Abstract

MARTINS, Moisés de Lemos  and  MARCONDES, Valéria. “Them”, Venezuelans, and the crisis in Venezuela: discursive practices in the magazine Veja. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2020, vol.38, pp.59-78. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.38(2020).2593.

This paper analyses the feature article “Fuga de uma ditadura: a saga dos venezuelanos no Brasil” (Flight from a dictatorship: the saga of Venezuelans in Brazil), by Jennifer Ann Thomas, published by the Brazilian magazine Veja in 2019. The subject of the article is refugees and the crisis in Venezuela. This paper identifies the discursive structures used tin the article to represent “others”, in this case, Venezuelan immigrants. Analysis is also made of linguistic expressions, which symbolise and produce differences between “us” (Brazil and Brazilians) and “them” (the other – Venezuela and its citizens). The paper concludes that the discourse about the “other”, which in Veja's article also includes statistics and quotes sources close to the government, only states that which is appropriate for the magazine's audiences to know, i.e. their readers. In summary, analysis of the article published by Veja magazine allows us to conclude that it reproduces the hegemonic discourse about “the other” – a reductionist, conservative and nationalist discourse. The theoretical reference underpinning this paper's semiological orientation is Social Semiotics (Martins, 2002/2017), a discipline of Social and Human Sciences, whose main concern is to establish the conditions that govern the social possibility of meaning and that, in semantic and pragmatic terms, leads to the explanatory and comprehensive interpretation of discourses. On the other hand, since this paper aims to understand social construction processes of the other, i.e. understand the social construction processes of identities, it is inspired by the intellectual current known in Europe as the “philosophy of difference” (Descombes, 1998; Foucault, 1966; Levinas, 2002; Martins, 2019; Ricoeur, 1991).

Keywords : immigrants; refugees; Social Semiotics; Venezuela; social representations.

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