Charge in Chilean singer's death

A judge in Chile has charged a former soldier in connection with the killing, more than 35 years ago, of the popular folk singer Victor Jara, reports the BBC.

The accused man, Jose Adolfo Paredes Marquez, now 54, was an army conscript at the time, the BBC says.

Jara was among thousands of people rounded up in the early days of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's right-wing military coup. He was taken to Santiago's national stadium, tortured and shot.

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--Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Comments

[Mark]

The Villa Grimaldi was a pretty country house on ample and well cared for land on the outskirts of Santiago. Many hundreds of young women and men were tortured there before being murdered and disappeared. Pinochet's armed forces bulldozed it but Chileans have brought its past to light, painstaking archeology to document the crimes. It's now a place to remember what happened. About 1,500 Chilean schoolchildren visit it a year. More than the national stadium -- still in use -- Villa Grimaldi is a place where the past continues to intrude into the present, urgent, terrifying, vital.