Protest has become a defining feature of contemporary politics in Latin America, yet we know surprisingly little about how political elites respond to protest before policy change occurs. Existing research largely assesses protest influence through distal institutional outcomes, overlooking earlier stages in which contentious claims enter political representation. This article advances a communicative perspective on protest outcomes by conceptualizing elite responsiveness as a discursive process encompassing three dimensions: attention to protest issues, communicative engagement with, and positional responsiveness toward protest claims. Using original protest event data combined with Twitter communications from governments and members of parliament in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia during the 2019 protest wave, we examine how protest characteristics shape elite discourse. Our findings challenge pressure-accumulation models of protest influence. Protest persistence does not increase elite responsiveness once contemporaneous event features are considered, suggesting that communicative responsiveness is episodic rather than incremental. Instead, elites selectively respond to symbolic and institutional signals embedded in individual protest events. Worthiness consistently increases attention and engagement but not support, indicating that early responsiveness involves recognition and discursive alignment rather than endorsement. Protests targeting the national government elicit the highest levels of responsiveness overall, yet this effect is sharply polarized: opposition MPs express significantly more support, while incumbents strategically withhold it, consistent with a partisan “blame game.” Moreover, opposition elites disproportionately reward peaceful protests with increased attention and engagement, whereas incumbents are comparatively less sensitive to protest tactics. The results support a signal-processing account of elite responsiveness in which institutional relevance, symbolic legitimacy, and strategic position jointly shape how protest claims enter elite discourse. This study reframes how social movements influence democratic politics, less through cumulative pressure and more through the selective negotiation of meaning, legitimacy, and representation.