At the edge of the abyss. Horror and modernity in Santa Maria of Iquique

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze some subjective issues for understanding why the killing of workers in the School Domingo Santa María de Iquique, is one of the milestones that inaugurates a new era on the nature of pain and horror in contemporary Chile. Owners of an Enlightenment vision about life, present and future, the cognitive distance that Chilean workers woven in relation to the death in the early twentieth century didn’t allow them to anticipate the complex and contradictory social universe that the modernization involved. Characterized by violent death, severe pain and moral in-justice, the slaughter perpetrated in 1907 turned this educational institution in historic cleaving to the advent of contemporary political massacres and in a symbol of the contradictions that constitute modernity and modernization processes in the twentieth century.