When someone like Mercedes Sosa dies, that part of one who grew up with her hurts, that unrecoverable part that one would like to be permanent and eternal - never old, never sick.

There are people who cry when these things happen, they cry for a woman they did not know personally, with whom they have not shared a stock or a blanket, whom perhaps they have not even seen in concert. 

They cry for the voice that soaked in poetry the evenings of juvenile distress, years of searching for beauty and solace.

That voice of a distant woman filled rooms in gloom, singing, for example, that there is a child out in the street, and it awakens indignation and love better than that one of a mother.

Representatives of a generation of poetry and struggle are dying, and one cannot avoid thinking of his own generation - which seemed more like degeneration than anything else.

Who the hell follows the wake of these men and women who died or were exiled in the 1970s, for defending what they believed as just, for building a future that too often ended up destroying them, who were the conscience and the beauty of the human animal?

You will tell me also that there are women and men today who defend, not so much what is theirs, but what is everyone’s against winds and tides, against bullets and bombs, against the manipulation and silence of the means of un-communication.

And they are right, because if something distinguishes the people is raising its voice, its Indian and true voice, suffering and whole; this voice, for the unsellable, for the incomparable, cannot jump ahead of Operation Triunfo, American Idol or the Whatever Factor.

Mercedes Sosa has died. We have her records, yes, compact discs, the flying saucers which those of us who grew up surrounded by vinyl, seem like Martian technology.

Mercedes Sosa is dead, assure us the newspapers, the radio stations, it is spat by TVs worldwide. But what is dead, I suspect, is a part of us.

We must give away Mercedes’ songs out on the streets, singing them out loud, if necessary, and mix her voice with the tears of the maternity wings of hospitals, there, where resurrection is possible.