The Exile and the Resistance: Chilean Music Outside Chile (1973–1990)

The two halves had different destinies and produced different music — but both shared the same root: the conviction that singing was resisting, that the song could do what silence could not, that the memory of what Chile had been was the only promise of what it could become again.

The Early Days: The Repression

The dictatorship wasted no time in making clear its relationship with popular music. Musicians suffered firsthand from the repression. Víctor Jara was tortured and extrajudicially executed at the Chile Stadium. Ángel Parra was tortured at the National Stadium and sent to the concentration camp in Chacabuco. Jorge Peña Hen, a classical musician who formed orchestras with young people from popular neighborhoods, was killed by the so-called Caravan of Death.

The burning of records was literal: the military destroyed entire collections of vinyl, ordered radio stations to eliminate the records of the New Song, and created blacklists of banned artists. There was an unwritten ban on playing quenas, charangos, and zampoñas, which were considered "subversive" instruments. The Andean instruments that Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún had brought to the center of the Chilean music scene were symbolically declared enemies of the regime.

The logic was clear and brutal: if music had been part of Allende's political project, destroying music was destroying the memory of that project. The dictatorship understood perfectly what its victims also understood: that songs were dangerous precisely because they survived the people who had written them.

Exile: Italy, France, and the World

Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún, named cultural ambassadors by Salvador Allende's government, were in Italy and France, respectively, when they received the news of the coup. The chance of being on tour saved them. But being saved also meant not being able to return: both groups were immediately included on the lists of people banned from entering Chile.

What they did in the following years was to build a second life from exile. Unable to return to their country, the members of Inti-Illimani settled in Italy until 1988, from where they supported international solidarity campaigns for the recovery of democracy in Chile. Quilapayún did the same from France.

They played all over Europe, in Mexico, in Cuba, in Venezuela, in any country that would receive them. Their concerts were not just musical performances but political acts: each presentation was a denunciation of the dictatorship, a demand for justice for the disappeared, a vindication of Chilean democracy before audiences worldwide who otherwise would have known little or nothing about what was happening in that long southern country.

The young people who had left Chile in their twenties 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.

The music of exile has a specific texture that differentiates it from the New Song before the coup: nostalgia became the main artistic material. Songs that described Chile from a distance — the smell of the earth, the streets of Santiago, the landscapes of the mountains seen from memory — with the melancholy of someone who knows that the return does not depend on them but on the fall of a dictator.

"Vuelvo" — composed by Horacio Salinas of Inti-Illimani from exile in Rome, with lyrics by Patricio Manns — was the song of return before the return was possible: "With ashes, with tears, with our proud impatience, with an honest conscience, with anger, with suspicion, with active certainty I set foot in my country."

The New Song: Inner Resistance

Those who stayed in Chile — those who could not or did not want to leave — also needed music. The repression had destroyed the New Song as an organized movement, but it had not destroyed the need to sing.

What emerged in the seventies and eighties within Chile was the New Song: a more discreet, more hermetic, more metaphorical movement than the New Song — because the New Song had been able to say things directly and the New Song had to say them without the censor immediately understanding them.

Groups like Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, Abril, Aquelarre, Ortiga, or the duo from Valdivia Schwenke and Nilo formed this movement, with soloists like Eduardo Peralta, Hugo Moraga, Isabel Aldunate, Cristina González, and Juan Carlos Pérez. With somewhat hermetic lyrics, mainly linked to the urban space, their sounds could be heard in the Café del Cerro, the Café Ulm, the Rincón de Azócar, university venues, Catholic Church premises, and community organization headquarters.

The spaces of the New Song were the only ones that the dictatorship did not completely control: the churches, which under the leadership of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez had declared their opposition to repression, opened their doors to artists. The universities — monitored but never completely silenced — maintained their clandestine gatherings. The cafes of Bellavista and the Italia neighborhood of Santiago functioned as meeting spaces where cultural resistance was articulated without being able to be named directly.

The New Song was more poetic, more abstract — the more contemplative faction of the youth of the time. It was a first musical response to the dictatorship, heir to the New Song but forced to speak in another way.

Illapu and the Return

Illapu — formed in 1971 in Antofagasta — was the group that best represented the experience of artists who lived through repression from within before being forced into exile. Its members were persecuted, some tortured, and eventually had to leave Chile. Like Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún, they continued making music from abroad as an act of resistance and remembrance.

The 1988 Plebiscite: The Return

On October 5, 1988, Chileans voted in the plebiscite that Pinochet had called to legitimize his continuation in power. The result was No — 54.7% of voters rejected the continuation of the dictatorship. It was the beginning of the end of the regime.

And in the weeks leading up to the plebiscite, artists in exile began to return. The group Illapu returned to Chile on September 17, 1988. A day later, Inti-Illimani did the same. For their part, Quilapayún returned to Chile on September 29, just six days before the plebiscite.

They didn't know what to think, as one of the possibilities was that it was a ruse by Pinochet. October 5 was approaching, the day of the plebiscite. Are you going to return with your four-year-old daughter or are you going to put your wife in danger? It was all very controversial.

The Inti-Illimani concert at the National Stadium in Santiago after their return was one of the most emotionally charged moments in the history of Chilean music: the group that had left young and returned older, playing in the same stadium where fifteen years earlier political prisoners of the coup had been tortured and killed. The geography of horror turned into a space of celebration and memory.

The Song of No: Chile Has Joy

The plebiscite campaign had its own soundtrack: "Chile, joy is coming" — the jingle that the opposition coalition used in their television spots, with its carefree melody and its promise of the future — was the most listened political song in Chile in 1988. It did not have the artistic depth of Víctor Jara's songs nor the ambition of the Cantata of Santa María, but it fulfilled a different function: it told a population that had lived fifteen years of fear that it was possible to smile and that joy was a political act.

Isabel Parra: The Daughter Who Continued

Isabel Parra — daughter of Violeta, co-founder of the Peña de los Parra — lived in exile from Mexico and Europe and was one of the most constant bridges between her mother's tradition and the New Song of exile. She recorded the poems of Pablo Neruda and Mario Benedetti. She performed with Inti-Illimani in Europe. She brought Violeta Parra's songs to audiences who had never heard the name of Chile.

Her brother Ángel Parra survived torture and the Chacabuco concentration camp and went into exile in Mexico, where he continued composing and recording until his death in 2017. Together, Violeta's two children were the most direct custodians of their mother's legacy during the darkest years.

Editorial note: Inti-Illimani spent fifteen years in Italy. They arrived at twenty and returned at thirty-five. Their children were born in Rome and spoke Italian before speaking Spanish. The songs they wrote in exile have a layer of specific pain that did not exist in the New Song before the coup: the nostalgia of someone describing a country they no longer know exactly how it is, because the country they remember ceased to exist the day of the coup and the one that exists now they know only by hearsay. That distance between memory and reality — between Chile as it was and Chile as it is — is the material with which the best music of Chilean exile was built. And when they finally returned and set foot on the land they had sung from so far away, they had to learn to sing from within again.