Bad Bunny is in the middle of his world tour right now, moving from city to city and filling stadiums with sound, movement, and emotion. This week he is performing in Chile, and next weekend he will be in Medellín, Colombia. I will say it plainly. I really want to go again in Colombia! There is something different about being present when music becomes more than entertainment and starts to feel like a historical and collective moment of reckoning. I discussed this earlier in the post Why Bad Bunny Scares People (and Inspires Millions).

In Chile, Bad Bunny chose to open his show not with one of his own hits, but with El derecho de vivir en paz. The song was written in 1971 by Victor Jara, a musician whose name still carries weight, grief, and meaning across generations. Based on videos I have view, it appears the choice changed the tone of the night by reminding the crowd that joy does not require forgetting and that memory can coexist with celebration.

There was no lecture and no explanation. There did not need to be. Tens of thousands of Chileans understood what it meant to hear that song in that place, the SAME stadium once used as a site of detention and torture during the Pinochet dictatorship was now filled with people singing words written by a man who was murdered for believing them. That is not nostalgia. That is confrontation.

Bad Bunny did not transport the audience back in time. He brought the past forward. He reminded everyone listening that history is not finished and that culture often senses danger before institutions do. Music becomes a signal. Sometimes it becomes a warning.

Victor Jara and the Cost of Singing

Victor Jara was not dangerous because he was famous. He was dangerous to right wing dictatorship because he was clear. He was a teacher, a theater director, and a folk singer who believed that art belonged to working people. His music spoke about dignity, labor, and collective responsibility. He believed culture should help people recognize themselves as political beings rather than passive subjects.

After the 1973 military coup in Chile, Jara was arrested and taken to a stadium that had been converted into a detention center. There he was tortured and killed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His hands were broken because he played the guitar. His voice was silenced because it carried truth. His murder was not an accident or an excess. It was intentional and symbolic.

Repression in Chile did not begin with executions. It began with language. Political opponents on the left were described as threats to order. Universities were framed as subversive and liberal. Artists were accused of poisoning the nation. Once those labels were accepted, right wing violence became easier to justify. Fear was not only enforced through force. It was cultivated through rhetoric.

One line from El derecho de vivir en paz still cuts through time. “No cannon will wipe out your right to live in peace.” The song insists that peace is not passive. It is a right that must be claimed. Jara was killed because he believed that living in peace meant speaking openly about injustice. His death teaches us that right wing authoritarianism does not fear chaos. It fears the liberal conscience.

Power, Education, and Familiar Ideas

One detail that often goes unexamined is how deeply the Pinochet regime reshaped education. In case you did not know this, Pinochet’s “Chicago boys” inspired thinking on education policy centered on school vouchers and school choice. His argument was framed as freedom and efficiency. The state should honor conservative values and should limit its involvement in education and allow private organizations to control what students learned.

This was not a neutral policy choice. It was ideological. Public education was seen as a democratic institution that produced shared civic identity. Privatizing education fractured that identity and weakened public accountability. Curriculum became something that could be controlled indirectly rather than debated openly. Knowledge itself became a political and market commodity.

The language surrounding those policies sounded familiar to now, history repeats and echoes. Choice. Freedom. Efficiency. Reduced government interference. What was left unsaid was how power shifts when education moves away from public responsibility. When learning is controlled by private interests, democratic oversight weakens. When oversight weakens, inequality deepens.

These conservative ideas did not remain in Chile’s dictatorship era. They traveled. They were refined. They were repackaged for Ohio, Arizona, Florida, DC, Texas etc. When contemporary debates about vouchers and privatization sound eerily similar, it is worth remembering where those ideas were tested most aggressively and under what political conditions. Dictatorship. History does not require identical outcomes to offer clear warnings.

America’s Present Tense

The United States is not Chile in 1973. But history does often not work by exact duplication. It works through similar patterns. One of the most troubling patterns today is the normalization of intentional arrests of American citizens in politically charged contexts. ICE arrests increasingly function as spectacle rather than process. The message being sent matters more than the outcome.

When citizens are detained before guilt is established, or when legal processes are used to intimidate rather than adjudicate, it an attempt to put fear in public life. It’s why ICE is reportedly asking their detainees if they are afraid once they are detained. Americans begin to calculate risk around speech, protest, and association. That calculation shapes behavior long before any law is passed. Silence may be practical but that is not what the denizens are doing in Minnesota.

At the same time, political violence tied to speech has crossed dangerous thresholds. The tragic assassination connected to the political ecosystem surrounding figures like Charlie Kirk underscores how combustible disagreement has become. When speech becomes a trigger for violence, pluralism collapses. People stop persuading. They start preparing.

This is not about left or right. It is about what happens when disagreement is no longer bounded by shared rules. Once violence enters the space of speech, and those who perpetrate it are pardoned en masse, everyone becomes less safe. Democracies do not survive that transition easily.

The Shooting of Renée Good and Unequal Accountability

The shooting of Renée Good intensified these concerns. Renée Good was white, an American citizen, a mother, and a civilian. Her death shocked many people who had long believed that state violence was something that happened in other communities. Where were all the Foxnews voices that once insisted “white lives matter”? They do matter. Every life matters.

Her death resonated not only because of who and where she was, but because of what it revealed. It fit into a long and painful history of African Americans experiencing state violence without proportional accountability. Each incident is treated as isolated. Over time, isolation becomes implausible. The pattern of oppression of liberty speaks for itself.

African American communities have been saying this for generations. What makes moments like this different is that more people are now forced to confront a reality they were previously insulated from. When violence reaches beyond historically targeted groups, denial becomes harder to sustain. Empathy often arrives late, but it arrives powerfully.

What followed Good’s death deepened public concern. Six Justice Department attorneys resigned this week after objecting to how the investigation was being handled. They protested that the focus was being shifted away from the officers and toward Renée Good and her family. They also objected to the federal government’s refusal to fully cooperate with local law enforcement. Those resignations are not procedural footnotes. They are signals of institutional fracture.

They aren’t the first. When thousands of career attorneys walk away from the Justice Department rather than participate, it raises serious questions about whether justice is being pursued or politically managed. Accountability does not weaken public trust. The appearance of shielding power does. This is how government legitimacy erodes.

Universities, Speech, and Control

Universities have always been spaces where societies argue with themselves. They are imperfect and sometimes exclusionary, but they remain central to democratic life. That role makes them targets when political power becomes anxious. In recent years, universities in the United States have increasingly been framed as left wing threats rather than public goods. Funding declines, legislative decrees, hiring interventions, and public attacks have followed. Faculty are portrayed as dangerous. Students are described as unruly. Research becomes suspect when it challenges power. None of this requires formal censorship. Fear and pressure do the work quietly.

This atmosphere changes behavior. Scholars weigh risk before inquiry. Students hesitate before organizing. Administrators prioritize avoiding controversy over defending principle while calling for neutrality. Over time, silence replaces debate. That silence is not neutral. It is corrosive. Historians show that authoritarian movements rarely begin by closing universities. They begin by narrowing what is safe to say inside them. Once inquiry is constrained, democracy weakens from within.

Law, Morality, and What Comes Next

Law is meant to restrain power, not perform it. When prosecutions stretch legal theory to serve political ends, trust collapses. Citizens begin to see law as a weapon rather than protection. That perception is dangerous, even when individual cases are defended as necessary. Grand juries pushing back against weak or symbolic prosecutions matter. They show that institutional norms still exist. But the fact that such resistance is notable tells us how strained the system has become. Norms should not have to fight for survival.

The most alarming signal comes when leaders suggest they are not constrained by law but only by their own morality. History is unambiguous on this point. Personal morality is not a substitute for shared rules. Once law becomes optional for those in power, it becomes punitive for everyone else. We know what comes next when leaders claim exemption from restraint. We have seen it before. Liberty does not vanish overnight. It erodes through normalization, silence, and selective enforcement.

The Right to Live in Peace

Victor Jara sang about the right to live in peace because that right was already under threat. Peace, in his vision, was not quiet compliance. It was dignity, voice, and shared responsibility. He was killed because he refused to separate peace from justice. When Bad Bunny opens a concert with that song, he is not reenacting history. He is refusing amnesia. He is reminding us that culture often notices danger before institutions do. Music becomes an early warning system.

The echoes between Chile’s past and America’s present are not predictions. They are reminders. We know what happens when dehumanization becomes normal, when law bends to power, and when fear replaces accountability. Liberty is fragile, not because people do not love it, but because they assume it will protect itself. A stadium singing about the right to live in peace is not a memory. It is a choice. The question is whether we are still willing to make it.

This post is dedicated to Victor.