Having grown up in the Chilean diaspora, Katia Chornik’s deep evaluation of how music was employed during the dictatorship carries with it both observation and immersion. This binary approach is reflected throughout her latest book, Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile, making for a clear yet intense read. When one thinks of music in Chile, the Nueva Canción Chilena, or New Song Movement, stirs up the most prominent memories of the country’s musical trajectory. In Chornik’s book, the Nueva Canción Chilena is situated among other repertoires, but what dominates the book’s atmosphere is how music featured as part of—and alongside— forms of torture, expression, or comfort.
Chornik’s return to Chile in the 1990s was her first reckoning with memories of the dictatorship. She recalls a memorial at Venda Sexy, a torture center where her parents had been detained. The location was synonymous with the loud music played to drown out detainees’ cries during torture. It was through Venda Sexy that Chornik made the connection between music and the dictatorship’s detention and torture centers.
The book is based on interviews with political detainees who survived Pinochet’s torture centers, former torturers, and people who were neither detainees nor state agents.
Based on archival material, interviews with political detainees who survived Pinochet’s detention and torture centers, former torturers, and people who were neither detainees nor state agents, Chornik lends much space to the narratives that speak for themselves throughout the book and complements the testimony with analysis that prioritizes memory.
Commencing with Chile’s nationwide protests in 2019, when the increase in bus fares prompted an uprising against socio-economic inequalities in the country, Chornik details how the Nueva Canción Chilena briefly resurfaced as part of the protest narrative in the streets. She notes that during the 2020 constitutional referendum, the far-right appropriated “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” (“The Right to Live in Peace”), a song by Victor Jara—who was detained, tortured and murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship—to promote their ideas. While a different scenario from the rest of Chornik’s book, the episode sets the scene for a historic dive into the dictatorship’s detention and torture centers, where memory is crucial for building historical testimony.
Chile’s National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura) report links music to torture. Through her research, Chornik discusses how perpetrators used music as a form of torture and degradation, while detainees sought personal comfort in music while using it as a medium to connect with others. At the Villa Grimaldi prison camp in the outskirts of Santiago, detainees were forced to listen to Roberto Carlos’s Un Millon de Amigos (A Million Friends). Another song frequently played at the complex was Gigi l’amoroso. Ana Jiménez, a survivor of Villa Grimaldi, recounts in the book, “You lived a permanent torture session because if they weren’t torturing you, you were listening to the torture of others, which was absolutely unbearable. And with music the whole time.”
Chornik notes that the songs were not randomly chosen by torturers, and neither was music an impulsive addition. The implications of singing—to tell on someone, and the wordplay associated with Gigi, used across detention centers—was associated with electric shock torture. She also notes the association of the word amoroso (loving) with sexual violence inflicted upon women during torture sessions. Torturers also interrogated detainees about their musical preferences, knowing that any mention of Nueva Canción Chilena singers or groups would be grounds for suspicion of an association with the left-wing factions.
For the purpose of researching the use of music in detention and torture centers, and wanting to avoid belittling the survivors’ memory and dignity, Chornik sought to engage with former members of the dictatorship to allow “the possibility of discussing questions that only they could answer because of their roles and actions.”
To interview Álvaro Corbalán, torturer and former Head of Operations of the CNI, Chornik opted to be accompanied by two musicologists. Despite the widespread use of music in torture, Chornik notes that Corbalán refused to answer questions about music in detention and torture centers. When asked about the use of music in detention centers, Corbalán would speak instead about music in relation to his own musical activities in the 1980s and throughout his imprisonment in order to deflect attention away from the original question.
“I was too little—I was born a month before Pinochet took power,” one of the musicologists accompanying Chornik replied to a question asked by Corbalán’s friend, to which Corbalán answered, “We didn’t have enough time to torture you.” Corbalán offered a snippet of information regarding his guitar, which he said was a personal gift from Argentina’s dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. Chornik writes, “The link with the infamous Argentine dictator suggests that Corbalán may have had a role in Operation Condor.”
In introducing the various snippets of memory relating to music, memory cacophony becomes evident. Chornik notes that not all testimonies fit a particular theme, or are of all equal relevance. Some anecdotes are funny, others tragic. Former Chilean political prisoner and author Jorge Montealegre Iturra notes that artistic endeavors “triggered a process of psychological flight” in situations of torture and confinement, while the prevailing conceptualization of the dictatorship’s horrors prevents slivers of happier memories from being pushed forth. Chornik quotes Montealegre’s discussion on how everyday life is “perceived as dissonant in a testimony of political imprisonment, altering a certain duty of being heroic in that situation, moving away from an expected behavior that should represent the role of the political prisoner.”
Chornik, however, also notes that the detainees’ own self-censorship played a role in diluting the experiences of music in detention and torture centers—be it as part of torture or as part of coping, resistance, and comfort. She refers to a testimony by Rosalía Martínez from 2015 on the Cantos Cautivos database—a digital archive of 168 testimonies from 41 detention and torture centers. “How could a person who had survived worry about what he or she had lived through, if this meant nothing compared to the fate of the missing and the executed?”
Contradictions also arise in the recollections of music in detention and torture centers. Chornik narrates how the Spanish singer and former footballer Julio Iglesias visited the Valparaíso prison to give a failed concert. The details of such an arrangement are now known, but the narratives concerning the actual event differ greatly. According to the political prisoners, Iglesias left without singing, while they hurled insults at the singer, most assuming he was pro-Pinochet. However, in a 2015 interview, Iglesias said he had sung at the prison.
Torturers also interrogated detainees about their musical preferences, knowing that any mention of Nueva Canción Chilena singers or groups would be grounds for suspicion of an association with the left-wing factions.
Another anecdote related to Iglesias is a memory relating to his song A flor de piel (Under my Skin). The song was sung in the Colonia Dignidad detention center by a guard to Carmen Espinoza and César Montiel, who associated psychological distress with the song. Chornik argues that “the redeeming meaning that the couple makes of this story leaves an uncomfortable feeling, as there are indications of psychological manipulation through the guard’s singing of Iglesias’s song.” The guard would sing the song separately to both of them while taunting the other’s presence. Both denied having been asked about their music preferences, thus making the song more psychologically meaningful when it was sung to them. However, former prisoner Luis Cifuentes specifically recalls having been asked about his musical taste during torture sessions.
The book concludes with a detailed discussion of the Cantos Cautivos database. Many testimonies come from former political prisoners in the diaspora. The database includes contributions and material from musicians such as Jorge Pena Hen, Sergio Vesely and Alfonso Padilla, as well as amateur musicians and others with no musical background. Twenty five of these assert that music was part of torture and punishment inflicted upon detainees by DINA and CNI agents.
Chornik tackles a difficult subject with much caution. It is through the author’s dedication to explaining both content and context that the reader is guided through the lived experiences of political detainees. Memory cacophony, as Chornik explains, is itself replete with dissonance and its effect lasts long after reading the book. Music was a part of the dictatorship’s violence, and Chornik’s research plays a pivotal role in making known the several strands of memory that inform, clash, and contradict, yet exist in a space that is largely so far unexplored.
Ramona Wadi is a freelance journalist and book reviewer. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine and Latin America; the latter with a focus on Chile, Argentina and Cuba.
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of the review. The original article had a few minor errors, which have now been corrected.