For Folk Singer, the Cancion Hasn’t Ended

Chilean folk singer Angel Parra says that starting a North American tour today at the Wadsworth Theatre is, oddly enough, his way of answering a telephone call that woke him at midnight, Christmas eve.

Parra’s sister, Isabel, who is also a singer and like her brother linked with the artistic revolution in Latin American popular music known as Nueva Cancion, was on the line from Santiago. She told Angel, an exile living in Paris, that he had been pardoned by the military government that had imprisoned, then expelled him 15 years ago.

“I was to become part of the Christmas gift package that the dictatorship was offering,” Parra recalled in a recent open letter to Chile. “. . . My sister’s dear voice sounded radiant on the phone. . . . ‘Your exile has ended!’ ”

Parra considered returning to his native country, but ultimately rejected the offer. Instead, he decided to remain in Paris and continue working against a regime that Parra and other experts claim has killed as many as 30,000 Chileans in its battle against communism, and which is now preparing for a plebiscite that most observers expect will hand Gen. Augusto Pinochet another eight-year term.

“I believe that this government must be viewed like the government of South Africa,” said Parra in an interview here last week. He cited its most recent abuses: the suspension of civil freedoms in a renewed state of emergency and human-rights reports that say the number of beatings, kidnapings and death threats against government critics are increasing. The government denies the involvement of its security forces; the critics disagree.

Artists have become the latest targets of harassment, Parra said. In February, the government stopped a Peruvian rock group from performing an innocuous love song at a music festival because it repeated the word no 23 times, he said. (The word has become a popular slogan against the plebiscite.)

The soft-spoken singer delivers this anecdote with comic matter-of-factness. But Parra has paid to tell his jokes. For the first three months after the bloody 1973 coup that toppled the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, he said, he was held with thousands of other prisoners in Santiago’s National Soccer Stadium. He spent another six months in a concentration camp known as Chacabuco, where he and other prisoners secretly recorded songs for a new album. No prisoner was spared torture, he said.

Parra believes that the murder of his friend, singer Victor Jara, one of Nueva Cancion’s best known martyrs, helped save his life by igniting the kind of outrage that followed the Francoist execution of Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca in 1936.

“I was a militant leftist, and I was very well known for my records and television show I did with Jara,” Parra said. “Someone had to be punished. They assassinated Victor.”

Parra said he is trying to put this part of his life behind him, preferring to focus his attention on the restoration of democracy to Chile and the revival of Chilean culture.

In contrast to Nueva Cancion’s fading popularity in other parts of Latin America, he said political repression in Chile has produced the opposite effect: “Thousands of young singers, painters and film makers have replaced the artists who were exiled. Most don’t have access to television or recording studios, but they still issue pirate tapes” throughout the country.

Parra pointed out that the new generation has continued the movement’s critical and poetic language , but not its folk-rooted style. Moreover, he said the movement, which played such an important political role in Allende’s democratically elected Popular Unity government, has been co-opted by Latin American popular music.

Today, Parra said, even Silvio Rodriguez of Cuba is played on Santiago radio while major record companies recycle the style in Julio Iglesias pop renditions. But it is underground rock groups such as The Prisoners in Chile, he said, who are the movement’s true standard-bearers:

“They express with terribly loud electric guitars of barbarous violence lyrics which call for an end to dictatorship, this epoch of horror . . . in which it was their luck to be born. That (message) attracts thousands and thousands of Chilean youths.”