Freedom songs: Chiles sounds of resistance ring out again
Freedom songs: Chile’s sounds of resistance ring out again
Opponents of Chile’s dictator sang in his prisons. Now the daughter of two survivors tells of her mission to help their music live again
Ed Vulliamy
Saturday 3 December 2016 19.05 EST
Many testimonies exist – legal, historical, political and human – to the horrors of the military coup and ensuing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean general who died 10 years ago this week.
But as all Latin America recalls the man whose brutality defined an era, no record better captures the ethos of its suffering than the collection of music made, performed, heard and sung by prisoners in the network of centres for political detention and torture operated by Pinochet’s brutal regime.
Cantos Cautivos (Captive Songs) is a digital archive compiled by Katia Chornik, daughter of two opponents of the dictatorship who survived one infamous detention centre, which was named La Discothèque by agents of the Dina secret police because guards deployed loud music to torture their quarry, or as a soundtrack to the abuse. Chornik spent her childhood in exile, between Venezuela and France, returning to Chile with her parents by the end of the dictatorship. She studied violin and musicology in Chile and the UK.
Chornik put together the Cantos Cautivos project while working at Manchester University and in collaboration with the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights, with the aim of speeding up the process of collecting testimonies and making these more widely visible.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/04/chile-pinochet-music-song-political-prisoners
Editorials, etc.:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016172149
