VICTOR JARA

Activist, singer, songwriter, renown theater director and member of the Communist Party of Chile, Victor Jara was tortured and murdered along with thousands in the Chilean Coup of 1973, which likewise brought down President Salvador Allende and broke the heart and took the life of Pablo Neruda. Jara was beaten and played with by monsters, his musician hands busted worthless, and a game of Russian roulette forced upon him by goons under the leadership of Jose Adolfo Paredes Marquez who was formally charged with Jara's murder in 2009. The military regime destroyed a vast majority of the musician's master recordings - burned them. If not for the courage and love of his wife Joan Jara, who retrieved her husband's battered body in a street in shanty town Santiago, and also smuggled out of Chile her own copies of his recordings, we might not have this song. Listen to it rise like the greatest bird.

photo: cubalmater.wordpress.com/.../