Desinformación y Migración Venezolana. El Caso Ecuador

According to the World Bank (2020) in 2019 more than 4 million Venezuelans migrated to other Latin American countries. This exodus has led to a reinforcement of exclusion in themedia reinforcement of exclusion recharged with symptoms of xenophobia and aporophobia (Perilla, 2020).Meanwhile, recognizing the proclivity of the media, which are themselves immersed in the era of disinformation, they have polarized the sensationalist discoursetowards social phenomena such as migration, thus affecting the behavior of the population towards Venezuelans (Corzo, 2020; Magallon-Rosa, 2021). Admitting this situation, one of the mostsituation, one of the most important tools to combat disinformation has been fact-checking agencies (Torres-Toukoumidis, Lagares-Díez and Barredo-Ibáñez 2021). This study will focus specifically on one of them, Ecuador Chequea, an Ecuadorian agency endorsed by Poynter, International Fact Checking Network. Its object of study will be news about Venezuelans. The general objective of this research is to analyze the news extracted by Ecuador Chequea about Venezuelan migration; three specific objectives are derived from this: [SO1] to determine the classification of fake news about Venezuelans. of fake news about Venezuelans; [SO2] to systematize a detailed review of the source, subject matter, audiovisual material, context and language. Based on the the third objective [OE3]: to identify the approach imbued with a positive discourse or a hate discourse in the news selected by the ve- rification agency. rification agency. For this purpose, seventy-one (71) news items were extracted between 2018 to 2021, applying their review through a content analysis directed towards the categories established by Pérez-Curiel (2021) referred to media, authorship, qualitative variables and discursive variables, together with those presented by Aedo and Farias (2009) regarding xenophobic discourse. The three objectives set out allow us to reaffirm the role of fact-checking agencies in a current phenomenon and to facilitate the understanding of theon a current phenomenon and facilitate the understanding of the Venezuelan migratory exodus in terms of its general characterizations and its discourse advocated in the news.