Juan Vásquez's El Canto del Delirio is a violently illustrated surrealist vision of Pinochet's military coup and regime. A full page panel shows Santiago de Chile from above with the Río Mapocho running at a diagonal from the top right of the panel to the bottom left while naked bodies tied in barded-wire rain down upon the city from the sky (12). This image resonates with the Evil that is feared to return in Mortis, and contrasts with El
Pantera's panels showing Walter Osorio falling from the Monument to the Revolution.
Again this panoptic view is used to express a domination over place and even over memory and time as seen in Mortis' concern with the ritual return of Evil and Death to the city. El
Canto del Delirio establishes a visual link between the September 11, 1973 Pinochet coup
d'etat and the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001
with a two-page spread of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as they are moments away from being struck. This link shows the ways that Evil and Death spread and grow across time and place, bodies falling from the sky - thus creating the atmosphere that fosters the growth of the security state and surveillance that go hand-in-hand with neoliberal practices of protecting capital over individuals and freedoms. Naomi Klein analyzed this neoliberal tendency around the globe in her book The Shock Doctrine where she called "these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, 'disaster capitalism'" (6). Klein goes on to explain that this ritualistic use of catastrophe to create the atmosphere necessary to expand neoliberalism originated precisely in the aftermath of Pinochet's coup in Chile (8). She states that it was "the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere" (8). This method of disaster capitalism became "the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering" (9). In this way the surrealist vision of bodies falling over Santiago de Chile and the images of mutilated bodies hanging over everyday spaces in
Mortis put on display how fear and violence can be read as metaphors for the engineering
of places for the implementation and return of oppressive evils.
IX. The Strategic Domination of Barad-Dûr: The New York World Trade Center, The Torre Latinoamericana, and The Costanera Center
The destruction of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers (illustrated in Juan Vásquez’s El Canto del Delirio), in this crazed reading across panels, borders, and time,
can function as a symbolic attack on the exemplary site of panoptic dominance that Michel De Certeau used in The Practice of Everyday Life. This dominance over place is called an "erotics of knowledge" by De Certeau, there is a certain pleasure in this knowledge of the whole, in this dominance of time and place (92). The World Trade Center is now a fiction and a memory but in the context of this visual braid it may be substituted by Mexico City's Torre Latinoamericana or Santiago de Chile's Costanera Center. The Torre Latinoamericana (or Latin American Tower), completed in 1956, was the most innovative and tallest skyscraper in Mexico City until 1984. It is considered a historical landmark and withstood the massive earthquakes of 1957 (7.9 magnitude) and 1985 (8.1 magnitude) due to its architecture and engineering. The tower is seen by some to be a symbol of safety and stability in Mexico. The Mexican businessman Carlos Slim (who was ranked the richest person in the world between 2010 and 2013) purchased seven floors of the tower in 2002. Slim is also partially responsible for bringing North American security and policing policies to Mexico which rely on computerized analysis and surveillance which directly relate back to De Certeau’s theories of strategic dominance over urban spaces. Chile’s Gran Torre Santiago, the most identifiable portion of the Costanera Center, was completed after several stalls in construction in 2012, and is now the tallest building in Latin America. Due to insufficient planning most of the building has remained unoccupied because the proper legal permissions and permits were not obtained from the government. This conflict between symbolic progress, capitalism, and politics is embodied by the fact that the tallest building in Latin America remains mostly unused and darkened as it looms over Santiago in the night sky. On a visit to Santiago in 2015 I heard the Chilean author Francisco Ortega
refer to the Costanera Center as "Mordor." This allusion may seem flippant at first but I believe that the connection is relevant. Mordor is the geographical domain of the Dark Lord Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The dominant architectural feature of the region is Barad-dûr, the tower of Mordor (often the tower and geographical region are conflated and the tower is simply identified as Mordor itself). This tower houses the Eye of Sauron which constantly surveyed Middle-Earth in order to see that the Dark Lord’s will was being obeyed and that no threats approached his domain. The tower of Barad-dûr and the Eye of Sauron are identified with the will and mind of Sauron himself – thus architecture and surveillance are metaphorically linked to the will of evil. This panoptic gaze structured the landscape of Middle-Earth according to its threat of violent power and also sought out any who dared threaten it. This very insistence on power and surveillance created the possibility of subversion and resistance that the very weakest, the most underestimated enemies of the Dark Lord, used to overthrow him. The connection of Barad-dûr with the Gran Torre Santiago signals how these symbols of power dominate landscapes in attempts to control and transform them according to their own will and vision of space. From the gleaming two towers of Mexico City and Santiago de Chile I propose new uses and tactics for reading urban spaces in sequential art across the Latin American map that these panoptical towers establish and maintain. Like the position of De Certeau in the WTC or the Torre Latinoamericana or the Costanera Center, the creators and readers of graphic narratives often view comic texts from a panoptical view and from that vantage lose sight of their possible street-level uses. In the following sections of this chapter I propose a street-level tactic for subverting traditional analysis of sequential art as well as
the traditional structuring of transnational dissertation projects that are forced to conform to certain rationales for the links and connections they find between nations, times, or histories. Not only this, but I will continue to follow the visual braid from the map-level to the street-level in order to see how resistance, justice, and crime are imagined as tactics for evading, escaping, surviving, and fighting the dominant systems of the security state and neoliberalism.