A Voice That Cannot Be Silenced

They came together in a storefront meetinghouse near Melrose and Vermont--Anglos and Latinos, new immigrants and old-time activists--to remember those slain in the Chilean coup of September, 1973.

Most especially, they came to honor Victor Jara, whose songs were the anthems of Chile’s poor and oppressed. Jara was only 39 when silenced by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s troops, but his music lives.

“This is a very emotional night,” organizer Paul Baker says. Jara is one of his heroes, a man who understood injustice and had a gift for making “very beautiful, lasting songs” to express a people’s anger and outrage.

Tonight, Baker has brought his guitar--the guitar he fashioned from a chair leg, a floor plank and other castoffs while a hermit monk in Scotland in the ‘60s. He is about to sing, in English and in Spanish, “Manifiesto,” which Jara wrote shortly before he was killed. It goes like this:

This guitar has no song for the rich. . . . It sings of the ladder we’re building so that one day we will all reach the stars. . . .

The narrow, high-ceilinged room with its wall of cardboard murals depicting the lives of Mexicans is packed. There is the clattering of folding chairs, the occasional wail of a siren drifting through the door left open to let in the night air.

This space, home of the Colectivo Macondo, is a Latin American cultural center, not a concert hall. And this event is less a concert than a pena or cultural cafe or, as Baker calls it, “a Latin hootenanny.” It’s about emotion, not perfection.

Onstage, Ross Altman is singing a song of tribute to Jara, with music by Arlo Guthrie. The lyrics, by an English poet, describe Jara’s death:

They tortured him for two long days, they beat his lovely head. They broke the bones in both his hands, then they shot him dead .

Fragrant empanadas are being dished up at the Colectivo’s snack bar. Up front, Bolivian musician Fernando Yugar is introduced. Hold everything! He’s lost his zampona , a bamboo panpipe. Lights on! The lost is found. Yugar plays.

Actor David Clennon, who was in the 1982 film “Missing,” the story of a young American who disappeared in Chile, reads Jara’s last, unfinished poem, scrawled in prison:

. . . What I have felt

And what I feel

Will give birth

to the moment. . . .

“I had tears in my eyes when he read,” says Juani Funes, a Chilean who left the country in 1976 and now lives in Mission Viejo and teaches at Orange Coast College and UC Irvine. “Between 1968 and 1971, when I was at the university (in Chile), Victor Jara was very, very popular. I saw him once. I was interested in what was going on, politically speaking.”

This is an evening with a cause, not just a celebration of a life snuffed out two decades ago. It’s a fund-raiser for the Victor Jara Foundation, recently established to keep his legacy alive and to further international cultural solidarity among the have-nots through music, art and written word.

Don White, a high school teacher and longtime companero (friend of the movement), passes a basket “to keep Victor singing.” Tonight, about $600 will be raised. (A big boost is expected from November’s New York premiere of the film of Isabel Allende’s “Of Love and Shadows,” a benefit for the foundation.)

Not surprisingly, Joan Baez’s name is invoked here. Protesting the Vietnam war, she’d sung of the “weary mothers of the world.” Her song is sung this night by Leslie Baer-Brown, a Whittier College staffer who founded Xela Aid to help the indigenous peoples of Guatemala.

Altman speaks of the “disappeared,” but also of the homeless living in our parks. He then sings an original song, a tribute to Salvador Allende, the Marxist president deposed by Pinochet. It takes a poke at Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state. It also provides inadvertent comic relief.

Isaura Rivera, translating in Spanish, mishears and interprets Dr. Kissinger as Dr. King. No, no, Altman corrected: “This has nothing to do with Martin Luther King.”

Another Altman protest song--written for Cesar Chavez--evokes memories: “I was standing outside a Safeway in 1968 . . . “ Ned Moore, a family therapist from Sherman Oaks, leans over and whispers, “That’s what I was doing, boycotting grapes.”

That is not what Baker, now 55, was doing. In 1968, he was preparing to check out of a Scottish monastery, to make his way as a writer and musician.

At the time, he’d never heard of Victor Jara. Several years later, Chilean refugees in Scotland introduced him to Jara’s songs. Baker became a devotee, even though they never met.

“Not that many people know of him,” he says. “He deliberately refused stardom.” Jara poked fun at the Establishment, at what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, at the fence-sitting middle classes. His songs had roots deep in Chilean tradition, which was key to what Baker calls Jara’s “challenge to the U.S.-ification of international culture.”

Baker is a slight, bearded man, a lapsed Catholic who wryly defines himself as somewhat inclined to extremes--”In the whole of the British Isles, there were just 60 hermit monks. . . . It was kind of a weird thing to do.”

He was just passing through the United States, having taken part in a political demonstration in Washington in 1987, when he was sidetracked. Moving in with a Salvadoran family in L.A., he began working within the “safe house” movement for Salvadoran refugees.

Baker has made 10 trips to Chile and supports himself by touring England and Scotland each year, singing Jara’s songs. And he’s writing a novel about government corruption, the U.S. role in Nicaragua and “Colonel South,” a controversial candidate for the U.S. Senate.

From his office in the L.A.-area home he shares, Baker is the U.S. link to the foundation and Jara’s widow, Joan, in Chile. A Briton who thinks of himself as a Scot, he is also the foundation’s tie to Great Britain, Joan Jara’s native country.

Self-taught in Spanish (he claims to have been working his way through his “Spanish in Three Months” text for 10 years), he has compiled a book of singable translations of Jara songs to raise money for the foundation. Under his umbrella network, “Echoes of Silence,” Baker carries on the fight for Jara’s people--the peasants, field workers, miners of the world.

One of Jara’s songs he sings is the “Song of the Miner”:

. . . I am a miner

I go to the mine

I go to death

I am a miner

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