Barrio Yungay’s Muralists

Chile’s Election Walls Speak in Color: Yungay’s Muralists Paint Hope and Warning

In Santiago’s Yungay neighborhood, the Brigada Ramona Parra preps new murals ahead of Chile’s November 16 election. With far-right challengers rising and strict campaign rules limiting slogans, their brushes revive a half-century tradition, art as politics, color as argument.

Painting a Campaign Between Scaffolds and Deadlines

At Cafetería Popular, a neighborhood café in Yungay, the façade has become a battlefield of paint. Scaffolds creak, brushes click in buckets, and the smell of coffee mixes with the sharp tang of latex. Members of the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP), Chile’s oldest and most storied muralist collective, work shoulder to shoulder, tracing green outlines that will soon become doves, faces, and clasped hands.

The vote to succeed President Gabriel Boric is set for November 16, and for the BRP, time is running out. The brigade’s goal: to rally the left behind former labor minister Jeannette Jara, without breaking Chile’s tight campaign laws, which ban explicit political slogans until late in the season. Their solution is subtler, visual: hope drawn in code.

“Murals are still very effective; they keep a powerful essence inside the poblaciones,” said national coordinator Ignacio Barría, pausing mid-stroke to speak with EFE. “We have to say everything, without saying it.”

For the BRP, born in 1969 on the eve of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the method hasn’t changed much—design in daylight, paint by dusk, finish before sunrise. The urgency matches the election calendar, and the memory of a city where, in the 2019 estallido social, walls once again became newspapers.

From Allende’s Streets to 2019’s Uprising

If Mexican muralism lives in museums, Chilean muralism lives on corners. “Mexican muralism comes from above, from institutions. Ours comes from below, from the people upward,” said Alejandro “Mono” González, the BRP’s founder and this year’s winner of Chile’s National Prize for Visual Arts, in remarks to EFE. “To fall into the institution is to fall into temptation, so we must stay alert.“

That independence forged its resilience. BRP murals once celebrated Allende’s 1970 campaign; after the 1973 coup, many were destroyed, but the practice survived underground. When the dictatorship fell, new walls rose. And in 2019, when mass protests filled Santiago, the colors multiplied again, portraits of victims, slogans of defiance, faces painted in the smoke.

“Muralism is the reflection of youth protagonism in a moment of renewal and creation,” said Carla Peñaloza, a historian at the University of Chile, in an interview with EFE. “It animated Allende’s campaign then, and it animates social movements now.”

But today’s muralists face new limits. Free walls are scarcer as gentrification and advertising claim the cityscape. Electoral law has also tightened: only registered campaign commands can call for votes outright. So the BRP works in allegory, a kite as a ballot, a pair of hands as a voting box, leaving names out but meaning unmistakable. “We’re representing dignity, childhood, and the struggles that define our principles,” Barría told EFE.

The unspoken candidate is there in the palette. So is the warning that art, too, can be silenced.

Walls, Rules, and the Art of Saying Without Names

This season, the walls of Santiago are crowded again: the BRP’s bold shapes, rival collectives’ crisp stencils, the occasional corporate ad waiting for a chance to reclaim space. “Mono” González’s current workshop has shifted to posters and handbills, plastered after dark with the blunt slogan “Nunca Más.”

“For us, it’s a response to the dangerous rise of democratic fascism,” González told EFE, referring to far-right candidates José Antonio Kast and Johannes Kaiser, both defenders of the dictatorship’s legacy and now polling within reach of a December runoff.

Not everyone agrees on the right medium. “What a mural can reflect, a poster cannot: the teamwork, the almost-clandestine rhythm, the colors, the hope,” said César Padilla, a long-time BRP collaborator, speaking to EFE while stacking glue-splotched prints for the night’s run.

Between legality and legibility, the muralists write in metaphor. Chileans know how to read between the lines: a dove with a red, white, and blue wing means peace with a passport; linked figures stand for solidarity against isolation. “Brigades are a star of hope amid so much extremism and individualism,” said Tamara Cáceres of the BRP, in comments to EFE. “The rise of the far right comes hand in hand with individualism; we no longer connect. Painting together restores the common good.“

Polls suggest Jara leads, but not enough to win outright. That makes symbols matter even more: the wall as persuasion, color as coalition. In a contest where ideology fights fatigue, imagery might be the left’s loudest weapon still standing.

Night Shifts, Bright Colors, and What a City Remembers

Every brigade night ends the same. Someone climbs down from the scaffold, brushes clatter into buckets, and the painters step across the street to see what strangers will see at dawn. The finished wall glows under lamplight, faces tilted upward, hands reaching, fragments of poetry about dignity and work.

Whether it changes votes is a mystery, but the effect is visceral. “You feel it when people pass, when they stop for a second,” Barría said quietly. “That’s enough. They remember.“

Rain and politics will eventually erase it. Opponents may tag it; a landlord might repaint it. But impermanence is part of the BRP’s theology. What endures is the act, the night shared, the ladder steadied, the proof that democracy still has a texture you can touch.

In campaign headquarters and polling booths, the battle is digital. On the streets of Yungay, it’s analog, brush against the wall, hands passing color to color. As Chile counts down to November, the BRP and its fellow brigades are writing their own ballot in paint: not a slogan, but a reminder.

Walls fade. The memory of who painted them does not.