Abstract
The Venezuelan forced displacement crisis constitutes the largest cross-border population movement in modern Latin American history, with over 7.7 million individuals displaced globally, predominantly hosted across South American nations. While public perception and policy responses to forced migration are heavily mediated by national news outlets, few comparative studies have critically examined media representations across distinct destination states within the Global South. This study presents a comparative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 480 news articles published between 2018 and 2022 in major national dailies from the two primary recipient countries: Colombia (El Tiempo and El Espectador) and Peru (El Comercio and La República). Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model, we interrogate how lexical selection, metaphorical framing, and discursive topoi construct the identities of Venezuelan migrants. The findings reveal a marked longitudinal shift from early humanitarian solidarity toward pervasive securitization and criminalization discourses. However, national differences persist: Peruvian media disproportionately deploy metaphors of inundation, disease, and existential security threats to legitimize restrictive border controls, whereas Colombian coverage demonstrates a fragmented discourse alternating between institutional integration narratives—aligned with regularisation policies—and localized crime reporting. This study illuminates how South-South migration narratives reproduce institutional xenophobia and shape public policy outcomes, emphasizing the necessity of ethical journalistic frameworks in forced displacement reporting.
