SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 18 — Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean military were so intent on eliminating all traces of the leftist singer and songwriter Victor Jara that torturing and then executing him was not enough to satisfy them when they seized power in 1973. For added measure, they also had master tapes of Jara's recordings and concert appearances destroyed.
A generation later, though, Chile is experiencing a full-fledged Victor Jara revival, or "resurrection," as the head of his former record label prefers to call it. Not only have Jara's remixed and remastered recordings recently been reissued in a sleek CD box set and his sheet music republished, but he is also the focus of a documentary available on DVD, a pair of tribute albums and a music festival here this month.
"I guess it just goes to show the truth of the saying that you can kill the singer but not the song," said Joan Turner Jara, Jara's British-born widow, a former ballerina who now runs the Victor Jara Foundation here. "Victor and his songs are there in the history of Chile, so in rediscovering, him Chileans are recovering their own past."
To the surprise of many, Jara's primary audience appears to be not middle-aged fans who remember him but young Chileans who had not even been born when he was killed. On university campuses and in coffeehouses he has become something of a counterculture hero much like Che Guevara and admired as a critic of the capitalist economy that now reigns triumphant here.
"People just discovering him now are surprised by the pertinence of what they are hearing," said Carlos Fonseca, executive producer of the CD box set and manager of Los Prisioneros, Chile's most popular rock group. "Besides, Victor is the personification of the rebel poet who stood up for what he believed in, and young people like and respect that kind of bravery."
Jara was one of the founders of the folk-based movement known as la Nueva Canción Chilena, or the New Chilean Song. His lyrics were often strongly political, and because he and other protest singers associated themselves with Salvador Allende's leftist Popular Unity government, they were conspicuous targets of General Pinochet.
For much of the next 17 years, Jara's music was in effect blacklisted. Fearful fans felt compelled to hide their albums and cassettes. His recordings could not be bought in stores, and his music was rarely if ever heard on radio.
"Victor's assassination was meant to send a warning to the world of culture in Chile that if this can happen to him, it can also happen to you," explained Viviana Larrea of Alerce Records, the first label to reissue Jara's recordings. "People were afraid to be associated with his songs, and so his physical death was accompanied by the symbolic death of his work."
Even after democracy was restored in 1990, there was no immediate resurgence, in part due to formidable technical obstacles. Because the original masters of nearly half his recordings had been destroyed by army troops in the days following the Pinochet coup, the remainder were scattered around the globe for safekeeping, their whereabouts sometimes forgotten, their sound quality often decayed.
But early in 1998 an alternative television channel here broadcast one song from a live performance that had been found in the archives of a television station in Peru and painstakingly restored. The response was so overwhelming that excerpting the tape grew into a regular feature of the show and eventually into a documentary called "The Right to Live in Peace," its title taken from one of Jara's best-known songs.
"People were so stunned by that first showing that they called and begged us to broadcast it again, so that they could tape it," recalled Carmen Luz Parot, director of the project. "A lot of people had pirated cassettes that had passed from hand to hand, but a whole generation that grew up during the dictatorship had never seen Victor Jara sing and were transfixed by his strength as an artist and performer."
That same year a Victor Jara tribute album, mainly featuring folk artists who were his contemporaries, was released here. That was followed last year by a more modern rock tribute album featuring popular Chilean, Argentine, Spanish and Brazilian bands performing Jara's best-known songs.
"Victor Jara is a fundamental reference for any young Chilean interested in social and political change, but I'm also drawn to his aesthetic," said Manuel García Herédia, 30, a guitarist and singer with Popular Mechanics, one of the groups on the rock tribute album. "He was always connected to new music, open to experimentation and like Bob Dylan was friendly to rock at a time when most folk artists were not."
The most visible sign of the resurgence, however, is the reappearance of virtually his entire body of work on record. The foundation spent the 1990's trying to track down high-fidelity versions of Jara's songs that could be remixed and remastered, and a result is nine attractively packaged CD's, available as a box set or individually, and a two-disc anthology that is expected to earn gold record status here soon.
Jara was no fan of foreign companies and often criticized their behavior in Chile: one of his best-known songs is a jibe called "Mobil Oil Special." So there is a certain paradox that the project to recover and reissue his music has been undertaken by the local division of AOL Time Warner.
"It was very hard for me at first to accept the offer of a North American multinational, because they are almost what Victor was singing against," Mrs. Jara acknowledged. "But I'm glad I decided to do it, and not just because they offered more money. They've done a good job with the sound quality and packing and promoting the records, too, and that has helped with the resurgence."
Warner, in contrast, had no doubts about embracing Jara. The company, relatively new here, was looking for a way to distinguish itself from local competitors and to appeal to a hip young audience.
With the 30th anniversary of the coup coming up in 2003, Warner plans special campaigns here aimed at promoting the work of Jara and other artists from la nueva canción, like Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani and Violeta Parra. Tabaré Couto, marketing director for Warner Music Chile said there were plans to rerelease their works in the United States and Europe, on the theory that "this is something that can appeal to the intellectual and world music public."
Jara has always had a following abroad. While he was still alive, for instance, American folk artists like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Pete Seeger recorded or performed songs written by or associated with him.
But in recent years his international prestige also seems to have taken a leap. The sponsors of the Victor Jara Foundation include prominent contemporary performers like Bono, Peter Gabriel and the actress Emma Thompson, who has been trying for several years to obtain backing for a film about his life and death.
Mrs. Jara said there remained much more for the foundation to do, like hunting down the sets, stage notes and posters from Jara's second career as a theater director.
"Victor's image had become that of a poster, a clenched fist, completely politicized," she said. "But he was not a symbol. He was a man, and it is important to recover him in all of his dimensions."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/arts/music/23JARA.html>
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