Very interesting. The Spanish Wikipedia confirms the connection between the two songs.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamba_de_mi_esperanza
"Zamba de mi esperanza" was composed by Luis Profili in the 1950s. Profili (1906-1975) was a construction entrepreneur from Mendoza who lived in San Martín . He was a fan of folk music, especially zamba . He sang accompanying himself on the guitar or bass drum and composed songs with no knowledge of musical notation. One of these songs was "Zamba de mi esperanza", which became well-known among the participants in the peñas and gatherings of friends where Profili would sing occasionally.
In those circumstances, she was heard by Los Hermanos Albarracín , a duo from La Rioja related to Jorge Cafrune, "el Turco", a singer from Jujuy of Arab origin, who had recorded the song "Virgen india" by the Albarracín on his album, Folklore (1962), which also became his first hit.
It was recorded as the opening track of Cafrune's fifth solo album, Emoción, canto y guitarra (1964). Horacio Fontova has joked about its popularity, saying that "anyone who doesn't know Zamba de mi esperanza is a marine ."
Argentina was experiencing a boom in Argentine folk music , which was becoming increasingly popular, within the framework of major socioeconomic transformations, characterized by a broad process of industrialization centered in Buenos Aires , which drove a large wave of internal migration from 1930 onwards, from the countryside to the city and from the provinces ( interior ) to the Capital .
In January 1978 Jorge Cafrune sang "Zamba de mi esperanza" at the Cosquín Festival. A few days later, on January 31, 1978, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver as the artist was riding on horseback to Yapeyú . There are serious suspicions that it was a murder ordered by the military government and carried out by then-Lieutenant Carlos Villanueva, whom two survivors of the La Perla clandestine detention center have pointed to as the person who said that "he had to be killed to prevent other singers from doing the same." [ Note 1 ]
Three years later, Nicaraguan singer-songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy composed "Nicaragua Nicaragüita", an emblematic song of the Sandinista Revolution , which contains a musical fragment, in the second verse, very similar to the melody of "Zamba de mi esperanza". Salvadoran poet Nora Méndez has investigated the origin of Mejía Godoy's song and discovered that it was conceived in the house of an Argentine woman, concluding that Profili's zamba, already world-famous in Cafrune's version, surely influenced that fragment of "Nicaragua Nicaragüita".
Zamba de mi esperanza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmBUqwxUvWMCarlos Mejía Godoy & Los de Palacaguina – Nicaragua, Nicaraguita https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5r0cbJ3kOs