For Victor Jara

No creo en nada
sino en el amor
de los seres humanos
--Victor Jara (1932-1973)

They can kill you--but not your lyrics--
And entice them with fancy living,
Their Coca-Cola smiles and the pretense--
Taking, taking, but never giving.

I can see your face brightly smiling
And your songs of peace brightly burning--
They can try to silence the people,
But they cannot stop their yearning.

I can see that day, Victor Jara--
That sad day when they tortured and killed you--
They can lie and buy off some people,
But they can't kill a dream of freedom.

So I go on singing this poem,
That your message spreads widely around--
They can kill or silence a poet,
But his songs will bloom from the ground.


March 8, 2004

Music: Manifiesto by Victor Jara

On September 16, 1973, Chilean political songwriter and activist Victor Jara was brutally murdered in Santiago's National Stadium during the aftermath of the U.S.-backed September 11, 1973, coup d'état which resulted in the death of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the installation of a repressive military dictatorship. The US-influenced regime change frustrated the Chilean people's hope for a government that would bring their country socio-economic justice, replacing it instead with a despair that would continue for the next 17 years under the repressive leadership of Augusto Pinochet, who after the coup abolished civil liberties, dissolved congress, banned unions' activities and workers' strikes, and reversed the agrarian and economic reforms of Allende's socialist government. More than twenty-two hundred people were "disappeared" under Pinochet's authoritarian rule.