Ex-Chilean Soldier Accused of Killing Folk Singer Is Arrested in Florida

A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folks singer Victor Jara and others through the bloody aftermath of a 1973 navy coup was arrested in Florida, officers introduced Tuesday.

The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is needed in Chile for the extrajudicial homicide of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports activities stadium. There, Mr. Jara and different dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the nation’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into energy.

Federal immigration officers and native regulation enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 throughout a visitors cease in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, in keeping with a news launch printed on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officers stated.

“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a particular agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, stated within the news launch.

Mr. Jara, who has been described because the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a preferred singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.

He had supported the Allende authorities and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested on the State Technical University alongside a whole bunch of scholars and school members.

Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled physique was discovered exterior a cemetery alongside these of 4 different victims. Before he was killed, troopers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly informed him that he would by no means play guitar once more.

Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes greater than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case discovered him accountable for Mr. Jara’s demise and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s household, which had introduced the case beneath a federal regulation that enables the victims of abroad human rights violations to hunt redress.

A former Chilean soldier testified in court docket that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice within the head.

“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.

A federal court docket revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July primarily based on a sealed criticism introduced by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation workplace.

“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news launch stated.

It was unclear whether or not extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos had been underway. The federal authorities couldn’t instantly be reached for touch upon Tuesday night time, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.

Mr. Barrientos was the most recent former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired navy officers had been every sentenced to greater than 15 years in jail by a Chilean decide over Mr. Jara’s demise.