RSSVictor Jara is Smiling In Heaven
Just a quick Sunday night note to salute my Chilean peeps, you know who you are, and share their joy at the election of President Michelle Bachelet, who the media likes to remind us is a “left wing single mother,” and perhaps more importantly, the daughter of one of Pinochet’s victims. (Her father, a former military officer, died in prison under the dictatorship.)
I do believe that Pinochet should face justice for his crimes (”Please remember Victor Jara,” as the Clash sang all those years ago, reminding us that the folk singer who had his hands broken by Pinochet’s thugs and was then told to play his guitar in the Santiago Stadium before being blown away by “Washington bullets”). But I also believe that the voters of Chile have once again delivered the ultimate punishment to the decrepit old despot: By once again repudiating the barbarism of Pinochet and affirming that it is the Socialist Party of the late Salvador Allende that represents democratic civilization in Chile.
The ultimate punishment for Pinochet is that the Chilean electorate has cast him and what he stands for in the trash can of history, leaving him to live out his days as a disgraced outcast hounded by prosecutors. (It’s a gentler fate than thousands of his victims had, to be sure.)
But Bachelet has more important matters on her plate than avenging the dead. The whole continent’s politics are being remade by new left-wing models of governance — the media will focus on the bogey men of the nationalist-demagogue Chavez/Evo Morales stripe, but ultimately it’s the more centrist, pragmatic model represented by Bachelet, Argentina’s Nestor Kirschner and Lula in Brazil that is carving out the more viable and durable alternatives for developing countries interacting with the world economy.
And there’s something emotionally satisfying — in the way that Hollwyood movies end — in the notion that when the people of Chile have been given the democratic right to choose their leaders, it is the children of Pinochet’s victims, rather than those of his acolytes, that they turn. As y’all used to say in the old days, Venceremos!
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3 Responses to “Victor Jara is Smiling In Heaven”
Very exciting indeed! And she’s a pediatrician. Think what a better country America could be if our president was a female pediatrician!
Maybe on one of her State visits to Washington, she’ll bump into Henry K and get to ask him how it feels to have empowered the men who tortured her dad to death.
After Pinochet was arrested in London in ‘98, a bunch of Chileans went to the British embassy in Santiago to pick up the garbage. The guards stopped them and asked: “What do you think you’re doing?” And they replied: “You picked up our trash, we’ll pick up yours.”
Check your vacation destinations carefully, Henry K: garbage collectors are waiting for you, too.
Victor Jara is smiling in heaven with the beginnings of a return to democratic rule in Chile, but it’ll take a lot of grassroots organizing and activism to secure the kind of social and economic equality he dedicated his life to. After 30 years his actual killer was disclosed: Edwin Dimiter, aka the ‘Sadistic Prince” who works in the Pensions department of the Bachelet government. It’s grassroots protests against Dimiter that are uncovering this gross injustice (see: http://socialistworld.net/eng/2006/06/06chile.html). There is a wonderful album released this year in tribute to Victor Jara by Francesca Ancarola called “Lonquen”–the name of the village where Jara was born and she notes that even under the current government the class divide in Lonquen. Here’s an excerpt:
“The title song, the only Ancarola composition, opens the album with a counterpoint to Jara’s portrait of Lonquén, where, it seems that, even with the dictatorship’s self-destruction, little has changed in sociological terms. Jara was a poet, troubadour, and prophet of the Chilean masses, and as Ancarola observes, “Víctor’s art emerges inexorably from his humble origin in a country marked by class differences.”
Francesca Ancarola, Lonquén: Tribute to Víctor Jara
Petroglyph (www.petroglyphrecords.com)
Victor Jara’s songs and his struggle continues.
MMS must have all the fanfare of one of the most critical medicines that has ever been created to mankind
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