They still have heroes...

They still have heroes in Latin America; not just celebrities. When Victor Jara was re-buried in December 2009, 36 years after his first clandestine hole-in-the-wall burial in Santiago’s central cemetery, over 10,000 people accompanied him to his final resting place. Another 5,000 leant out of their windows and balconies to shower the procession (40 blocks long in places), with confetti, and to serenade Victor with their own version of his songs.

Many thousands more spent the previous 48 hours at Victor’s wake, where they danced and clapped and sang along with the rock bands, folk musicians, world famous classical pianist, choirs, school troupes and young dancers, all of whom were honoured to donate their talent to the memory of a working-class hero, despite the fact that many of them weren’t even born at the time of his brutal murder. Thousands lined up down the side of Plaza Brasil, round the corner and down 6 blocks of Calle Companía, and waited for hours, in belting sun, to file past Victor’s beautifully restored coffin, lying centre stage and spot-lit in the performance space known as the Galpόn Victor Jara, a cool and tranquil refuge from the fiesta going on outside. They bought their babies, toddlers, pooches, their flowers, their teddy bears and their poems, and these last three were strewn round and on the coffin, without touching Victor’s red and black campesino poncho that warmed the coffin’s head. Then wave after wave of mourners, standing to attention three each side of the coffin, their heads held proud in the spot light, stood guard for Victor. It was the least they could do for him. Many cried when they left, all were visibly moved. Just as Victor’s mum had often played her guitar and sang for the dead, the midnight hour belonged to the traditional keeners with their haunting, improvised songs accompanied by fingerbells, tambourines and guitar. What the posters everywhere said was true: Victor Jara – en el corazόn de su pueblo (in the heart of his people).

The distance the funeral procession had to cover from the Galpόn to the central cemetery is 4 km. Santiago is flat. It shouldn’t have taken long, given that the accompanying crowds were a joyous, flag-waving, music-loving multitude. There were none of the hazards that can beset huge bodies of people on the march in London – no rain, no impatient traffic and astonishingly, no police. The procession’s guardians were angelic, rather than uniformed and gun-toting. They were a volunteer host of 250 young people assembled by the Fundaciόn Victor Jara’s human dynamo of a director. They guarded the coffin, they helped people when they tripped over, they cleared space for the dancers in Native American dress, they carried babies and mopped brows when the vast crowds occasionally got stuck down some of the narrower, sun-drenched streets. It took 5 hours to walk 4 km! 5 hours of walking past elders who stood in shady doorways clutching ancient photos of Victor, 5 hours of shuffling through fountains of confetti, 5 hours of sweating in sympathy with the dancers in their brightly coloured woollen clothes, 5 hours of impassioned call and response, ‘Compañero Victor Jara?’ ‘Presente! Presente! Ahora y siempre!’ (Here, now and always!) and best of all, 5 hours of heart-felt singing, with Victor, as his voice led the crowds onward.

Santiago’s vast central cemetery with its tall trees cooled the hot and dusty funeral procession as it finally crawled to a halt outside the moveable barriers operated by the volunteer brigade of youngsters who told us they’d been guarding Victor’s final resting place for the past 7 hours. Victor’s family and friends filed through for 20 minutes alone with their beloved, and it was touch and go as to whether the huge funeral crowd would stop their calling, their responding and their singing to give the family some well-deserved peace. The volunteers asked the front rank of marchers to be quiet, and explained why, the shushes were passed from person to person back across the tombs, down the long corridors of the dead and into the spacious tree-lined avenues where the marchers had set up temporary camp beneath their flags and banners. Paradoxically, silence broke out to the accompaniment of cicadas, birdsong and a lone Argentinian troubadour, who looked like he might have walked the thousands of miles across the pampa and the cordillera, specifically to be here at Victor’s funeral, just so as to hold this silence with his guitar. What he played, so gently, was what Victor lived and died for, El derecho de vivir en paz, The right to live in peace.


Peace is also what defines the various Chilean national parks that we have visited. From the black and white striped granite pillars of the Torres del Paine mountain range in the Province of Last Hope in southern Patagonia, the sweetly scented broom forests of the island of Chiloé, to the Christmas pudding shaped, smoking volcanoes, complete with their topping of creamy white snow, reflected in the mirror lakes of Parque Nacional Huerquehue. These parks aren’t the sort of place for a drive and a picnic, or at least, only up to a point. Beyond that point lie the last remnants of Chile’s wilderness. The shortest hike takes around 7 hours. The longest about 7 weeks. There are trails, but nothing you could ride a bike along (let alone a vehicle), but a horse, yes. Mostly, the terrain is vertical. There are no tea shops, no rubbish bins and no mobile phone signal. What you carry in, you better carry out.

The fauna is impressive, particularly the black necked swans bobbing like so many question marks on the Sound of Last Hope, or the buff-necked ibis with its scythe-like beak, yellow head and indescribably raucous call or indeed, the iconic (i.e. ugly), whackingly huge Andean condor. Did my binoculars catch the glimpse of a tail feather disappearing into the clouds of this fabled creature? Pass. However, Celine, staring out of the bus window on our way to the airport at the end of the world, saw not one, not two or three, but FOUR Andean Condors. And were they circling high above the Patagonian steppe or soaring gloriously over distant peaks? Were they heck! They were skulking about in a field by the main road, whilst Ms Binoculars here had her head in a book!

The flora isn’t bad either. The great stands of Araucaria (Monkey Puzzle) forest in the Lake District were around during the Mesozoic era, and the 50 metre tall Alerce trees, out of which Chilotés build their wooden houses, can live for 4000 years. They grow one cm every 15 years and their trunks are a library for reading about the climate changes of the last 4 millennia. Let’s hope, despite the principle-free politicians of Copenhagen, these living archives will still be here in another one thousand years, along with us, polar bears, penguins, in fact the whole caboodle, even the not so heart-warming mosquito and bindweed.


Our year-long stay in South America ends, as it began, in Chile, the continent’s impossibly long and fragmented backbone, the borders of which encompass every geographical feature from the most active of snow-tipped volcanoes, through the world’s highest geyers to its driest desert. Why spend so long in Chile, seasoned gringo travellers ask? It’s boring and US influenced. Well, no and yes. It is US influenced. The legacy of US “not in my back yard” foreign policy exists, in different ways, in each country we’ve visited. But what’s boring about a socially conservative, catholic country with a single parent, atheist, female president (the most popular ever, even right at the end of her term of office)? How amazing that a country with a tiny population of 16 million can produce a Violeta Parra, a Roberto Bravo, a Mahani Teave an Isabel Allende, a Victor Jara! And what about the Mapuche Indians, who mounted a 300 year long defence of their lands, the most spirited in the whole of South America! How brilliant that at the end of the first decade of our celebrity-obsessed twenty-first century, Chileans turn out in their thousands to bury a hero, the son of a peasant woman, an artist and musician, a man who believed in, and defended, his people.