This week marks the 40th anniversary of what’s known as the other 9/11:
September 11, 1973, when a U.S.-backed military coup ousted Chile’s
democratically elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in a
17-year repressive dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. We’re
joined by Joan Jara, the widow of Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who has
just filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. court against the former military
officer who allegedly killed Jara 40 years ago. Jara’s accused killer,
Pedro Barrientos, has lived in the United States for roughly two decades
and is now a U.S. citizen. Jara’s family is suing him under federal
laws that allow U.S. courts to hear about human rights abuses committed
abroad. Last year, Chilean prosecutors charged Barrientos and another
officer with Jara’s murder, naming six others as accomplices. We also
speak with Almudena Bernabeu, an attorney with Center for Justice and
Accountability, who helped file the Jara family’s lawsuit last week. "I
saw literally hundreds of bodies that were piled up in what was actually
the parking place of the morgue," Joan Jara says of finding her
husband’s body 40 years ago. "I recognized him. I saw what had happened
to him. I saw the bullet wounds. I saw the state of his body. I consider
myself one of the lucky ones in the sense that I had to face in that
moment what had happened to Victor. I could [later] give my testimony
with all the force of what I felt in that moment — and not the horror,
which is much worse, of never knowing what happened to your loved one.
That happened to so many families, so many women who have spent these 40
years looking for their loved ones who were made to disappear."Video
Source: democracynow.org
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