Reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s “The Visceraless State,” reminded me of the idea of percepticide related to Argentina’s Dirty War. Garza employs the metaphor of the human body, considering its complex structure, to compare it to the state of Mexico. Just like a human body, a political system can either be healthy or sick. Garza writes that “the neoliberal state has established visceraless relationships with its citizens. Relationships without hearts or bones or innards. Disemboweled relationships” (p. 22). Due to the corruption of the Mexican government, prioritizing profits over the carful protection of its citizens, it left its citizens out to dry and subject to violence by the tyrannical regime, like a body without its organs which cannot protect itself to stay alive.

This can translate into percepticide because as state violence and lack of governmental care become ubiquitous, the citizens can internalize the trauma as a normal occurrence. “It is the forgetting of the body, in both political and personal terms, that opens the door to violence. Those who are no longer human will be the ones to walk through it” (p. 25). In other words, a body without its organs is barely human, just like a loss in morality is inhumane. A careless government strips people of their humanity when violence becomes normalized, which ultimately leads to people adopting percepticide. The metaphor of body as the consequence of a corrupt government, in this case, is as much physical (death and the process of dying) as it is psychological (suffering and percepticide).