, when I must sing of horror...”—he was interrupted. A group of guards came to fetch him, to separate him from those who were about to be transferred to the National Stadium. He quickly passed the scrap of paper to a compañero who was sitting beside him, who in turn hid it in his sock as he was taken away. His friends had tried, each one of them, to learn the poem by heart as it was written, so as to carry it out of the stadium with them. They never saw Víctor again.
In spite of the fact that large numbers were transferred to other prison camps, the Estadio Chile remained full because more and more prisoners were constantly arriving, both men and women.
I have two more glimpses of Víctor in the stadium, two more testimonies... a message for me brought out by someone who was near him for some hours, down in the dressing rooms, converted now into torture chambers, a message of love for his daughters and for me... then once more being publicly abused and beaten, the officer nicknamed “the Prince” shouting at him, on the verge of hysteria, losing control of himself: “Sing now, if you can, you bastard!” and Víctor’s voice raised in the stadium after those four days of suffering, to sing a verse of the Popular Unity hymn, “Venceremos.” Then he was beaten down and dragged away for the last phase of his agony.
The boxing stadium lies within a few yards of the main railway line to the south, which, on its way out of Santiago, passes through the working-class district of San Miguel, along the boundary wall of the Metropolitan Cemetery. It was here early in the morning of Sunday, September 16, that the people of the población found six dead bodies, lying in an orderly row. All had terrible wounds and had been machine gunned to death.
They looked from face to face, trying to recognize the corpses and suddenly one of the women cried out, “This is Víctor Jara!”—it was a face which was both known and dear to them. One of the women even knew Víctor personally because when he had visited the población to sing, she had invited him into her home to eat a plate of beans. Almost immediately, while they were wondering what to do, a covered van approached. The people of the población quickly hid behind a wall, in fear, but watched while a group of men in plain clothes began dragging the corpses by the feet and throwing them into the van. From here Víctor’s body must have been transferred to the city morgue, an anonymous corpse, ready to disappear into a mass grave. But once again, he was recognized—by one of the people who worked there.
When later the text of his last poem was brought to me, I knew that Víctor wanted to leave his testimony, his only means now of resisting fascism, of fighting for the rights of human beings and for peace.