🌍 International Badass: Victor Jara

Victor Jara was a Chilean folk musician, theater director, and communist who believed that songs could be a form of political resistance. The Pinochet regime decided to test that theory on September 11, 1973, arrested him along with thousands of others during the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected government, and spent the next several days demonstrating, in the most brutal terms available, that they understood exactly how dangerous he was.

Born in 1932 to a peasant family in rural Chile, Jara grew up in poverty and came to music and politics simultaneously — they were never separate things for him. He became one of the central figures of the Nueva Canción movement, Chilean folk music explicitly connected to leftist politics and the lives of working class and indigenous people. He used the guitar the way a journalist uses a notebook: to document, to witness, to make the invisible visible. When Allende's Popular Unity coalition won the 1970 election, Jara performed at the celebration. He understood that what was being built was fragile and historic and worth defending.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, backed by the CIA and the Nixon administration, bombed the presidential palace and seized power. Allende died inside it. Within hours the regime began rounding up thousands of leftists, union organizers, artists, and intellectuals. Jara was arrested at the Universidad Técnica del Estado where he had been with students. He was taken to Chile Stadium — a sports arena the coup government had converted into a detention and torture facility holding thousands of prisoners.

What happened to him over the following days is documented through survivor testimony. He was beaten. His hands were broken — the hands he used to play guitar. Guards mocked him, telling him to play now. Survivor accounts describe him continuing to sing quietly to the other prisoners despite his injuries, keeping people's spirits from collapsing entirely. Whether you call that courage or stubbornness or both, it is one of the most documented acts of defiance in the history of political violence against artists.

He was killed on September 16, 1973. His body was found outside the stadium with 44 bullet wounds and signs of severe torture. He was 40 years old. His wife Joan, a British dancer, identified his body and spent the next decades in exile fighting for justice while the Pinochet regime classified what happened to him as a non-event.

The CIA's role in the coup that killed him is not disputed — it is documented in declassified American intelligence files. The Nixon administration considered Allende's democratic socialist government an unacceptable precedent and worked systematically to destabilize and ultimately destroy it. Victor Jara was one of approximately 3,000 people killed in the first weeks of the Pinochet regime. He was targeted specifically because the military understood that songs outlast soldiers and they wanted his silenced.

They failed at that part. In 2016, a U.S. federal civil court found former Chilean army officer Pedro Pablo Barrientos liable for Jara's torture and murder and ordered him to pay $28 million in damages to Jara's family. Barrientos had been living in Florida for years. The Chilean government has since pursued criminal extradition. His songs are played at protests in Chile, in Spain, in the United States, in Palestine — wherever people are organizing against the same forces that put him in that stadium.

They broke his hands so he couldn't play. His songs are still playing. That's the part they didn't account for.

"How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror."
— Written by Jara inside Chile Stadium in the days before his death. The poem was smuggled out by a survivor.

This week's international badass had his hands broken by a CIA-backed military regime so he couldn't play guitar — and his songs have been played at every major protest movement on earth for fifty years since.