In Chile’s ongoing social rebellion, songs are ringing out through the streets. And one of the most prominent anthems of the masses of people marching in the city centers is legendary folk singer Víctor Jara’s “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” (“The Right to Live in Peace”).

At one huge protest on October 23, in Santiago’s Plaza Italia, thousands of people beat pots and pans in protest while spontaneously singing the song. On October 25, at an even bigger gathering of 1.2 million in Santiago, a mass of people played and sang the same song in an organized concert called “Mil Guitarras por Víctor Jara” — “A Thousand Guitars for Víctor Jara.” In another enormous cultural act in Parque O’Higgins on October 27, beloved national artists, including Illapu, sang the song accompanied by the crowd.

Why has Jara’s composition become so important to the protests of 2019? First, because the song — written in 1970, originally as an homage to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese revolution — has taken on a new meaning as a condemnation of the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, who ordered the militarization of major cities to violently put down the protests. It was the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship that the military had been deployed to repress a social movement. The song has become a denunciation of the state of emergency, the military on the streets, the brutality of the security forces, and the military-controlled curfew (again, a first since the dictatorship). Second, the song has expressed the historical memory of the chilenos: the continuity of the struggles for social justice that have spanned the decades, and the living legacy of Víctor Jara, a symbol of the values of the 1960s and early 1970s.