Joan Jara, British dancer who fought for justice after her folk-singer husband was killed in Pinochet’s Chile – obituary

Joan Jara, who has died aged 96, was a British-born ballet dancer and widow of the Chilean Left-wing activist and singer-songwriter Victor Jara, who was tortured and murdered in 1973 a few days after the coup d’etat led by General Augusto Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

Joan Jara campaigned for the rest of her life to bring her husband’s killers to justice, filing her first lawsuit in 1978 as  a symbolic gesture during the military dictatorship. It was not until 1999, after Pinochet’s arrest in London, that Joan Jara asked for the case to be reactivated, though her lawyers found themselves frustrated by the refusal of members of the Chilean armed forces and the police to co-operate.

In 2013, however, the Chilean Supreme Court convicted six former members of the military for his murder and requested the extradition of former Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, who had fled to the US in 1990 on a visitor’s visa; he became naturalised after marrying a US citizen. He was alleged to have played a game of Russian roulette with Jara, which culminated in his shooting Jara in the back of the head and then ordering his men to riddle Jara’s body with bullets.

In 2016 a Florida federal court found Barrientos guilty of torture and murder, following a civil lawsuit filed by Joan. Four days before her death it was announced that Barrientos would be extradited on November 28 to  stand trial in Chile.

Joan Alison Turner was born in Highbury, north London, on July 20 1927. She fell in love with dance in 1944 when her mother took her to the Haymarket Theatre to see the German modern dance company Ballets Jooss, which, with the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance, had been rescued from Nazi Germany by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, philanthropic owners of Dartington Hall.

She subsequently met the ballet’s founder, Kurt Jooss, who encouraged her to train at the Sigurd Leeder school before recruiting her to his ballet. She went on to perform around Europe and in 1953 married Patricio Bunster, her Chilean dance partner.

The pair moved to Chile, where they joined the Chilean National Ballet and taught at the University of Chile. Their daughter, Manuela, was born in 1960, but during the pregnancy Patricio had an affair with a younger dancer and the couple separated. As Joan was nursing her wounds, Victor Jara, a penniless former pupil of hers, five years her junior, arrived with a bunch of flowers she guessed he had probably stolen from a local park. They began a relationship and in 1964 their daughter Amanda was born. They married in 1965.

Before his death Victor Jara established himself as a well-known actor, theatre director and folk singer-songwriter, a leading light in the Nueva Canción Chilena, a radical musical and social movement of the 1960s. He was also a Communist Party activist and  vociferous supporter of Salvador Allende, who was elected president in 1970. Jara was appointed a “cultural ambassador” of Allende’s Popular Unity government, travelling throughout South America and to Norway, and campaigning against the war in Vietnam.

On September 11 1973, the day of the Pinochet coup, Jara, by now a professor at the Technical University in Santiago, left for his job at the university. That afternoon, Joan recalled, “Victor called me to say that he couldn’t get home because of the curfew, that he loved me and urged me to stay home and take care of the girls. What he didn’t tell me was that he couldn’t leave because the university was surrounded by tanks and under siege.”

She subsequently learnt, from a smuggled message, that her husband was among some 800 students and professors who had been taken to the Chile Stadium, a concert arena which had been turned into a makeshift concentration camp.

Then on September 18 a young worker at the municipal morgue of Santiago came to her house and told her that her husband’s body was in the morgue and it was urgent that she identify him so that he would not end up in a mass grave. He warned her not to show any emotion as it could be “detrimental to everyone”.

“It was a terrible sight,” she recalled. “There were hundreds of bodies there, with terrible wounds, many with their hands bound behind their backs. There was a passage lined with bodies, and at the end there was Victor.”

Testimony from survivors described how Jara had been picked on by his captors and beaten, burned, and tortured for several days, his tormentors paying particular attention to his face and hands –  symbols of his fame as a singer and guitarist, before shooting him dead and throwing his body into a ditch. “His hands were hanging awkwardly,” Joan recalled. “They had obviously been broken. I later discovered that his torturers had taunted him by saying, ‘Play your guitar now’. ”

According to later judicial reports, Jara had 56 fractures and had been shot 44 times. Joan was allowed to take his body, but had to bury him without ceremony. A month after the coup, she took the advice of British diplomats and moved to London with her two daughters.

They lived off Jara’s songwriting royalties and Joan became involved in human rights campaigns. A year after his death she released a posthumous album that included Manifiesto, a song he composed weeks before the coup but never performed in public. She returned to Chile in the mid-1980s, shortly before the end of the Pinochet regime. There she founded, together with her first husband Patricio Bunster, the Espiral Dance Centre and, in 1993, the Victor Jara Foundation.

In death even more than in life Victor Jara became a folk hero for the Left and for musicians. The Clash and U2 were among the groups who paid homage to him, and in 2013 Bruce Springsteen gave a concert in Santiago on the 40th anniversary of the military coup, and sang Jara’s Manifiesto.

Even after a measure of democracy was restored when Patricio Alwyn, a Christian Democrat, became president in 1990, Joan Jara faced an uphill struggle to see her husband’s killers brought to justice, due to continuing deep political divisions in Chile which saw Pinochet remain as Commander-in-Chief of the army until March 1998 and subsequently senator for life, a status that protected him from legal action.

Things began to turn in Joan Jara’s favour after October 1998 when Pinochet was arrested in London by order of a Spanish judge. After long judicial proceedings he was eventually extradited to Chile, where he was detained under house arrest and died in 2006.

According to 2013 estimates by the Chilean government, more than 3,000 individuals were killed or “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime between 1973 and 1990; more than 27,000 were tortured, and at least 50,000 were arrested and interrogated as suspected political opponents. Joan Jara considered herself one of the lucky ones: “At least I knew what had happened to him. I wasn’t left to wonder, like the relatives of so many loved ones who just disappeared. I was at least glad about that.”

In 2008 the Chilean government renamed the stadium where Jara had died the Victor Jara Stadium. In 2009, a Chilean judge ordered the exhumation of his remains, allowing him to be reburied in an official ceremony attended by the then president Michelle Bachelet. 

More recently, one of his most famous songs, El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (“The right to live in peace”), became an anthem of the protests that erupted in October 2019 against the conservative government of President Sebastián Piñera – the largest anti-government protests in Chile since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship.

In 2009 the Chilean Senate awarded Joan Jara Chilean nationality in recognition of her contribution to the struggle for democracy, and in 2019 the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts  presented her with an award for her “contribution to the development of dance”.

Her daughters survive her.

Joan Jara, born July 20 1927, died November 12 2023