Los Prisioneros - Social and Political Legacy

Social and Political Legacy

According to several authors, the prisoners became, by his letters contingent and social criticism in the voice of thousands of young Chileans and Latin Americans in the 1980s. On July 1, 1983 was the year of Gonzalez Tapia Narea and for the first time they called "The Prisoner", while on the other hand, on 11 May of that year, held the first protest against Augusto Pinochet's regime giving a chain of protests until the end of 12 October 1984. Both paths crossed and Prisoners unwittingly became the banner of struggle in their being censored in the mainstream media, including the then state government network, Televisión Nacional de Chile (Channel 7), left the signs of the 1985 Telethon, as Prisoners made their appearance. According Narea, detected something that could be dangerous to the stability of the government of General Pinochet, 66 while Fonseca said the band's first album, The Voice of 80, made no direct attack on the dictatorship nor a tribute Salvador Allende.

Claudio Narea in his autobiography Mi Vida Como Prisionero (My life as a prisoner) said Los Prisioneros were left:

"I remember when George began to talk of socialism one day as we walked by San Miguel. (...) I said it was only fair that no one would starve to death and that life would be better for everyone when that system was implanted, and that insurance would be implemented. (...) But in fact it was so common that within the band we were talking about politics, because music was what filled us. (...) We had no political prisoners in our families, and we went to protest, as (...) although Pinochet got to hate watching things that happened in those days, as the case of slain professionals, for example. Jorge Gonzalez has said many times that the letter was a fill in the songs of the prisoners. It was he who invented those songs. (...) Our band will be remembered forever by those who lived through the dictatorship because of that, because there was no dictatorship and could do almost nothing but sing songs of the prisoners. I have no idea if the fame and popularity of the band had been the same without the soldiers, but it seems not. I think we belong to this period we like it or not."

But in the 1980s to Jorge-leader and principal songwriter of the group, The Prisoner did not belong to any political party and that their songs are not partisan, "We only have what everyone feels. Some people claim against capitalist society not because they had read Marx but because they simply can not afford the money to buy everything that television should have taught that to be happy. "He does not believe that their songs are in a base ideological, but it appears that once made the background. Nor that they are so rebellious, because that would mean, for example, have a generational conflict with their parents. "I have no problems with them and I never left the house, he said. To say that sounds are protesting advertising. No other claim is not against a person against the system tal.

According to Fonseca: They had another vision of music they wanted to be successful, and everywhere. So no points confined to Chile. Now, over time, you realize that despite the people that turned those songs into a tool of struggle against the dictatorship. So George is upset when asked about this, because he never felt doing protest songs "