Canción para matar una culebra/song to kill a snake.
Image courtesy of the Popular Music Archive at the University of Liverpool
by lauren ddin
In September 1970, Salvador Allende, a candidate of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) party, was elected President of Chile. Allende was the first Marxist to gain power in a liberal democracy in Latin America, with a campaign that called for a ‘peaceful road to socialism’. However, on September 11th 1973, following months of rising political tensions, Chile’s democratically elected president was overthrown by the head of the armed forces, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet proceeded to orchestrate a regime of terror and violence in which repression and torture became institutionalised aspects of society. Under his dictatorship, numerous extra-judicial killings were committed, in particular, many political dissenters, artists, and intellectuals were detained and killed. According to Amnesty International, over 3,000 people are officially recognised as having disappeared or been killed in Chile between 1973 and 1990, while 40,000 were subject to political detention and/or torture. Without a doubt, Chile experienced a cultural blackout produced by the repressive measures of the authoritarian state. Many artists went into exile, either abroad or internally, and continued to create pieces of cultural resistance.
Specifically, the image I have decided to study is a vinyl cover that belongs to the Chilean music group, Inti-Illimani, an instrumental and vocal Latin American folk band. At the moment of the Chilean coup, the band was on tour in Europe and could not return to their country as the military junta of Pinochet had outlawed their music. Consequently, they were forced to live in de facto exile. Inti-Illimani was formed in 1967 by a group of college students, and they quickly gained fame in Chile thanks to a cover of the song ‘Venceremos’ (We shall win), which served as the national anthem of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity party. The vinyl cover I have chosen is from the 1979 album ‘Canción para matar una culebra’ which means song to kill a snake. The album’s title is a reference to a poem titled Sensemayá, by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén.
The vinyl cover presented speaks directly to ‘Hope, Struggle, and Solidarity’, the overarching theme of our project and exhibition. The diaspora of artists from Chile is clearly represented in the figure of the man seen holding a guitar and suitcase, and yet this sorrowful scene is contrasted with an exuberant use of colour, as well as symbols such as a white bird and mountains to represent hope and solidarity for a better future. But what really caught my eye when I first saw this artwork was the snake, whose body is wrapped around the vinyl cover but whose head is creeping onto the image we see on the front cover. On the back of the sleeve, it becomes clearer that the the snake, which is coloured to evoke the flag of the United States, has wrapped itself around the mountains. To my interpretation, this is a metaphor for the US’ involvement in the fall of the Allende government; the image of the snake wrapping itself around the mountains alludes to the way that hopes for a better future were suffocated. In the name of containing a ‘communist threat’, the US opted to subdue the dream of socialism.
This element of the artwork motivated me to learn more about the CIA's intervention in Chile, which continues to be one of the most controversial topics related to US foreign policy. In fact, The Chile Declassification Initiative, approved by President Bill Clinton, resulted in the declassification of about 24,000 documents between 1999 and 2000. Yet to this day, academics have still been unable to agree as to whether the US was directly behind the 1973 coup. What is known is that the US backed Pinochet’s seizure of power; it is also clear that conditions the CIA covert operations prepared the ground for Allende’s demise. Within the context of the ideological confrontations of the Cold War, scholars agree that the US Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger, considered the leftist government of Allende to constitute a threat to US interests as part of the Soviet Union’s efforts to expand communism. US anxiety was already heightened due to Cuba’s transition to a Communist state. In fact, the US followed a containment policy that sought to keep communism out of the Western hemisphere by subduing the spread of ‘communist ideology’ in a bid to strengthen US imperialism. Overall, academics acknowledge that Kissinger and the containment of communism coupled with President Nixon’s approval played a central role in the US’ involvement in destabilising Chilean politics in the lead-up to the coup. Yet, the increased availability of sources made possible by the declassification of official records has not necessarily given us any conclusive answers; more often, it has served to widen the gaps in the existing body of knowledge by creating new layers of debate/contested history.
Fifty years have now passed since the coup d’état was staged in 1973. Undoubtedly, the shadow of Pinochet's regime remains as Chilean society continues to experience a great deal of pain for the dictatorships’ victims. Similarly, the CIA’s reputation remains tarnished by this incident which continues to be discussed in mainstream media until this day. Even as recently as 2021, declassified documents confirmed Australia worked with the CIA to oust the Allende government. There is clearly a vast deal of knowledge that is left to be uncovered surrounding the events of 1973 in relation to the “facts” - but the surviving collections of posters, vinyl covers, political pamphlets, and music produced during this period offer something different by serving as a window into the lived experiences that the regime sought to repress.
References
Amnesty International. 2013. Chile: 40 years on from Pinochet’s coup, impunity must end. [Online]. [Accessed 01 April 2023]. Available from: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/09/chile-years-pinochet-s-coup-impunity-must-end/
Goldberg, P.A. 1975. The politics of the Allende overthrow in Chile. Political Science Quarterly. 90(1), pp.93-116.
Shiraz, Z. 2011. CIA Intervention in Chile and the Fall of the Allende Government in 1973. Journal of American Studies. 45(3), pp.603-613.
