‘Chile Lucha’ por todo el mundo/Chile Fights from across the world: How Chilean resistance to dictatorship became international.

Image courtesy of the Popular Music Archive at the University of Liverpool

by Elisa Martinez Relano

The Chile Lucha album represents a story in two halves, told through the protest songs of a musician and the paintings of a visual artist. Released in 1975, it is a response to the violent coup d’état carried out by the army under General Augusto Pinochet two years earlier. The first question that arises when seeing this album, even after a momentary glance, is: why do the translations into Swedish and Finnish feature so prominently? What connects Chile and the Nordic states despite being over 13,000 kilometres apart from one another?

The writer of these songs is Francisco Roca, otherwise known as Luis Veloz Roca. A Chilean folk musician based in Sweden since the early 1970s, Roca’s dual national identity is indicative of the international dimensions of the Chilean solidarity movement. Despite living abroad, he joined various bands that incorporated Andean instruments, resulting in his use of guitars (charango lute and Spanish), flutes (quena and zampoña), and the bombo drum in the Chile Lucha album. This grounds Roca’s musical work in Chilean culture and keeps the listener aware of the political context throughout. Accordingly, printed on the lyrics sheet is a significant declaration that all royalties were to be given to the Chilean resistance movement. Directly named in the acknowledgments of the album are two of the solidarity campaigns that supported the project. First, is the French Comité de Soutien a la Lutte Révolutionnaire du Peuple Chilien (Committee to Support the Revolutionary Struggle of the Chilean People). As one of many bodies formed in France to support the revolutionary struggle after the coup, they sponsored lawyers who went to represent incarcerated Chileans. This committee may also have been the connection to the Chilean artist that created the album cover, Pedro Uhart, who was based in Paris. The second acknowledgement is to Chile-kommittén i Sverige (Chile Committee in Sweden), which was a group that despite being initially populated by the considerable number of refugees arriving from Chile, quickly achieved a majority native Swedish membership. They appear to have advocated for an international line in all activities by collaborating with Stockholm-based campaigns for freedom in Vietnam, Palestine, and Angola alongside Chile (fn1). This is evidence that the movement in Chile, Sweden, Finland, and France contextualised itself within a broader struggle across multiple continents (perhaps a Tricontinental approach). It is this transnationalism that becomes central to the understanding of Roca’s Chile Lucha as a record of hope, struggle, and solidarity.

Not only does the title translate to ‘Chile Fights’, but the photographs of protesters on the inner sleeves and inserts embed an overwhelming sense of active protest into this album. When opening the cover sleeve of the album, the viewer is confronted with crowds holding placards such as ‘La revolución se hace luchando, no llorando’ (The revolution is made by fighting, not by crying). This may also be a reference to the fact that, for some people in Chile, the way they grieved the murders and disappearances caused by the regime was through action and cultural intervention. When we interviewed the graphic artist and founder of the Tallersol Archive Antonio Kadima about his experiences of the period, he also expressed this sentiment pertaining to art as an outlet or reaction to events as they occurred. On the reverse cover, we see a wall plastered with posters and handwritten messages from the far-left organisation MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement). This is a more literal reference to the types of armed opposition operating in the country up to that point. The MIR was founded in 1965 from various socialist, anarchist, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary factions whose tactics ranged from political pressure to paramilitary action. After the coup they were heavily persecuted on account of being the foremost guerrilla movement. Alongside the lyrics and translations is a quote from the assassinated MIR leader Miguel Enríquez ‘La lucha será larga y difícil […] hasta vencer’ (the fight will be long and hard until defeat). But whose defeat? Enríquez’s combined melancholic and hopeful tone denotes the duality of struggle, as he contemplates what he sees as the inevitable loss of life against the opposition’s eventual demise. Roca echoes this in the song ‘Palomita-Palomita’, which alludes to the particularities of the Chilean context. Together with Pinochet’s oppressive censorship, the fact that Chile spans over 4,000 kilometres from north to south meant communication could be difficult. Therefore, the song describes ‘palomita mensajera’ (messenger dove) who must resist her wings being cut so that she can fly to inform people of current events (fn2). The dove serves as a triple symbol: for freedom, for communication, and for the natural landscape of the country. This offers an explanation of why birds are such frequent motifs in the protest posters of the period, acting as a signal to the population that the art pieces on which they appeared concealed important communication. Thus, even from beyond Chile, Roca reminds both Pinochet and the wider world that the population would not give up fighting for freedom.

Beyond the music itself, the album artwork provides further insight into the cultural production of Chileans living abroad as well as other global solidarity efforts. The illustration on the vinyl cover was adapted from a painting by Pedro Uhart, who, much like Roca, was born in Chile and moved abroad before the coup. Instead of Sweden, he settled in France. The original piece was one of his ‘floating murals’ painted during September 1973, only weeks after the Allende government was overthrown. Without enough money to buy a canvas, in 1972 he began using old sheets which he could hang in the street like the murals found in Chile. By adopting this medium, he built upon the Latin American tradition of mural painting. In turn, a reclamation of public space could take place in which Uhart increased the visibility of his politically charged artwork. On the 25th of September 1973, 14 days after the coup, Le Monde described it as the Chilean Guernica, in reference to Picasso’s depiction of the human experience of terror, during a review of the Paris Biennale (fn3). Uhart also displayed the work across the European continent, for example in Warsaw, Poland. However, looking further into the history of this painting serves also to mitigate this hopefulness associated with a transnational solidarity movement. The original piece and Pedro’s subsequent work were subject to censorship by the leaders of French art organisations who did not agree with his overtly political tone. Perhaps this is another reason why the mural worked so well as a medium for Uhart; he could take advantage of the ‘outdoor’ and ‘unofficial’ nature of these spaces to raise awareness for Chile in a way that he could not elsewhere.

Present in Uhart’s artwork is the style of graphic design found in typical Chilean 20th century posters and cartoons, blended with features of the storytelling tradition and folkloric art practices of his upbringing to create a hybrid Chilean design. The resulting composition has little unfilled space, instead being covered with distinct elements and bright colouring. Such an approach makes the blank section in the top left-hand corner of the mural even more striking, as only a single eye flowing with tears occupies the area. This emptiness locks your gaze onto the section, almost becoming a visualisation of the chasm left by the thousands of people that would end up being displaced from their families over the duration of the dictatorship. Thousands were imprisoned, murdered, or exiled. This largely figurative piece depicts US  soldiers standing on top of a Chilean flag, as it is being strangled by the heavy ropes that the artist has woven through the painted sheet. This lays out Uhart’s accusation against countries such as the USA for facilitating and later upholding the Chilean coup and military regime. Finally, a sea of people split into waves of red, white, and blue are rising up from the bottom of the mural. These figures carry hammers and g

uns, or, the implements of manual labour and armed resistance. Roca and Uhart’s messages converge at this point, displaying the determination of the Chilean people against oppression. As such, this part of the painting is what appears on Roca’s album cover. Yet on the album’s modified version of the painting, it has been rotated in a way that the waves of people now appear to form the shape of Chile’s coastline. This impression is maintained as the names of key cities in the struggle of the coup (Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepción) have been added to the drawing.

For people hoping to learn from the experiences of this period in Latin America, ‘Chile Lucha’ provides a window into this historical context. The artwork provides insight into the roles of key nations and organisations involved in solidarity activism, as well as the challenges they faced. The multiple stories, people, and artforms combined within this one piece is a testament to the collaborative nature of resistance movements linked to the Chilean cause.

Footnote 1: Charlotte Tornbjer, ‘Moral shock and solidarity. 1973 and the Swedish commitment to Chile’, in 1973: a meeting with the spirit of the times, ed. by Marie Cronqvist, Lina Sturfelt, and Martin Wiklund (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2008) pp. 56-70 (p. 63).

Footnote 2: ‘Conversando con Francisco Roca’, Perspectivas a través de la Nueva Canción Chilena, University of Chile Radio, 23 October 2013 <https://www.mixcloud.com/borisenaud/perspectivas-40-ruch-02/>

Footnote 3: ‘Publications’, Pedro Uhart <https://www.pedro-uhart.com/WebPagesFR/presse.php>