Puerto Rican Bad Bunny Makes Chile’s Stadium Sing Against Empire

In Santiago, Bad Bunny opened 2026 by threading protest music through a stadium show, reviving Víctor Jara inside Estadio Nacional. As Chile shifts right and Venezuela convulses, one Puerto Rican songbook asks who still owns peace in the Americas today.

A Mandolin That Cuts Through Jet Noise

The first jolt of the night wasn’t bass or fireworks. It was a mandolin—thin, bright, and almost too delicate for a stadium—pulling thousands of voices into a melody that has lived through dictators, mourning, and survival. This past weekend, Bad Bunny opened his first shows of 2026 in Santiago, Chile, and before the party could even begin, he asked the crowd to remember.

A backing musician played an instrumental version of Víctor Jara’s 1971 song “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz.” The chords floated across Estadio Nacional, and the response came fast: cheering, then shouting—people throwing the lyrics back into the air like a vow. For anyone who knows Chile’s past, it was not a neutral choice. It was a match struck in a room full of old gasoline.

The gesture fit the spirit of Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the album that powers this tour and carries a resistant, political pulse through its pleasures. But in Chile, the tribute felt sharper, because Estadio Nacional is not just a venue. It is a landmark scarred by history—a place whose meaning has never been purely entertainment. The brief mandolin passage became a public reminder that Latin America’s stadiums have often doubled as theaters of power, where bodies are gathered not only to celebrate but also, sometimes, to be controlled.

Outside the arena, the region is tense in ways that make cultural signals feel louder than they used to. The text you provided frames the moment plainly: in December, Chile elected far-right politician José Antonio Kast to be the country’s next president, a figure linked by family history to the shadows of authoritarianism. In that climate, a song about the right to live in peace is not simply nostalgic. It’s diagnostic—an X-ray held up to the present.

Bad Bunny’s choice resonates further as the hemisphere watches Venezuela, where the United States has captured Nicolás Maduro after striking Caracas in the early hours of Jan. 3. Even for Venezuelans who have suffered under abuses, the text reflects a wary truth: many in the region fear what U.S. intervention often brings after the headlines fade. Latin America’s people have learned to ask not only who falls, but what structures remain standing.

When Peace Becomes a Political Word

“El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” began as an act of solidarity beyond Chile. When Víctor Jara wrote it in 1971, it was a protest against the Vietnam War, a refusal to treat distant suffering as someone else’s problem. The song’s original lens was international: the idea that peace is a right that can be stolen by empires, napalm, and cold policy math.

History soon brought the song back to Chile.

Two years later, in 1973, Chile was consumed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet after a coup against democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, described in your text as U.S.-backed. The language of “terror regime” barely covers what followed: persecution, torture, disappearances, and the systematic destruction of dissent. The right to live in peace was no longer a poetic phrase aimed overseas. It became a local emergency.

And Víctor Jara became its martyr. In the version of events in your text, Estadio Nacional itself was used as a site to torture Allende sympathizers. Jara, imprisoned there with thousands, was brutalized—his fingers broken by a guard—yet he refused silence, singing “Venceremos.” Not long after, he was shot and killed by the Pinochet-led military. Whether one knows the story in detail or only in outline, the essence remains: the state tried to erase a voice, and the voice became an emblem.

That is why Bad Bunny’s mandolin opener mattered. It didn’t ask the crowd to pretend the past is past. It suggested the past is a tool—one people use to measure today’s threats. The text also notes how “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” surged again during Chile’s mass protests in 2019, when millions demanded changes to social and economic structures long linked to dictatorship-era policy. Even when the protests responded to immediate abuses—policing, inequality, daily humiliations—they also carried a deeper demand: to dismantle systems that had survived the dictatorship with a cynical air of bureaucratic impunity.

The Spanish passage in your text widens the lens further, invoking Residente’s “This is not America” as a reminder that “America” is not a synonym for the United States—and that linguistic theft mirrors political entitlement. The argument cuts: calling only the U.S. “America” is as absurd as calling “Africa” only “Morocco,” and yet the habit persists because hierarchies persist. In this telling, the hemisphere is treated like a franchise—something the North can name, manage, and claim.

But the passage also complicates the dream of hemispheric unity. It argues that Latin America’s lived experience often aligns more closely with the wider Global South—places shaped by colonialism’s ongoing violence—than with North American power. That framing matters here because it helps explain why a song written for Vietnam could become Chile’s anthem, and why Chile’s anthem can now echo inside a stadium headlined by a Puerto Rican artist. It’s not sentimental unity. It’s shared vulnerability, shared resistance, shared memory.

After news broke on Jan. 2, sociology professor Dr. Alonso Gurmendi summarized that unease with a blunt line: “The history of US interventionism in Latin America is a history of human rights violations…” He called Maduro a monster, but warned against naïveté about the motives of U.S. power. The point wasn’t to defend a dictator. It was to defend the region from repeating a familiar pattern: replacing one form of domination with another and calling it liberation.

Songs That Refuse to Stay Buried

Bad Bunny didn’t stop at Jara. Your text says his band also performed instrumental covers of Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a La Vida” and Jara’s “Te Recuerdo Amanda.” Together, these choices formed a kind of Chilean suite—music that has carried the country’s tenderness and rage, its grief and dignity, across decades.

In a normal pop context, these would be “deep cuts,” tasteful nods meant to flatter local audiences. But this wasn’t mere cultural tourism. The timing and setting made it feel like a statement: that Latin pop’s biggest stage can still hold political memory without diluting it into an aesthetic.

That matters for the broader Latin American moment described in your text. While the hemisphere watches Chile turn right under José Antonio Kast and watches Venezuela destabilize after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, it is easy for ordinary people to feel trapped between monstrous local power and the opportunism of foreign power. In that squeeze, culture becomes one of the last spaces where dignity can be rehearsed publicly.

It is also where messages travel faster than policy. A Mexican political analyst, Abraham Mendieta, wrote online: “Thanks to Bad Bunny, ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’ is going viral again…” In the same thread, he argued that the song’s anti-imperial origins still fit “the times we live in,” casting it as a potential anthem for the era. Whether one agrees with his politics or not, the reaction reveals something crucial: when institutions fail, people turn to songs to articulate the moral shape of the present.

That is why a Puerto Rican star singing Chile’s history is not a gimmick. Puerto Rico itself is a political contradiction—Latinidad under a U.S. flag, culture that travels globally while sovereignty remains unresolved. When Bad Bunny steps into Estadio Nacional and opens with Jara, he is also bringing Puerto Rico’s own complicated relationship with empire into the room, even without spelling it out. He’s reminding audiences that the struggle over who gets to define “America” is not abstract. It shows up in passports, bases, debt, elections, coups, and the quiet fear of being erased.

For a few minutes in Santiago, the stadium became something more than a tour stop. It became an archive, a warning, and a shared breath. A mandolin line from 1971 cut through 2026 noise and asked the only question that keeps returning, decade after decade, from Vietnam to Chile to Venezuela: who is allowed to live in peace—and who has to fight just to deserve it.

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