Empirical Pragmatics of Violent Silence: Press Narratives about Guayaquil (2025) as Illocutionary Acts of Structural Erasure

When a newspaper systematically omits a relevant causal explanation, it does not merely fail to inform — it performs an illocutionary act. Drawing on Austin's speech act theory and Grice's cooperative principle, this paper argues that the systematic press silence on structural drivers of urban violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador (2025) constitutes an act of structural erasure: a communicative action that produces a distorted public understanding of violence causation with real perlocutionary effects on policy, investment, and citizen perception. We provide the first empirical, quantitative evidence for this claim at scale. Using four Large Language Models (LLMs) to score 31 press sources (16 local Spanish-language, 15 international English-language) across eight structural causal conditions, and applying Neutrosophic fsQCA (N-fsQCA) to compute illocutionary consistency and indeterminacy, we find that five of eight structural drivers are systematically under-represented in the press relative to a validated structural baseline: weapons trafficking (gap=-0.444), extortion (gap=-0.345), prison linkages (gap=-0.340), drug routes (gap=-0.290), and economic pressure (gap=-0.214). Crucially, this silence is not random: it is patterned, stable across 31 sources and 4 LLMs, and exhibits a local/international asymmetry that reveals two distinct illocutionary communities enacting different acts of erasure about the same referential reality. We term this empirical pragmatics of violent silence: the systematic, measurable breach of Gricean maxims in press accounts of urban violence.