(Intervening the social and individual body. Metaphors of a sanitized society in the newspapers El Mercurio, La Tercera and the magazine Ercilla during the Chilean civil-military dictatorship, 1973-1975)

Abstract

In September 1973, a coup d’état in Chile established a new order. The interruption of a democratic government was explained through the metaphors of disease: the country was sick; a cancer was corroding the nation. To cure it, it was necessary to extirpate the evil at its roots, for only in this way would restoration and “national reconstruction” be achieved.
The language spread with medical explanations that stressed the need to intervene in the individual and social body. Alongside these medical explanations appeared the “cleansing operations”, whichappealed not only to the disappearance of Marxism in its symbolic dimension, but also in its material aspect, whose most tragic effect was the disappearance of thousands of people. Through these operations an attempt was made to establish an aesthetic for the new society and its living spaces, signified by a neat, disciplined and ordered world order, where the “contaminating” elements had to be eradicated. Representative democracy was the system that had allowed the spread of the disease. Therefore, it had to be replaced.
This paper shows how the press adopted these discourses that moved between the disease of the body, rehabilitation, and the dissemination of preventive measures in a hygienic key. For this purpose, the newspapers El Mercurio, La Tercera and Ercilla Magazine will be reviewed. However, in order to understand the use of these metaphors during the dictatorship, attention must be paid to the place that the body had in the Popular Unity project.
The analysis incorporates studies on the imaginaries of illness (Sontag, 2013; Arendt 2006; Delich 2013 and Iazzeta 2013), the role of symbolic production in politics (Balandier, 1994; Eco, 2015) and the link between body and revolutionary or disciplined youth.