New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani congratulated Brazil’s Lula on his reelection by quoting a 1970s Marxist protest slogan linked to Salvador Allende’s Chile.
Breitbart reported that Mamdani, the left-wing mayor of New York City, marked Brazilian President Lula Inacio de la Silva’s second-round victory on Sunday with the line “The people united will never be defeated!”
That phrase is not a generic pep talk. It is the title and refrain of a 1970s protest song written as Chile’s socialist government slid toward collapse, and it has traveled for decades as a left-wing street chant.
Mamdani’s choice put the leader of America’s largest city in open rhetorical company with that tradition while Brazil’s opposition still refused to concede.
Lula lost the first round to Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro by a little over two points. He then narrowly won the runoff on Sunday and secured what reporting described as a historic fourth term.
A judge Breitbart described as loyal to Lula intervened at the last minute to keep polls open an extra two hours in Bahia, a northeastern electoral stronghold for the president.
As of Monday morning, Bolsonaro had not conceded.
Those details matter because Mamdani did not offer a bland diplomatic note. He reached for a slogan with a long political pedigree and used it as the congratulation itself.
Chilean pianist Sergio Ortega wrote “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” in the 1970s while Salvador Allende’s government was tottering.
Allende, described in the reporting as a Communist-sympathizing president, had nationalized Chile’s mining industry. Nationwide worker strikes followed. In September 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew him.
Allende died during the coup. A Chilean court ruled in 2012 that he committed suicide with an AK-47 rifle gifted by Fidel Castro as Pinochet’s troops stormed the presidential palace. Castro and other leftists long insisted Allende died in a final gun battle instead.
Pinochet then ruled Chile for 17 years. The song outlived the government that inspired it and became a portable anthem for the international left.
Percussionist Carlos Quezada played in Ortega’s band and later lived in exile in France. In a December 2019 BBC interview, he described why the music mattered to them before the coup.
"It was very exciting. We defended ourselves through songs, it was our only possibility. We felt that we had the responsibility to raise awareness in people, through music, to avoid the hell that came a few months later anyway,"
Quezada also said audiences never let the number go.
"They always ask us to end this song; I’ve been in the band for 50 years and I think I’ve sung it more than a thousand times,"
The same refrain later showed up in European street politics, including France’s Yellow Vest demonstrations from 2018 to 2020. Reporting tied the song to those protests and to later chaotic vandalism as the movement tried to stage a comeback.
Mamdani did not have to reach for a 1970s Marxist protest hook to notice an election result in Brazil. Mayors congratulate foreign winners with plain language every year.
He quoted a chant born under Allende, carried through Pinochet’s coup, kept alive by exiles, and recycled in hard-left street actions. He did it while a Brazilian senator who won the first round still withheld a concession and while a late judicial order had stretched voting time in a Lula base state.
Voters in New York hired a mayor to run city services, not to cosplay Latin American revolutionary nostalgia. When that mayor salutes a socialist victory with the old Allende-era line, he tells the public which political family he claims.
Taxpayers can live with honest disagreement about foreign elections. They should not have to pretend a Marxist street slogan is just friendly manners.
