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Victor Jara and the story of his last poem

mahmag  •  06 October, 2008

v.jara

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There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?


An Unfinished Song

It took me months, even years, to piece together something of what happened to Victor 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 the 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 Victor, 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 11 September, Victor found that the centre 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 Department of Communications 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, Victor 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 six hundred 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 Victor 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 neighbourhood, they tell me that Victor 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, Victor 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 back of their heads. Victor lay 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 recognised.

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 Victor was first recognised by one of the non-commissioned officers. 'You're that fucking singer, aren't you?' and he hit Victor on the head, felling him, then kicking him in the stomach and ribs. Victor 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, remember 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, Victor 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 Victor 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 Victor 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. Victor 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, Victor 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 14 September, the prisoners were divided into groups of about two hundred, ready to be transferred to the National Stadium. It was then that Victor, slightly recovered, asked his friends if anyone had a pencil and paper and 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 any representative of a foreign embassy. (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 of 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 were 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 Victor 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 five thousand people were imprisoned, could only imagine what must be happening in the rest of his country. He must have realised 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, Victor 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 Victor again.

In spite of the fact that large numbers were transferred to other prison camps, the Estadic, Chile remained full because more and more prisoners were constantly arriving, both men and women. I have two more glimpses of Victor 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 Victor's voice raised in the Stadium after those four days of suffering to sing a verse of the hymn of Popular Unity, '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 16 September, 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 recognise the corpses and suddenly one of the women cried out, 'This is Victor Jara!' - it was a face which was both known and dear to them. One of the women even knew Victor 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 Victor'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 recognised - by one of the people who worked there. When later the text of his last poem was brought to me, I knew that Victor wanted to leave his testimony, his only means now of resisting fascism, of fighting for the rights of human beings and for peace.

There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?
Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives' faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?
The blood of our President, our compañero,
will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!

How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the momentÂ…

Estadio Chile

September 1973
---from www.historyisaweapon.com
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