Fundacion Victor Jara
by K.G. Jack Muzzy
Q3 2024 | 10/24/2024
FUNDACION VICTOR JARA
FUNDACTION VICTOR JARA
Huerfanos 2146 Plaza Brazil
Santiago, Chile
March 16, 2023
Dear Compañeros,
Forty-seven years ago, in 1976, I was a National Maritime Union, AFL-CIO, merchant mariner and an unlicensed crewmember of United States Lines M/V Pioneer Crusader that carried U.S. military cargo to Santiago, Chile. I wanted to honor those who had been imprisoned, tortured, and executed inside the National Stadium in 1973. Today I think again of Victor Jara’s last poem—and what instead could have been accomplished by Unidad Popular, UP, opposed to the fascist military dictatorship supported by the U.S. and headed by General Agusto Pinochet— Estadio Chile:
There are five thousand of us here.
In this small part of the city.
Five thousand.
How many of us are there in all
In the cities and in all the country?
Here we are, ten thousand hands
Who plant the seeds and keep the factories running. So much humanity,
hungry, cold, panicked, in pain,
Under moral duress, terrified out of their minds!
Six of ours lost themselves
In the space of the stars.
One man dead, one man beaten worse than I ever thought
It was possible to beat a human being.
The other four wanted to free themselves of all their fear.
One jumped into the void.
Another beat his head against the wall.
But all had the fixed look of death in their eyes.
What fear is provoked by the face of fascism!
They carry out their plans with the utmost precision, not giving a damn about anything.
For them, blood is a medal.
Killing is an act of heroism.
My God, is this the world You created?
Is this the product of Your seven days of wonders and labour?
In these four walls, there is nothing but a number that does not move forward.
That, gradually, will grow to want death.
But my conscience suddenly awakens me
And I see this tide without a pulse
And I see the pulse of the machines
And the soldiers, showing their matronly faces, full of tenderness.
And Mexico, Cuba, and the world?
Let them cry out of this ignominy!
We are ten thousand fewer hands that do not produce.
How many of us are there throughout our homeland?
The blood of our comrade the President pulses with more strength than bombs and machine guns.
And so, too, will our fist again beat.
Song, how hard it is sing you when I have to sing in fear!
Fear like that in which I live, and from which I am dying, fear.
Of seeing myself amidst so much, and so many endless moments
In which silence and outcry are the targets of this song.
What have never seen before, what I have felt and what I feel now
Will make the moment break out…
1
I was one of a generation of North American New Leftists who saw themselves connected to the worldwide movement for Socialism. The ascension of the Popular Unity coalition and the election of Salvador Allende in 1970 in Chile was watched carefully by my generation. The repression of democratically elected President Allende resulting in the overthrow of the Popular Unity government paralleled an era of political repression by the FBI and law enforcement agencies inside the U.S.
I am one voice and do not intend to speak for my generation —1960s, 1970s, 1980s— of left political activists and revolutionaries. I, as many of my generation, came to political consciousness as the Irish revolutionary and socialist James Connelly described: “Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.”2 The emergence of the New (American) Song Movement —Nueva Canción— propelled by Victor Jara took many of my generation and me along: side by side, stride by stride, arm in arm, in solidarity and in the struggle for an equitable, just, and sustainable land.
I dedicate “Lest We Forget, Lest We Forgive, A Personal Remembrance” to commemorate the life and spirit of Victor Jara and all victims of the CIA sponsored Chilean coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and to all victims of U.S. Democracy across the Southern Cone of South America 1975 – 1985.
In Solidarity,
K.G. Jack Muzzy
U.S.A.
2023
Lest We Forget – Lest We Forgive – A Personal Remembrance
September 11, 2024, will mark 51 years—over a half century to date—since the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown.
3
To victims of the CIA sponsored Chilean coup d'état September 11, 1973
4:
Harbor Grudge
a crossing along a southern horse latitude—
as twilight falls
stern hopping noise
suspended pungent heat
subsiding stagnant air fill your lungs
screw churning black pigmented swirling white water
woe the hour of vengeance the stadium’s cadavers beseech
a single glow of man-made light now joins my life to the land of your deaths
to still unearthed graves I heard your mothers demanding their children
ship to city disappearing and never the eternal shall rise
my country employed the hands that murdered you
unraveling night falls upon placid waters
steaming into the starlight filtered
immersed starkness
vast open water
compañeros
Santiago de Chile 1976
Lest We Forgive
To victims of U.S. Democracy across the Southern Cone of South America 1975 – 1985
5:
In memory of a generation imprisoned, tortured, raped, robbed of life, children, the pursuit of happiness, by the government of the United States of America and its South American fascist allies.
The Disappeared and The Missing: There is no relenting when you know your friends—mother, father, child, wife, husband, brother, sister—and comrades have been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered by the tens of thousands across eight countries directed by Operation Condor and their children kidnapped with the full knowledge and support of the government of the U.S. What is instigation and support of mass murder and human trafficking: crimes against humanity.
A Personal Remembrance
For successive generations to understand the generation of the 1970s of left-wing political activists and revolutionaries and the purpose of Victor Jara “scribbling” the lines of his last poem “Estadio Chile6” before his death in the Estadio Chile: that fascism will ultimately fail. The voices of a generation who struggled for an equitable land have not been silenced or written out of history.
Lest We Forget – Lest We Forgive – A Personal Remembrance
Woe The Hour Of Vengeance
We will one day take power, exercise stewardship, over Earth’s resources and create an anti- fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, non-racist, non-sexist, equitable, and sustainable landscape. Imagine! Capitalism cannot kill, imprison, every one of us. We will continue the struggle until death or that day of reckoning comes our way.
Woe The Hour Of Vengeance
Translation credit: March 16, 2023, letter Fundacion Victor Jara, Santiago, Chile, and Lest We Forget – Lest We Forgive – A Personal Remembrance translated into Spanish by Leyre Alegro.
1 https://allpoetry.com/Chile-Stadium
2 https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1907/xx/revsong.htm
3 https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-15/extreme-option-overthrow-allende
4 Kornbluh, Peter, “Declassifying U.S. Intervention in Chile,” North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), September 25, 2007.
https://nacla.org/article/declassifying-us-intervention-chile
5 Rohter, Larry, “Exposing the Legacy of Operation Condor,” New York Times, January 24, 2014.
6 Jara, Joan, An Unfinished Song: The life of Victor Jara, Ticknor & Fields, 1984.
