Víctor Jara, Chile, and the Class Legacy of Latin Resistance

The Song of Broken Hands: Víctor Jara, Chile, and the Class Legacy of Latin Resistance

On the fifty-third anniversary of his death, to young comrades — a singer, a coup, a continent, and what remains for us

Dear Young Comrades,

Look closely at these hands. Hands that held a guitar neck, swung a hoe, directed an actor on a theatre stage, and were then broken on the cold concrete of a stadium. On the morning of 16 September 1973, in Santiago, on a side-street near the Metropolitan Cemetery, a body riddled with forty-four bullets was found. There were fractures in the wrists and hands. The body was Víctor Jara's: forty years old, a village child, a theatre director, a singer, a member of the Communist Party of Chile.

Today is the fifty-third anniversary of Jara's murder. We will introduce him to you; but not only him. Because Jara's story is not the story of an artist alone. It is the story of a people trying for three years to take their fate into their own hands, of the coup that strangled that attempt in a week, of the apparatus that financed the coup from Washington, and of a song that then rose from every corner of the continent. Let us begin with three questions:

Who was this man, and why was he killed in a stadium?
What was tried in Chile between 1970 and 1973, who wrecked it, and how?
What remains for us from that guitar today — from Santiago to Montevideo, and from there to Istanbul?

This third question is ours. Because to commemorate Jara is not to weep at a grave; it is to look at where the class he belonged to stands today. We will say here what we said in our 12 September file: the revolutionary form of commemorating the dead is to name the work they left unfinished.

1. From Lonquén to Santiago: A Peasant Child's Education

Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was born on 28 September 1932 near Lonquén, south of Santiago. His father Manuel was an inquilino working the land of the great landowners — a landless peasant; one of the hundreds of thousands who, in the semi-feudal order of the Chilean countryside, worked the master's land for a full belly and, when they voted, voted for the candidate the master pointed to. His mother Amanda was a woman who played guitar and sang at village weddings and funerals. Jara had no musical education as such; what he had were the folk melodies learned at his mother's knee.

This detail matters. Like all the great names of Nueva Canción, the "New Song" movement, Jara took his music not from the conservatory but from his class. This is the biographical root of the sentence he would later sing — "I do not sing for a guitar": music had come to him not as a profession but as part of a way of life. The distance between artist and people was not, for him, an abyss to be closed; it was something that had never opened.

Amanda's early death left Víctor adrift at fifteen. For a time he entered a seminary, left it; did his military service; then entered the theatre department of the University of Chile. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Jara must first be known as a theatre director: at the University's Theatre Institute (ITUCH) he became one of Chile's most striking stage directors; the plays he directed took him abroad and won prizes. In the same years he joined the folk group Cuncumén and travelled Chile's villages collecting songs. So the form Nueva Canción took in Jara is not a singer becoming political, but a political theatre-maker turning to song. Stagecraft, a sense of rhythm, the "dramaturgy" of a song — all come from there.

Peña de los Parra: A Movement from a Basement

In 1965, in the basement of a house on Carmen Street in Santiago, the siblings Ángel and Isabel Parra opened a peña. A peña, in Latin America, is the name given to modest places where people gather to hear music, drink wine, and talk. In that basement Víctor Jara, Patricio Manns, Rolando Alarcón, and soon groups such as Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún took the stage. The Parra siblings' mother, Violeta Parra (1917–1967), was a woman who had spent a lifetime collecting every vein of Chilean folk music village by village, and then drawn a new song from that vein. Songs such as "Gracias a la vida" and "La carta" are founding texts of New Song. Violeta took her own life in 1967; Jara's first major albums began to appear that same year. It is like a handing-over of a flag.

New Song is a stance before it is a musical genre: bringing folk instruments (charango, quena, zampoña, bombo) together with the Spanish guitar; taking the continent's indigenous and peasant music out of the "folklore" display case and into the language of today; turning lyrics from ornament into a form of speech. This was an answer to the American pop music flooding Chile in those years, and to the local imitation produced from it — Nueva Ola ("New Wave"). Jara's song "Las casitas del barrio alto" is an adaptation of the American folk song "Little Boxes," and it satirises the bourgeoisie living in identical villas in Santiago's rich neighbourhoods, their children, and their lives of "medicine, law, engineering." This is itself a cultural exchange as a reply to cultural imperialism: the critical vein of American folk music is taken; American monopoly culture is refused. There is a method here; we will return to it.

The Songs: A Chronicle of Labour

To list Jara's songs for you is, in fact, to draw the class map of 1960s Chile:

"Plegaria a un labrador" (Prayer to a Labourer, 1969): Written in the form of a Christian prayer, but the one addressed is not God; it is the peasant who works the land; what is asked of him is that he rise and, with his brothers and sisters, take his fate into his own hands. It took first prize at the first Chilean New Song Festival. That the song's language is religious is not a tactic; it was the language of its addressee: the Chilean peasant spoke the language of the Church; Jara told him class struggle in that language.
"Preguntas por Puerto Montt" (Questions for Puerto Montt, 1969): On 9 March 1969 in Puerto Montt, police opened fire on poor families who had built shacks on vacant land; ten people died. In the song Jara names the Interior Minister, the political author of the massacre. This is the first moment in Chile when a song accused a minister by name. The result: Jara was attacked by a right-wing group at a concert; an attempt was made to ban the song as well.
"Te recuerdo Amanda" (I Remember You Amanda, 1969): A factory gate, a five-minute break, a woman worker who meets her lover in those five minutes, and a man who goes up into the mountains and does not come back. Chile's most sung love song is also a shift song. Jara's genius is here: he placed love inside the factory clock; he told the factory clock through a love song. Amanda is his mother's name; Manuel, his father's.
"El derecho de vivir en paz" (The Right to Live in Peace, 1971): Dedicated to the people of Vietnam and to Ho Chi Minh, recorded with electric guitar and a rock arrangement. Proof that New Song was not "closed to tradition." In October 2019, in Chile's new great uprising, hundreds of thousands sang this song with one voice in Santiago's squares; forty-eight years later.
"Luchín" (1972): A child playing in the mud of a shantytown, with a ball made of rags. Jara knew this child. The song is neither pity nor a pornographic narrative of poverty; it counts the game the child plays and, at the end, says that the doors must be opened to those children.
"Manifiesto" (1973): One of his last songs, written months before the coup and published after his death. It tells why he sang: not in order to sing, but because the song had a meaning; because the guitar was a "worker's guitar." It is one of the rare texts in which an artist names his own work as a task inside a class.

Jara also recorded an album, "La población" (1972): a documentary-album that tells the founding of a Santiago shantytown (población) in the residents' own voices, with field recordings and songs. What we now call "fieldwork," done by a musician. The singer is not a "star" but a labourer keeping the neighbourhood's record.

Let us say one thing plainly. We do not intend to tell Jara as a saint; what made him a saint is the manner of his killing, and that is a frame imposed on us by his murderers. Jara was a man who had fights inside the theatre, who, as his wife Joan told it, was stubborn, could grow angry, and was sometimes found too didactic on stage. That is not what matters for us. What matters is what he saw his art as: a job, a job inside a class.

2. Three Years: What Was Tried in Chile?

Now let us widen the stage. Because the bullets that killed Jara were fired in a stadium, but the aim was taken in Washington; and the target was not a singer but an attempt.

Allende and Popular Unity

On 4 September 1970 in Chile, the socialist Salvador Allende, candidate of the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular) coalition that ran from socialists to communists, from radicals to left Christians, came first in a three-candidate race with 36.6 percent. This was the world's first Marxist head of state to take office by election. Allende's programme was not revolution but the "Chilean road" to revolution: remaining inside the constitutional order, nationalising copper, the banks, and big industry; deepening land reform; half a litre of milk a day for every child; raising wages; opening culture to the people.

Copper was the heart of the matter. More than three-quarters of Chile's exports were copper, and the largest mines were in the hands of two American companies, Anaconda and Kennecott. On 11 July 1971 the Chilean Congress approved the nationalisation of copper unanimously. The right-wing parties voted yes as well; because no Chilean deputy could face the voters saying "let copper stay with the Americans." That day was declared "National Dignity Day" in Chile. Allende deducted from compensation the "excess profits" the companies had taken in the past; at the end of the account, the companies came out in debt. That was what imperialism did not forgive.

In the same years there was another experiment in Chile; we told it on this blog in Cybernetic Horizons: Cybersyn. A planning system built by the English cybernetician Stafford Beer together with Chilean engineers, linking nationalised factories by a telex network and collecting production data near real time. When the truckers' lockout organised with the money of the bosses and the CIA tried to paralyse the country in October 1972, Cybersyn's telex network let the government see which road was open and which warehouse was full. Those who today discuss "planning with artificial intelligence" need to remember that telex room: technology serves whoever holds it.

And the cordones industriales: from 1972 onward, in Santiago's industrial belts, workers occupied factories without waiting for the government's nationalisation list and built their own organs of coordination. The debate inside Popular Unity was exactly this: Allende and the Communist Party said "consolidation first, protect the institutions," while the left wing of the socialists and the MIR said "build the organs of workers' power now." No one lived long enough to settle that debate.

The Place of Nueva Canción

Culture was not the ornament of these three years; it was their infrastructure. In 1968 the record company DICAP (Discoteca del Cantar Popular), founded by Communist Youth, pressed the albums of Jara, Quilapayún, and Inti-Illimani; because the monopoly labels would not press them. "Venceremos" (We Shall Win) became Popular Unity's election anthem; the words were the poet Claudio Iturra's, the music Sergio Ortega's. In June 1973 Ortega wrote a new anthem from a slogan he heard in the street: "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" — "The people united will never be defeated." Quilapayún recorded it a few months before the coup; then the whole world sang it.

In these years Jara worked in the culture department of the State Technical University (UTE) in Santiago, toured the country in Popular Unity campaigns, and gave concerts in factories, mines, and shantytowns. The university where Inti-Illimani was founded is the same UTE; that is not a coincidence. In Chile the centre of "New Song" was not the conservatory but the university of engineering students and workers.

3. The Coup: An Attempt Strangled in a Week

On 23 August 1973 the Army Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats resigned under pressure from the right and from putschists inside the army; Allende appointed in his place Augusto Pinochet, whom he believed "loyal to the constitution." Nineteen days later, on the morning of 11 September 1973, that army bombed La Moneda Palace. Allende died in the palace after making his last radio address to the people. You know the last sentences of that speech; if you do not, find them and listen: "History is ours, it is made by the peoples," he says, and that the great avenues will one day open again.

On the morning of 12 September Jara went to UTE as he did every morning. That day the university was surrounded by soldiers; hundreds of students, faculty, and staff, Jara among them, were taken a few streets away to the indoor sports hall, Estadio Chile. In those days there were some five thousand detainees in Estadio Chile. An officer who recognised Jara separated him. Witnesses told what followed: he was beaten in the stands; his hands and wrists were broken with rifle butts; they mocked him — "go on, play." Jara's last poem, written in those days on a scrap of paper a friend hid in a pocket, tells of the five thousand in the stadium, of hunger, of cold, and of the people dying beside him; the poem is unfinished.

On 15 September he was pulled from the line of detainees. On the morning of 16 September his body was found on a street near the cemetery, together with the body of Littré Quiroga (Allende's Director-General of Prisons). The 2009 exhumation and the forensic report that followed established the number with certainty: 44 bullet traces and many fractures; 23 bullets in Quiroga's body. The corpses were taken to the morgue; a young person working at the morgue recognised Jara and told his wife. The English dancer Joan Jara identified her husband's body among hundreds of unnamed corpses, had him buried quietly on 18 September, and left the country with their two small daughters. She gave the next fifty years to this case. The book she wrote, Víctor: An Unfinished Song, is this piece's most important source. Joan died on 12 November 2023 at ninety-six; the Chilean Supreme Court's ruling had become final a few weeks before she died.

You may have heard the legend that "his hands were cut off." Forensic medicine does not confirm that; it confirms the fractures. We say this because the memory of the class needs the truth, not the legend. The truth is heavy enough.

The Balance Sheet

In the first months of the coup, tens of thousands were held in Estadio Nacional, Estadio Chile, and concentration centres across the country. By the official figures of the state commissions (Rettig and Valech), between 1973 and 1990 more than 3,200 people were killed or disappeared; more than 38,000 were tortured; hundreds of thousands went into exile. Popular Unity's records were burned in the streets; DICAP was shut; the playing of Andean instruments such as the charango and the quena was in practice banned. Because the junta knew what even the sound of those instruments meant.

In 1975 Milton Friedman came to Santiago; Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago, later to be called the "Chicago Boys," wrote the junta its "shock treatment": sale of public enterprises, privatisation of pensions, crushing of the unions, full freedom for capital. Neoliberalism's first laboratory in the world was built on the grave of an elected socialist government. The 1980 Constitution was written so as to carry this order beyond the junta; the popular uprising of 2019 was against that constitution; in 2022 the draft of a new constitution was rejected at referendum. So the question is not closed today.

4. The CIA and "Making the Economy Scream"

Now let us look at who prepared this coup, how, and at what cost. There is no need for speculation here; there are documents. In 1975 the U.S. Senate's Church Committee published a report titled "Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973." The report is the U.S. government's own confession. Let us summarise:

The 1964 election: To prevent Allende's election, the CIA channelled some 2.6 million dollars into the campaign of the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei; more than half of Frei's campaign budget came from the United States. The campaign's main theme was "fear": Soviet tanks, children taken to kolkhozes.
1970: When Allende was elected, President Nixon, on 15 September 1970, instructed CIA Director Helms to "make the economy scream." Helms's notes from leaving the meeting are in the Church Committee report: "ten million dollars available, more if necessary." The ITT company offered the CIA a million dollars to block Allende.
"Track II": To prevent Congress from confirming Allende (at that time Congress chose among candidates who had not won a majority), the CIA fomented a coup inside the Chilean army. The obstacle was Commander-in-Chief René Schneider, loyal to the constitutional order. Schneider was shot and killed on 22 October 1970 during a kidnapping attempt by one of the groups to which the CIA had linked arms and money. The result backfired; Congress confirmed Allende. But something in Chile had broken that day.
1970–1973: The Church Committee found that in these three years some 8 million dollars was spent on covert operations in Chile. Where the money went: opposition parties, the right-wing press (especially the newspaper El Mercurio, more than 1.5 million dollars on its own), paramilitary groups such as "Patria y Libertad," the truckers' lockout and shopkeepers' strikes. In addition the United States cut credit to Chile; blocked credits from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank; and dumped stocks to pull the copper price down on the world market. That was what was called the "invisible blockade."
Kissinger's sentence: On 27 June 1970, at a meeting of the "40 Committee," Henry Kissinger said the words later entered in the documents: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." This sentence is the summary of imperialism's understanding of democracy: if the people vote right, democracy; if they vote wrong, "irresponsibility."

After the coup the CIA's role did not end. In 1975 the juntas of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil founded Operation Condor: a joint apparatus that hunted, kidnapped, and killed opponents across borders. The United States knew of this network and supported it; Allende's former minister Orlando Letelier was killed in 1976 in the heart of Washington by a bomb placed in his car, a Condor operation.

A class reading

Comrade, grasp the movement here. The CIA's work in Chile was not a "conspiracy"; it was a class job. Anaconda and Kennecott's copper, ITT's telephone company, the claims of American banks: these were concrete capital groups that lost when they were nationalised in Chile. What Kissinger called an "irresponsible people" is the people who said "no" to this capital. And the Chilean army that carried out the coup was not a force imported from outside; it was the core of the Chilean bourgeoisie's own state. Allende's error was to believe that that state's oath of "loyalty to the constitution" stood above classes. Prats was loyal; Pinochet had sworn as well. An oath has no class; an army does.

This is the same pattern we showed in Turkey in our 12 September file, and it is exactly why, in our September 11 piece, when we listed the pattern of U.S. foreign policy from 1823 to today, we set Chile 1973 beside 12 September 1980. There are seven years between the two coups; behind both, the same "Chicago" prescription, the same IMF, the same Condor logic, and the same stadiums. When you think of Diyarbakır Prison and Mamak, think also of Estadio Chile; torture is imperialism's universal answer to class struggle.

5. The Open Veins of Latin America: Eduardo Galeano

To understand Chile one must leave Chile. The book that does this best was published in Montevideo in 1971, two years before the coup: Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America" (Las venas abiertas de América Latina).

Galeano (1940–2015) was a Uruguayan journalist; he had begun drawing political cartoons at fourteen and editing the weekly Marcha at twenty. He wrote the book at thirty, in ninety nights, in his own phrase. Its subject is how the continent has been plundered for five hundred years: the silver of Potosí, Brazil's sugar and gold, the slave economy of the Caribbean, Peru's guano, Chile's nitrates and copper, Central America's bananas, Venezuela's oil. The book's thesis turns the fairy tale of development economics — "underdevelopment is a stage, then development comes" — on its head: Latin America's poverty is the condition of Europe's wealth and then of the United States'; not a lack, a result. In Galeano's famous sentence, the international division of labour is "some countries specialising in winning and others in losing."

This is the literary form of Marxist dependency theory (Andre Gunder Frank, Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos Santos); it has no footnotes, but the spine is the same. What Galeano did was to take the transfer of surplus value, unequal exchange, and colonial plunder out of the language of economics and write them onto a continent's body: veins, open veins.

The book was banned by the juntas of Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. After the 1973 Uruguayan coup Galeano went into exile in Argentina, and after the 1976 Argentine coup to Spain; he could return only in 1985. The trilogy he wrote in exile, Memory of Fire (Memoria del fuego), tells the history of the American continent in short fragments, from below — that is, through the eyes of indigenous people, slaves, women, workers. Then came The Book of Embraces, Football in Sun and Shadow, Mirrors, Children of the Days. Galeano was one of the rare writers who knew how to write a Marxist history with the plainness of a people's preacher.

2009 and 2014: Two Scenes

Two scenes in the book's life show you what it means.

The first, 17 April 2009. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez pressed a Spanish copy of the book into the hand of the newly elected Barack Obama. The next day the book jumped on Amazon's bestseller list from sixtieth thousand to second. One head of state had said to another, "read this first"; thirty-eight years later the book had become a political weapon again.

The second, May 2014. At a book fair in Brasília, Galeano said he could not reread the book today, that he could no longer bear "this leaden prose of the traditional left," that when he wrote the book he had not had sufficient equipment in economics and politics. The right-wing press presented this as a "confession": "Galeano recanted his book." Yet in the same speech Galeano was not saying that the truth the book told was invalid; on the contrary, that the truth was worse than the book. What he rejected was the book's style; an ageing writer's dislike of the language of his younger self. He did not take back the history of plunder.

Why do we tell you this? Because it is something we have done several times on this blog and will keep doing: writing a self-criticism of the language and frame of our own earlier pieces. That is what Galeano did, and the enemy marketed it as a "giving up." Self-criticism is not an admission of defeat; that the enemy markets it as such cannot be a reason to give up self-criticism.

Galeano and Jara: Two Languages of the Same Continent

Jara naming a minister in "Preguntas por Puerto Montt" and Galeano calling to account the eight million indigenous people who died at Potosí are the same operation: naming the agent of plunder. That is the first article of the class legacy of Latin American resistance culture: Poverty has no fate; it has an agent. You say it in song or in prose; but you say it.

6. Inti-Illimani: History's Longest Tour

Inti-Illimani was founded in 1967 (the group's own chronicle takes the beginning back to 1966) at the State Technical University in Santiago — that is, at the university where Jara worked — by engineering students. Its name comes from Aymara: "sun of Illimani"; Illimani is a mountain in Bolivia. So a Chilean group took its name from the language of the Andean peoples and from a neighbouring country's mountain. That is the name of New Song's not being nationalist, of its being continental.

The group's work in its first years was to carry Andean music into Chilean cities: charango, quena, zampoña, bombo. In the Popular Unity years they sang "Venceremos," "Canción del poder popular" (Song of Popular Power), songs from Cuba, from Vietnam, from the Spanish Civil War. Horacio Salinas's guitar writing and Horacio Durán's charango are the core of the group's sound; Jorge Coulón has been its spokesperson and its memory from the first day.

On 11 September 1973 Inti-Illimani was on tour in Italy. They could not return. Their exile in Italy lasted fifteen years; in their own words, "history's longest tour." That exile turned a music group into a worldwide symbol of resistance: Chile solidarity committees were founded in every city in Europe, and Inti-Illimani became the voice of those committees. The world learned "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" from them as much as from Quilapayún. In 1975 the American composer Frederic Rzewski wrote thirty-six piano variations on that melody; the song entered the classical repertoire. In Italy, instrumental pieces such as Salinas's "Alturas" built a new language joining the melodies of the Mediterranean and the Andes. Exile did not impoverish them; it widened their music. That is the second lesson of Latin resistance culture: Exile is not the place lost; it is the world gained. Turkey's 12 September exiles lived the same thing; we told it in the 12 September file.

On 18 September 1988, a few weeks before Pinochet's plebiscite, Inti-Illimani returned to Chile. Thousands were waiting at the airport. "No" won the plebiscite; the junta withdrew in 1990. In the 2000s the group split in two: Inti-Illimani under Coulón, and Inti-Illimani Histórico founded by Salinas, Durán, and Seves. There is pain in that split; but both groups are still on stage. Histórico gave concerts in Rome and Berlin in September 2026 and will mark its sixtieth year in Santiago on 27 December 2026 with the Peruvian singer Eva Ayllón. Sixty years; half of them in exile.

The Voice of the Continent

Inti-Illimani is part of a larger map. New Song was not born in Chile; it was born across the continent and took a different name in each country:

Country	Movement / Name	Context
Chile	Nueva Canción Chilena: Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani, Patricio Manns	Popular Unity, DICAP, coup, exile
Argentina	Mercedes Sosa, Atahualpa Yupanqui	Peronism, 1976 junta, exile
Uruguay	Daniel Viglietti, Alfredo Zitarrosa	1973 junta, exile
Cuba	Nueva Trova: Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés	Revolution, Casa de las Américas
Venezuela	Alí Primera	Oil, poor neighbourhoods, "Canción necesaria"
Brazil	Chico Buarque, Geraldo Vandré	1964 junta, censorship, MPB
Nicaragua	Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy	Sandinista revolution

The common ground of this map is not a national "folklore"; it is a cultural front fighting the same enemy in every country of the continent (oligarchy + the United States + the army) with the same weapon (the people's instrument + the word of the class). In the 1970s there were juntas in seven Latin American countries, and the exile singers of all seven shared the same stages in Europe. Exile turned the continent's scattered voices into a choir.

The Voice That Spread Across the World

The traces of Jara and New Song in the world are like a cultural archive of class solidarity:

The Clash, in 1980, name Jara in "Washington Bullets"; the song accuses the CIA's role in Chile by name.
U2's 1987 song "One Tree Hill" contains an elegy for Jara.
Bruce Springsteen, in September 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the coup, sang Jara's "Manifiesto" in Spanish in Santiago.
Arlo Guthrie set to song the poem the English poet Adrian Mitchell wrote for Jara; Calexico recorded "Víctor Jara's Hands"; Simple Minds' album "Street Fighting Years" was dedicated to Jara.
"El pueblo unido" was sung in Portugal in the Carnation Revolution, in Iran in 1979 in a Persian version, in the Philippines, in Greece, in Turkey, and again in 2019–2020 in the streets of Chile. That a march is rewritten for fifty years in every street of the world shows what the word "universal" means.
And most important: in October 2019 in Santiago, the millions who rose against the Pinochet constitution and the neoliberal order renamed Plaza Italia "Plaza Dignidad" (Dignity Square) and there sang "El derecho de vivir en paz" with one voice. The song Jara wrote for Vietnam in 1971 became Chile's own song in 2019. That a song "does not die" is exactly this: a new class movement needing it again and singing it.

In 2003 Estadio Chile was renamed Estadio Víctor Jara. The murderers' stadium now bears the victim's name. This is naming as a result of struggle; not the enemy's "tolerance."

7. The Echo in Turkey: Grup Yorum and Beyond

Now let us come from Santiago to Istanbul. Latin America's New Song arrived in Turkey in two waves.

First wave: the 1970s, beside Neruda and Theodorakis

In the 1970s, Latin America was present in the Turkish left's cultural repertoire through the Cuban Revolution and Che; but as music, Chile's voice was heard as exile albums reached Turkey via Europe after the coup. Yeni Türkü, when it was founded in 1978, took Latin American instruments and New Song's polyphonic approach to arrangement directly; its first album, Buğdayın Türküsü (1979), is built on Pablo Neruda's poems. Zülfü Livaneli's joint work with Mikis Theodorakis carried the Mediterranean's political song into Turkish; what Theodorakis did against the Greek junta and what Inti-Illimani did against Pinochet are products of the same period, of the same intercontinental front. That "Bella Ciao" began to be sung in Turkish is the sign of this international repertoire settling in Turkey. 12 September 1980 cut this first wave in Turkey exactly as in Chile: records were seized, artists went into exile, the "Ugly King" among them.

Second wave: 1985, Grup Yorum

In 1985, in a period when the junta still ruled, four students at Marmara University founded Grup Yorum. There was no founding document as such; but when their first albums Sıyrılıp Gelen (1987) and Haziranda Ölmek Zor (1987) are heard, it is clear where the approach to arrangement, the use of polyphonic chorus, the togetherness of folk instrument and guitar come from: Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún. In Yorum's own account this influence has always been stated openly. The Turkish of "Çav Bella" reached millions with Grup Yorum; the Latin American and Spanish Civil War repertoire stood side by side with Anatolian folk songs at their concerts.

But the real thing Yorum took from New Song was not a "style" but a position: seeing music as part of the organisation of the class. Giving concerts at strike sites, in shantytowns, at prison gates; producing the song not as a "product" but as the common labour of a collective; the group continuing despite changes of cadre. This is the position Jara named in "Manifiesto": not in order to sing, but because the song had a job.

The cost resembled Chile's as well. In 2010, 55,000 people at the "Independent Turkey" concert in İnönü Stadium; in later years hundreds of thousands in Bakırköy. Then: from 2016 onward, raid after raid on the İdil Cultural Centre, concert bans, members arrested, names put on "wanted" lists. In 2019–2020 imprisoned members began a hunger strike against the concert bans. Helin Bölek died on 3 April 2020, on the 288th day of the hunger strike. İbrahim Gökçek died on 7 May 2020, a few days after ending a hunger strike that had lasted 323 days. The photograph of a guitarist wasting away on hunger strike is the Turkish counterpart of the broken hands in the stands of Estadio Chile. Two countries, two periods, two states; the same answer to the musician.

You may debate the hunger-strike tactic; we debate it too. But you cannot debate this: that in a country a music group's giving a concert is counted as "terror" is proof that in that country music is still part of class struggle. A state that sees art as harmless does not ban it; if it bans it, it has found it harmful; if it has found it harmful, art is doing its job.

Beyond

Grup Yorum is not alone. Grup Kızılırmak, Grup Munzur, Ezginin Günlüğü, the multilingual repertoire of Kardeş Türküler, Bandista founded in 2006 and joining Spanish Civil War and Latin American songs with ska and punk; all fed from the same vein. Latin America's gift to Turkey is not a "Latin tone" but this idea: Folk music is not a heritage to be put in a museum; it is the language of today's class struggle. The kinship between an Anatolian folk song and an Andean melody is not an exoticism on the "world music" shelf; it is that both are the voice of the same class.

8. A Class Reading Against the Official Narrative

There is a liberal narrative of Jara and Chile, widespread on culture pages, in documentaries, in the language of "human rights." Let us set it side by side:

Official / liberal narrative	Class reading
Jara was a "peace singer," "an idealist who wanted to change the world with his voice."	Jara was a member of a communist party, a cultural worker of a class movement. "The Right to Live in Peace" is written for Vietnam's war against the United States; it is not a pacifist song.
In Chile "democracy" collapsed in 1973 because of "polarisation"; both sides went too far.	One class brought in the army and the United States to take back its nationalised property; the other class trusted the institutions and was caught unarmed. The "two sides" were not symmetrical.
Pinochet committed "excesses" but "fixed the economy"; Chile became "Latin America's jaguar."	The neoliberal "miracle" was built on top of torture chambers; in 2019 millions took to the streets against this "miracle." Capital's order and the junta are not two separate things; they are two stages of the same thing.
The CIA "intervened," but Chileans carried out the coup.	The CIA spent 8 million dollars in three years, paved the road that led to the killing of the commander-in-chief, and strangled the economy. The coup was carried out by the army of the Chilean bourgeoisie; there is no "either/or" between the two; there is a division of labour.
Jara's killing is a "tragedy," a "crime against humanity"; the killers are "monsters."	The killers were ordinary officers; at the end of the chain of command there was a class. "Monster" language personalises the agent and acquits the structure. Barrientos lived in Florida until his fifties as an ordinary American citizen.
Justice "found its place" in 2018, in 2023.	Justice is the result of fifty years of organised struggle by Joan Jara and Chilean lawyers; not a gift the state gave of itself. Barrientos's case is still ongoing.
"El pueblo unido" is a "protest song" classic, on world-music lists.	A march that class movements in every country have sung again for fifty years. When the class movement falls silent, it too goes into the museum; when it rises, it is sung again.

9. The Account: Fifty-Three Years of Justice

Let us give briefly the chronology of how what we call justice worked; because the chronology itself is a lesson.

1973–1990: Junta period; no investigation.
1990–2009: "Transition" governments; the 1978 amnesty law protects the killers. Joan Jara and the Víctor Jara Foundation keep the case alive.
2009: The grave is opened; forensic medicine finds 44 bullets. Jara is buried again on 5 December 2009, this time in a ceremony the people attend.
2012–2013: Chilean courts name as defendants officers who were on duty at Estadio Chile at the time. It emerges that Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, named as the direct perpetrator of the murder, fled to the United States in 1989 and took citizenship in Florida.
2016: A federal jury in Orlando finds Barrientos liable for Jara's torture and killing in the civil case brought by the Jara family (Jara v. Barrientos); it awards 28 million dollars in damages. This is the first judgment against a Chilean coup officer living in the United States.
3 July 2018: A Chilean court convicts eight former officers of the murders of Jara and Quiroga.
28 August 2023: The Chilean Supreme Court makes the ruling final: 15 years and 1 day (murder) for seven former officers, 5 years and 1 day (aiding) for one. The same day, hours before his arrest, one of the defendants, retired general Hernán Chacón, kills himself at home. Joan Jara saw this ruling; she died three months later.
30 November 2023: The United States revokes Barrientos's citizenship (on grounds of false statements in his application) and deports him to Chile. Fifty years later.
December 2025: In Chile, Judge Paola Plaza files an indictment against Barrientos as perpetrator of the aggravated detention and aggravated killing of Jara and Quiroga. The case continues in 2026.

The lesson of this chronology is this: Justice is not a ripening that time brings of itself; it is a door forced again every day for fifty years by a family, a foundation, a group of lawyers, and a class movement. In Turkey the torturers of 12 September and the commanders of Diyarbakır Prison lived and died in a country where that door was not forced. The difference is not that Chile had a Joan Jara; it is that in Chile a movement that forced that door did not disperse after the junta.

10. What Is Being Covered Over?

At Jara commemorations, three things are usually covered over. Let us open them.

First, his party. That Jara was a member of the Communist Party of Chile, that he worked for Allende in the campaigns, that his records came from Communist Youth's company, is reduced in most commemorations to a footnote. Yet Jara's art was produced inside this organised relation. To turn him into an "independent artist" is to erase the condition that produced his art. An artist's being organised does not diminish him; what made Jara Jara is precisely his being a cultural worker of a class organisation. This is the same operation as calling Nâzım in Turkey a "great poet" and not mentioning his party.

Second, the army. In commemorations the "junta" is bad, while the "army" is told as if it were separate from the junta. Yet it was the regular army of the constitutional republic that took Jara to Estadio Chile; Pinochet was the commander Allende himself had appointed. The class character of the state is not invented on the day of the coup; the coup is that character in its naked form. We said this in our Anthropic Surveillance and Palantir pieces as well, for today's "critical infrastructure" and listing apparatuses: the apparatus is built first; then it is decided whom it will be turned on.

Third, the United States today. The Church Committee report was written in 1975, and the United States filed what it did in Chile as a "past mistake." But the network of Condor is woven today by Palantir's software; the method of "making the economy scream" is the sanctions regime applied today to Venezuela, Cuba, Iran. The country that sheltered Barrientos in Florida for fifty years today speaks of "exporting democracy." To commemorate Jara and not name today's blockades is to exile the killers fifty years into the past and let them go on with their work today.

11. The Class Legacy of Latin Resistance Culture: Seven Articles

Now to the real question: what remains for us from that guitar? Let us summarise the legacy the continent left us in seven articles.

1. Poverty has an agent. Galeano's five-hundred-year account, Jara naming a minister: the first job of resistance culture is to name. Words without an agent — "fate," "bad luck," "underdevelopment" — are the language of exploitation.

2. People's culture is not a museum; it is a weapon. Taking the charango from the conservatory display case and carrying it to a Popular Unity rally; taking the folk song out of its "authentic" costume and into the strike tent. This is the common method of New Song and of Grup Yorum. In Turkey the difference between "Anatolian rock" and "özgün müzik" (original song) is not a difference of tone; it is this difference of position.

3. Art is collective labour. The peñas, DICAP, Inti-Illimani's collective identity lasting sixty years with a changing cadre, Grup Yorum's principle of "not the person, the group": resistance culture does not produce stars; it produces a common voice. This is the exact opposite of the capitalist culture industry's "artist brand" logic, and a practical answer to the "marketing character" we discussed in our Fromm piece.

4. Internationalism is not a feeling; it is a network. Chile's exile singers organised Europe's solidarity committees; Italy gave Inti-Illimani fifteen years of stage; "El pueblo unido" was sung in Tehran, Lisbon, Istanbul. The continent taught us that solidarity has a concrete infrastructure: concert, committee, record, translation.

5. Exile is not the place lost but the world gained. Galeano wrote Memory of Fire in exile, Inti-Illimani "Alturas." Defeat is not the stopping of production. Turkey's 12 September exiles did the same; but we have not told this enough.

6. Memory is organised work. Joan Jara's fifty years, the Víctor Jara Foundation, Chile's human-rights lawyers, the mothers who ask "Where?" Memory is not preserved of itself; whoever was killed, whoever killed, whoever paid, these are written again every day. Otherwise the killer's narrative wins. This blog's commemorations tag is the piece of this work that falls to us.

7. Culture does not stand in for the question of power. This is the heaviest article of the legacy. All of Chile's songs, all its peñas, all its records, could do nothing against the tanks on the morning of 11 September 1973. Popular Unity's cultural hegemony was real; but the army belonged to the bourgeoisie. Jara's song did not protect him from the bullet; Grup Yorum's concerts of a hundred thousand did not protect the İdil Cultural Centre from the raid. That is the most bitter thing Latin resistance culture teaches us: The song is the voice of the class; it is not the army of the class. When the cultural front takes the place of the front of power, the cultural front loses first. Then everything.

12. Concrete Tasks

To commemorate is to do. For today and the days ahead:

Listen, but listen in order. First Violeta Parra's "Gracias a la vida," then Jara's "Plegaria a un labrador," "Te recuerdo Amanda," "El derecho de vivir en paz," "Manifiesto"; then Quilapayún's "Cantata Santa María de Iquique" (the cantata of the nitrate workers massacred in a school in 1907) and Inti-Illimani's "Alturas." Translate the words; loving a song you do not understand is what the culture industry wants.
Read Joan Jara's book. Víctor: An Unfinished Song has been translated into Turkish. Then Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America; then Memory of Fire.
Open the Church Committee report. "Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973" is open on the U.S. Senate's site and in the archives. Reading imperialism's own confession from its own document is more instructive than any "conspiracy" video.
Set Estadio Chile beside 12 September. As a young comrade reading this piece, to know Santiago without knowing Mamak, Diyarbakır, Metris is incomplete. Our 12 September file is there for that.
Do not only listen to Grup Yorum; follow their cases. Which institutions issue statements against concert bans and arrests, which stay silent; look. A "who stayed silent" list is an X-ray of a movement.
Found a peña. We mean it. A room, a few chairs, a guitar, a kettle. A place where songs are translated and sung, discussed, where no one takes a ticket. New Song began in a basement. Our Event Organizing and Comradeship guide tells how to do this with care.
Translate. Good Turkish translations of Jara's songs and of Galeano's short texts are still lacking. Take one on; that is how the knowledge commons grow.
See today's blockades. Chile was strangled in 1973 by an "invisible blockade"; today Cuba, Venezuela, Iran are strangled by the same method. To commemorate Jara and not name today's sanctions regimes is to put yesterday in a museum.
If you are an artist, choose your position. Jara's "Manifiesto" is the single question an artist asks himself: for whom, for what? There is no such thing as an "independent artist"; you are bound either to the market or to the class.
If you are a computing worker, study Cybersyn. Chile's telex room is the first experiment in the "planning with artificial intelligence" debate. Cybernetic Horizons and the Socialist Artificial Intelligence Manifesto are its continuation.
Sing a song together today. There is a Turkish of "El pueblo unido," of "Çav Bella," of "Venceremos." A song listened to alone is consumption; a song sung together is organisation.
Look at your own hands. At the start of this piece we said "look closely at these hands." They broke Jara's hands because those hands were working: guitar, hoe, stage. Your hands are working too: keyboard, steering wheel, bench, chalk. Organise so they are not broken.

Dear Comrades,

In the stands of Estadio Chile, a man with broken hands tried to sing in front of five thousand detainees. Those who tell it say he sang "Venceremos" and that a few people joined him. We cannot document the truth of this scene; what we can document are 44 bullets and broken wrists. But even if the scene is not true, the lesson is: a class's song is larger than the man who sings it. They killed him; they could not kill the song, because the song was not his. It belonged to a class, and that class is still here.

Galeano's continent is still bleeding from its open veins; Inti-Illimani is still on stage as it enters sixty; Grup Yorum's imprisoned members are still in prison; Barrientos's case is still ongoing; Chile's Pinochet constitution is still in force. So nothing has ended. Commemoration begins by accepting this.

The song is the voice of the class; it is not the army of the class. Our army is our organisation. And only that protects the song.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone. Reproduce it.

Related Pieces

This piece is part of the blog's commemorations line.

Coups and imperialism: 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup · Twenty-Five Years of September 11 · The Palantir Manifesto · Nuremberg and NATO

Art, the artist, and class: Yılmaz Güney: The Ugly King · From Having to Being: Reading Erich Fromm with Class · Bedahet Tosun commemoration

Planning and technology: Cybernetic Horizons · The Socialist Artificial Intelligence Manifesto

Organisation: Event Organizing and Comradeship · Whose Family Is Safe?

Sources

Jara and the case:

Joan Jara, Víctor: An Unfinished Song (1983); Turkish: Víctor Jara: Yarım Kalmış Bir Şarkı.
Fundación Víctor Jara — the foundation's archive and case chronology.
Radio Universidad de Chile, 10 December 2025 — the indictment of Barrientos, 44 bullets, chronology.
Center for Justice and Accountability, Jara v. Barrientos — the 2016 Orlando case.
Al Jazeera, 29 August 2023 — Supreme Court ruling and Chacón's suicide.
The Progressive, 8 December 2023 — Barrientos's deportation.
Billboard, July 2018 — conviction of eight officers.

Chile and the CIA:

U.S. Senate Church Committee, "Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973" (1975).
Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (National Security Archive, 2003).
Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press, 2011).
Rettig Commission Report (1991) and Valech Commission Report (2004).

Galeano:

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (1971; Turkish: Çitlembik Yayınları).
Tropics of Meta, May 2014 and MR Online, May 2014 — the 2014 "self-criticism" debate.
JSTOR Daily, Galeano 1940-2015.

New Song, Inti-Illimani, and Turkey: