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Judi Lynn

(160,076 posts)
Tue Jun 24, 2014, 04:15 AM Jun 2014

Collective Panic in Venezuela

Collective Panic in Venezuela
6.18.14
by George Ciccariello-Maher

A specter is haunting Venezuela — the specter of the colectivos. All the powers of old Venezuela have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it: political parties, NGOs, the foreign press, and of course, Twitter users.

“Armed thugs,” “vigilantes,” “paramilitaries” — these are just a few of the hyperbolic terms attached to what has suddenly emerged as the central bogeyman of the Venezuelan opposition today: “los colectivos.” The story goes something like this: amid the recent protests by mostly middle-class and opposition students, it was not only Venezuela’s police and military that repressed the “peaceful” protesters, but also groups of pro-Chavista thugs who terrorized and attacked the well-meaning demonstrators.

The recently popularized term says so little but seems to mean so much. It is in the gap between what the term says and what it means that we can locate its function in the contemporary Venezuelan crisis.

An Empty Signifier

On the surface, colectivos refers to the grassroots revolutionary collectives that make up the most organized element of chavismo. Beyond this, the term loses all clarity.

On February 12, for example, it was widely claimed on Twitter that the student Bassil da Costa was shot by armed collectives. On February 19, videos were circulated claiming that colectivos were rampaging through the wealthy zone of Altamira in Caracas firing hundreds of live rounds. And when the young beauty queen Génesis Carmona was killed, her death was immediately blamed on the colectivos.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/collective-panic-in-venezuela/

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Collective Panic in Venezuela (Original Post) Judi Lynn Jun 2014 OP
Comparison made to New Orleans, appropriately. Judi Lynn Jun 2014 #1
Great Op. The odor of government deceit almost wafts from the story. merrily Jun 2014 #2

Judi Lynn

(160,076 posts)
1. Comparison made to New Orleans, appropriately.
Tue Jun 24, 2014, 04:19 AM
Jun 2014

From the original posted article:


“Colectivos” thus joins a long and sordid list: from the traditional epithets like the rabble, the mob, the scum, the lumpen, and the horde to more specific and recent variants like “Tupamaros” and “terror circles” (widely used to smear the Bolivarian Circles around the time of the 2002 coup).

Since nothing strikes more fear in elites’ hearts than the unpredictable movement of the poor beyond the bounds of informal segregation, there’s also motorizados, a term so vague as to trouble translation. Are they motorcycle couriers, moto-taxistas, or simply anyone who happens to be on a motorcycle? Even in more tranquil times, one often sees tweets whipping up a panic that “Tupamaros” are in Altamira, with a blurry photo of a red-shirted motorcyclist provided as evidence of the threat.

The recent popularization of the term colectivos is thus a powerful exercise in opposition myth-making. According to one analysis of the racialized panic that led to exaggerated and false reports of violence, looting, and rape in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, “even if all reports of violence and rape were to be proved factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be “pathological” and racist, since what motivated these stories was not facts, but racist prejudices.”

Still, it does matter that these claims in 2014 Venezuela are as detached from reality as those in 2005 New Orleans — further evidence of the pathologies of anti-Chavismo.
The dangers of this myth should not be understated. By dehumanizing all those it broadly describes, the term colectivos legitimizes violence against them (just as the bizarre, racist rumor that the National Guard is infiltrated by Cubans no doubt serves to legitimize sniper attacks).

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