Pinochet’s prisoners were tormented with music but still found solace in it, a new book reveals
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'Manuel Flores', watercolour by Francisco Aedo Carrasco (Chacabuco, 1974). The artist and his model were political prisoners at Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert during the Pinochet dictatorship. The artist is among the disappeared.
view moreCredit: María Cristina González Benedetti collection. Museum of Memory and Human Rights
University of Cambridge media release
110 years after Augusto Pinochet’s birth, Chile has just elected a new far-right President, José Antonio Kast, who has praised the dictator's legacy. At the same time, a new book exposes the brutal and tender realities of political imprisonment during the dictatorship (1973–1990) through the power of music.
Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile is published today by Oxford University Press. The book’s author, Dr Katia Chornik, grew up in the Chilean diaspora as her parents experienced political detention and exile under Pinochet. She first became aware of the horrors of Pinochet’s detention centres* after returning to the country as a teenager in the 1990s. She learnt that her own parents had been imprisoned in a Santiago torture house known as Venda Sexy (Sexy Blindfold) and La Discotheque, on account of the sexual violence and blasting of loud music which its prisoners, always blindfolded, were subjected to.
Chornik, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies, has interviewed dozens of survivors, as well as former prison guards and convicted perpetrators from the higher echelons of Pinochet’s regime.
Survivors’ memories of life, death and music
In 1975, Ana María Jiménez, a music teacher and pianist, was arrested and taken to the torture and detention complex of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago. There, she told Chornik, she was forced to listen to recorded music: “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.”
One of the songs that Jiménez heard most was ‘Gigi l’amoroso’, popularised by the Italian-Franch singer Dalida. Its lyrics narrate the story of Gigi, a serial seducer.
Jiménez recalls: “When they would come to torture you, they said: “here comes Gigi l’amoroso.” They sang the song, and they loved to feel like they were Gigi. They used to put that song on at full blast while they performed the torture.” But Chornik found that agents’ use of this song was far more sinister as it repurposed their slang word “gigi”, which referred to a device for administering electric shocks to prisoners.
As well as documenting the use of music as background to torture, Chornik emphasises that prisoners also comforted themselves and each other with music, took courage and hope from songs, and mounted acts of musical resistance.
Ana María Jiménez once sang to comfort a fellow prisoner who was suffering in solitary confinement after a brutal torture session. She chose to sing “Zamba para no morir” (Zamba so as Not to Die), a song popularised by the Argentine singer, Mercedes Sosa. “All of my comrades had tears rolling down their faces,” Jiménez recalls. The agent in the prison abruptly stopped her and told her not to overstep her bounds “with cute little political songs”. Jiménez refused to comply and was made to spend the entire night in the rain. She later learned that her singing was the last thing her fellow prisoner heard before he died.
In another camp, Jiménez ran music workshops and founded and directed a choir of prisoners. Forty years after her imprisonment, she revived the choir, a story Chornik details in the book.
Luis Cifuentes, a political prisoner held at the National Stadium, listened to Cat Stevens singing ‘Morning has broken’ on a radio receiver secretly circulating in the changing rooms. The song helped him build up courage for imminent torture sessions. “I had an obsession for ‘Morning has broken’,” he says, “it was reassuring.”
In 1975, a young couple, Carmen Espinoza and César Montiel, were detained at the torture and extermination center Colonia Dignidad, an isolated colony in Southern Chile, founded by Nazi fugitives. A man Espinoza and Montiel identified as a guard repeatedly sang Julio Iglesias’s love song ‘A flor de piel’ (Under my Skin) to them. This song was special to them before their detention and it still gives the couple fond memories of their youth, despite how they experienced it at Colonia Dignidad.
Julio Iglesias himself attempted to perform at Valparaiso Jail in February 1975. As Chornik reveals in the book, the gig did not go according to plan. Iglesias was booed when he addressed the prisoners and had to leave without singing.
Chornik set out to explore memories of the dictatorship from different types of people, not only former political prisoners. María Fedora Peña describes finding a melody written by her father on a scrap of paper using burned matchsticks while he was in solitary confinement (see images). In September 1973, Jorge Peña Hen – a respected composer, conductor and pedagogue – was detained at La Serena prison and soon after writing this melody, he was assassinated by the Caravan of Death, an army death squad. His daughter says: “In his unfathomable universal loneliness, defiled and deserted in his senseless confinement. And in the midst of that nothingness, I see the historic man celebrating life.”
The perpetrator: Álvaro Corbalán
Chornik interviewed Álvaro Corbalán in Punta Peuco prison near Santiago, where he is serving sentences for disappearances and murders of scores of political opponents. Corbalán is the former Head of Operations of the CNI secret police and commander of Cuartel Borgoño, one of the dictatorship’s most notorious torture centres. He also happens to be a prolific singer-songwriter and still manages to share recordings of his songs, made against prison rules, on social media.
“Music was part of the violence, and the ability of some agents to appreciate, write, and play music doesn’t lessen the severity of their actions,” Chornik says. “I firmly oppose any suggestion that the ‘human’ side of perpetrators of human rights violations should invite redemption or pardon.”
Corbalán avoided discussing use of music in the prisons he oversaw but revealed to Chornik that the guitar he still plays was a personal gift from Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla when he headed Argentina’s military junta.
“Corbalán said he received the guitar during a work trip to Buenos Aires. The location, timing and people involved suggest he may have had a role in Operation Condor,” Chornik says.
Operation Condor was a CIA-backed secret programme of cooperation between South American intelligence services. Chile, along with Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, were core members. This November marked the 50th anniversary of Operation Condor's formal creation. Condor operatives carried out covert disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial executions across borders. Special death squads also targeted leading opposition figures exiled in Latin America, Europe, and the USA.
This book has taken Chornik a decade to write and she feels it was a matter of ‘now or never’. “Many of the survivors have already passed away,” Chornik says. “I felt the urgency to record their experiences before it was too late.”
Educating through memory
In 2015, Katia Chornik founded Cantos Cautivos (Captive Songs), an acclaimed digital platform which has compiled 168 testimonies of musical experiences in political detention centres in Pinochet’s Chile. She is currently working with UNESCO on a Global Citizenship Education project that is bringing material from Cantos Cautivos into classrooms across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Presidents do not often write prologues to books but Chornik’s opens with the resolute words of Michelle Bachelet Jeria, Former President of Chile and now a candidate for UN Secretary-General:
“For Chile, this work serves as a vital tool for deepening our understanding of our history and reinforcing our permanent commitment to justice and human rights. Yet its relevance extends far beyond our borders … As we look to the future, let us draw inspiration from the courage and creativity of those who resisted oppression through music. Their stories remind us of the enduring power of art and humanity to confront even the darkest forces.”
Reference
Notes to editors
*In 2004, a truth commission set up by the Chilean state recognized 1,132 centers for political imprisonment and torture active during Pinochet’s dictatorship, including clandestine houses, camps, stadiums, prisons and commissariats.
Photograph taken in 2000 of the third floor of the Valparaíso Jail, where political prisoners were held during Pinochet's dictatorship
Credit
Mario Patricio Cordero
Ana María Jiménez leading the choir at Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace in September 2013
Credit
Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace Corporation
Unfinished melody written by Jorge Peña Hen with burned matchsticks while in solitary confinement at La Serena Jail in October 1973, shortly before he was assassinated.
Credit
Peña Camarca collection
The front cover of Katia Chornik's book, Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet’s Chile (OUP, 2025)
Credit
Oxford University Press
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