Soldier reveals details of Chilean singer's murder

Santiago: The notorious murder of popular folk singer Victor Jara — who became a symbol of resistance after he was tortured and killed in the chaotic first days of Chile's 1973 coup — has never been solved.

The soldiers involved were ordered long ago to carry their secrets to their graves or face a similar fate. Jara's brutal death — his hands were smashed, head beaten and body pumped with at least 44 bullets — was meant as a warning to anyone who challenged General Augusto Pinochet's authority during the dark years of Chile's dictatorship.

The climate of fear remains, even with two decades of democracy and Pinochet dead and buried. But some facts are finally emerging after 36 years of silence and myth-making about Jara, who was detained in a stadium with 5,000 other supporters of ousted President Salvador Allende.

In June, Jara's body was exhumed for a proper autopsy. Ballistics and other evidence from the autopsy may help investigators identify who ordered the killing — and who fired a handgun into Jara's skull that night.

"Where there is a bullet, there is a gun," Nelson Caucoto, Joan Jara's (Victor's wife's) attorney, said. "Behind a draftee is the order of an officer — we are interested in the officer."

One Army draftee, Jose Paredes, has described the murder and named the officers he said were responsible.

Paredes, now charged with Jara's murder, denies firing a machine gun into the singer's dying body. He said he told interrogators that a lieutenant known as "El Loco," the Crazy One, held Jara against a dressing room wall and played Russian roulette until a bullet blasted through the singer's skull.