A human rights mystery is solved in Chile

The accounts also explained for the first time how Jara’s body was identified and saved from an anonymous mass grave. Most of the hundreds of people executed in the days following the military takeover were taken unidentified to the Santiago morgue and buried in mass graves. In Jara’s case, a government worker assigned to the morgue that day told the court he was alerted by a coworker that one of the 300 bodies piled in the courtyard looked like the famous singer. The official, Hector Herrera Olguin, whose regular job was as a clerk in the Civil Registry, which administers Chile’s identity cards system, located the body and at great personal risk took fingerprints from the singer’s broken hands. He then went to his office in the Civil Registry and pulled the file for Victor Jara’s identity card, which include finger print records.

After confirming it was Jara, Herrera Olguin then drove to Jara’s home and informed his wife, Joan Turner, that her husband had been killed. He drove Turner back to the morgue, where, according to his description, she was able to find her husband’s body and embrace him for the last time.

The Jara case was one of the thousands of unsolved murders committed by the Chilean military after Pinochet’s coup. A special judge was appointed to investigate Jara’s murder several years ago, but closed the case in 2008 without identifying those responsible for the murder. The case was reopened due to pressure from the public and from Jara’s widow, and the judge for the first time located and interrogated the soldiers on duty in the stadium.

Paredes, the soldier who was the first to confess to participating in the shooting, said he had kept his role secret for 35 years, not even telling his wife. He is charged with premeditated murder and is being held in a maximum security prison in Santiago.

Victor Jara’s most famous song, Te Recuerdo Amanda (I remember you Amanda), was a ballad celebrating the love of his absentee laborer father for his mother, Amanda, who died when he was 16. Victor Jara was 40 at the time of his death.

John Dinges is the co-founder and former co-director of CIPER , which is a nonprofit news organization financed by the Chilean media company COPESA and contributions from the Open Society Institute and Ford Foundation. CIPER began operations in 2007 and in its first year was the winner of the New Journalism prize conferred by the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Read more on Chile:

Santiago struggles to deal with smog woes

History gets a rewrite at the Pinochet Museum

Is Chile heading to the right?

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