A Chilean army officer accused of murdering the popular folk singer and political activist Víctor Jara in the first days of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 CIA-backed coup d’etat goes on trial in a Florida courtroom on Monday, a landmark moment in his British widow’s four-decades-long fight for justice.

Agony of Chile's dark days continues as murdered poet's wife fights for justice Read more

Joan Turner Jara, who is 88, will be one of the key witnesses in the civil case to be heard in Orlando’s federal court against Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez, a lieutenant in Chile’s army that toppled the country’s elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed General Pinochet’s brutal 17-year military dictatorship.

Barrientos is alleged to have tortured then shot Jara in the head in September 1973 in a locker room at Santiago’s Chile Stadium, where thousands of perceived subversives, activists and communists were rounded up and detained by Pinochet’s forces. Jara’s mutilated body was later found dumped outside the stadium with 44 bullet wounds.

Almost 3,100 people were killed during the Pinochet regime, according to Chile’s truth and justice commission, including 1,000 “disappeared” whose bodies were never found.

As well as being a singer, Jara, 40, was a poet, theatre director and professor at the University of Chile and became one of the best-known victims of the oppression instigated by the new ruling military junta.

“This is a powerful moment for all those who have been seeking justice and truth about what happened during the Pinochet coup,” said Dixon Osburn, executive director of the California-based Center for Justice and Accountability that brought the civil action against Barrientos.

“It is also an emotional and almost overpowering moment for Víctor’s widow Joan and the two daughters who have been fighting the fight for justice for the murder of their husband and dad for more than 40 years.

“What happened in Chile Stadium remains shrouded in mystery but we believe we’re going to be able to draw back that veil by constructing a coherent narrative of what took place there. Our hope is we will present very compelling evidence that this Pinochet officer is liable for the torture and murder of Víctor Jara, or at the very least he aided and abetted.”

Now 67, Barrientos fled to the US in 1989 soon after Pinochet lost the first free election in Chile in almost 20 years, and became an American citizen through marriage. He has lived openly in the central Florida city of Deltona since but has not responded to several requests for comment.

The civil case, brought under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act, marks the first time an officer from the Chilean army will appear as a defendant in a US courtroom to account for Jara’s death. The complaint seeks unspecified damages for torture and extrajudicial killing.

A judge in Chile indicted Barrientos and seven other officers for Jara’s murder in 2012 but the case has been slow to progress and the US government has not publicly responded to a formal request from Chile for Barrientos’s extradition.

The Orlando trial will feature testimony from about 20 witnesses and is scheduled to last two and a half weeks. It be will determined by a six-person jury in front of Florida district court judge Roy Dalton.