The British dancer, choreographer and human rights activist Joan Jara, widow of the late Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara, has died in Santiago at the age of 96, two weeks before her husband’s killer is due to be extradited from the US to Chile.
She became a symbol of opposition to the Chilean dictatorship for her unrelenting pursuit of truth and justice for her husband, who was brutally tortured and killed after Gen Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état.
In exile in the UK, Joan Jara played a crucial role in raising international awareness of the horror unfolding in Chile under Pinochet’s bloody regime. And in 2016, she was a key witness in the civil trial against the former Chilean army officer Pedro Barrientos who eventually was found liable for Victor Jara’s death.
On Monday, hundreds of mourners gathered at the Centro de Danza Espiral, a dance school Joan founded with her first husband, the Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster, where her body lay before a burial on Wednesday.
Chile’s leftwing president, Gabriel Boric, praised her as “a woman who struggled half a century for justice, who leaves us an imperishable legacy in arts and the defense of human rights.”.
Camila Vallejo, the government spokeswoman said: “Your fight and resistance for the truth, justice and reparation will stay in our memories forever.”
Joan Alison Turner was born in London on 20 July 1927, moving to Chile in the mid-1950s to perform as a soloist with the Chilean National Ballet. She went on to teach dance at the University of Chile, where she met Víctor Jarain 1960.
The couple married and, with Víctor a committed communist closely tied to socialist president Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government, raised two young daughters in the shadow of political upheaval.
On 11 September 1973, the coup d’état attempt Jara had long foreseen was executed with US backing, and Joan and Víctor listened together at home as Allende’s final words were broadcast from Chile’s presidential palace.
Víctor left for a local university to wait for events to unfold with fellow Allende supporters in a final act of defiance, where he was arrested and taken to Estadio Chile, a small covered stadium in downtown Santiago.
There, he was humiliated, tortured, beaten and finally murdered in the changing rooms beneath the stadium on 16 September, shot 44 times before his body was thrown out into the street.
Joan was alerted by passers-by, and had to recover her husband’s body from among a pile of corpses dumped at a Santiago morgue.
She fled to exile in the UK with her two young daughters, taking Jara’s surname, and tirelessly campaigning to raise awareness of the tragedy that had befallen Chile.
Joan eventually returned to Chile in the mid-1980s, and after Chile returned to democracy in 1990, created the Fundación Víctor Jara to fight for justice for her late husband.
She was awarded Chilean nationality in 2009 by the government of Michelle Bachelet for her human rights work and role in rebuilding Chilean democracy.
In 2021, Joan was awarded Chile’s national arts prize.
While she continued her prominent work in the arts in Chile, Jara was able to contact witnesses who had been present in the stadium, which was renamed Estadio Víctor Jara, and collect testimonies from when the singer was murdered.
The investigation of Víctor’s death was reopened in 1999, and in 2016, a civil court in the US state of Florida found Barrientos liable for Víctor Jara’s torture and extrajudicial murder, ordering him to pay $28m in damages to the family.
In 2018, eight more former officers were sentenced to 15 years in prison in relation to Jara’s murder.
Barrientos, who fled Chile in 1989 and became a US citizen through marriage was arrested in Deltona in October and is due to be extradited to Santiago on 28 November to face a criminal trial. His US citizenship was revoked earlier this year for failing to disclose his links to the Pinochet dictatorship.
Jara is survived by her two daughters, Amanda Jara and Manuela Bunster.
• This story was corrected on 15 November 2023 to delete an erroneous reference to Orlando as a US state
