Every year, musicians gather to pay tribute to the legendary
folk singer, Víctor Jara, murdered during a military coup
in Chile in 1973.
He was completely committed to trying to make the world
a better place.
And he actually gave his life for that.
Now, after 45 years, will his family finally get justice?
Tell me about Víctor.
What shall I tell you?
Well, I was in love with him so
you must take my words with a pinch of salt,
but he was a very special person.
In the 1960s, Jara and other artists used their music to
advocate for political and social change, and workers’ rights.
The singers went to the trade unions to sing, went to factories
to sing, went to universities to sing.
When a socialist president, Salvador Allende,
was elected in 1970,
Jara was one of his most famous supporters.
But from the start, the U.S. government and allies within the
Chilean military worked to destabilize the new regime.
As Kissinger said, you can't stand back
and let a country go communist.
So we didn’t really have consciousness
of what was coming.
And then on the 11th September, 1973, when I got home
Víctor was listening to the radio and we realized
that the coup had started.
Víctor was programmed to sing in the technical university
where Allende was going to speak and he decided he should go to the
university and he left home.
Víctor managed to ring me when he got there.
It was just after the bombing of the Moneda Palace.
Chile today joined the list of South American
countries to fall under military rule.
Tonight, control of the Chilean government
is in the hands of the country’s armed forces,
the presidential palace is under attack.
Eventually there were about 5,000 prisoners after a few days.
It was packed full.
That was horror in that place, during those days.
The military behaved with great cruelty,
torturing people, interrogating them.
Exactly what happened to him there, it is not yet clear.
But on the 18th of September, a young man
who was working in the city morgue came to fetch me at home.
I saw his body, I saw the...
the bullet holes.
I saw the disaster of what they had done to him,
and was able to take
him from the city morgue and to bury him in the cemetery.
Nobody can lie to me about what happened to Víctor.
I saw his body.
Over the next 17 years of military rule under General Augusto Pinochet,
an estimated 27,000 people were tortured,
and over 3,000 were killed or disappeared.
So, I am one of the lucky ones.
So many people here in Chile, so many families, they still don’t
know the destiny of their loved ones.
That is the worst fate.
The Jara family fled to London and began calling for an investigation
of Víctor’s murder.
Even after the military dictatorship ended,
the attempts faltered.
But they kept pushing.
But the wall of silence finally began to crumble, as low-ranking
military conscripts and other eyewitnesses came forward.
And in 2015, a Chilean judge charged nine
army officers with Jara’s murder and ordered them to stand trial.
Chile requested that Barrientos, who is now an American citizen by
marriage, be extradited from the U.S. to face charges.
To bolster that request, the Jara family filed
a civil suit against Barrientos in Florida.
And in 2016, they won.
A jury awarded them $28 million,
which Barrientos can’t afford to pay.
It's taken so long, and this is a step, a further but a very big step,
towards revealing the truth of what happened 43 years ago.
So thank you. Thank you, to all of you. Thank you.
The first sign of justice for his case would occur
here in the United States.
And this has been …
Almost 45 years after Víctor Jara’s murder, in July, 2018, eight of the
military officers on trial in Chile were found guilty
and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Chile continues to pursue its request for Barrientos’s extradition
and is awaiting a decision from the United States.
It’s 40 years on, but in Víctor's case,
there's been another sort of justice.
His music has been able to go on, you know, and people can
hear his voice.