A specter is haunting Venezuela — the specter of the colectivos. All the powers of old Venezuela have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it: political parties, NGOs, the foreign press, and of course, Twitter users.

“Armed thugs,” “vigilantes,” “paramilitaries” — these are just a few of the hyperbolic terms attached to what has suddenly emerged as the central bogeyman of the Venezuelan opposition today: “los colectivos.” The story goes something like this: amid the recent protests by mostly middle-class and opposition students, it was not only Venezuela’s police and military that repressed the “peaceful” protesters, but also groups of pro-Chavista thugs who terrorized and attacked the well-meaning demonstrators.

The recently popularized term says so little but seems to mean so much. It is in the gap between what the term says and what it means that we can locate its function in the contemporary Venezuelan crisis.