The alleged killer of internationally renowned Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara may be facing justice at last. On July 14, in a little-reported but momentous decision, a federal judge in Florida determined that Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez was no longer considered a citizen of the United States, paving the way for his extradition to Chile.
AP Photo/John Raoux
Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nunez, leaves the federal courthouse Monday, June 27, 2016, in Orlando, Florida. Barrientos, former lieutenant under the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, was convicted by a jury of torturing and killing the famed Chilean folk singer Victoor Jara.
U.S. District Judge Roy B. Dalton of Florida's Middle District revoked Barrientos’ “Certificate of Naturalization” in a July 14 ruling that has largely escaped the attention of news media.“Defendant is forever restrained and enjoined from claiming or exercising any rights, privileges, benefits, or advantages in connection with his December 17, 2010, naturalization,” the decision read.
Barrientos was ordered to immediately surrender any documents, including U.S. passport and voting documents. This decision clears the way for his extradition from the United States to Chile, where he is wanted for Jara’s September 1973 murder.
In 2013, Jara’s family brought a case against Barrientos under the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. The case finally went to trial on June 13, 2016, with legal representation by the Center for Justice and Accountability in partnership with the law firm Chadbourne & Parke.
On June 27, 2016, the jury in the civil trial found Barrientos liable for involvement in Jara’s torture and murder and accessed $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages. But he continued to live as a U.S. citizen in Florida, thereby avoiding a forced return to Chile, where eight of his fellow officers were imprisoned for Jara’s murder in 2018.
"Wanted" poster created by world artists demanding the extradition of Barrientos in 2015. (Address and phone number have been obscured.)
One of the expert witnesses who testified at Barrientos’s trial in 2016 was Steve Stern, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a longtime scholar of the efforts to reclaim historical memory in Chile. Stern told The Progressive in an October 2016 interview that Barrientos “had moved to Florida around 1989 after the plebiscite [the October 1988 national popular referendum that ended the dictatorship in Chile]. That meant there would be some sort of democratic transition. He has since become a U.S. citizen.”
Stern said that Chile, which was not able to bring Barrientos to trial in absentia, requested extradition from the Obama Administration, although “There’s not been a response yet.”
Now, however, the U.S. government has taken action, arguing successfully before the U.S. District Court in Orlando that Barrientos had illegally procured his naturalization because he “was not lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” It said he gained “U.S. Citizenship by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation [of his role in the Chilean military during the 1973 coup.]”
Marcelo Urra from Santiago, Chile, CC BY-SA 2.0
Grafitti mural of Victor Jara at the Chilean Congress of Psychology, State Universities of Chile, October 2010. The text reads: "Give us your strength and your courage in the struggle."
Writing in The Nation in 2016, Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile Documentation Project for the National Security Archive, said: “The United States, which played a shameful and sinister role in the advent of the Pinochet dictatorship and the atrocities that followed, is now in a position to support efforts, led by courageous families and creative lawyers, to bring accountability to those human-rights crimes.”
Asked by email in late July why no U.S. media seemed interested in the Florida court’s recent decision, Kornbluh told The Progressive, “When they actually extradite him back to Chile, it will be in the news. . . . Expulsions take time, but hopefully this becomes a symbol of a fiftieth anniversary pursuit of justice for one of the most infamous post-coup murders.”
Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles concurs. Her 2016 book, Terrorismo de estadio: Prisioneros de guerra en un campo de deportes, tells the stories of many victims held in the detention center at Estadio Chile (now renamed Víctor Jara Stadium) following the coup. Bonnefoy says the Florida court decision has received a great deal of notice in the press in Chile, but she tells The Progressive via email from Santiago, “It won’t get coverage [in U.S. media] until there are actual consequences.”
In 2008, the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center was established by the Department of Homeland Security under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is charged with “identifying, investigating, prosecuting, and removing human rights violators and war criminals found within the jurisdiction of the United States.”
A statement on the ICE website says the agency has since 2003 arrested more than 480 individuals for human rights-related violations and “physically removed 1,100 known or suspected human rights violators from the United States.”
On August 28, Chile’s Supreme Court sentenced seven former military officers to between eight and twenty-five years in the murder of Jara and another man at the stadium. This ruling came just two weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the coup. But Barrientos cannot be tried in absentia, and therefore the court is waiting on the United States to extradite him under the terms of a treaty, signed by President Barack Obama in 2014.
Warko, CC BY-SA 2.0
Joan Jara in September 2012.
The treaty “obligates each party to extradite to the other persons sought by the requesting state for prosecution.” It remains to be seen, now that the citizenship of Barrientos has been revoked, whether or not ICE will follow through on his expulsion from Florida. After more than six weeks of attempts, ICE officials did not respond to numerous requests from The Progressive for comment for this article.
A 2019 Netflix documentary, ReMastered: Massacre at the Stadium, tells the story of the 2016 Florida trial and the more than forty-year quest of Joan Jara, Víctor’s widow (now ninety-six), to seek justice and accountability for his torture and murder. As Stern explained, “victims and their survivors have a right to the truth, and that memory actually cannot be swept under the rug or buried.”