“They Are the Ones Who Kill with No Reason”: The Sense Construction of the Word “Violence” within the “Catrillanca Case”

The objective of this research is to analyze the sense of the word “violence” regarding the media coverage of the “Catrillanca case”, one of the biggest events of the Chilean-Mapuche conflict that has caused great commotion in recent times (Pinto, 2020). For this purpose, the discursive semantics perspective was adopted and the proposals of the French Discourse Analysis on the naming of events in the press were considered. This research employs a qualitative methodology of a descriptive-interpretative scope. The corpus is composed of fifteen texts, which constitute a sample from a larger corpus. The texts were extracted from traditional (El Mercurio) and alternative written press (El Mostrador and Mapuexpress). The analysis of the corpus allows us to affirm that the sense of the word “violence” is ‘updated’ (Détrie et al., 2017) in a different way in each newspaper. These updates are summarized in three semantic categories: “criminal violence, ” “state violence”, and “structural violence”. In addition to this, it was observed that the word “violence” is associated with different social actors, not always recognizable. The differences between the editorial lines of each newspaper could explain this variation.