On 11 September 1973, the day of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile, Joan Jara’s husband, Victor, a distinguished musician and supporter of the socialist president, Salvador Allende, left their residence within the capital Santiago to assist defend the technical college the place he labored. The college was surrounded by the navy and police, and Victor was arrested and brought, with a whole lot of others, to the Estadio Chile sports activities stadium. There he was tortured over a number of days, and his palms mutilated, earlier than being shot greater than 40 occasions.
The subsequent time Joan noticed him was within the metropolis mortuary, the place a employee recognised his physique, got here to see Joan and accompanied her to determine him. She organised a hasty burial, and Victor’s stays have been positioned in a distinct segment in the primary Santiago cemetery, to which courageous folks risked their lives to convey flowers all through the dictatorship.
Anxious to keep away from issues with their new pals within the navy, the British embassy offered Joan with a secure conduct that enabled her to depart Chile along with her two daughters on 15 October 1973.
In Britain through the late Nineteen Seventies and early 80s, Joan, who has died aged 96, labored exhausting to rescue recordings of her husband’s music (a lot of which was smuggled out of Pinochet’s Chile due to the Swedish embassy) and to advertise solidarity with the folks of Chile.
She helped to organise extremely profitable solidarity live shows on the Queen Elizabeth Corridor, Royal Pageant Corridor and the London Roundhouse, and different massive venues across the UK. She was commissioned to put in writing her story, which was revealed in 1984 as Victor, An Unfinished Track.
She was born Joan Alison Turner Roberts in London. Her father was an antiques supplier. Her mom had labored as a volunteer secretary for the Labour MP Fenner Brockway. In July 1944 Joan noticed a efficiency in London by the Ballet Jooss, a contemporary dance firm led by Kurt Jooss, who inspired her to take up dancing professionally.
From 1947 she studied along with his affiliate Sigurd Leeder, and carried out with their firm, together with in a staging of The King and I with Yul Brunner.
Dancing with the Jooss firm in Germany, in 1951 she met the Chilean dancer Patricio Bunster, who two years later grew to become her first husband. In July 1954 the couple sailed for Chile, the place they joined the Santiago Ballet Firm and created the Ballet Fashionable, which took fashionable dance to disadvantaged city and rural areas of Chile.
Joan and Patricio separated in 1960, shortly earlier than their daughter, Manuela, was born. In that very same 12 months she met Victor Jara, then an experimental theatre director within the Chilean capital, with whom she had a daughter, Amanda, in 1964.
The 2 of them labored collectively as he grew to become a number one member of what was generally known as the Chilean New Track (Nueva Canción) motion, which introduced easy, unsanitised people music to very large audiences, impressed by the work of the singer Violeta Parra and different younger musicians.
Joan and Victor’s home grew to become a centre the place musicians would collect, check out new songs, cook dinner feasts on the barbecue and experiment with indigenous devices. “We organised processions across the backyard,” Joan stated, “weaving out and in of the timber, and ultimately out on to the road with canine barking and the youngsters dancing round in pleasure.”
The New Track motion grew to become a way more politically acutely aware phenomenon, decided to succeed in out to and inform the tales of Chile’s working-class, miners and peasants. Joan and Victor have been enthusiastic supporters of Allende throughout his electoral marketing campaign in 1969, and took part actively within the efforts to unfold tradition to all ranges of Chilean society throughout his authorities from 1970 to 1973.
The coup in opposition to Allende and her husband’s loss of life utterly modified Joan’s life. As she defined in an interview: “I took on my husband’s surname and felt I had a mission to perpetuate the reminiscence of Victor and the that means of his work and his values.”
In 1984, although Pinochet was nonetheless in energy – and would stay so for an extra six years – Joan determined to return to Chile along with her daughters. She established the Victor Jara basis, to protect her husband’s reminiscence, and in addition based the Espiral fashionable dance college in a poor neighbourhood of Santiago, the place younger folks may examine and carry out.
Following Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998, Joan known as for the investigation into her husband’s loss of life to be re-opened. In 2009 the federal government awarded Joan Chilean nationality; and in the identical 12 months she was capable of maintain a funeral for her husband. She continued to marketing campaign for justice for her husband and others murdered by the navy through the coup, urgent for these accountable to be recognized and dropped at trial.
A gaggle of former navy officers have been sentenced to fifteen years in jail in Chile, and one other of the alleged perpetrators, Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, was tracked right down to Florida within the US, the place he had claimed citizenship via marriage.
In 2016 Joan introduced a civil motion in opposition to him; the jury discovered Barrientos chargeable for Victor’s loss of life, and he was ordered to pay the household $28m in compensation. He is because of be extradited to Chile to face prison proceedings.
Joan is survived by her daughters.
