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Mob outrages: reflections on the media construction of the masses in Venezuela (April 2000–January 2003)

In Spanish, the first meaning of the term ‘turba’ is that of a residual, dark substance used for fuel (‘peat’ in English) and were it not for this marginal utility it would be a synonym for the abject. It is only in its second meaning that it refers to the idea of a confused and disordered mass, standardly translated into English as ‘mob’. But this shift in meaning in Spanish from ‘fuel’ to ‘dangerous mass’ turns out to be useful for thinking about the political contentions of contemporary Venezuela. This essay will investigate the cultural and political meaning of media representations of a number of the popular sectors allied with Chavism, which have been disseminated by the privately owned Venezuelan media. By looking at journalism, press photography and TV, we can ‘see how the media produces the crowd’, unpicking and analysing media strategies for constructing the collective as an undesirable, rebellious multitude. I have chosen a quite restricted time frame, looking at the representation of the masses during a few days in April 2002, when Venezuela was shaken by a dizzying series of events: a huge mass demonstration, and then a coup d’état and counter-coup which followed on from each other in a matter of hours, ejecting President Chávez from power and then restoring him. There are three basic claims underlying this approach. First, I want to engage with the work of the Colombian theoretician Jesús Martín Barbero, to emphasize that ‘mediation’ does not designate a neutral space through which discourses pass but is rather a space of hegemonic struggle. Second, despite the obvious differences, I have been inspired by the reflections of Ranajit Guha on Indian peasant rebellions and the studies of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm on primitive forms of protest, to show that the construction of collectives in terms of mobs or rabbles constitutes a strategy to remove political legitimacy from marginalized social subjects. Finally, I