In the days following the military coup in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, the folk singer and guitarist Víctor Jara was detained and taken to Estadio Chile, a sports arena converted into a mass detention center by the Pinochet dictatorship. There, he was tortured and executed.
His torturers shattered his hands and paraded him around the stadium, taunting him to try to play his guitar. This brutality was symbolic. Jara was a public figure, a musician whose work had become intertwined with democratic aspiration and uplifting the working class, so much that it was said that his music was more powerful than a thousand machine guns. Silencing him was meant to silence the masses — but it did not.
Jara’s songs endured, carried by recordings, memory, and communities both in Chile and abroad. The stadium where he was killed now bears his name. His music continues to be sung generations later, from everyone to Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen to even Bad Bunny.
Unfortunately, accountability under the law tends to arrive long after an authoritarian regime is deposed, as it did in Jara’s case. There, after decades of searching, the responsible lieutenant was located in Florida having fled Chile after the collapse of the regime. Together with the Center for Justice and Accountability, my colleagues and I brought a civil case against him in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida under the Alien Tort Statue and Torture Victim Protection Act for arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and crimes against humanity.
And so, although accountability may sometimes arrive late, the music is nevertheless part of the inspiration that ultimately pushes a society to reject and hold the regime accountable — to move towards transitional justice.
Authoritarian regimes have always feared the power of music. From the banning of performances to imprisonment, exile, torture, and worse, authoritarian regimes have repeatedly targeted musicians whose work transforms political grievance into shared language. Across decades and continents, authoritarian governments have responded to protest music with striking consistency.
In apartheid-era South Africa, singer Miriam Makeba was forced into decades-long exile after criticizing the regime, her music banned at home even as it gained reach abroad. In the Sixties in Greece, under military rule, the music of Mikis Theodorakis was prohibited by decree, its composer imprisoned and exiled. In Cold War Czechoslovakia, underground musicians were stripped of licenses, arrested, and harassed for refusing to conform to state-sanctioned aesthetics.
More recently, artists like the Kurdish artist Nûdem Durak in Turkey, Uyghur pop singer Ablajan Awut Ayup in China, and the Russian band Pussy Riot have been prosecuted under expansive national security laws, detained for lyrics deemed subversive, or labeled extremists for performances that challenge official narratives. In each case, the state’s response reveals a shared anxiety: authoritarianism depends not only on fear, but on fragmentation. Protest music does the opposite by creating a soundtrack of resistance.
Regimes react because music, particularly in moments of repression, becomes a power multiplier. It unifies communities, encourages critical thinking, galvanizes opposition, and inspires action. We have seen glimpses of this as of recent — from Bad Bunny’s halftime performance promoting unity and love in reaction to ICE raids, colonization in Puerto Rico, and rhetoric against Latin America, to the resurgence of resistance songs from decades ago. Some of these include Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name,” about institutionalized racism and police brutality in the context of the Rodney King verdict, the Cranberries’ ultimate anti-war anthem “Zombie,” and System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B (Bring Your Own Bomb)” protesting the Iraq War; to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio,” about the killing of students at Kent State by the national guard, and Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son” about draft-dodging elites. Many of these songs have unfortunately become more relevant today, with the atrocities committed against innocent civilians in conflicts around the world, to the extrajudicial killing of Americans at home.
The song that survived the stadium
While regimes continue in their attempts to silence artists, history suggests a persistent irony: the more aggressively a regime attacks music, the more enduring their message often becomes.
Few stories illustrate this more clearly than Jara. Decades after his murder and years after the collapse of the Pinochet regime, law entered the story — not as a substitute for music, but as a means of preventing erasure. In a U.S. federal civil action, a jury found a former Chilean military officer liable for Jara’s torture and killing, awarding damages to his family and creating a record of the atrocities committed. Using evidence obtained in these proceedings and by Chilean authorities, the officer, Lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nunez, will now be tried before Chilean courts. While accountability arrived late, it did arrive with an authoritative record and a finding of responsibility. The result is a legal acknowledgment that what happened mattered, and still does.
While music alone cannot deliver accountability, the law can ensure that violence does not disappear into denial or historical amnesia. Legal processes compel evidence, assign responsibility, and transform testimony into history. What authoritarian regimes seek to erase, the law preserves.
In cases involving persecuted artists, legal accountability has affirmed that cultural repression is not incidental to authoritarianism, it is central to it. These cases recognize that attacks on artists are attacks on collective expression itself.
Resonance beyond repression
Authoritarian regimes attack artists precisely because they understand their power. What they fail to understand, though, is resonance. A gunshot may sound once, but a song echoes across generations. Songs persist because they are designed for repetition. They can be sung quietly or loudly, publicly or privately. Lyrics written for one struggle can animate another decades later. This continuity explains why protest songs from earlier eras continue to resurface in moments of political strain.
Music teaches people how to hear themselves as part of something larger; how to resist. Law teaches the world how to remember. Together with lawyers and judges, artists transform voices into rights, recognition, and justice. In this way, music continues to be a shared soundtrack to resistance.
Christina Hioureas is a New York-based lawyer specializing in international law, arguing cases before international courts and tribunals. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at both the UCLA School of Law and the USC Gould School of Law, where she teaches courses on human rights law. She acted as legal counsel to the widow and daughters of the late Chilean folk musician, Víctor Jara, securing a historic judgment against the lieutenant responsible for his torture and execution during the Pinochet dictatorship.
