Justifying Assault between Colombian Politicians. The Case of Former Mayor Rodolfo Hernández on YouTube

Abstract

In November 2018, the then-mayor of Bucaramanga (Colombia) attacked a municipal councilor amidst a heated political discussion. The video of the assault spread like wildfire on social media and was used by the Attorney General's Office as reliable evidence to suspend the mayor from office. This article analyzes a set of virtual comments from Internet users in reaction to the video. The corpus was extracted from the post made by the El Tiempo news outlet on YouTube using the YouTube Comment Scraper tool between November 28 and December 28, 2018, to focus on reactions to the political event in the first month. From an interdisciplinary interpretive perspective of discourse analysis, we determined the regularities of these reactions, the ways of explicitly and implicitly justifying acts of violence, and the political effects that ended up favoring the former mayor's public image. The article concludes by inserting the studied case into the current debates on democratic representation and the rise of anti-political ideological matrices in rulers' public discourse.