"...As every cell in Chile will tell
The cries of the tortured men
Remember Allende, and the days before,
Before the army came
Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad - those Washington Bullets again..."
~ The Clash -
They couldn't kill his songs' (excerpts)
...Victor Jara was 38 when he died. In the
1960s he wrote songs of protest against the ruling elite of his country. He was
one of the founding fathers of
Four days of torture
On
Next week the first Victor Jara CD will be
released. The album is called 'Manifesto'. The recordings on that CD have been
remastered and many of them had to be smuggled from
The last poem
The CD includes a reading by Andrew Mitchell
of the translation of Victor Jara's last poem. The poem was written in the
boxing stadium where he was being tortured and eventually murdered. The scraps
of paper where it was written on were smuggled out by those who survived. The
song remains unfinished. The lyrics literally stop mid-sentence as he was led
away to the changing rooms of the stadium and was shot repeatedly through the
chest. "Silence and screams are the end of my song" he wrote.
Joan Jara says that now Victor can rest in
peace, knowing that his work has been carried on as he had asked in his last
message. "They could kill him, but they couldn't kill his songs," she
says.
Source:
"They Couldn't Kill His Songs"