Joan Jara, who found justice for her husband killed after a coup, dies at 96

Joan Jara, a British-born dancer and instructor who devoted herself to finding justice for her husband, Victor Jara, a popular Chilean folk singer and songwriter who was murdered during the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte to dictatorial power in 1973, died November 12 in Santiago, Chile. She was 96.

Her death was announced by the Victor Jara Foundationa human rights initiative she founded.

Justice came in two ways for Mrs. Jara (pronounced Hara), more than 40 years after her husband’s death: In a civil case brought by her and her two daughters, involving Pedro Barrientos Núñez, a former lieutenant of the Chilean army, was found liable for her husband’s damages. death, and in legal proceedings in Chile that led to his arrest last month in Deltona, Florida, where he had lived for many years; He is expected to be extradited to Chile.

Mr. Jara, who was also a theater director and poet, sang about poverty and injustice. In ‘Manifyingto’ he sang in part:

My guitar is not for the rich

no, nothing like that.

My song is from the ladder

we build to reach the stars.

Mr. Jara was a visible supporter of Salvador Allende, the Marxist who was elected president of Chile in 1970. On September 11, 1973, the Jaras were at home with their daughters, Manuela and Amanda, listening to Mr. Allende give a speech. . Suddenly the speech was cut short and replaced by military marches.

Right-wing military officers, backed by the CIA, had stormed the presidential palace and overthrown Mr. Allende, who was believed to have committed suicide that day with an assault rifle.

Despite his and his wife’s fears that something terrible had happened, Mr. Jara drove to the State Technical University in Santiago, the capital, where he was teaching theater and scheduled to sing at a performance by Mr. Allende.

“It was the last time I saw him,” Ms. Jara said.

Mr. Jara, a member of the Communist Party, was arrested the next day along with other students and professors and taken to Chile Stadium. As a prominent backer of Mr. Allende, he was easily recognized by General Pinochet’s soldiers. They shot him more than forty times, twice in the head, and dumped his body outside a cemetery.

On September 18, a mortuary worker went to Ms. Jara’s home and asked her what color underpants Mr. Jara had been wearing the day he disappeared.

“What a strange question,” she said during her 2016 testimony in the Florida civil trial in U.S. District Court in Orlando. ‘But that wasn’t the case because lately we had been on a trip to London. And so I could answer, ‘They are blue.’”

Her response helped the mortuary identify Mr. Jara’s body. When she arrived to pick it up, she saw bodies piled up outside. Inside, among more bodies, she found her husband’s corpse face up.

“His eyes were open,” she testified. “One eye was bloody and bruised. His hands hung at an odd angle from his wrists in front of his chest and were covered in blood.” She added: “I think I saw 20 large bullet holes in his stomach and a huge wound in the center of his body.”

With the help of friends, she bought a coffin and a burial plot and was hastily buried.

“There was no hope of thinking about a funeral,” she testified.

When she got home, she told Manuela, her eldest daughter, that her father had been murdered. “And I will never forget, never forget her scream, a terrible scream when she heard it,” she told the court.

Still, she felt happy.

“So many people here in Chile, so many families, they still don’t know the fate of their loved ones,” Ms. Jara said in a video interview with The Times in 2018. “That is the worst fate.”

She and her daughters fled to London, where they stayed for about ten years before returning to Chile in the mid-1980s. (General Pinochet would remain in power until 1990.) There she opened a ballet training center, Centro de Danza Espiral, with her former husband, Patricio Bunster, a Chilean dancer. In 1993 she founded the Victor Jara Foundation.

Mrs Jara was born Joan Alison Turner on July 20, 1927 in London. Her father ran a typewriter company and later sold antiques. Her mother was a housewife.

Joan wanted to become a dancer when she went to see the Ballets Jooss, a German modern dance company, at the Haymarket Theater in London in July 1944. She attended a dance school in London and was accepted by the Ballets Jooss in 1951.

The Daily Record and Mail of Glasgow wrote in 1953 that Mrs. Turner and Rolf Alexander were the “outstanding leading actors in the Ballets Jooss’s performance of ‘Journey in the Fog’,” a piece created by the company’s founder, Kurt Jooss.

That year she married Mr. Bunster, a dance partner of hers in the group. They moved to Chile in 1954 and divorced six years later when she was pregnant with Manuela.

Ms. Jara later became a dancer with the Chilean National Ballet and also taught dance at the University of Chile, where she met Mr. Jara. They married in 1965.

After his death, Ms. Jara found her voice, said one of her attorneys, Kathleen Roberts.

“When Victor was murdered, she began a new life where she had to continually speak out to seek justice,” Ms. Roberts said by phone. “And not just for him, but for the many victims of the coup and the dictatorship. She felt a real sense of obligation.”

In 1978, Mrs. Jara and her daughters began the arduous process of finding out who killed Mr. Jara. They filed lawsuits to open an investigation into his death, but that went nowhere until a former Chilean soldier said in 2009 that he witnessed Mr. Jara’s torture and saw Mr. Barrientos shoot him.

But no one knew where Mr. Barrientos was until a Chilean television network tracked him down in Florida in 2012. That year, the Court of Appeal of Santiago charged him in absentia with the murder of Mr. Jara and requested his extradition, which is only now, after eleven years, almost complete. Mr Barrientos has maintained his innocence.

In 2013, the Jara family, with help from the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights organization that represents survivors of torture and other abuse, sued Mr. Barrientos under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which Congress passed enacted to bring accountability to human rights violators living in the United States.

In addition to finding Mr. Barrientos liable for Mr. Jara’s death, a jury also ordered him to pay the Jara family $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages. “Victor could never have imagined that justice for this case would happen in the United States,” Ms. Jara said after the verdict.

Part of the extradition delay is that Mr. Barrientos was a naturalized citizen. But that status was revoked by a court this year because he “concealed material facts relating to his military service in his immigration application,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr Jara’s survivors include her daughters Amanda Jara Turner and Manuela Bunster. In 2003, the arena where Mr. Jara was murdered was renamed the Victor Jara Stadium.

Ms. Jara may never have imagined that her husband’s song “Manifyingto” would be performed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band as an encore at a concert in Santiago in 2013 at Movistar Arena.

“In 1988 we played for Amnesty International in Mendoza, Argentina, but Chile was in our hearts,” Mr. Springsteen told the crowd in Spanish. “We met many families of desaparecidos” – the thousands of people who “disappeared” under Pinochet’s dictatorship – “who had photos of their loved ones.”

He added: “A political musician, Victor Jara, remains a great inspiration. It is a gift to be here and I accept it with humility.”