This past weekend, Bad Bunny kicked off his first shows of 2026 with the Debi Tirar Mas Fotos World Tour stop in Santiago, Chile. In spirit of the album’s resistant and political nature, the Latin star honored Chile’s storied political history by paying homage to the country’s famed folk singer, Victor Jara.
The moment came at the beginning of the performance when one of the backing band members from Bad Bunny’s band played a beautiful instrumental version of Jara’s 1971 song “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” on a mandolin. As soon as the song’s delicate chords rung out in Estadio Nacional, the packed stadium cheered and shouted out the song’s powerful lyrics. It was a short moment with weighty implications that reach as far back as the Seventies, but felt eerily present.
Bad Bunny’s decision to honor Chile’s history is powerful in its own right, but even more compelling in light of the currently issues facing Latin America. In December, Chile elected far-right politician José Antonio Kast to be the country’s next president. Kast’s brother was a minister during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and his father was a member of the Nazi party.
Beyond Chile, Venezuela has been in the global spotlight following the United States’ capture of President Nicolás Maduro. Though Maduro’s presidency has been marked by human rights abuses, people have still been wary about the U.S. intervention in the country.
“The history of US interventionism in Latin America is a history of human rights violations, human experimentation, slavery, poverty and genocide, not emancipation,” sociology professor Dr. Alonso Gurmendi wrote on X after the news broke on Jan. 2. “Maduro is a monster who does not care about his people, but let’s not be naive: neither does the US.”
“El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” was released as the single from Jara’s album of the same name in 1971. At the time, Jara wrote the track as a protest song against the war in Vietnam. But the song took on new meaning in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, following the 1973 U.S.-backed coup that led to Jara being imprisoned, along with thousands of Chileans, for dissenting against the Pinochet regime and openly supporting the ousted Socialist president Salvador Allende.
Notably, the Pinochet regime used Chile’s famed Estadio Nacional, where Bad Bunny performed this past weekend, to torture Allende sympathizers. It was there that Jara famously resisted in the face of the brutal regime when a guard pointedly broke the folk singer’s fingers. Still, the singer refused to be silent, breaking into his song “Venceremos.” It wasn’t long after that Jara was shot and killed by the Pinochet-led military.
Along with “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” Bad Bunny also had his band do instrumental covers of Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a La Vida,” and Jara’s “Te Recuerdo Amanda.”
“Thanks to Bad Bunny, ‘El derecho de vivir en Paz’ is going viral again, one of the most beautiful songs of humanity,” Mexican political analyst Abraham Mendieta wrote on X. He added: “Composed by Víctor Jara when Vietnam defeated criminal imperialism, it makes sense and reason in the times we live in. It should be the anthem of this era.”
