On the morning of 12 September 1973, Jara was taken prisoner, along with thousands of others, and imprisoned inside Chile Stadium. The guards there tortured him, smashing his hands and fingers, and then mocked him by asking him to play the guitar. Jara instead sang the Chilean protest song "Venceremos". Soon after, he was killed with a gunshot to the head, and his body was riddled with more than 40 bullets.
According to the BBC "There are many conflicting accounts of Jara's last days but the 2019 Netflix documentary Massacre at the Stadium pieces together a convincing narrative. As a famous musician and prominent supporter of Allende, Jara was swiftly recognised on his way into the stadium. An army officer threw a lit cigarette on the ground, made Jara crawl for it, then stamped on his wrists. Jara was first separated from the other detainees, then beaten and tortured in the bowels of the stadium. At one point, he defiantly sang "Venceremos (We Will Win)", Allende's 1970 election anthem, through split lips. On the morning of the 16th, according to a fellow detainee, Jara asked for a pen and notebook and scribbled the lyrics to "Estadio Chile", which were later smuggled out of the stadium: 'How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror. / Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.' Two hours later, he was shot dead, then his body was riddled with machine-gun bullets and dumped in the street. He was 40."
After his murder, Jara's body was displayed at the entrance of Chile Stadium for other prisoners to see. It was later discarded outside the stadium along with the bodies of other prisoners who had been killed by the Chilean Army. His body was found by civil servants and brought to a morgue, where one of them was able to identify him and contact his wife, Joan. She took his body and gave him a quick and clandestine burial in the general cemetery before she fled the country into exile.
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