The New Chilean Song: The Movement the World Heard After the Coup (1965–1973)

The movement was not born to run a political campaign. It was born in 1965 at a peña — a live music venue — that Violeta Parra's children, Ángel and Isabel, opened at 340 Carmen Street in Santiago: the Peña de los Parra, the space where a generation of young musicians gathered to play songs that combined Latin American folklore with Andean instruments, with the harmonic complexity of European singer-songwriter music, with lyrics that spoke of the social reality of Chile and the continent with an honesty that commercial radio would never have allowed.

What united all those musicians — Víctor Jara, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani, Illapu, Patricio Manns, Rolando Alarcón, Isabel and Ángel Parra — was not a political program but an aesthetic and ethical attitude: the conviction that popular music had the obligation to speak of the real world, that the instruments of indigenous peoples were as legitimate as the electric guitar, and that the song could be both art and political act without either dimension betraying the other.

La Peña de los Parra and the Birth of the Movement

La Peña de los Parra was the first physical space of the movement: a small and inexpensive venue where musicians played without amplification for audiences of students, intellectuals, and workers who paid a modest entrance fee and listened in silence — or sang together when they recognized the song.

The model of the peña — the intimate live music space alternative to the recording industry and television — quickly spread throughout Santiago and the rest of the country. Universities had their peñas. Unions had their peñas. Working-class neighborhoods had their peñas. The music reached directly from the musician to the audience without the filter of the industry that would have tamed its content.

The label DICAP — Discoteca del Cantar Popular, founded in 1968 by the Communist Youth — was the recording arm of the movement: a record label that recorded and distributed the music of the Nueva Canción without the limitations of the commercial market. Most of the fundamental records of the movement were published by DICAP.

Víctor Jara: The Most Complete Artist of Chile

Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was born on September 28, 1932, in San Ignacio, a small rural town in southern Chile, into a peasant family. His mother was a folk singer — the first voice he heard, the first guitar he saw played. His father was an alcoholic and violent. His childhood was harsh in a way that he transformed into artistic material without turning it into victimhood: Víctor Jara's songs speak of the poor without condescension, because he was one of them.

He arrived in Santiago as a teenager, studied theater at the University of Chile, and became one of the most important stage directors of Chilean university theater — a dimension of his work that is often forgotten when only the singer-songwriter is mentioned. The theatrical training gave him something that most singer-songwriters of his generation did not have: the ability to construct a song like a scene, with characters, with dramatic conflict, with resolution.

His songs are small plays: "I Remember You Amanda" (1969) — the story of Amanda who runs for five minutes to meet Manuel during the factory break, knowing that Manuel will not return because he went to the mountains and "remained between the snow and the earth and the sea" — is a perfect narrative in four minutes: love, work, war, death, without a single word too many. The song does not explain the political conflict that killed Manuel — it shows it in Amanda's running body and in the empty space where Manuel should be.

"The Right to Live in Peace" (1971) — written against the American intervention in Vietnam, with the title of a poem by Pablo Neruda — became during the Chilean social uprising of 2019 the most sung anthem of the protests: forty-eight years after being recorded, the song found its most massive moment when Chile returned to the streets to demand the same thing Jara had asked for.

"Prayer to a Worker" (1969) — winner of the First Festival of the New Chilean Song — is his most ambitious work in formal terms: a secular prayer to the field worker, with the structure of a psalm and the urgency of a political speech, which turns popular religious tradition into an instrument of class consciousness.

"Manifesto" (1973) — recorded weeks before the coup, as if he knew what was coming — is his artistic testament: "I sing because the guitar has meaning and reason / I sing that has been brave, will always be a new song." The declaration of faith in the song as a political and ethical act that needs no justification beyond itself.

September 11, 1973

The military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, was, among many other things, an act of deliberate cultural violence: Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship knew exactly what the Nueva Canción meant, who its artists were, and how deeply they had connected with the social base of the government it had just destroyed.

Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún, appointed cultural ambassadors of Salvador Allende's government, were in Italy and France, respectively, when they received the news of the coup. Chance saved them: if they had been in Chile that morning, they would probably have met the same fate as Víctor Jara.

On September 12, 1973, just one day after the military coup, Jara was arrested and taken to the Estadio Chile, where he would be tortured and killed. During the days he was detained along with almost five thousand prisoners in that stadium, he continued writing. On Saturday, September 15, he took paper and pencil and wrote his last verses to record on paper the horror he was experiencing. That poem"We are five thousand" — is one of the most devastating documents in the history of political repression in Latin America.

He was killed in the Estadio Chile with 44 bullets after being tortured for days. His executioners destroyed his face and hands: "Now let's see you play those beautiful songs, you son of a bitch," they said to him.

In 2023, fifty years later, six former military officers were convicted for his murder. The stadium where he died now bears his name.

Quilapayún: The Cantata of Santa María

Quilapayún — "three beards" in Mapudungun — was the group most directly linked to the political action of the movement: a male vocal ensemble with Andean instruments and guitars that performed songs by authors and works of collective composition with a solemnity and power that made them the official sound of the Chilean left.

Their most important work — the "Cantata Popular Santa María de Iquique" (1970), with music by Luis Advis and text by Quilapayún — is the most ambitious piece of the entire Nueva Canción Chilena: a cantata in the form of a popular oratorio that narrates the massacre of the Santa María School of Iquique in 1907, when the Chilean army fired on three thousand nitrate miners and their families who had gathered at that school to demand better working conditions. It is estimated that between five hundred and three thousand six hundred people died.

The Cantata turned that forgotten episode — deliberately buried by official history — into the collective memory of the Chilean working class. It remains the most performed vocal work in Chilean musical history and one of the most important in all of Latin America.

Inti-Illimani: The Andean Sophistication

Inti-Illimani — "sun of the snowy mountain" in Aymara — was born in 1967 among students of the State Technical University with a more musical and less directly agitational orientation than Quilapayún: their project was to explore the music of all Latin America — Andean, Caribbean, Brazilian, Bolivian Andean — and to build with them a new musical language that was popular without being simplistic.

With more than three decades of work in Latin American root music, with strong influences from Europe and the deepest folklore of Chile, Inti-Illimani is a school of sound and ethics for local culture. The variety of instruments they mastered — quena, sikus, charango, Venezuelan cuatro, mandolin, in addition to conventional instruments — allowed them to create sound textures that no other group in the movement achieved.

The coup found them touring in Europe. Fifteen years of exile in Italy began, which turned their music into the most international face of Chilean resistance.

The Music the Coup Could Not Destroy

The Chilean New Song became known to the world thanks to the impact of the military coup on September 11, 1973: until then, Chilean singers were practically unknown outside the country, but the growing interest in the new political situation and the publicity from exiles led to the formation of an internationally recognized musical phenomenon.

The cruelest paradox in the history of the Chilean New Song is this: the same coup that destroyed it within Chile launched it to the world. Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani played in Europe, in Mexico, in Cuba, throughout the world in solidarity with the Chilean resistance, bringing the songs of Víctor Jara and Violeta Parra to audiences that adopted them as their own.

The dictatorship burned the records. People kept singing them from memory.

Editorial note: The soldiers who tortured Víctor Jara in the Chile Stadium broke his hands before killing him — according to some testimonies, specifically so he could not play the guitar. And he, with his hands shattered, continued writing. The poem "We are five thousand" was written in that stadium, with that body, under those conditions. The dictatorship wanted to destroy the music by taking the musician's hands. It did not understand — or understood too late — that Víctor Jara's music did not live in his hands but in the hands and voices of all who had learned it. Fifty years later, "The Right to Live in Peace" was heard in all the squares of Chile during the social uprising of 2019. The hands that played it were different. The song was the same.