Ex-Chilean army officer is expelled from the US as he is charged with Singer’s murder

A former Chilean army officer has been deported from Florida to Chile to face charges in the kidnapping and murder of a popular folk singer and a prison director just days after the 1973 military coup that ousted President Salvador Allende.

The army officer, Pedro Barrientos, 74, who was deported on Friday, was formally informed of the accusations of the murders of folk singer Víctor Jara and former prison director Littré Quiroga, and temporarily detained at an army base while the investigation against him is completed .

Mr Barrientos’ return to Chile was the latest chapter in one of the Chilean dictatorship’s most notorious crimes, as the country concludes an emotionally charged year marking the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. The expulsion comes days after the death of Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who, declassified documents show, was the main architect of secret US plans to destabilize the Allende government.

It also comes after decades of relentless pursuit of justice by Mr. Jara’s widow, Joan Jara, a British-born dancer who filed a criminal lawsuit in Chile and took Mr. Barrientos to a civil court in Florida. Mrs. Jara died last month at the age of 96.

Mr. Barrientos is the last of eight Chilean officers charged with the killings. Four were convicted and began serving their sentences in August; two others, Nelson Haase and Juan Jara, are at large; while a seventh officer, Hernán Chacón, 86, took his own life when detectives arrived at his home in Santiago to take him to prison. A judge will determine whether Mr. Barrientos is guilty of the charges. Human rights cases in Chile under the old legal system do not have a trial system. Once convicted, Mr. Barrientos can appeal.

Mr. Jara was a soft-spoken, accomplished theater director, composer and singer who rose to prominence in the 1960s and emerged as a cultural icon during the Allende administration in the 1970s. His songs became part of the musical repertoire of the political opposition during the dictatorship and are still popular to this day.

His daughter Amanda Jara, who was eight years old when her father was murdered, remembers him as ‘a warm and very nice father’. But she believes justice is still elusive.

“So much time has passed that this doesn’t feel like justice,” she said in an interview. “But I think this is important for the country, for our collective history.”

Mr Jara and Mr Quiroga, supporters of the left-wing Allende government, were arrested by the army on the day of the coup, September 11, 1973, and taken to the capital’s Chile Stadium – since renamed Víctor Jara Stadium – where they were held together with thousands of other prisoners. A court found that they were singled out by military officers and interrogated and tortured for days. On September 15, 1973, both were shot by a group of officers; Mr Barrientos was believed to be one of them.

“Their deaths were slow,” said Nelson Caucoto, attorney for the Jara and Quiroga families. “There was not a day or hour when they were not abused, beaten or tortured by a group of police officers. One soldier testified that they had been sentenced to death; they would not leave the stadium alive.”

Mr. Jara had two gunshot wounds to the back of his head and more than 40 wounds all over his body. Mr. Quiroga was shot 22 times. Their bodies, along with those of three other victims, were dumped outside a cemetery in the capital and eventually identified by their families at the morgue.

“I lost so much that day,” Joan Jara said in an interview with The New York Times in 2016. “I lost my job and my profession. My children left their school, their friends, their home and their country. I have never been able to remarry. I was very much in love with Víctor.”

Mr. Barrientos left Chile at the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990 for the United States. He worked as a landscaper and then as a chef in Deltona, Florida, and became a U.S. citizen.

The unraveling of his quiet life in a Florida suburb began in 2012, when Chilean reporters found him at his home and the judge who investigated the killings indicted him in absentia and requested his extradition.

The following year, the Jara family – backed by the Center for Justice and Accountability, based in San Francisco, and the New York law firm Chadbourne & Parke – filed a civil suit against Mr. Barrientos in Orlando under the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows people to sue human rights violators living in the United States.

In 2016, a federal jury found Mr. Barrientos liable for Mr. Jara’s torture and extrajudicial execution and awarded the family $28 million.

During the trial, a soldier testified in a videotaped statement that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about shooting Mr. Jara in the head, and was happy to show the gun he allegedly used.

Although the Chilean judiciary had been requesting his extradition since 2012, Mr. Barrientos was only apprehended by Homeland Security agents two months ago after a Florida court found that Mr. Barrientos had disclosed material facts regarding his immigration application. military service had hidden.

The court revoked his citizenship last July based on a complaint filed by the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation.