El pueblo unido jamás será vencido

The story

"¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" is a Chilean protest song with music by Sergio Ortega Alvarado and words written together with the band Quilapayún. Its title came from a phrase used by the Colombian political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in a speech of the 1940s, which supporters of Popular Unity, the socialist government of President Salvador Allende, took up as a slogan in the early 1970s. Ortega said he composed the song after hearing a young man shout the phrase as he was walking home in Santiago in June 1973. Shortly before, Allende had named him Cultural Ambassador of the Popular Unity government, a post he briefly shared with Víctor Jara.

The song was first released in June 1973 on the live album Primer festival internacional de la canción popular (DICAP label), which Quilapayún closed with it, and was recorded in Chile at a large Quilapayún concert in the Alameda in Santiago, three months before Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état overthrew Allende and began the military dictatorship. Víctor Jara was killed days after the coup. With Ortega's "Venceremos", it became one of the most successful songs of the Nueva Canción Chilena. It has a marching rhythm, and its chorus is a shouted slogan over percussion alone.

In the following years the song appeared on many albums, above all by Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani, who lived in exile through the dictatorship, in France and Italy respectively, and continued their careers there until they returned to Chile after the dictatorship ended more than fifteen years later. Its theme, its simplicity in any language and its reach across political lines made it a song of protests worldwide, most with no tie to Chile. In 1975 the American pianist Frederic Rzewski wrote 36 piano variations on it. In Iran its melody carried a Persian revolutionary song, "Barpakhiz" ("Arise"), sung by leftists in the revolution of 1979 and revived in the Green Movement; in 1979 its English title was chanted in the White Night riots in San Francisco after the sentencing of Dan White for the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk; and in Argentina in 1983 it was sung with new words at the Resistance March for the disappeared, and still in the 2000s after the disappearance of Julio López.

Later movements kept adapting it. The Ukrainian band GreenJolly reworked it as "Razom nas bahato" (Together We Are Many) in the first days of the Orange Revolution of 2004, and that song was Ukraine's entry at the Eurovision Song Contest of 2005. In 2010 and 2011 protesters in Tunisia, and from 25 January 2011 in Tahrir Square in Egypt, chanted a slogan of their own to its rhythm, which became the unofficial slogan of the Arab Spring. It was translated into Chinese during Taiwan's Sunflower Student Movement in 2014 and played in Cantonese in the Hong Kong protests of 2019–2020, and its title became a motto of the protests across Latin America in 2019–20. Its title is also an unofficial motto of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and President Nicolás Maduro has quoted it.

What it says

A rallying song of political unity and resistance. Its mood is defiant and determined, built on a marching beat and a shouted chant.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.