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News > Newsletter

Latin American Music Artists React to Trump's Election

  • Lila Downs performs

    Lila Downs performs "Zapata Se Queda" during the 13th Latin Grammy Awards in Las Vegas. | Photo: Reuters

Published 9 November 2016
Opinion

As an openly racist president was elected in the U.S., teleSUR takes a look at how artist-activists reacted across Latin American and the Caribbean.

1. Mexico's old-school rock-rap band Molotov did not miss the opportunity to take a jab at both U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The band, awarded a Grammy for their album “From Russia With Love” in 2012, posted a photoshopped image showing Peña Nieto building a wall.

Peña Nieto was heavily criticized when he decided to personally meet Trump before the presidential elections, after Trump promised to build a wall at the Mexican border in a bid to stop Mexican migrants traveling into the U.S., at the financial expenses of the Mexican government, after calling Mexican immigrants “drug traffickers” and “rapists.”

2. Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Dextler, whose song “Al Otro Lado del Rio” won an Oscar for the Best Original Song in the movie, “The Motorcycle Diaries” re-posted Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal's tweet saying: “Let them build the f***ing wall. History will take care of the failed plan to have Mexico pay. And to open the deficit there will always be.”

Bernal starred as Cuban revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara in “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

3. Mexican artist and Grammy Award winner Lila Downs from the Indigenous state of Oaxaca posted the video “The Demagogue” released two weeks ago.

The song portrays a “white devil who believes he is the king of the world, buying and selling hatred,” who “does not respect women, races, life, the whole humanity,” say the lyrics.

4. Cypress Hill, the first Latino hip hop crew to get both a golden and platinum record, did not denounce the victory of Trump but instead preferred to celebrate the news that marijuana was legalized for recreational use in four U.S. states.

The Los Angeles-based band has long been known for campaigning in favor of the legalization of the cannabis, usually smoking a giant joint on stage.

5. From Puerto Rico, Calle 13's main singer Rene Perez Joglar, known as Resident, commented that “the good news about Trump's victory is that it will go so badly that even the supporters of Puerto Rican statehood will want independence.” He also posted a track "appropriate for today: 'The Idiots'."

 

Resident started actively supporting Puerto Rico's independence in 2011, after the Associated Free State was not allowed to be part of the regional organization Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

6. Chile's internationally-renown feminist and Indigenous rapper Ana Tijoux posted on her Twitter account, “The world is not the world anymore. The world ate up the world,” as a reaction to Trump's victory.

7. “Argentina's most notable rapper of the millennium” according to Pagina 12, Sara Hebe re-posted a tweet by teleSUR correspondent Hibai Arbide Aza saying that “Bernie was the best in everything. EVERY THING.”

Hebe has a long past in feminist and social activism in Buenos Aires, where she has fought President Mauricio Macri's neoliberal policies, which include budget cuts in cultural programs and violent evictions of people from their homes.

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