Luchin

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Description

Luchin, was written by the famous Chilean musician and activist Victor Jara, who was murdered by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the football stadium of Santiago in 1973. Pinochet rose to power that year in a bloody coup whose parallels with the war on Gaza today are striking: Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, with covert financial and military support from the United States.

Luchin tells the story of a two year old boy from the slums of Santiago de Chile. Luchín lives in a two-roomed wooden house, not so different from the houses of refugee camps here. His father has a small cart and a horse which are very precious because they are the familys only means of livelihood. At night they have to be kept inside the house for fear of being stolen. Luchín sleeps snuggled up to the horse, who is his friend. There is no room in the bed.

The song reads:


Fragile like a paper kite over the roofs of the slums of Santiago

played little Luchín, his tiny hands blue with cold

Bare-bummed and covered in mud he crawled his short life

with the rag ball, with the cat and the dog - and the horse looked on.

If there are children like Luchín that eat earth and worms

let us open up all the cages so that they fly like birds

with the rag ball, with the cat and the dog - and with the horse as well.


Who of us here hasnt seen the kids in the camps playing with rug balls and letting their kites fly freely in the sky while their world is being confined closer and closer by an ever increasing number of checkpoints and barriers around their camps, towns and villages.



The song touches on several dimensions of freedom: Freedom from being confined to slums and refugee camps by the occupation, but also freedom as a yearning of all the one billion poor on this planet for a life of dignity and finally maybe also on a more poetic level the power of resistance and sumood, to still hang on, to let the kites rise and dream of a better life



We dedicate his song to all children in Gaza. May they one day have a childhood!