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When the Pinochet regime overthrew Chile’s democratic government in 1973, it unleashed a wave of terror—rounding up and killing thousands of leftists. One of them was Victor Jara.
Jara was more than a musician. In Chile, his name carried the cultural weight of a Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger. He was a voice for the people—and for that, he was tortured, paraded on public display to other detainees, and then executed. This was a message. A warning. A brutal piece of propaganda meant to silence dissent.
Forty years later, I traveled to Chile to investigate Jara’s murder. I interviewed survivors who had been detained alongside him. I pored through old archives. And after months of work, we found his killer—living in plain sight, running a pizzeria in Orlando, Florida.
Using the Torture Victim Protection Act—a law that allows U.S. courts to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable—we built a case. We proved not only that he had tortured and murdered Victor Jara, but that he had lied to gain entry into the United States.
As a result of our work, his U.S. citizenship was stripped. He was extradited to Chile. And he was convicted for the murder of Victor Jara.
Justice took decades. But we got it.
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