How a Chilean protest song became a feminist anthem around the world

The drum is like a heartbeat. The chant is haunting and the movements hypnotic. Almost six months since it was first performed, “Un Violador en Tu Camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”) has become a universal feminist anthem that has crossed borders, languages, and cultures.

“It’s a wall of pure, raw emotion,” says Paula Soto, who took part in a demonstration of the song organized by Latin American women’s groups in London, UK. “This is a woman going to war. This is our war.”

The lyrics and movements call out violations of women’s rights and treat the issue holistically — they speak to individual experiences, from domestic abuse to abortion rights, and the institutional structures that allow these violations to take place.

In the original Spanish, a section denounces the culture of victim blaming: “And it’s not my fault / not where I was / nor what I wore.” Another calls out the system for upholding sexualized violence: “The rapist is you / It’s the cops / the judges / the state / the president.”

It’s a topic universally understood by women, but each phrase has its own meaning for those who speak them, driven by their own pain and anger.

The song, originally by Las Tesis — a then little-known feminist collective from the Chilean coastal city of Valparaiso — “contextualizes violence, placing the blame where it belongs with the perpetrator, not with the victim, and highlights the complicity of the whole system,” says Soto.

A song for social uprising

Un Violador en Tu Camino caused ripples across the world when Las Tesis first performed it in Valparaiso in November 2019. Videos began circulating on social media. A larger intervention then took place in the capital Santiago on International Day of the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, against a backdrop of an ongoing nationwide protest movement against inequality that had exploded in Chile in October. Protests originally against a high cost of living catalyzed wider calls for social and economic change, from better healthcare to environmental protection to safeguarding women’s rights.

An estimated 130,000 cases of domestic violence are reported in the country each year, according to The Chilean Network Against Violence Towards Women. In 2019, there were 46 recorded femicides.

The group told the Guardian the anthem was adapted to reflect the social uprising and crisis — as demonstrations continued to be met with violent repression and security forces faced allegations of rape, assault and torture. Since unrest erupted in October, the National Human Rights Institute has recorded 257 cases of sexual violence by authorities in the context of the demonstrations.

The title “A rapist in your path” refers to the official slogan of the Chilean Carabineros police force in the 1990s: “A friend in your path.”

Specific lyrics and choreography allude to allegations of violence from police and military. One of the movements involves squatting, referring to the practice of forcing detainees to squat naked. This police practice was banned in Chile last year, but numerous accounts suggest this is still taking place, especially to women and girls in detention, according to NGO reports on the ongoing human rights violations in Chile.

“This was on everybody’s mind,” says Soto, the daughter of Chilean exiles. Her family fled Chile during the dictatorship of 1973 to 1990, a time in which state forces commonly used sexualized violence as a form of torture.

“Chile has very strong memory of how prevalent sexual violence and rape was during that period. That can’t ever be discounted; it is intergenerational trauma.”

In early December, 79-year-old Maria Isabel Matamala took part in another organized performance of Un Violador en Tu Camino among nearly 10,000 women in Santiago. Older women were particularly encouraged to join in the demonstration, which was staged outside the National Stadium, a notorious prison camp during the dictatorship where inmates were tortured and killed. Many of the women performing “A Rapist in Your Path” together outside the stadium in December were survivors of torture under the dictatorship.

Matamala told Women Under Siege at the time: “This performance reflects all of our rage for all that has happened. We’ve taken this victimization and transformed it into force, into fight, and into conviction to create a society without violence.”

“Las Tesis brought together an extraordinary quality of writing, rhythm, theater, and concept,” says Soto. “They brought in really complex and heavy concepts from the feminist movement and feminist thinking into very simple strokes that anyone can memorize in five minutes, which is what gave it the power.”

Interpretations took place outside of Chile within days, and the anthem has since reached every continent bar Antarctica. According to a crowd-sourced map, it has spread through at least 300 cities, from Mexico City to Tokyo, New Delhi, Beirut, and Chicago.

“The speed in which the performance went around the globe needs to be understood, because it did not count on the mass media to do it. It did it by itself, and that is quite astonishing,” says Rita Segato, an Argentine anthropologist whose work on the politics of sexualized violence informed the lyrics. One of the reasons, she says, is because it “refers to a topic, perhaps the only one topic that affects all women around the globe: violence.

In the first lines, the lyrics read: “Patriarchy is a judge / That judges us for being born / And our punishment / Is the violence you now see.”

“I believe people can identify [the] complexity underneath the surface meaning of the text,” Segato says, adding that 70 years of feminist theory has finally helped us see “what was invisible” — this systemic violence.

“[But] let’s be careful here,” she cautions. “Not everywhere has the same kind of violence.”

A global anthem for a ‘borderless revolution’

As performances spread across the world, the song evolved. The words were adapted to local and personal contexts, allowing the anthem to acknowledge women’s different experiences and struggles. In Brazil, women added the lyrics: “Marielle is present. Her killer is a friend of our president,” referring to the 2018 slaying of Rio de Janeiro-based politician Marielle Franco. In India, the song became a protest against a spate of rapes and femicides. In New York, more than a hundred women performed outside the county court building where the criminal trial of Harvey Weinstein, who is now a convicted rapist, was taking place.

But, by confronting violence against women, it remained universal. And though the performance is empowering and celebrated as a cross-border protest, the unnerving truth is that it resonates globally because of this shared experience of violence.

Dilara Gürcü, a Turkish feminist author, lives in Paris where one of the first international performances outside of South America took place.

On November 29, hundreds of women occupied the space outside the Eiffel Tower and performed the chant in French. They gathered on a cold winter night, the tower lit up behind them.

Gürcü was struck by the sheer emotion of it. “I felt shaken. I felt like crying, smiling, shouting. It spoke a global language about the experience of being a woman,” she says.

Gürcü believes the power of the anthem reflects fourth-wave feminism, or “technological global feminism,” in which the use of social media and the internet helps address international violations of women’s rights, “because there are so many common issues.” She adds, “Seeing women miles away experiencing the same thing has a healing power because you know you’re not alone.”

In Poland, the role of religious institutions was added to the chant. “Here, religious fundamentalism is one of the strongest pillars of the system’s attempt to control women’s reproductive rights,” says Pamela Palma Zapata, a feminist activist and photographer who lives in Gdańsk. “[This month], for example, the lower house of parliament will begin discussions to totally ban abortion in Poland — during quarantine, when women cannot go out and protest.”

Palma Zapata says the song is a “symbol of resistance” in Poland, which is why it was performed on this year’s International Women’s Day. “It’s a sign that, together, we’re strong to say ‘enough’ to the constant attacks we face from the patriarchy.”

“It is a confirmation that our struggle, albeit with differences, is the same for all women around the world,” she says. “It is a borderless revolution against the patriarchy, regardless of nationality.”