Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile, Katia Chornik, 2025, Oxford University Press
During the estallido social that rocked Chile in October 2019, a song by Víctor Jara went viral as musicians played it in protest at President Sebastián Piñera’s use of martial law and declarations that the country was “at war”.
Even the National Opera House of Santiago played a recording on loudspeakers of “El derecho de vivir en paz” during the uprising, and hundreds convened to sing the protest song outside the National Library as part of a massive demonstration.
The tragic experience of Jara—a celebrated Chilean singer-songwriter murdered by the Pinochet regime—speaks to both the brutality of right-wing violence in the country and the creative spirit of resistance among its victims.
But it also highlights the important role played by music—and cultural production of other kinds—in political resistance and in sustaining the romantic ideals of much leftwing ambition.
During his brief captivity at the Estadio Chile sports complex in Santiago and shortly before his execution, for example, Jara was still thinking in musical terms, still writing lyrics.
He left a moving testimony of this through an untitled poem known as “Somos cinco mil” (We Are Five Thousand) but also as “Estadio Chile” or “Canto qué mal me sales” (How Hard It Is to Sing).
Smuggled to Argentina and France and set to music by Isabel Parra, since 2010 the lyrics of this poem have been permanently displayed by the main entrance to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in the Chilean capital.
Jara was 40 when he was seized on 12 September 1973 along with thousands of others, imprisoned and tortured in the bowels of the stadium before being executed, his body riddled with machine-gun bullets then dumped in a street.
A well-known communist activist and admirer of Che Guevara, he was a prominent supporter of the leftwing Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition under Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973, and hence an obvious target of Chile’s US-backed military plotters.
As Katia Chornik notes in Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile, Jara’s cultural activism and death have undoubtedly played a part in the pivotal role that his music has had in the collective memory of Chileans.
But unlike Jara’s story, the musical experiences of tens of thousands of others captured, imprisoned and tortured by military thugs are not widely known.
Chornik’s fascinating work of scholarship sets out to address this by exploring the role of music in memories of this trauma that democratic Chile has ever since expended much energy trying to heal.
It is a pioneering and valuable study because music, and culture more broadly, can be a bellwether of resistance—and nowhere has this been more so than in Latin America and the Latino diaspora.
In classical Marxist theory there is a strong implication that material conditions fundamentally shape cultural formations, and this interplay has been explored by theorists from Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton to Fredric Jameson.
In a high-profile Prologue to Chornik’s book by Michelle Bachelet—Chile’s first woman president who was herself tortured by the regime in the 1970s—discusses the role of music in contexts of political repression, and hence also as an instrument of memory.
Bachelet writes: “These pages demonstrate that even in the most oppressive circumstances, music became a form of resistance and resilience. Songs hummed under one’s breath or shared in whispers acted as acts of defiance, preserving identity and solidarity among prisoners. These stories remind us that the human spirit seeks expression and connection, even in the darkest times.”
We must not forget that Bachelet was held and abused by the military at Villa Grimaldi, a notorious detention centre in Santiago serving as a headquarters of the secret police and which crops up frequently in Chornik’s book.
The author has collected, documented and interpreted memories of musical experiences and particular songs composed, played and listened to in more than 1,000 imprisonment and torture centres.
Her empirical research has created a unique archive with the motive clearly being to understand and promote the value of music in engagements with memory that are vital to healing in traumatised societies.
Chornik argues that remembering through music, one of the most affective forms of culture, enables witnesses to address difficult experiences, engage with memory processes, and “open” previously closed emotional spaces. Indeed, she writes, “music is a language with which to convey memory”.
Importantly, she also delves into the thorny topic of how music has been used in the context of torture—a phenomenon that goes back many centuries.
In the recent era our knowledge of this is associated with the “enhanced interrogation methods” employed under George W Bush’s administration, whereby victims were subjected to loud music—at least partly based on the practices of the British military in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and on Israeli techniques in the 1990s.
The author proceeds to explore memories of singing and listening experiences linked to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading forms of treatment.
She examines how music was employed during interrogation sessions themselves and finds unexpected—and at times uncomfortable—overlaps between the views of music held by prisoners and their oppressors.
One survivor recounted: “At Villa Grimaldi, they made you listen to recorded music, which was insufferable. You heard it day and night. I physically felt the music. It was Kafkaesque: you heard the screams of the inmates and, amid all that, the music and commentary of the guards. You lived a permanent torture session because if they weren’t torturing you, you were listening to the torture of others, which was absolutely unbearable. And with music the whole time.”
Chornik does not shy from the objective demands of her discipline, exploring the role of former perpetrators of abuses and making brave decisions during her research to interview individuals who generated in her an “intense, raw fear”.
Among those she met was Álvaro Corbalán, who held powerful positions in Pinochet’s repressive state apparatus and was directly responsible for horrific crimes, yet was also a prolific singer-songwriter.
The author makes an important observation here about cultural production, pointing out that paying attention to work by the likes of Corbalán “does not justify, relativise, or validate perpetrators’ crimes and stain the memory of victims, and that music and other art forms do not necessarily imply good moral values”.
Chornik also goes beyond an examination of the exertion and defiance of power, considering unconventional memories such as humorous songs written and sung by political prisoners to satirise their situation that are examples of “paradoxical happiness”.
She relates the story of a disastrous gig by the Spanish superstar Julio Iglesias at Valparaíso Jail in 1975 in which the artist was said by survivors to have insulted his audience, thereby generating chants of “son of a bitch” among the prisoners. He left without singing a note.
Finally, Chornik investigates the role of music in activism and commemoration, and sketches out the Cantos Cautivos (www.cantoscautivos.org) digital open-access archival project she devised compiling testimonies of musical activities during imprisonment.
Her highly original book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of culture in memory, by highlighting how we all retain songs associated with political trauma and turbulence.
It shows how music is intimately related to the socialisation of resistance, particularly resistance to fascism, to such an extent that it might be argued that the best tunes are, by nature, anti-fascist.
Examples of this continue to abound. In the US, for example, there is a long history of anti-fascist music, from Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound To Lose” to Bikini Kill’s “George Bush is a Pig”.
For decades, working-class US musicians have been advocating for the rights of immigrants in America, such as Merle Haggard’s “The Immigrant” and Dolly Parton’s cover of Guthrie’s “Deportee”.
And as we speak, they are aiming their tunes at the brownshirts of ICE—from Zada Mendoza’s “Chinga La Migra” and Jesse Welles’ “Join ICE” to Zach Bryan’s “Bad News” and “La Cumbia De La Migra” by Los Jornaleros Del Norte.
Musicians and their fans, as Chornik’s book demonstrates in Chile, are clearly among the first cultural warriors to join the barricades thrown up in the global fight against tyranny.
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Categories: Chile