Political antagonism between supporters and opponents of former president Hugo Chávez has been a defining feature of daily life in Caracas for more than a decade. Despite their different political orientations, the antagonistic poles of “chavismo” and “the opposition” share striking similarities, starting at the level of political practice. I argue that Venezuela's political polarization reflects the shared logic of populism. Through the story of Jorge Tortoza—a photojournalist killed during the failed 2002 coup d’état against President Chávez—I describe how the chavista–opposition divide is produced and policed through performances of victimhood, performances that are essential to populist mobilization in Venezuela.

It is a pleasure to receive this review of Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela and to have the opportunity to engage with Carla Moscoso's insightful analysis. I'm grateful for many of the reviewer's key points, which are organized in a helpful chapter-by-chapter summary. I will return to many them later in my reply, but I want to begin by explaining what I take to be the book's broader significance. Two decades of the tumultuous twenty-first century have undone easy assumptions about the democratizing influence of media technology. Rather than spreading liberal democracy across the globe, the political, economic, and technological openings of the late twentieth century sowed the seeds of populist revolutions. The political grounds beneath our feet are shifting; what happens next is anyone's guess. If we are to make predictions, much less act upon them, we need a conceptual framework suited to the times. That is especially true when it comes to thinking about the role of news media in political processes. So many of our normative pronouncements about what media outlets should or should not do are still playing catch up to what media outlets are actually doing. There was no better laboratory for observing the transformation of news media in times of populist upheaval than Venezuela during the Hugo Chávez era (1999-2013). When I arrived in 2006, Venezuela was the acclaimed epicenter of the "left turn" in Latin American politics. The capital, Caracas, was home to an old and powerful private press, a robust alternative media movement, and a burgeoning state media. Digital technology and social media platforms were booming. So too were broadcast and print news outlets. Today, Caracas's incredibly diverse media ecosystem is a thing of the past, destroyed in part by the extreme political polarization that pitted supporters and opponents of the late president Hugo Chávez against one another. Much of what we are witnessing now in the USA and Europe was already on full display in Venezuela: openly partisan news outlets, selective reporting, accusations that the government was censoring the press,

This article draws on research in Venezuela to make a broader argument about the link between populism and injury. Specifically, it considers the role that crime victimhood plays in the rise of punitive populism or the so‐called punitive turn. Under President Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan government publicly denounced tough‐on‐crime policies as instruments of socioeconomic oppression. Following Chávez's death, there was an abrupt change of course due, in part, to the opposition's mobilization of crime victims. The Venezuelan case illustrates a double bind that confronts scholars who are critical of the punitive turn. On the one hand, the figure of the crime victim mediates the body politic in a way that reproduces structures of racial and economic domination. On the other hand, the failure to substantively address the material injuries of crime victims propels grassroots support for punitive populism. Instead of focusing on the subject of rights, this article proposes starting with the subject of wrongs as a bottom‐up approach to political subjectivity that can help us understand the dynamic behind punitive populism and show us a way out of the double bind.

Abstract. Despite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars -the use of denuncias.Keywords: Populism, journalism, denuncias, corruption scandals, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, José Vicente Rangel Venezuela needs every citizen to be a denouncer. The denuncia has an ethical basis and I use it as a public service. It is a basic institution of democracy.

No abstract