Victor Jara
Pongo En Tus Manos Abiertas

Even if not strictly part of Western culture, the name Víctor Jara has reached these parts. If only for being sung by artists close to us like The Clash, U2, and Calexico ("Victor Jara's Hands," 2008).

Víctor Jara is one of those artists for whom it's never clear where folklore ends and history begins, one who should be debated whether to list among songwriters promoted by a record label or in a book to be studied at school. Chilean, born in a small town near the capital Santiago in 1932 to a peasant father, Manuel, and a singer mother, Amanda, who passed on her passion for music and taught him to play the guitar. With that classical guitar, Víctor decided to pursue the profession of singer-songwriter, alternating it with his already established career as a theater director, making a fundamental contribution to the Nueva Canción Chilena, singing the love for his working people and opposing dictatorships, injustices, and the destruction of ideas, thus aligning himself with that small group of chosen ones who still manage to identify the absence of unwritten rules imposed from above with the purest, most authentic, and truly acceptable concept of Liberty. The rest are just masquerades. He dedicated what is probably his best song ("El Aparecido") to Ernesto "Che" Guevara, distinguishing himself from many authors of fashionable tributes, as he sang it in 1967 just before the Argentine revolutionary met his end. The funny ones might say he indeed brought him bad luck ("correlé, que te van a matar!").

His discography began in '66 and extended until his death in '73, which is now probably unrecoverable in its original version, although it was reissued en masse in 2001, resulting in assaults on the original structure of the albums; this "Pongo En Tus Manos Abiertas" is from 1969 and exposes the substantial framework of Víctor Jara's song, that is to say, a powerful voice full of energy and feeling, a deep South American soul, bursting with ideas to shout to the wind with the support of the classical guitar. "Te Recuerdo, Amanda", dedicated to his muse mother, is one of the pieces that will become part of his personal history as a manifesto of love and the cruelty that love destroys ("The open smile, the rain in your hair, it didn’t matter, you ran to meet him, with him who left for the sierra, who hadn’t done anything, who left for the sierra, and in five minutes he was murdered, the siren sounds, back to work, many did not return, not even Manuel").

This fourth record release of his is an anthem to the new course of South American music, a song that mixes indigenous musical elements with skilled songwriting to analyze the history of its people and the struggles of the poor stratum, alternating personal compositions for his Chile ("Preguntas por Puerto Montt" dedicated to the massacre of peasants in the aforementioned town by Pérez Zujovic, "A Luis Emilio Recabarren" for the eponymous leader of the worker's revolution, and "'Movil' Oil Special" inspired by the student riots of the time in the universities) with tributes that travel the paths that lead him across the continent ("A Desalambrar" is a cover of Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti, "Juan Sin Tierra" was originally sung by Jorge Saldaña for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and "Zamba del Che", by Rubén Ortiz, is again for Che Guevara). But it is the album itself chosen as the symbol of Víctor Jara and the ineffective attempt to suppress his song by the forces of disorder: the hands prominently displayed on the album cover became his symbol, the hands capable of playing guitars and creating cultural movement, those hands that for this reason were massacred by the men of General Augusto Pinochet during the coup d'état of September 11, 1973 (a September 11th often overlooked by history, as also highlighted by the film "11 September 2001") that, aided by the U.S. government, overthrew the democratic Salvador Allende, of whom Jara was a supporter.

The songwriter was taken, along with thousands of other people, to the Estadio Nacional de Chile (renamed after him in 2003) where he became a victim of torture and humiliation by the military, who first destroyed his means of communication, his hands, his primary form of expression, and then riddled him with gunshots. But even there, without strength and nearing the end, he knew how to compose poetry that now survived thanks to his wife Joan Turner; she, in fact, disobeyed Pinochet’s order to destroy the matrices of Víctor Jara's records and saved the recordings, taking them away from the bleeding Chile. And the song of Víctor Jara is now immortal.