Description
As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, its pervasive effects reach the ‘Global South’. In South America, for instance, the pandemic’s socio-economic impact has exacerbated deep pre-existing inequalities. In this context, governments in the region have adopted a security discourse in attempts to palliate the proliferation of the virus. The measures and discourses of control have affected groups of society differently, including refugees and migrants. This paper takes the case study of Venezuelan asylum seekers and migrants in Ecuador to analyse the convergence of Covid-19’s novel security discourse and the already entrenched securitisation of Venezuelans. Through critical discourse analysis of governmental elites’ declarations and interview transcripts, this work demonstrates how both securitisations construct the ‘Venezuelan Other’. Thus, the paper contributes to the studies of the securitisation of migration, empirically locating it in a ‘South-South’ migration context.
