August 2001

From 1973 to 1990, Chile was governed by a military dictatorship, which had overthrown the elected government of Salvador Allende Gossens three years into his six-year term. Many players participated in the movements for change that led Chile back to a civilian government in 1990 -- social scientists, lawyers, union leaders, grass-roots community leaders, politicians and artists. Least recognized in accounts of Chile’s redemocratization were the artists, who, almost immediately after the 1973 coup, began laying a groundwork for later strategies that eventually put an end to military rule.

For novelist and journalist Patricia Verdugo, the role of music was paramount. Verdugo remembered going to Princeton in January of 1978 for some meetings with Chilean physicists. They saw everything as very bleak and told her they saw no end to the dictatorship. They wanted to know when something was going to happen. They had a sensation, as all exiles have, of never being able to return to their country. She assured them that things were happening. "But where?" they insisted.
To their disbelief, she replied:

What is happening can be measured in music. The only way we have of communicating is through music. We can’t talk about politics; they don’t allow us to hold meetings. But if I hear someone listening to music, I know who that someone is and that’s enough for me to know that that person is with me, only because he is listening to Violeta Parra.

She tried to explain to them, and to other exiles when she visited Harvard, what it meant to play the guitar again in the universities. They thought that was "stupid." "No, it is not stupid," she told them, "because you have not lived through the terror. The terror is so great that gathering around a guitar to sing Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra is a fierce act of dissidence." Verdugo elaborated:

Music was our first symbol of identity that gave us energy and enabled us to reconstruct groups. I felt I was in one of those animated cartoons, the one where one of the characters–I don’t remember which one–is fighting some moles. The moles start digging tunnels underground until suddenly, bup! the house caves in. They undermined everything underground without his ever realizing it. So, I said to the exiles, "That’s what is happening. What we are doing is fundamental in terms of communicating with each other through song. You don’t see it because it’s all underground. It’s under the music."

This was understood very well by Roberto García when he founded the Alerce recording label in 1976. Part of what he did was clandestine, part of it went to the public. He distributed Silvio Rodríguez, the internationally popular Cuban singer, without the dictatorship finding out who Silvio Rodríguez was. Suddenly, the entire country was singing "Ojalá," which he had written. The Chilean version of the song was recorded by Gloria Simonetti, whose political affiliations were of the far right. Verdugo describes the almost unbelievable situation:

Gloria Simonetti sang "Ojalá" on all the radio stations and it became the number one song of the year. Everyone asked, "Who composed such a wonderful song?" "Silvio Rodríguez." "And who is Silvio Rodríguez?" "An anti-Castro Cuban," someone would say, covering up who he really was, "who, when he says, `I hope he dies,’ he’s saying that he hopes that Castro dies." No one knew that Rodríguez was in fact one of Cuba’s most renowned popular recording artists, or that Ricardo García had brought the recording of "Ojalá" to Chile. And from then on, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, and the re-releases of Violeta Parra fed us from underneath, underneath, and through music we all knew who we were. Not through politics. Through music.

The following accounts are excerpts from the more than one hundred interviews I made between 1994 and 1999 for a book I am writing, Symbols of Resistance: A Chilean Legacy, to tell the artists’ story -- a story reaffirming that during times of fear, social inequity, and political conflict, artists can and do influence political process and public opinion.

JOAN JARA , Dancer, teacher
[Joan Jara was married to the well-known singer Victor Jara, who was killed by machine-guns at the Chile Stadium three days after the coup. Earlier this year, that stadium was renamed the Victor Jara Stadium and was turned over to the Victor Jara Foundation in Santiago as a venue for cultural programs.]

From my point of view, the Chilean artists in exile played a tremendously important role in creating awareness internationally about what was happening in Chile. They acted as the living image of Chile. That was certainly true in England, where I was living.

I think more than anything, the music of Chile was a motivating force for solidarity. I have an intimate experience of how the spirit of Victor and his music made people want to know more about Chile. First of all, the story. But then, through the songs, and how the music spread in spite of always being in Spanish. People understood...it was a way of communicating. So many people who went to the first Chilean concert in Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1974 became committed and spent years in the solidarity movement for Chile. So many people.

In New York there was an extraordinary concert at the Felt Forum that Phil Ochs organized, where Bob Dylan made an appearance. That’s where the song for Victor had its first performance, the poem that Adrian Mitchell, the British poet, had written. He had told me, "I can imagine this being sung to a Woodie Guthrie tune." I had it in my pocket that night. And backstage I dared to say to Toshi Seeger, "I’ve got this poem," and I showed it to her. I knew that Arlo Guthrie was going to perform that night, and Toshi said, "Give it to me, I’ll take it to Arlo." After reading it, he said, "Oh, yeah, I can imagine what this goes to." So he invented a tune and performed it for the first time there at that concert. Later he recorded it. "Victor Jara of Chile, Lived like a shooting star, He sang for the peoples of Chile..." A very beautiful song, very, very beautiful.

I left Chile one month after the coup and returned for a visit the first time in January of 1981, a very bad time, a very repressive time. I felt I had to come back to Chile, one, to sort of smell it. And to interview people who knew Victor before I did. I was taken to small, clandestine places that were supposed to be the local football club, or something, where there were peñas [small clubs, popular since the mid-sixties, where musicians played, usually music from the New Chilean Song movement, and where wine and empanadas were served] going on with lots of young people singing. That was one way people had of keeping things alive, keeping spirits up. It preserved a sense of identity, keeping the strings of memory alive.

I came back to stay just after my book, Victor: An Unfinished Song, was first published in London in 1983. [A Spanish version was published in Spain that year; the book was republished in the United States in 1984 under the title, An Unfinished Song: The Life of Victor Jara, by Ticknor & Fields, New York; a new edition will be published in London in September 2001]. I took a plane from Australia, where I was promoting the book, to Easter Island and on to Santiago thinking that I wasn’t going to be let in. But they did let me in. Just before Christmas of 1983. They told me that if I didn’t take part in anything political, I could stay; otherwise, out. So I was relatively careful. I didn’t want to go out, for example. I did go to funerals.

There were so many funerals. They were obvious political demonstrations. That’s what I most remember about that time. Funerals of people who were killed for this or that. And also funerals of well-known people like the actor Roberto Parada or Rodrigo Rojas [the young man who was set on fire by Pinochet's henchmen]. That was where we would meet, in the cemetery. Really. It was terrible. And of course there were songs, along the way and in the cemetery. Running from the tear gas and all that. Matilde [Pablo Neruda's widow]. That’s what I most remember.

ANGEL PARRA, Composer, Singer
[Angel Parra is part of a remarkable family. One of his uncles was a poet and a troubadour, another a union leader all his life; his uncle Nicanor Parra is a physicist and Chile’s best known poet on an international level after Neruda; his sister Isabel is a prominent singer and musician, as are his son Angel and his niece Tita. His mother, Violeta Parra, is one of Chile’s true folk heroes, a luminous musical talent as composer and lyricist who inspired many who created the New Chilean Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, Angel and Isabel established a small club in the house they had recently bought, where exponents of the New Chilean Song came to perform: the Peña de los Parra. People went there to listen to Victor Jara, Rolando Alarcón, Patricio Manns, Isabel, Angel, many young musicians. Later, peñas appeared in cities all over the country, all exact copies of the Peña de los Parra: low tables, carafes instead of bottles of wine, candles, with empanadas and croquettes for sale at intermission.]

Those 1,000 days [of Allende’s Popular Unity government] seemed like one single day, one single day and one single night -- until September 11. All that had been elation, street parties, dance, murals of that time became overshadowed by another reality, like a magnificent sunny day that suddenly begins to cloud over, and there is a horrible storm.

From September 14, 1973, until the middle of 1974, I was held prisoner in different jails. I was at the National Stadium until they closed it on November 9 [1973], and in Chacabuco for six months. A next-door neighbor turned me in. But I knew they had to find me sooner or later. I think there were two people the military wanted to use as examples: Victor and me. That day [September 11] Victor was at the Technical University, and that very day they arrested him. I fell three days later. I’ve always said, very seriously, that I’m alive thanks to the death of Victor. It was about who they got first, who to use as an example: "This is what happens to little singers for getting involved in politics." My experience in the National Stadium is very painful -- I have it repressed. One day I’ll get it out. Maybe the most important thing that can be said is that once we were in prison, and everyone knew that we were there, we developed a cultural program inside the jails of Chile, an enormous program. There were hundreds of cultural agitators in prison. There came a time when it was much more to the dictatorship’s advantage to send us abroad than to keep us in the jails, because we were making more noise inside than outside.

In Chacabuco, the camp in the north, we lived in pavilions, houses that had belonged to the nitrate mining town of Chacabuco when the English were there at the beginning of the 20th century. When copper replaced nitrate as our principal export, the mine and the houses were eventually abandoned. (Salvador Allende had decided to make that mining town into the first national monument to the working class. He got as far as inaugurating it, and then workers ended up there as prisoners, along with artists.) There were two rooms, a small patio and a hot plate where we prepared our meals. The houses had no roofs. We covered them with canvas. We covered doors and windows with arpilleras [The patchwork craft done by women who participated in workshops created in early 1974 by the Pro Peace Committee to relieve their tensions and anxieties. The women were usually from working-class neighborhoods; their husbands, partners, sons or fathers had lost their jobs or had been detained and disappeared].

I remember Gonzalo Palta, an actor who was a fellow prisoner there, directed one of the theater groups in Chacabuco. A young man who had directed a chorus in the Communist Youth organization mounted a chorale with more than 400 prisoners. We created mural newspapers. There were many journalists in the jails and excellent illustrators and caricaturists, so we didn’t need photographers -- besides, we didn’t have cameras. They drew with pencils. Once it was known that you were in prison, we could receive packages from outside, with food, with books, with materials to write with. Some of us wrote poetry while we were there.

We didn’t have a radio, but we had music, the music we made ourselves. The miners of the María Elena Union sent me a guitar. Later a quena appeared, then a bombo, until we ended up with a small orchestra inside the camp that played different kinds of Latin American music.

There was also intense activity in popular culture. Prisoners who had been manual laborers would ask organizations to provide materials so that they could continue to work with their hands. Materials found on site were also used. Jewelry and other crafts were made out of scrap metal, cloth and pebbles. This form of cultural work began to occur in all the jails. It was the only form of power there was to maintain our spirit, maintain a state of mind that belonged to us and not to those who dominated us -- or who wanted to dominate us.

At first there was a good deal of opposition to these activities. In our case -- there were 1,200 of us in the north -- we formed what we called an "old people’s committee" and selected a representative to talk to the military authorities. And once they saw what it was all about, we were able to do our shows. The guards would even ask our permission to attend. Every Saturday we’d put on a play by "improvised" playwrights, people who had never written plays. Every week they’d write a different script, a play that lasted 40 or 50 minutes. Of course they were comedies; we couldn’t tell our dramas there. It was all about keeping the prisoners’ morale and dignity as high as possible.

There were humorous things. When you leave an experience like that alive, you remember many more positive things than negative. For example, there was a tiny little man who played the role of Tarzan in skits because he was the only one who had a leopard-skin print bikini. And he continued playing the role because he had those bikinis. Many funny things.

Three or four months after my release, which had been accelerated by international pressure from artists like Yves Montand, Aznavour, Joan Baez, I was summoned to appear at the investigation division of the Political Police. I was told by an official that I had to leave Chile. There was no official document but it was a very direct threat. So, at the end of 1974 I went to Mexico, where I lived for two years before going to Paris.

ROBERTO MARQUEZ, musician, singer, director of Illapu

We were one of the last groups to join the New Chilean Song movement, at the end of 1970. We recorded our first record, Música Andina, in 1972 with DICAP, the Communist Youth label, which opened the door for us to introduce our music at festivals in Santiago. We’re from the north of Chile and played music from that region, which was barely known here in Santiago at that time. Many people from central Chile felt that music didn’t belong to our country because it sounded more like music from Perú and Bolivia. They didn’t understand that part of the Andean music corresponds to northern Chile and Argentina as well.

We were very young when we started. My brother José Miguel was 13 when we came from Antofagasta to Santiago. I was 17. We were the first to leave home. Four of eleven children were in the group. It was difficult for our mother to accept, but we knew what we wanted to do with our lives. By September of 1973 we were in high gear. Everyone was predicting a bright future.

The coup was very traumatic. All the people in the DICAP catalog were persecuted by the regime, including us, although we were not very political nor were we connected to a political party. We were very young and were not very clear about anything, but we felt Allende’s government was doing good things for our people. We were automatically marginalized from the media and were called to appear at a regiment, as were all the singing groups. Andean instruments -- charangos [small stringed instrument made from an armadillo shell], quenas [reed flutes] -- were banned. So was wearing a poncho. As a result, we were banned from performing in this country. So, half of the Illapu returned to Antofagasta, to the womb, so to speak. Three of us stayed in Santiago, where we sang in cafés, little things to keep active.

We began to function again as a group at the end of 1974, when those who returned to Antofagasta reorganized and started performing in a peña called El Tambo Atacmeño at the University of the North. We joined them there, then moved back to Santiago and made a record shortly after the New Year of 1975. Shortly after the Andean instruments were banned, a group called the Barroco Andino appeared. They played baroque music with those Andean instruments, and the charango, the quena, the zampoña [pan pipes], were once again legitimized. So when Illapu reappeared, we reclaimed our music.

In 1976 we made Despedida del Pueblo. On that album, we recorded a song that we had heard in Argentina when we went there to learn about the country and its music: a candombé with an Argentine zamba rhythm. We added charangos and quenas and mixed it differently. It told of a black man, José, who had a very hopeful message. Nothing very deep politically, but something could be interpreted from the lyric, from metaphors that conveyed much more than what the song itself said. There are phrases that people made their own.

El Candombé para José became a kind of hymn of political prisoners. They would sing it when a new prisoner was brought in or when a prisoner was released.

Candombé para José
(Roberto Ternán)

En un pueblo olvidado no sé porqué
Y su danza de moreno lo hace mover
En el pueblo lo llamaban negro José
Amigo negro José.
Con amor candombea el negro José
Tiene el color de la noche sobre la piel
Es muy feliz candombeando dichoso él
Amigo negro José.
Perdonáme si te digo negro José
Eres diablo pero amigo negro José
Tu futuro va conmigo negro José
Yo te digo porque sé.
Con mucho amor las miradas cuando al bailar
Y el tamboril de sus ojos parece hablar
Y su camisa endiablada quiere saltar
Amigo negro José.
No tienes ninguna pena al parecer
Pero las penas te sobran negro José
Que tú en tu baile las dejas yo sé muy bien
Amigo negro José.
Perdonáme si te digo negro José
Eres diablo pero amigo negro José
Tu futuro va conmigo negro José
Yo te digo porque sé
Amigo negro José
Yo te digo porque sé
Amigo negro José.

Candombé for José
by Roberto Ternán

In a forgotten town I don’t know why
And his dark man’s dance makes him move.
In the town they call him Negro José,
Friend Negro José.
Negro José dances with a lot of love,
He has the color of night on his skin.
He’s very happy dancing, ecstatic, our
Friend Negro José.
Forgive me if I tell you Negro José,
you are devil but Friend Negro José.
Your future is linked to mine Negro José,
I tell you because I know.When he starts to dance, a lot of loving glances,
and the drumbeat of his eyes seems to talk
And his bedeviled shirt wants to jump,
Friend Negro José.
You seem to have no troubles,
But you abound in troubles, Negro José.
You leave them behind in your dance, I know that very well,
Friend Negro José.
Forgive me if I tell you Negro José,
You are devil but friend Negro José,
Your future is linked to mine Negro José,
I tell you because I know,
Friend Negro José.
I tell you because I know,
Friend Negro José.

Journalist Patricia Verdugo had also spoken about this song:

In November of 1976, Pinochet, through U.S. pressure basically, had no other alternative but to open the prisoners’ camps. (Later, there were other prisoners, but this marked the end of political prisoners jailed since the coup.) When the last camp, Tres Alamos, was opened, I was there covering the event. All the prisoners were lined up with their knapsacks and their bundles waiting to be liberated. When the doors are about to be opened, some of them decide to say good-bye to each other and the way they have of saying good-bye starts with singing El Negro José. Then, all the voices -- we’re talking about hundreds of people in a huge patio of a concentration camp -- start to sing, and then their families who are outside waiting for them also start to sing. You felt these thousands and thousands of voices joined in one song and there was nothing more to say. One song said it all.

End Part I