The National Stadium: social violence and spectacular power in Chile 1968-1976
Creators: name: Maycock, Colin
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: The Chilean Commission for Truth and Reconciliation noted that, "it is absolutely essential that we understand the crisis of 1973...in order to understand how the subsequent human rights violations we were charged to investigate came about."1 This thesis is one attempt to take that admonition seriously. The human body's role in the creation and maintenance of modern social reality is a complex issue; however, the careful examination of a society in crisis will illuminate some of the body's elemental connections with the broader social sphere. To trace these connections, I examine the manner in which open political conflict dismantles, on material and representational planes, the overt manifestations of civil society, in essence making it subjectively unreal. As civil strife intensifies, there is less shared representational and material space. The absence of a broad consensus about the constituent elements of social reality is, in fact, the absence of social reality itself. It is my contention that the erosion of the multiple material and ideological elements that constituted Chilean social reality that occurred during President Salvador Allende's government was not halted by the Junta that seized power on September 11, 1973. The civil conflict that was literally deconstructing Chilean's lived realities was reconfigured on a mythic plane by the Junta and the resulting social reality was then militarily imposed on the subject population. The Junta's version of reality, was radically different from the experienced reality of the subject population. The Junta used excessive violence as a means to bring external reality into correspondence with its precepts. The Junta's violence generated further discourses that doubled back in defence of their initial premises. The late 1960s and early 70s was a period of intense civil unrest in Chile. Public manifestations social strife were brought to an abrupt end by a violent military coup. The Chilean military Junta used torture and disappearance as a means of maintaining political control of the country and its citizenry. Political violence is an intriguing phenomena because it usually involves behaviour that is unrelated to the actor's espoused ideological goals. The physical human body serves to bridge the disparity between act and purpose. There are innumerable, trans-cultural instances where actual human bodies, rather than their representations, are mobilised as a means of attesting to the veracity of nonmaterial ideas. The literal physicality of the human body is used as an analogical device in order to imbue ideas with a material form. In order to install its version of reality, the military creates two geographically contiguous but radically different landscapes. The first presents an experiential image of social peace while the second is filled with bestial violence. Both of which are dependent upon and defined by the other. The National Stadium functions as an icon and a manifestation of the Junta's mythological construction of reality, while for the subject population it is the clearest symbol of the repressive nature of the military regime and the fearful and disconcerting social reality they are forced to endure. The Stadium was a means by which the Junta brought into material reality their vision of social reality, for example it served to make visible the presumed, but unseen, terrorists that threatened the nation. By literally making materially real, through the application of violence, what was, in fact, wholly imaginary, the Stadium served to demetaphorise the Junta's discourse. It is through that demetaphorisation that the subject population glimpsed the covert apparatus of repression that became generalised throughout the Junta's reign. [Footnote reads] 1 Report of the National Commission on Truth and Human Rights Volume 1. Trans Phillip E. Berryman. (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 47.