Harry Targ
The
Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been
such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military
authorities found it necessary to declare ‘subversive’ even the indigenous
instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and
inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor’s name, they
banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song
Movement….
It
was a mystery to me how Victor was remembered. Since the coup his very name had
been censored, his records prohibited. But in spite of that I heard his songs
being sung in poor community centres, in church halls, football clubs and
universities, with whole audiences of young people joining in the singing as
though his songs had become part of Chilean folklore (from
Joan Jara, Victor, An Unfinished Song, Bloomsbury,
London, 1998).
Victor
Jara, The Voice of the People
In a powerful biography of the life of Victor Jara,
his wife captures the deep political and cultural roots her husband planted in
the soil of the working people of Chile. He committed his life to celebrating
and popularizing the songs and stories of the Chilean people, recognizing that
his cultural project had to be intimately connected to the political project of
Salvador Allende’s socialist and democratic Popular Unity coalition. Allende in
October, 1970, was the first elected socialist president of a Latin American
country.
The Nixon Administration and the Chilean military
found the people’s choice unacceptable and set about undermining Allende’s
government. On September 11, 1973 the military launched a coup, killed Allende,
rounded up thousands of his supporters, and brought them to a huge soccer
stadium, and tortured and shot their cultural icon, Victor Jara.
The
United States Crushes Revolution in Chile
The United States had supported the Christian
Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA financing since the 1950s.
The Christian Democratic candidate in 1970 was opposed by Marxist Salvador
Allende, who, as the head of a coalition of six left parties, won a plurality
of votes.
From the time of the election in October, 1970,
until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup toppled Allende, the United
States did everything it could to destabilize the elected government. First,
the United States pressured Chilean legislators to reject the election result.
When that failed, energy and resources were used to damage the Chilean economy
and build a network of ties with military personnel ready to carry out a coup.
Allende developed policies to redistribute land,
nationalized the vital copper industry, and established diplomatic relations
with the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Popular culture stimulated by
artists such as Victor Jara flowered and grew. All these moves exacerbated
tensions with the United States, since its investments in copper, iron,
nitrates, iodine, and salt were large.
The Nixon administration formed a secret committee,
“the 40 committee,” headed by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to
develop a long-term plan to destabilize and overthrow the Allende government. The
CEO of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, a major foreign
influence in Chile, was enthusiastic about the Nixon plan.
Among the
policies utilized by Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile,
termination of aid and loans, International Monetary Fund pressure on the
government to carry out anti-worker policies, the engineering of a substantial
decline in the price of copper on the world market, fomenting dissent in the
military, and funding opposition groups and newspapers, particularly the
influential Santiago daily, El Mercurio. Despite
growing economic crisis and protests by
the rightwing spurred by U.S. covert operations, the Allende-led left coalition
scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in
March, 1973.
Since Nixon’s directive to make Chile’s “economy
scream” had not led to Allende’s rejection at the ballot box, the Kissinger
committee and the right-wing generals decided to act. On September 11, 1973 the
military carried out a coup that ousted the Allende government, assassinated
him in the Presidential Palace, and established brutal rule under the
leadership of General Augusto Pinochet. A year after the coup, Amnesty
International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners had been taken. The
new regime banned all political parties, abolished trade unions, and initiated
programs to assassinate pro-Allende emigres, including former Foreign Minister,
Orlando Letelier, who was blown up in an automobile in Dupont Circle in
Washington D.C.
The spirit of the brutal U.S. policy in Chile was
expressed by Kissinger in 1970 when he declared: “I don’t see why we need to
stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its
own people.” One year after the coup President Ford (who replaced the discredited
Richard Nixon) defended the it as being in the “best interests of the people of
Chile and certainly in the best interests of the United States.” A different
assessment was provided by a distinguished diplomatic historian, Alexander De
Conde who wrote that the United States “had a hand in the destruction of a
moderate left-wing government that allowed democratic freedoms to its people
and to its replacement by a friendly right-wing government that crushed such
freedoms with torture and other police-state repressions.”
Chile is one example of the way the United States has
sought to control and influence the internal affairs of nations. But the spirit
of resistance planted in so many different ways in so many places by cultural
performers and revolutionaries such as Victor Jara lives on.
As long as we sing his songs,
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.
“Singout Magazine” 1975
