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The USA has expelled the convicted killer of the famend Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara. The December 1, 2023, expulsion comes greater than 5 many years after retired Chilean military lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez killed the well-known singer.
Jara was a famend musician, theater director, instructor, member of Chile’s Communist Social gathering, and a supporter of the administration of the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. His music has been in contrast to the work of Bob Dylan, and it impressed songs written by Irish band U2 and the Tucson, Arizona-based indie-folk band Calexico, who opened their 2008 album Carried to Mud with the tune “Victor Jara’s Arms.”
The retired Chilean lieutenant was arrested in an operation carried out by the U.S. Immigration and Customized Enforcement brokers on October 5 in Deltona, Florida. He had beforehand been stripped of his U.S. citizenship on July 14 for mendacity on immigration kinds. In response to the press launch saying his arrest and that he was to be returned to Chile to face prices for “his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killings through the aftermath of a navy coup in 1973.”
Barrientos’s arrival in Chile was marked by shouts and jeers blended with the sounds of Jara’s music.
Barrientos’s extradition comes simply weeks after Jara’s widow, Joan Jara, handed away on the age of ninety-six. Jara’s household had demanded that the US extradite Barrientos for years, in accordance to Reuters.
“Joan Jara had seen the sentencing of seven of these accountable [for killing her husband],” Francisco Bustos, a Chilean lawyer and professor who labored as a part of the crew representing Jara’s household, tells The Progressive. “However it’s all the time a aid [for the family] to know that the perpetrators are going through justice.”
Barrientos emigrated to the US in 1989, and have become a U.S. citizen by way of marriage in 2010. In 2016, he was convicted of the homicide of Jara in a civil trial, and ordered to pay $28 million. He reportedly had boasted about his half in Jara’s homicide on various events, going so far as allegedly exhibiting off the gun he had used.
Following the CIA-backed coup d’etat towards Allende led by Chilean Normal Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, hundreds of leftists, activists, and Allende supporters have been detained and tortured by the dictatorship. Lots of these detained have been later killed and disappeared into secret mass graves.
Jara was kidnapped by the Pinochet regime the day after the coup and imprisoned in a Chilean sports activities stadium that now bears his title. He was tortured, reportedly having his fingers smashed by his captors, and was later shot within the head and killed earlier than being riddled with bullets from a machine gun. The navy displayed his physique on the entrance to the stadium as a warning to different prisoners, earlier than disposing of it within the streets together with the our bodies of many different prisoners executed by the regime.
The prosecution of Barrientos in Chile is one more step ahead within the quest for justice.
He was forty years outdated.
“Víctor Jara is an icon due to his artwork and his songs,” Bustos says. “It’s due to this he turned a goal of the dictatorship, exactly as a result of the regime perceived him as a menace.”
He provides, “Joan Jara, throughout her lifetime, was all the time involved with making the connection that Víctor Jara’s case is one among hundreds of instances of significant human rights violations [that occurred during the dictatorship].”
In Chile alone, greater than 3,000 individuals have been killed throughout Pinochet’s rule.
In 1975, Pinochet would be part of different leaders within the area as a part of Operation Condor, which was carried out towards insurgents, leftists, activists, and those that resisted the coups and navy dictatorships throughout South America. The U.S.-supported regional operation was established throughout secret conferences in November 1975, and introduced transborder terror to the area.
By the tip of the Operation Condor in 1983, between 50,000 and 60,000 individuals had been killed, 30,000 individuals disappeared, and greater than 400,000 individuals imprisoned and tortured throughout the area.
The households of the victims have sought justice for those who have been tortured and killed by the regime. For the reason that return to democracy in Chile, following the tip of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, different South American nations like Argentina have had related reckonings. Looking for justice has been on the coronary heart of the administration of newly elected Chilean president Gabriel Boric, which introduced in March 2023 new efforts to seek out those that have been forcibly disappeared throughout Pinochet’s reign between 1973 and 1990. This is only one a part of Boric’s bigger plan to deal with human rights violations through the seventeen-year-long dictatorship. These efforts to hunt justice in Chile are among the many most superior within the area.
To this point, there have been 297 convictions for crimes towards humanity that occurred through the practically 20 years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, with 134 perpetrators serving jail sentences. One other 1,300 instances stay open.
Pinochet himself confronted prices for the violence, with the British authorities arresting the previous dictator on a world warrant whereas he was recuperating in a hospital in London in 1998. Pinochet ultimately died in December 2006 in a navy hospital in Santiago, Chile, with out ever serving time for his crimes.
However Pinochet’s legacy stays.
“We must always not neglect that Pinochet died as a fugitive from justice,” Joan Garcés, a former adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende and now a human rights lawyer in Spain, stated in a 2013 interview with Amnesty Worldwide. “It was clear that worldwide society noticed him as a felony.”
In July 2018, eight retired navy officers have been sentenced to fifteen years in jail by a Chilean decide for the kidnapping and homicide of Jara. In August 2023, a Chilean decide upheld the conviction of the navy officers.
The prosecution of Barrientos in Chile is one more step ahead within the quest for justice.
“It has been an excellent achievement, particularly for Chilean civil society,” Bustos says. “These trials have been introduced from beneath, by the organizations for the group of disappeared detainees, by the group of political deputies and by a whole lot of family members or torture survivors who filed a grievance along with human rights attorneys.”
He provides, “It’s a course of that, from beneath, has achieved these outcomes which can be necessary to defend, as an indication that impunity is not going to be accepted in Chile.”
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