15) EIGHT CHARGED IN VICTOR JARA MURDER

     On December 27, Chilean Judge Miguel Vasquez charged two officers, Pedro Barrientos and Hugo Sanchez, in the 1973 murder of Chilean communist folk singer Victor Jara; six others have been charged as accomplices in the murder.

     Four of the eight accused took courses at the School of the Americas, the U.S. military base which trained thousands of officers for pro-Yankee regimes across Latin America.

     The four SOA graduates include Pedro Barrientos, the second-in‑command of the National Stadium which was turned into a open‑air prison following the U.S‑sponsored coup led by General Augusto Pinochet; Raul Jofré took the same Officers' Orientation course as Barrientos in 1968; Edwin Dimter Bianchi took a Combat Arms Orientation course in 1970; and Jorge Smith Gumucio took a Combat Arms Orientation course in 1972. An international arrest order has been issued for Pedro Barrientos, who now lives in Florida, and was in charge of the squad which killed Jara.

     The Pinochet dictatorship launched its coup d'etat on Sept. 11, 1973, with the bombing of the presidential palace, detentions and killings of thousands of opponents, and the death of elected president Salvador Allende. Jara was detained in Santiago on the day of the coup, taken to a concentration camp in the stadium, subjected to brutal torture, and had his fingers and wrists broken by soldiers. He was then murdered by machine gun fire, and his body left on the street to be discovered by passersby. But Jara's powerful music lives on; many of his songs can be found on YouTube.

(The above article is from the January 1-31, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)