The chance of fate, or a macabre coincidence, made The two most representative groups of the so-called New Chilean Song were thousands of kilometers from their country on September 11, 1973. when the La Moneda Palace was bombed and chaos took over Chile.
(Enter the special: 50 years of the coup d’état in Chile)
Inti Illimani and Quilapayún, named cultural ambassadors of the government of Salvador Allende, They were in Italy and France, respectively, when news of the coup d’état reached them.
“We were at a press conference and the telexes began to arrive with the news of the military coup. It was a terrible surprise for us. We didn’t know what it meant. We went to the Chilean embassy and began to try to understand what was happening. It was a moment of great anguish. We did not speak French and we did not understand much of what they said in the news,” recalls Eduardo Carrasco, director of the Quilapayún groupwhen remembering the horror that occurred to him knowing that just five days after the coup The band’s artistic director, Víctor Jara, would die after being tortured in the Chile Stadium.
“It was the darkest and most painful news that came to us from Chile, we were preparing a concert and someone came with that information that hit us. Not only because it was a violent act, but also because it was unfair and unnecessary. It was outrageous,” Carrasco tells EL TIEMPO with an expression distraught by the pain that, 50 years later, he has not been able to erase when he remembers again. the atrocity that Augusto Pinochet’s regime unleashed against Jara, who was the reference of the Chilean protest song and who was tortured until all his fingers were broken and then forced to try to play his guitar.
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However, those notes that were extinguished that September 16 continued to resonate inside and outside Chile thanks to the musicians for whom Víctor Jara was a mentor and inspiration. To this day, Quilapayún’s concerts begin with La plegaria del labrador, a song that Jara composed in 1969 and that speaks of the dream of having a country free of those who wanted to dominate them in misery and where justice and justice reign. equality.
“Víctor Jara is a cultural pillar of our country,” says José Seves, one of the most iconic members of Inti Illimani. whose group suffered the same fate as Quilapayún but from another European shore.
“In 1973, communication from abroad was very difficult, even by telephone. Furthermore, it was not advisable, because we, as a group, represented the government of Salvador Allende. We had left as a cultural delegation and The dictatorship intended the extermination of all those who did not think like them“, Seves tells this newspaper, who does not spare qualifiers or comparisons to describe what exile meant to them.
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“It is tremendously heartbreaking, incomprehensible, unacceptable. I lost my mother when she was 13 years old and I think exile did something similar to me. It is tremendous loneliness. Being isolated from your country is really the closest thing to a shipwreck because it is quite devastating. They are nights in which you cannot sleep while you look for where to assert yourself and how to understand the pain of having lost your nest,” says Seves.
Being isolated from your country is really the closest thing to a shipwreck because it is quite devastating.
And it is that the members of Quilapayún and Inti Illimani They were far from suspecting that this month-long musical tour would actually last 15 years and that They would be in charge of breaking the information fence that the dictatorship had imposed in which news from Chile neither left nor entered.
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“Solidarity with Chile was a global phenomenon. Latin American countries immediately opened their doors to the exiles. The Venezuelans were very generous in that sense, Colombia and Mexico too. Argentina in the early days, until the dictatorship of Jorge Videla (1976-1981) arrived. And, in Europe, countries like Sweden, France and Germany also welcomed us. We had to travel a lot at that time. All our concerts were acts of solidarity with Chile and ended with El pueblo Unidos and with other of the most political songs against the dictatorship,” says Carrasco.
Anthems of the resistance
Among all the songs that were created before and after the Chilean coup d’état, there was one that became, not only a reference of resistance in Chile, but also spread like wildfire throughout the rest of the Latin American countries and whose chorus has been sung on the streets of the region for 50 years: “The people united will never be defeated!”.
“In June 1973, the situation in Chile was very tense, with a lot of verbal and street violence. We composed to sing with people what we called contingent songs,” says Carrasco, who remembers, with a laugh, how the song emerged while they were at the house of the composer Sergio Ortega and he was playing the Brahms sextet on a piano.
Suddenly, in the middle of the improvisation, a lyric emerged that they all sat down to write and that ended up being performed in the central Alameda de Santiago, a few days later, in a demonstration in favor of Salvador Allende.
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Of course, beyond this mythical harangue, There is a wide repertoire of songs that are the soundtrack of what happened after the overthrow of the Popular Unity leader, and that influenced younger artists in different Spanish-speaking countries.
With these compositions, The musicians of the New Chilean Song made their way through their nostalgia to sing to the country to which they dreamed of returning. Among them is Vuelvo, whose music was composed by Horacio Salinas, director of Inti Illimani, from exile in Rome, with lyrics by musician Patricio Manns, who managed to escape from Chile with the intervention of Cuba.
“With ashes, with tears, with our haughty impatience, with an honest conscience, with anger, with suspicion, with active certainty I set foot in my country”, thus begins the first verse of this song in which it is described the distrust with which the exiled artists saw the possibility that the regime opened for them to return in 1988.
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“We didn’t know what to think, since one of the possibilities is that it was a trick by Pinochet. It came on October 5, the day of the plebiscite in which, if the Yes vote won, this gentleman would remain in the Government for another eight years. But, fortunately, there was a massive mobilization for the No, so that the dictatorship ended and the democratic period made way,” says Seves.
The return of music
The young people who had left Chile in their 20s would return covered in gray hair and with their families in tow, after having been the most visible face of Chileans abroad, who dedicated themselves to telling the world, in their case with songs, what was happening, behind closed doors, in their long country.
“Finally the blacklists were over, we would no longer be there, we could return. But, Pinochet was still there, the National Intelligence Directorate (Dina), its agent services, its murderous cutthroats. Are you going to return to your four-year-old daughter or are you going to endanger your wife? Everything was very controversial,” recalls the Inti Illimani musician.
But, hope won over skepticism, and the guitars, the quenas, the charangos and the voices sounded again, after 15 years, marking a campaign that, In 1988, he would end up removing the dictator from power with the forcefulness of the votes and the voices he had silenced for almost two decades.
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A caravan led by a bus transporting the musicians left from the Pudahuel airport to a popular area of the Lo Prado commune, in the northwestern sector of Santiago, where the musicians offered an emotional open-air concert.
“On September 18, which is Chile’s National Day and is very symbolic, a huge number of people were waiting for us, it was tremendously exciting. They put us on a bus and we stopped at the place where the three teachers who had their throats cut by the dictatorship in 1985 were found. People we knew, who were our age…,” recalls Seves.
The Flag Park – a bastion of popular resistance – became the scene from which the dictatorship could never take them down again. That September 24, 1988, surrounded by thousands of young people waving their red rags and their No signs, the musicians sang the songs that, for years, were prohibited on the radio.
“We find ourselves with photos instead of the people we would have wanted to hug, but, we don’t come from the past, we come from the future, of a world that admires them and is willing to open its heart to the Chile of democracy and freedom,” said Jorge Coulón, one of the founders of Inti Illimani, excitedly that day, in front of the crowd that, excited and in the middle of the crying, he sang his songs. The Quilapayún group would experience something similar days later after the plebiscite that ended 17 years of military rule.
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“The No campaign ended with a great event in the center of Santiago in which there was a rally of more than a million people. There, we sang again The town united after 15 years. That was a dream turned into reality, an incredible thing,” recalls Carrasco, who at 83 years old still retains the powerful voice of his songs, although now slower and calmer.
ANDREA AGUILAR CÓRDOBA
Special for EL TIEMPO
SANTIAGO
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