/ARTS WEEKLY/ MUSIC-MEXICO: A Militant Song for Chile’s Allende

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Sep 9 2003 (IPS) - The 30 years since the Augusto Pinochet-led military overthrow in Chile of socialist president Salvador Allende are being remembered in many countries through concerts, expositions and seminars, with the late Allende a symbol of social justice.

Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani and Illapu – emblematic groups of Latin American protest music – performed together for the first time in a recent concert in the Mexican capital, ahead of the Sep. 11 anniversary of the coup that plunged Chile into a 17-year, iron-fisted dictatorship.

The three Chilean musical groups, cultural icons of the political left, performed for the “Allende in Our Memories” event at Mexico’s National Auditorium.

This recital is part of a series of tributes organised here, in Chile and in France in memory of Allende, who died Sep. 11, 1973, at the presidential palace in Santiago during the bloody coup led by Pinochet, who would become dictator until 1990.

“Many Chileans are envious because the concert was held in Mexico and not in Chile, where we never performed together, but where we perhaps all should be right now,” said Roberto Márquez, a member of Illapu.

Mexico broke off relations with Chile following the 1973 coup and took in hundreds of Chilean exiles in the 1970s and 1980s, such that Allende’s admirers and Latin American leftist activists held the country in high regard.

Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún and Illapu are symbols of protest songs, known at the time as ‘nueva canción’ (new song), heavily influenced by indigenous music.

Although the three groups have continued to produce music and albums fairly continuously since the 1960s, it was in the 1970s and 1980s that they enjoyed their greatest success.

At the concert, which was two years in the planning, they performed the hit songs that brought them fame and which even today are played at gatherings of Latin American social activists and leftists. These include “Venceremos” (We shall triumph), by Inti-Illimani, and “A desalambrar” (Tear down the fences) by Uruguayan singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti and made popular by Quilapayún.

But the central figure was Allende, for whom all three groups had performed back in the day.

The song “Allende”, by Quilapayún, says, “Exactly dawned the light of day/ exactly on your profile that early morning/ when suddenly the acute wind of September/ made quiet your life, your voice and your gaze.”

(Exacta amaneció la luz del día/ exacta en tu perfil la madrugada/ cuando de pronto el viento agudo de septiembre/ hizo callar tu vida, tu voz y tu mirada)

“An unforgettable concert,” says Chilean Felipe Radrigán, creator of FR Producciones, the Mexico-based firm that organised the event.

Alongside Violeta Parra, and Victor Jara (assassinated by the Pinochet dictatorship’s forces), the three groups are the leading representatives of Chilean folk music of that era.

For those who lived in exile to escape persecution from the Chilean dictatorship – which ended in 1990 – these musical groups are an intrinsic part of their history.

Most of the current members of the groups also lived in exile, in Europe, while others returned to the country with the passing of the years and Chile’s return to democracy. This created divisions in Quilapayún, which now exists in two versions, one based in Chile and the other in Europe.

“This reunion is important in a country like Mexico, which always acted in great solidarity with the Chilean people,” said Illapu’s Márquez.

Illapu, with its 30 years of history in which it combined traditional music with the sounds of electric instruments, created the song “Vuelvo” (I Return), which became the ballad of Chilean exiles, and a favourite at “Allende in our memories”.

“I bring in my suitcase of uprootedness/ fraternal friendship of other peoples/ I leave behind pain and lost sleep/ I return to live whole again,” says the song by Illapu, a group that survived in exile in France and Mexico.

(Traigo en mi equipaje del destierro/ amistad fraterna de otros pueblos/ atrás dejo penas y desvelos/ vuelvo por vivir de nuevo entero)

It was the presence of the Chilean exiles, and the exiles from the other dictatorships in South America’s Southern Cone, in the 1970s and 1980s, that led to the proliferation of “peñas” (venues where Latin American music could be heard) in Mexico City. And won the hearts of many Mexicans, giving them a taste for that folk music style.

“It is important to recover the legacy of Salvador Allende, because a people and a continent that does not recognise itself in the positive as well as the negative of their history will not likely search for new paths,” Illapu member Carlos Elgueta, said in an interview with Proceso weekly.

In addition to the Allende tribute concert in Mexico were two nights of music in Chile last Friday and Saturday, “The Dream Exists”, drawing musicians and musical groups from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Uruguay.

In Paris, Chile’s Angel Parra will be performing Sep. 12-14 at La Carneuve Park in honour of the memory of the fallen Chilean president.