Indigenous threats and white counterfactuals: The semiotics of race in elite print media coverage of Ecuador’s 1990 Indigenous uprising

Abstract

This article explores the role that images of a threatening racial other play in the exercise of power and demonstrates that the discursive framing of such threats provides insight into how responses to perceived risks become possible and politically desirable. Specifically, it examines print press coverage of the 1990 Indigenous uprising in Ecuador to examine how white-elites sought to defend the public invisibility of whiteness by framing Indigenous protestors as threatening racial others. Coverage of the 1990 uprising in Ecuador’s major newspapers encouraged a moral panic about the potential threat that ‘out of place’ Indigenous protestors presented to white, urban society. In the absence of widespread Indigenous violence during the protest, white-elite print media formulated counterfactual accounts of the event that stressed the potential of Indigenous violence to upset national stability as a means to justify the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous political actors as national threats.