Since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has undergone a period of intense racial and class conflict, as a multiethnic subaltern coalition has begun to assert itself politically against a previously hegemonic and inordinately dominant white elite. Scholars have highlighted the local media’s racial and class snobbery when covering social movements and civil society, attempting to split the country into two groups: ‘underclass mobs’ and ‘respectable’ civil society. This article, which analyses media coverage at crucial points of conflict – 1998/9, 2002, 2013 and 2014 – finds that western media have overwhelmingly matched the local media, portraying only the largely dark-skinned working-class chavista groups as vicious ‘mobs’, ‘hordes’ and ‘thugs’, while representing the white, upper-class opposition as ‘civil society’.
Duno-GottbergL., ‘Mob outrages: reflections on the media construction of the masses in Venezuela’ (April2000–January2003), Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies13, no. 1 (2004); HernandezJ. A., ‘Against the comedy of civil society’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies13, no. 1 (2010); LupienP., ‘The media in Venezuela and Bolivia: attacking the “bad left” from below’, Latin American Perspectives40 (2013).
2.
MacLeodA., Bad News from Venezuela: twenty years of fake news and misreporting (London: Routledge, 2018).
3.
ECLAC, Social Panorama of Latin America (Santiago: United Nations2013).
4.
FelicienA.SchiavoniC.RomeroL., ‘The politics of food in Venezuela’, Monthly Review70, no. 2 (June2018).
AbaloE., ‘Constructing (il)legitimate democracy’, Triple C: Communication Capitalism and Critique12, no. 2 (2014).
11.
FoxSee E.WaisbordS., ‘Latin politics global media’, in FoxE.WaisbordS., eds, Latin Politics, Global Media (Austin: University of Texas Press2002), pp. 8–10.
12.
Lupien, ‘The media in Venezuela and Bolivia’.
13.
Duno-Gottberg, ‘Mob outrages’.
14.
Hernandez, ‘Against the comedy of civil society’.
15.
Lupien, ‘The media in Venezuela and Bolivia’.
16.
CohenL.AguilarF., ‘Poor Venezuelans crowd pro-Maduro stations in hope of vote “prize”’, Reuters, 20May2018; AponteA.MartinezA., ‘For poor Venezuelans, a box of food may sway vote for Maduro’, Reuters, 12March2018.
Ciccariello-MaherG., We Created Chavez: a people’s history of the Venezuelan revolution (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 174.
20.
Cited in Lupien, ‘The media in Venezuela and Bolivia’.
21.
CannonB., ‘Class/race polarisation in Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chavez: a break with the past or the song remains the same?’, Third World Quarterly29, no. 4 (2008).
22.
Cannon, ‘Class/race polarisation in Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chavez’.
23.
SalasJ. M. H., ‘Ethnicity and revolution: the political economy of racism in Venezuela’, Latin American Perspectives32, no. 2 (2005).
24.
Duno-Gottberg, ‘Mob outrages’.
25.
Salas, ‘Ethnicity and revolution’.
26.
MacLeod, Bad News from Venezuela.
27.
JonesB., Hugo! The Hugo Chavez story from mud hut to perpetual revolutionary (London: Vintage, 2007), pp. 205–25.
28.
De La PedrajaR., Free Trade and Social Conflict in Colombia, Peru and Venezuela: confronting US capitalism, 2000-2016 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), p. 93.
29.
For example, C.MarcanoA.Barrera Tyszka, Hugo Chavez (New York: Random House 2007), pp. 167–88.
30.
DominguezF., ‘Venezuela’s opposition: desperately seeking to overthrow Chavez’, in DominguezF.LievesleyG.LudlumS., Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America: reaction and revolt (London: Zed Books, 2011), pp. 120–21.
31.
Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chavez, p. 170.
32.
GolingerE., The Chavez Code: cracking US intervention in Venezuela (London: Pluto Press, 2007), p. 64.
AdamsonB., ‘Thugs, crooks, and rebellious negroes and racialized media coverage of Michael Brown and the Ferguson demonstrations’, Harvard Journal on Racial and Ethnic Justice32 (2016); SmileyC.FakunleD., ‘From “brute” to “thug”: the demonization and criminalization of unarmed black male victims in America’, Journal of Human Behaviour in the Social Environment26, nos. 3–4 (2016).
