Chilean Documentary Reveals the Name of Victor Jara's Alleged Killer

This article was first published in Irish Left Review here.

Earlier this year human rights lawyer Nelson Caucoto Pereira and Joan Jara, wife of nueva canción singer Victor Jara, appealed to the Chilean Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence to collaborate in the effort to reconstruct the events leading to Victor Jara’s murder, as well as divulging the names of lieutenants responsible for the atrocity. While no affirmative statement was issued following the appeal, a documentary featured on Chilevision in May revealed the name of the lieutenant who allegedly pulled the trigger on Victor Jara.

The documentary entitled ‘Quien Mato a Victor Jara?’ (Who Killed Victor Jara?) created a strong narrative of the events unfolding in Estadio Chile and the circumstances leading up to Victor’s murder and subsequent discovery of his body. Jose Alfonso Paredes Marquez, a former conscript from the Tejas Verdes contingent who had previously been indicted for his participation in the murder, named Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez as Victor’s alleged killer.

Barrientos was the unidentified lieutenant who, according to Paredes, shot Victor in the head after the singer refused to answer his questions. “He shot him at almost point blank range because the man would not answer him.” [1]

Barrientos has been living in Florida since the 1990s, around the time when Paredes was arraigned in court for his participation in Victor’s murder. Barrientos was interrogated by the FBI some weeks before the airing of the documentary, following a request from Chile regarding the murder of Victor Jara. Tracked by journalist Macarena Pizarro from Chilevision, Barrientos denied his involvement in Victor’s murder. When asked whether he would return to face Chilean justice, Barrientos retorted, “It depends. I do not have to face justice because I killed no one. I’ve been to Chile several times but now, loud and clear, I won’t go.”[2]

The Tejas Verdes contingent, under the command of Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, had been ordered to Santiago as part of the support for the military coup in the vicinities of La Moneda. Upon the transfer to Estadio Chile, the lieutenants indulged in the interrogation, torture and murder of those detained in the stadium. The first prisoners to be transferred to the stadium were those barricaded inside the Technical University, including Victor Jara.

Testimony by Osiel Nuñez from the Students’ Federation sheds light upon the treachery and intimidation by the Tejas Verdes contingent at Estadio Chile. Upon the persona of ‘el Principe’ (The Prince), Nuñez states that he had a very powerful voice and did not need a microphone to make himself heard in the stadium. The lieutenant declared “Soy un Principe” – I am a Prince, to the detainees, later addressing each section of detainees, asking them if they were hearing him, with each section having to answer in the affirmative.

The identity of El Principe remains disputed – both Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko from DINA and Edwin Dimter from Tejas Verdes were suspected of having been ‘the Prince’. However during court procedures, Paredes mentioned Lieutenant Nelson Edgardo Haase Mazzei as the alleged ‘Prince’; a statement which has been denied by Haase.

It was the Prince who, upon recognising Victor Jara, separated him from the rest of the detainees together with Litré Quiroga; Chief of the Service of Prison under Salvador Allende’s government. Victor was taken into a room where Lieutenant Nelson Haase was sitting behind the interrogation desk. Another lieutenant – allegedly Pedro Barrientos, played Russian roulette with Victor, eventually shooting him in the skull. Victor fell to the ground, his body convulsing. The order was given to conscripts to open fire on Victor’s body,[3] as well as upon the other fourteen detainees who were with Victor. One of the victims was Quiroga, who was reportedly tortured for three days prior to his assassination.[4] The documentary featured the exact location where Victor’s body was discovered by social activist Monica Salinas – in a field outside the walls of Cemeterio Metropolitano.

The documentary highlights the impunity enjoyed by the ex officials. Implying a range of absurd rhetoric, Pedro Barrientos, Jorge Smith and Luis Ernesto Bethke denied being present at the Estadio Chile in the aftermath of the military coup, although Paredes’ testimony contradicts the lieutenants. When interviewed by Chilevision, Barrientos denied the Tejas Verdes regiment or himself having been present in Estadio Chile. Asked about Paredes, who accompanied Barrientos in his role, more denials ensued. Echoing Jorge Smith, Barrientos insisted he did not remember Paredes and was nowhere near Estadio Chile, claiming instead to be in the vicinities of La Moneda. This contradicts the fact that Paredes stated he had access to the interrogation rooms through accompanying Barrientos. Bethke’s non-committal reply to the same question was “Why wouldn’t I admit I was there?” The epitome of impunity was characterised by Nelson Haase in 2009 during a telephone interview with newspaper La Nacion. Asked whether he was present in Estadio Chile during Victor’s torture and murder, Haase replied that he was not in Estadio Chile. “I was never in Estadio Chile. I don’t know it. I don’t even like football.”[5]

The officials from Tejas Verdes responsible for the atrocities which occurred in Estadio Chile in the aftermath of the coup are Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, who later became Head of DINA (Dirección de Intelligencia Nacional), Jorge Smith, Luis Ernesto Bethke, Nelson Haase, Edwin Dimter, Rodrigo Rodriguez Fuschloger and Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez. The officials specialised in torture and indulged in the violations upon their return to Tejas Verdes, taking over a resort hotel and transforming it into an interrogation and torture center.[6] Hernan Valdes, a survivor of Tejas Verdes stated “… all I knew about evil until then was only caricature, only literature. Now evil has lost all moral reference.”[7]

Reacting to the information revealed in the documentary, Joan Jara expressed shock at the cynicism and arrogance of officers involved in her husband’s murder. “Everyone was lying with impunity. I believe that there was a large official circle in the stadium that was, in one way or another, involved in this cruelty.” Gloria Konig, executive director of the Victor Jara Foundation, declared that justice must allow investigations into the new declarations by conscript Paredes. “I believe yesterday it became clear that the conscripts have fear.” Lawyer Nelson Caucoto Pereira stated he expects Chile to respond to the warrant requested by the Courts in order to indict Barrientos for his alleged role in killing Victor Jara, echoing earlier statements in which he insisted the aim is to hold those officials wielding power responsible for Victor’s death.[8]

Notes

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[1] http://laradiodelsur.com/?p=92415
[2] http://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/2012/05/17/540933/acusado-de-asesinato-de-victor-jara-niega-haber-estado-en-el-estadio-chile.html
[3] http://ciperchile.cl/2009/05/26/los-estremecedores-testimonios-de-como-y-quienes-asesinaron-a-victor-jara/#el-principe
[4] http://www.cidh.org/countryrep/Chile74eng/chap.2b.htm
[5] http://tomasdinges.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/how-victor-jara-died-last-minutes/
[6] http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/beginners/contdina.htm
[7] http://memoriaviva.com/English/centros_detencion_lista.htm
[8] http://www.adnradio.cl/noticias/nacional/joan-jara-y-reportaje-de-en-la-mira-todos-los-oficiales-mintieron-con-un-cinismo-demasiado-grande/20120517/nota/1690047.aspx

Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile

This review was first published in Upside Down World here.
Ariel Dorfman was thirty-one years old and working as a cultural advisor to President Salvador Allende when Augusto Pinochet's military coup abruptly destroyed the socialist revolution. The actions of the dictatorship created a reign of macabre realities which would split Chilean narratives into opposing memory camps. Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (HMH Books, 2011) is an eloquent memoir which fluctuates between reflections on death and exile - the meaning of not having died next to Allende in the presidential palace La Moneda, and Dorfman's own exile, a decision enforced by Allende’s advisors and which very possibly saved his life, yet which has assailed Dorfman with a tenacious need to question his own role and actions within that particular era of Chilean history.

The book moves rapidly from one event to another, disrupting chronology whilst creating an intense discussion of contrasts – death and exile, the revolutionary and the exile, the desaparecidos and the exile, language and exile. Exile becomes a single constant which, as time passes, exudes a certain inevitable detachment from the reality that is Chile. There is no reconciliation with the revolutionary past in exile – an issue which Dorfman struggled against for many years in various countries as he futilely sought to aid the Chilean resistance from abroad during the first years of exile in Paris and Amsterdam.

El pueblo unido – the people united in a socialist revolution under the banner of the Unidad Popular disintegrated in exile. A hierarchy developed within the exiled community, leading to strife within the movement struggling to develop a resistance movement against Pinochet. Dorfman recounts how his family had been promised an apartment in Paris by Carlos Iturra, author of the famous hymn Venceremos, at “solidarity rental rates.” The family moved their belongings to the apartment, only to discover a few days later that Iturra had received threatening phone calls from dictatorship sympathisers. The location was presumably unsafe. However, upon collecting their luggage from the apartment, it became evident to the family that the hierarchy of the Communist Party had negotiated with Iturra to reside in the apartment. Iturra was, at that moment, organising a vacation in the Alps for children of Chilean exiles. The sense of a community united in a revolutionary stance had deteriorated.

“Exile destroys children along with the parents.” Dorfman recounts how his children, Rodrigo and Joaquin struggle with identity and history in exile. Whilst the eldest, Rodrigo, gradually eliminates traces of Chile in his art, Joaquin seemingly fails to absorb the Chilean identity. Dorfman describes how the Andes Mountains feature prominently in Chilean children’s artwork – a characteristic which holds no fascination for Joaquin, born in exile. However, both sons are affected by the consequences of dictatorship and exile. Rodrigo has imbibed a rebellious streak which leads him to a return to Chile and subsequent filming of protests. Joaquin is haunted by the stories of the desaparecidos and the terror inflicted upon Chileans, such as the story of Rodrigo Rojas – a young man who, along with his girlfriend Carmen Gloria Quintana, had been doused with paraffin and torched. Their bodies were dumped in a ditch – at the exact location where three dissidents were discovered with slit throats only a year earlier. Dorfman admits an inconsistency between the lies designed to protect children from the horrors of the dictatorship and the children’s absorption of the truth.

The ramifications of exile flow into metaphorical prose. Dorfman distinguishes between various facets of exile – the actual departure from Chile, and the indefinite aspect – which lead the author to hold on to a library inside their house in Chile which was being used as a safe house for the MAPU, instead of acquiring new books. Exile created contradictions, ambiguity and barriers, as Dorfman realises that the revolutionary who joined the struggle for a socialist revolution, who was present when Allende saluted the people a week prior to the military coup, had distanced himself from his compañeros in Chile. After a long process in which he persisted in identifying with the resistance in exile and aiding the movement, Dorfman’s evolution veers towards the intellectual writer whose memories and stories are festering within an increasingly permanent exile and the still imagery of the revolutionary past.

Dorfman struggles with the truth as the exile commences in Buenos Aires. Narrating the case of Victor Jara, he tells of how a writer described Victor having his hands cut off by the lieutenants – an erroneous statement which portrayed how legends mingled with truth to construct a false reality. Another experience of false memory is Dorfman’s recollection of a photograph of him taken a week before the coup in front of La Moneda. His memory is of him in revolutionary stance, fists in the air. When the photo resurfaces, Dorfman discovers a pensive version of himself next to writer Antonio Skarmeta. The illusion of el pueblo unido had vanquished the actual memory – exile implants images in the mind of the exile and constructs an alternative reality.

It is not only actual memories that abscond from the exile. Pinochet’s reign contaminated language and society by referring to torture as ‘excesses,’ whilst the dictatorship was described as a ‘regime.’ The euphemisms contributed toward the cycle of impunity and infiltrated social circles where new alliances were being forged, with some former socialists seeking to gain elite status by liaising with the right wing – a phenomenon which Dorfman states was blatantly portrayed in the social pages of newspaper El Mercurio.

The book is also replete with stories of people from Chile. Carlos - the carpenter who hid Allende’s poster behind the boards in his workshop until Pinochet was arrested in London. Patricia, the wife of a right wing thug who used her husband’s status as a cover to transport Allende supporters to safety in a car gifted to her husband by DINA. Susana Weiner, who worked as a courier for MAPU, played a role in saving the lives of dissidents, including Dorfman, and was entrusted with transcribing notes describing torture in detention centres and smuggling them out of Chile. Their experiences, combined with the stories of the detenidos desaparecidos and President Patricio Aylwin’s initiative during the transition to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission urged Dorfman to contribute towards furthering the struggle, resulting in two particular publications written in exile.

Widows (1978) is a novel which deals with a group of women who refuse to hand over a body which washed ashore. As the novel was published, the first desaparecidos were being discovered in Chile. In the memoirs, Dorfman describes the act of disappearing people as an aberration on existence. “Disappearance was an outrage against the chemistry and structure of life itself. The bodies of the missing were wrenched out of the normal progression of existence ...” The outrage of the discovery contrasts sharply with another discovery of bodies in 1990, where younger Chileans born after the coup were less interested in the process. According to Dorfman, this discovery was a disruption in their lives which necessitated excavation and destruction of a football pitch.

However, in his renowned play entitled Death and the Maiden, Dorfman shows how torture survivors were side-lined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Paulina – a torture survivor whose husband is a lawyer working on behalf of the Commission, kidnaps the man she believes to be her torturer and subjects him to a trial, appointing her husband as her oppressor’s defence lawyer. Paulina insists she wants the truth – a truth which till now wallows in impunity as torturers and victims walk side by side on Chilean streets, depriving torture survivors of their right to justice and the opportunity to inscribe their testimonies.

Dorfman describes how torture tarnishes universal expression such as music. The last scene features Paulina listening to Schubert in a concert – the music played during her torture session. The reconciliation with her favourite music was brought about after the confession was extracted from her torturer – the right to truth as opposed to sacrificing one’s self for the better of the democratic transition.

In the fragments of Dorfman’s diary of his return to Chile in 1990, the author grapples with the realisation that his experiences and that of the Chilean nation have diverged so greatly, it is impossible to nurture the dream of returning to live in Chile. The fragile transition, which sought to reconcile, rather than call for justice in order to avoid disruptions in the process, differed greatly from Dorfman’s vision of returning to the people united in a collective struggle. Exile further split the left wing memory camp, as those who remained in Chile looked upon exiles with certain resentment, contrasting the suffering they had endured with the relative comfort of escaping the horrors of the dictatorship.

Dorfman, unable to harmonize the experience of different memory camps on the left, decided to seek refuge in the US and later become a citizen of the same country which had conspired with Pinochet to overthrow Allende. He states that the desire to return was vanquished by the necessity to adjust, bringing to an end a previous personal conflict concerning language. Renouncing imperialism during the years of Allende’s presidency and the first years of exile also meant renouncing the English language, which Dorfman was familiar with since childhood, having lived in the US when his father and the family fled from Argentina. Throughout the course of exile and the subsequent return to Chile, Dorfman realises that language as a universal medium holds the power to navigate political borders and memory. Also, in Dorfman’s own words, acquiring US citizenship meant “I will never again go into exile.”

Personified by writers  such as Milan Kundera, who Dorfman describes as “the saddest man I have ever seen,” and Antonio Skarmeta, author of Il Postino, who predicted Dorfman would never return to live in Chile, exile became the ultimate choice of survival, creating a refuge within another complex realm of loyalties.

Whilst the book might have benefited from a more chronological order, and the metaphorical prose might seem daunting for some readers, Dorfman has masterfully created a narrative so intricate and yet simple in its message. He lays bare the complexities of memory, made easier to follow once the reader acknowledges that memory knows no chronology but is rather a series of events that profoundly impacted the rememberer’s life, and the act of remembering is a process of cunningly implanting additional images and obliterating others. Most importantly, Dorfman furthers the split memory narrative by adding the memory of the exile, the desaparecidos and the torture survivors to the usual general divide between the supporters of Allende and those of Pinochet. As compromising as it may seem, Dorfman acknowledges the importance of embracing ambivalence in order to construct a narrative which berates, glorifies and wallows in despondency. The book emanates the turmoil of Dorfman’s complicated yearning to regain Allende’s years, and his unrepentant decision to seek shelter in a nation known for its oppression, in order to avoid repeating his own history.

Tribute to Victor Jara: Venceremos!

The lines fainted, their dilapidated strands
wove bandages for crushed hands,
that strummed strings in the wake
of imminent annihilation. The anthem
defended and defeated, braiding
definitions around treacherous throats

History bequeathed the stadium
with punctured lungs and slain guitars.
In the long, narrow land, a memory writes itself.

Dawn dissolved in dark mines and the victorious voice
banished melancholy below the butchered bodies
allowing the revolution its revival in the blossoms
of an anticipated historical future.