On September 11, 1973 there was a coup in Chile against the government of Salvador Allende. The singer -songwriter Víctor Jara, a member of the Communist Party, decided to go to the State Technical University. The university was bombarded, the coup plotters assaulted it, and Jara was arrested and transported to the Chilean Stadium, where a concentration camp was being improvised.
They tortured him and beat until his bloody face and break his ribs. They deprived him of food and water. They insulted and professed words of hate towards their political speech and letters. On the fourth day, the author of ‘The right to live in peace’ was taken to a basement and shot. He received 44 bullets. When his abandoned body appeared in the immediate vicinity of a cemetery, his wife Joan could not believe the state of his body. It seemed a lie that only a week had passed since the last time I had seen it. Today the stadium in which he was tortured and shot him bears his name.
Víctor Jara’s music has survived as an emblem of the protest song thanks to songs such as ‘Manifesto’ or his great classic, ‘I remind you Amanda’, which portrayed the precarious working conditions that affect a couple. The same album that contained this, ‘I put in your open hands …’ (1969), also included a theme called ‘To Discourage’, which claimed the property of the lands for which they work it.
Víctor Jara has received countless tributes in these 51 years that have passed since his death. The songs that have been written for him are counted by dozens: Labordeta, Silvio Rodríguez, Ska-P, Ismael Serrano … and the Castilian are not limited. There are also U2 (‘One Tree Hill’ mentions him), The Clash (“please Remember Víctor Jara in the Santiago Stadium” by ‘Washington Bullets’) or Calexico. Bruce Springsteen has versed him. In the video of the essential ‘This is not America’ of resident, the 2.57 minute shot is not just a reference to ‘This is America’ by Childish Gambino. The person who receives it in a sports stadium, holding a guitar, can only be Victor Jara.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK87Akipyzy
Amaral have decided to join tributes in one of the most beautiful and round compositions of ‘Dolce Vita’, ‘It could have been me’, our song of the day today. In this half -time acoustic cut they allude to the National Stadium in which it was shot, and talk about “stories that have never been closed” and “come back every time someone names you.”
Although it is not a single of ‘Dolce Vita’, the official YouTube of Amaral is already being filled with thanks to Chileans who have excited themselves listening to the song. “What emotion, my God! Listen to Victor Jara’s name in a song of Amaral!, Says a comment. “They don’t know the song they just made,” adds another. And so on: “49 years since I heard” Amanda I remind you “for the first time. Thanks for this special song for many that we are now “old.”
“It could have been me ‘it seems a political song in which Amaral claim:” Now I know that the system is not changed from within. ” The group asks “your voice, Victor Jara.” However, Juan Aguirre assures that we are not so much before a protest song and before a reflection on chance: «We are using the figure of an incredible Spanish icon, an incredible singer, to say that anyone who expresses himself, any individual -Tú That you write, someone who does theater, someone who simply works on anything else-could have been in that place where he was with thousands of people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_qfq_ryfio
