# The Estadio Chile *A Biography of Victor Jara* — Legendary Biographies No. 073 - **Subject:** Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez - **Written by:** Sandile Mokoena - **Shelf:** Music / World - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 197 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 197 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-079-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-175-8) - **Content notes:** torture; state-sponsored murder Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/073-the-estadio-chile.html ## About this book September 12, 1973, the Estadio Chile in Santiago. Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez, forty, the Chilean folk musician whose songs had soundtracked the Salvador Allende presidency, has been arrested by the soldiers of the Augusto Pinochet coup that overthrew the government the previous morning. He is held in the stadium with five thousand other detainees. Witnesses later testify that his captors broke his hands with rifle butts and mocked him to play guitar. On the morning of September 16, 1973, he is shot forty-four times. His body is dumped on a Santiago street. His widow Joan Jara, the British dancer, identifies him at the morgue. Sandile Mokoena's biography opens earlier — in the Lonquén farming community south of Santiago, where Jara was born in 1932 — and follows the arc through the seminary years he abandoned, the University of Chile theatre school where he met Joan Turner, the long Nueva Canción Chilena movement, the Chile Stadium and El Derecho de Vivir en Paz recordings, the Manifiesto posthumous album, the September 1973 coup and the four days at the Estadio Chile, the long Joan Jara campaign for justice that lasted forty-five years, the 2018 conviction of eight retired Chilean army officers at the Santiago Court of Appeals, and the November 30, 2023 deportation of Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez from the United States to face Chilean prosecution. What emerges is a portrait of the Chilean folk musician whose songs the Pinochet coup killed him for, and whose justice the four-decade campaign of his widow Joan secured — through Chilean criminal courts, U.S. federal civil courts, and finally an ICE deportation flight in November 2023. ## Contents 1. Lonquén 2. Santiago 3. The Theater 4. Violeta 5. Nueva Canción 6. Joan 7. The Guitar as Weapon 8. Te Recuerdo Amanda 9. Allende 10. The CIA 11. September Eleven 12. Estadio Chile 13. The Unfinished Song 14. The Body 15. Exile and Memory 16. Justice 17. The Songs Remain 18. Who Won 19. The Conviction ## Questions **Who is The Estadio Chile about?** Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Estadio Chile — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,449 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,500 words, 19 chapters, 197 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: torture; state-sponsored murder. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Sandile Mokoena is a Johannesburg-based journalist whose biography of Steve Biko was a finalist for the 2024 Alan Paton Award. He writes about southern African political and musical figures with the patience of an oral historian. His long-form profile work includes the books Room 619, The Estadio Chile, The Thirty-Year Exile, and The Trench Town Origin. Each narrative relies on extensive archival research and direct interviews with living witnesses to reconstruct complex twentieth-century histories. He lives in the suburb of Melville, Johannesburg, where he collects vinyl records and works as a freelance newspaper contributor.