The United States has expelled the convicted killer of the renowned Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara. The December 1, 2023, expulsion comes more than five decades after retired Chilean army lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez killed the famous singer.
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.
Jara was a renowned musician, theater director, teacher, member of Chile’s Communist Party, and a supporter of the administration of the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. His music has been compared to the work of Bob Dylan, and it inspired songs written by Irish band U2 and the Tucson, Arizona-based indie-folk band Calexico, who opened their 2008 album Carried to Dust with the song “Victor Jara’s Hands.”
The retired Chilean lieutenant was arrested in an operation carried out by the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents on October 5 in Deltona, Florida. He had previously been stripped of his U.S. citizenship on July 14 for lying on immigration forms. According to the press release announcing his arrest and that he was to be returned to Chile to face charges for “his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killings during the aftermath of a military coup in 1973.”
Warko, CC BY-SA 2.0
Joan Jara in September 2012.
Barrientos’s arrival in Chile was marked by shouts and jeers blended with the sounds of Jara’s music.
Barrientos’s extradition comes just weeks after Jara’s widow, Joan Jara, passed away at the age of ninety-six. Jara’s family had demanded that the United States extradite Barrientos for years, according to Reuters.
“Joan Jara had seen the sentencing of seven of those responsible [for killing her husband],” Francisco Bustos, a Chilean lawyer and professor who worked as part of the team representing Jara’s family, tells The Progressive. “But it is always a relief [for the family] to know that the perpetrators are facing justice.”
Barrientos emigrated to the United States in 1989, and became a U.S. citizen through marriage in 2010. In 2016, he was convicted of the murder of Jara in a civil trial, and ordered to pay $28 million. He reportedly had boasted about his part in Jara’s murder on a number of occasions, going as far as allegedly showing off the gun he had used.
Following the CIA-backed coup d’etat against Allende led by Chilean General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, thousands of leftists, activists, and Allende supporters were detained and tortured by the dictatorship. Many of those detained were later killed and disappeared into secret mass graves.
Jara was abducted by the Pinochet regime the day after the coup and imprisoned in a Chilean sports stadium that now bears his name. He was tortured, reportedly having his fingers smashed by his captors, and was later shot in the head and killed before being riddled with bullets from a machine gun. The military displayed his body at the entrance to the stadium as a warning to other prisoners, before disposing of it in the streets along with the bodies of many other prisoners executed by the regime.
The prosecution of Barrientos in Chile is yet another step forward in the quest for justice.
He was forty years old.
“Víctor Jara is an icon because of his art and his songs,” Bustos says. “It is because of this he became a target of the dictatorship, precisely because the regime perceived him as a threat.”
He adds, “Joan Jara, during her lifetime, was always concerned with making the connection that Víctor Jara’s case is one of thousands of cases of serious human rights violations [that occurred during the dictatorship].”
In Chile alone, more than 3,000 people were killed during Pinochet’s rule.
In 1975, Pinochet would join other leaders in the region as part of Operation Condor, which was carried out against insurgents, leftists, activists, and those who resisted the coups and military dictatorships across South America. The U.S.-supported regional operation was established during secret meetings in November 1975, and brought transborder terror to the region.
By the end of the Operation Condor in 1983, between 50,000 and 60,000 people had been killed, 30,000 people disappeared, and more than 400,000 people imprisoned and tortured across the region.
The families of the victims have sought justice for those that were tortured and killed by the regime. Since the return to democracy in Chile, following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, other South American countries like Argentina have had similar reckonings. Seeking justice has been at the heart of the administration of newly elected Chilean president Gabriel Boric, which announced in March 2023 new efforts to find those who were forcibly disappeared during Pinochet’s reign between 1973 and 1990. This is just one part of Boric’s larger plan to address human rights violations during the seventeen-year-long dictatorship. These efforts to seek justice in Chile are among the most advanced in the region.
Public domain
Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara performing in Helsinki, Finland, in a 1969 protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam.
To date, there have been 297 convictions for crimes against humanity that occurred during the nearly two decades of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, with 134 perpetrators serving prison sentences. Another 1,300 cases remain open.
Pinochet himself faced charges for the violence, with the British government arresting the former dictator on an international warrant while he was recuperating in a hospital in London in 1998. Pinochet eventually died in December 2006 in a military hospital in Santiago, Chile, without ever serving time for his crimes.
But Pinochet’s legacy remains.
“We should not forget that Pinochet died as a fugitive from justice,” Joan Garcés, a former adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende and now a human rights lawyer in Spain, said in a 2013 interview with Amnesty International. “It was clear that international society saw him as a criminal.”
In July 2018, eight retired military officials were sentenced to fifteen years in prison by a Chilean judge for the abduction and murder of Jara. In August 2023, a Chilean judge upheld the conviction of the military officials.
The prosecution of Barrientos in Chile is yet another step forward in the quest for justice.
“It has been a great achievement, especially for Chilean civil society,” Bustos says. “These trials have been brought from below, by the organizations for the group of disappeared detainees, by the group of political deputies and by hundreds of relatives or torture survivors who filed a complaint together with human rights lawyers.”
He adds, “It is a process that, from below, has achieved these results that are important to defend, as a sign that impunity will not be accepted in Chile.”