Soldiers discarded Victor Jara's body at a cemetery entrance south of Santiago. Before shooting him, Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet's men shattered Jara's hands with rifle butts, seemingly afraid that even dead he might pick up a guitar and sing, "La Plegaria a un Labrador" -- The Prayer to a Worker.

Joan Turner buried her husband, told anyone who would listen that a dictator had done this crime, then fled Chile with her two daughters. In parting defiance of the regime that killed a poet, she took her husband's name and became Joan Turner de Jara.

"Music was very, very important in a popular unity time. It was something that joined people together," Joan said. "Victor was sort of a famous figure who was very outright in his political support of the popular unity program. He was -- some people would call him famous, other people would call him notorious, depending on which view they took."

The Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende was elected and flourished for three years. Because Allende was a Marxist, the U.S. government made it official, though secret, policy that Allende must fall. The archives of national security long ago made clear that then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, diplomat and Nobel laureate, endorsed the efforts to oust Allende.

This messing about contributed to a coup, led by Pinochet and a group of generals who understood that to suppress a government of popular unity, part of the populace would have to go. Thousands vanished.

Victor Jara, whose albums sold throughout Latin America, and whose communism made him a natural ally of Allende, was pulled out of the State Technical University in Santiago. He was taken to an indoor sports arena. Thousands of others were led into Santiago's outdoor soccer stadium, but Victor Jara, a songwriter, had to be killed meticulously.

"Victor was separated from the other people and taken away," Joan said. "His hands were beaten so he couldn't play the guitar again. He seems to have been -- and this is something I have only learned now after 31 years -- taken into an underground chamber there and executed. His body was left in the entrance as a sort of sign."

When neighbors who lived near the cemetery recognized the body, it was sent to a morgue.

"There were people there trying to identify these anonymous corpses. One of the young men came to my house to fetch me. No funeral, that wasn't allowed. I saw literally -- literally -- hundreds of bodies. Victor's body was not downstairs with the rest because there were too many. He had to go upstairs to the part where they had administrative offices. There in the hallway was another whole line of corpses."

In months to come, Victor Jara's records were burned in the streets. His master tapes were destroyed.

"It was enough to have a record of Victor's in your house to be arrested," Joan said. "That's because it killed him."

In the days after Salvadore Allende was taken out of the presidential palace feet first, a bullet in his brain, and before the general stalking of old Allende allies began, the Pinochet regime released news footage to American networks, showing the coup. They had inserted a soundtrack of heroic music, as if it would somehow imbue their crime with virtue and convince the world the generals had done a great thing.

That was what made it so important to kill Victor Jara, first the man, then the music. Little wonder the killers came for him first and that his music and name were banished from places public and private.

Last week, the ghosts of Santiago again slipped under the door of Pinochet's mansion. A judge put him under house arrest for the deaths of Operation Condor, the systematic stalking and murder of Chilean dissidents who escaped the country.

It is the second time Pinochet has been charged. In 1998 he was detained in Britain after Spain indicted him in the killings of Spanish citizens during the Santiago terror. He waited out his time visiting Margaret Thatcher, a reward for backing Britain in the Argentine War. Then he went home, to enjoy the senatorial immunity that a human rights attorney named Eduardo Contreras finally had peeled away, one layer at a time. First came the discovery that Pinochet had smuggled millions of dollars out of Chile and into a Washington bank; the money was far more than he could have earned even on a dictator's salary.

Stripped of his immunity, Pinochet, now 89, pleaded he is mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Unlikely to ever see the inside of a prison, Pinochet gave away his game in an interview where he made it clear that this is all about his legacy.

"I never aspired to be a dictator," he told one television interviewer. "Look, in all political struggles, in every corner of the world, there are excesses." He said he doesn't want people to think badly of him.

Things happen, it seems, although Augusto Pinochet never seemed to connect what happens with the deeds that begin the process.

Called to testify when the Chilean courts opened a new inquiry into Jara's death, Pinochet and his cronies finally gave up the name of the commander who ran the detention center where Jara was murdered. His name is Mario Manriquez Bravo and, like Pinochet, he now faces charges of murder.

Victor Jara's widow returned to Santiago after Pinochet stepped down. She runs a foundation dedicated to reviving her husband's works. Old recordings have been found and he is returning to the world stage in a boxed set. The arena in which he was murdered is now the Estadio Victor Jara.

It would be a fine place to question Pinochet or Manriquez, but new prisons are already being built for the military men who killed men and women such as Victor Jara. Pinochet will answer his crimes in private, so no crowd can shout at him as he is led into the court. Perhaps somewhere, from some distant phonograph, brought back to life now that the prayer of a worker has been answered, he will hear Victor Jara's voice telling him: