Anniversary of Sept 11th 1973 - 40 Years After US-Backed Coup, Chileans Search For Justice

Chileans are still dealing with the aftermath of a CIA-backed coup launched decades ago.

On this anniversary of Sept 11th 1973 when a US backup coup took place that overthrew the democratically elected leader of Chile and replaced by the dictator Pinochet who proceeded to murder thousands of innocent people with full US backing and knowledge, Mint Press carry this report to reflect on the 40 years that have past and the search for justice.

Perhaps some people will remember the television pictures from the day after the coup, Sept 12th when things changed dramatically where thousands of people including teachers and students were taken to the Chile Stadium-over night pressed into service as a detention center - and many were subsequently attacked and killed.

"The Chile Stadium was no joke. We saw them kill people right in front of us, we saw how people went crazy from that terrible, tense situation. Torture is not only when the torturers are in front of you, abusing you directly, destroying you, but that atmosphere was also torture."
("Chile. La Memoria Prohibida"

In the Mint Press article report they focus on the story of Jara, 40 who died at the hands of the fascists and here we take up the report....

Not everyone knows the name Victor Jara; but for students of rock ‘n’ roll history, Jara’s story — which has been profiled in Rolling Stone’s “15 Rock & Roll Rebels” — illustrates the humanity and conscious weight of music.

A theater teacher and director, Jara picked up the social and moral convulsions of the Sixties, as the Free Love movement swept across his native Chile.

With songs of love and justice that reflected the socialistic ideology of the common good — his songs are remembered as establishing the Nueva Cancion Chilena folk music movement — in the 1970 election Jara supported Salvador Allende for the Chilean presidency, the candidate whose ideology best matched his hopes for peace and justice.

This cost him his life. At the age of 40, Jara — along with thousands of others, including the teachers and students of the State Technical University in Santiago — were taken to the Chile Stadium on September 12, 1973. The day before, President Allende had died under mysterious circumstances in a military coup d’etat. After segregating him in an underground changing room, soldiers broke Jara’s ribs and shattered the bones in his hands. He was mocked and ordered to play his guitar with his broken hands. When he responded by singing “Venceremos” (“We Will Win”), he was further beaten.

On September 16, the soldiers swept Jara with machine-gun fire, riddling his body with 44 bullets. His body was dumped unceremoniously on a road on the outskirts of Santiago. Jara’s wife, Joan, retrieved his body and buried it. Immediately thereafter, she fled Chile

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The call for justice

“I saw literally hundreds of bodies that were piled up in what was actually the parking place of the morgue,” Joan Jara told to Democracy Now. “I recognized him. I saw what had happened to him. I saw the bullet wounds. I saw the state of his body. I consider myself one of the lucky ones in the sense that I had to face in that moment what had happened to Victor. I could [later] give my testimony with all the force of what I felt in that moment — and not the horror, which is much worse, of never knowing what happened to your loved one. That happened to so many families, so many women who have spent these 40 years looking for their loved ones who were made to disappear.”

Four decades later, she seeks justice for her loss. The soldier that is accused of killing Jara — Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez — is being sued by Joan Jara via the Center for Justice and Accountability for violations of human rights under a little-used federal regulation, the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which allows for redress of ross crimes against humanity by those who sought shelter in the United States. For the last twenty years, Barrientos has lived in Florida...

The full report of this report can be found at the link below. As we can see the US is quite happy to materially support, finance and then harbour these terrorists and have continued to do so over the years in many other situations as their premium terrorist organisation, the CIA which operates worldwide and on an industrial scale was heavily involved in this tragic event and many other ones.