On Víctor Jara’s “The Right to Live in Peace”

In October 2019, there were shootings in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Long Beach, and Kansas City. Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Simone Biles won her twenty-first medal at the world gymnastics championships. But these are US headlines—the rest of the world focused on other events, and in Latin America the spotlight was on Chile.

During that tumultuous month in 2019, protests rocked the narrow nation. More than a million young people from all classes poured into the streets to demand social and economic justice. And during those marches and demonstrations, a curious thing occurred: “El derecho de vivir en paz” (“The Right to Live in Peace”), a song by Víctor Jara that had not been a particularly big hit in his lifetime, became an anthem.

Jara was a national hero in Chile, a singer-songwriter and poet dedicated to social justice who died in 1973 at the age of 40, murdered by the CIA-backed military forces that ousted Salvador Allende, the first popularly elected socialist president of Chile. Because of his music-making and because he was an artist, before they shot him, Jara’s captors cut off his hands.

Jara had not worked alone. He was part of a larger activist arts community, and particularly of what’s called Nueva Canción Chilena, or the Chilean New Song Movement, which also included Violeta Parra (of “Gracias a la vida” fame), Quilapayún, and Inti-Illimani. After Jara's death, his American-born widow Joan Turner, the executor of Víctor’s estate, established La Fundación Víctor Jara, to keep his music and his ideas alive.

In October 2019, one of the foundation’s annual programs, Mil guitarras para Víctor Jara (a sing-along with guitar accompaniment), coincided with the protests, so that the the poet’s music effectively served as its soundtrack. “El derecho de vivir en paz” was sung by hundreds of thousands of voices.

The original song’s lyrics, however, are very specific to a particular moment, and it’s not exactly 2019:

El derecho de vivir
Poeta Ho Chi Mi
Que golpea de Vietnam
[…]
El derecho de vivir en paz
Indochina es el lugar
del ancho mar
Donde revientan la flor
Con genocidio y napalm
[…]
Tío Ho, nuestra canción
[…]

And, from the translation by Jara’s widow, Joan Turner:

The right to live,
poet Ho Chi Minh,
strikes out from Vietnam.
[…]
The right to live in peace.
Indochina is the place
on the far side of the wide sea,
where they blow up flowers
with genocide and napalm.
[…]
Uncle Ho, our song
[…]

By the end of the month, the song had been revised, with new lyrics composed in collaboration with more than two dozen contemporary Chilean artists, among them Mon Laferte, C-Funk, Javiera Parra, and Manuel García. Released with a statement from the artists and the blessings of the Jara foundation, the new version quickly replaced the original on the streets.

El derecho de vivir
Sin miedo en nuestro país
En conciencia y unidad con toda la humanidad
Con toda la humanidad
[…]
El derecho de vivir en paz
Con respeto y libertad

Un nuevo pacto social
Dignidad y educación
Que no haya desigualdad
[…]
Es la paz nuestra canción
[…]

 

Here, in my translation:

The right to live
without fear in our country,
in consciousness and unity with all humanity,
with all humankind.
[…]
The right to live in peace
with respect and freedom.
A new social pact.
Dignity and education.
Let there be no inequality
[…]
Peace is our song.
[…]

 

Revised by Chilean singer-songwriter Elizabeth Morris and the artists who recorded it, the new lyrics were a massive hit (more than six million views on YouTube) but the new version wasn’t without its critics. For some, the mere act of revising Jara’s work seemed sacrilegious. The main target of the criticism seemed to be the omission of Ho Chi Minh. But the foundation released a statement saying that if Jara himself had written the song today, he would not have included the Vietnamese leader’s name.

In 1971, when Jara wrote the original, the Vietnam war was raging and there was great fear in the Third World—and in socialist countries in general—of US intervention. The new version, though more inclusive and more current, is also more generic, but it has helped generate new interest in Jara’s body of work and in his story as a poet of the nation.

When I first heard the new take on Jara’s song, I was quite moved. I began to wonder what song from American protest movements might still find such resonance  today: “I Shall Not be Moved”? “Blowin’ in the Wind”? “Mississippi Goddamn”? “Eve of Destruction”? “Masters of War”? Is there anything comparable to Jara’s song that could bring us together? And what changes, if any, might that song need?

In Chile, the new version of Jara’s song didn’t simply thunder through the millions on the street. It also flooded TikTok in thousands of shorts supporting leftist candidate Gabriel Boric, the second popularly elected socialist president of Chile. After becoming an anthem, “El derecho de vivir en paz” soon morphed into a campaign soundtrack and then a song of triumph.

(For more information on Víctor Jara, “El derecho de vivir en paz,” and the Nueva Canción Movement, you can check out an Audible documentary called “La Cinta Perdida”/“The Lost Tape,” which will be released later this month. I did the English translation and was completely riveted by the story.)