La construcción discursiva del populismo autoritario

This paper deals with authoritarian populism in the Latin American context, particularly in Venezuela. The aim is to show how a democratic system that remained stable for forty years collapsed in a relatively short time of its history. A short account of the political context is given and aspects of the relation between populisms and democracies are examined. It is claimed that the quality of democracy depends in great part on the quality of the dialogue so the analysis follows an interactional approach (Bolívar 2018). Changes in populist discourse from classical to authoritarian are observed through the linguistic and discursive processes of deinstitutionalization of the democracy. This is illustrated with attention to diachronic changes in the dialogue in one particular genre and in the political strategies used by the authoritarian leaders.