Following the 1973 coup, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio pushed forward an operation designed to materially and rhetorically erase the traces of a recent past through the whitewashing of urban walls. Taking the episode as a starting point, the following article seeks to render visible the conflation of aesthetic, hygienic, and political claims that the campaign circulated and their reincarnations in a binary narrative anchored on the language of order that arguably still haunts us today.