Note from Holly Near: Put out recently by Quilapayun, a Chilean ensemble that lived in exile after the military coup, this youtube shows footage from the 70s as well as honors the young people who are building a strong student movement today to protest the right wing government recently elected in Chile following the progressive leadership of President Michelle Bachelet. I had an opportunity to work with Quilapayun in the seventies and eighties and again when I went to Chile a few years ago. We sang at a men's prison in the northern part of the country.
The Chilean student movement roared back to life on Thursday, with organizers and media outlets reporting that hundreds of thousands of people joined students in the nation's streets calling for a free and quality education for all.
On its surface, a poem seems incapable of stopping a bullet. Yet Chile’s transition to democracy was facilitated by the poet’s survival in people’s minds, his lines repeated time and again, as a form of subversion. Life cannot be repressed, he whispered in everyone’s ears. It was a message for which he may have died, but that lives on in his verse.
Formerly top secret records that provide new details about the "Campaign of the NO" in Chile–the dynamic political movement that eventually led to Pinochet's loss of the presidency. Like "Zero Dark Thirty," "Argo" and "Lincoln," which also examine historical events, "NO" has been criticized for misrepresenting, and omitting, key elements of the history it depicts. Genaro Arriagada, who directed the actual Campaign of the NO in Chile, called the movie a "caricature."
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