The voice of the Bishop: Eladio Vicuña, anticommunism and Moral Panic, 1955-1973

Abstract

September 11^th, 1973, coup d’ etat, was a conjunctural fact, which implied the end of several processes, that Chilean society was experimenting. From the analysis of official Catholic Church documents, and also private writings (press and pastoral letters), we pretend to know the ideological ideology of one of the relevant actors of Chillan community, as it was bishop Eladio Vicuña Aranguiz, one of the voices who experimented the democratic breaking off occurred in September 1973. Through his life itinerary, we pretend to know the influence that global bipolar ideology caused, in the perceptions of people at local level, in this case as this context enabled the building of moral panic discourse, that finally decanted in the legitimation of coup.