This column is dedicated to publishing comments by Latin America researchers in Norway on issues, events and developments in Latin America. All Norway based researchers may publish their opinions about relevant issues in this column. Please contact norlarnet@sum.uio.no

Charles Arthur is a Canadian military scholar invited in Norway through the Youth Mobililty Program (Academic) between Canada and Norway. He teaches International Humanitarian Law at Quisqueya University, in Port-au-Prince and Fundamentals of Legal Theory in Vancouver. He holds MA degrees in Law (U. of Montreal), International Studies (spec. Defense and Security U. of Grenoble), UN Operations (UNITAR). In this comment he critizices the media coverage on Latin America

In the Information Age, the fourth power has achieved unprecedented advances: media coverage is global, quasi instantaneous and increasingly influential. Pictures are now worth more than a thousand words: they can effectively sway hearts and minds. For Latin America scholars and policy makers of the North, this phenomenon is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the influx of news and information has, first and foremost, expanded our perceptual knowledge about Latin America. Secondly, it has also defined our cooperation with Latin American countries. However, conversely, our media coverage on Latin America is often biased, inaccurate and\or manipulated for political purposes by local and international actors with interests vested in the region. Two Latin American countries have recently offered us excellent examples of this dynamic: Haiti and Colombia.

The Haitian “Nightmare"

Consider the recent presentation by the NRK of the award winning documentary on Haiti, “Ghosts of Cité Soleil", directed by Danish director Asger Leth. (You can find the trailer here ) Filled with extremely disturbing images of gun violence, drug abuse and political chaos, the movie was served “straight" to the Norwegian public in a flurry of boys armed with machine guns and mutilated, carbonized cadavers peppering the streets: a nightmarish, apocalyptic urban setting that made Bosnia look like a Hollywood resort. Prior to the showing of this film, Haiti had been heavily present in the Norwegian news cycle after the terrible back-to-back hurricanes of last September and the food riots of April.  Again, the images and reports shown around the world were of despair, misery and hopelessness. Designed to profoundly impact the viewer at a visceral level more than to inform, these carefully crafted headline news perpetuated Haiti’s reputation as a lawless, god forsaken island unable to extricate itself from the clutches of foreign dependency, as shown by this frightfully graphic CNN footage aired on September 12, 2008.

A bleak picture indeed.

Unbeknownst to the majority of western viewers and policy makers, the situation in the field during those moments was certainly tragic but far less chaotic in reality.  It was the work of relief workers who had been in Haiti for years that prevented a total disaster but it received very little attention. By focusing the lens on specific events, the media can thus obfuscate the larger picture and, therefore, distort our perception of important peripheral phenomena occurring at the same time.
When mainstream news providers in the West constantly fail to broadcast solid, in-depth analytic coverage of events and, more importantly, of U.S. policy in Latin America, that coverage will be, more often than not, spectacular, superficial, and distorted by long-standing stereotypes that widen the North-South divide. In such a context, a renewed interest in Latin American studies in the post 9\11 world must ever be encouraged and built upon impervious academic foundations.

If Haiti is a crucial example of a paradoxical media distortion in Latin America i.e when the emotional impact supersedes analysis, Colombia is a text book case of asymmetrical media disruption, when information is so fundamentally controlled by one actor that the line between news and state propaganda is effectively crossed.

Colombia: The Madonna Effect

In Colombia’s Medias and in the US mainstream news cycles, the dominant narrative is grossly disconnected from the abysmal human rights reality in the field. Since the beginning of the Uribe government, the public was subjected to an avalanche of reports about murders and kidnappings carried out by the FARC while human rights violation by the Colombian Armed Forces, and its paramilitary allies, have been systematically obfuscated.
The dramatic rescue of Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt by Colombian Special Forces fascinated western audiences. Her subsequent praises for the Uribe administration and the military were broadcasted around the world, legitimizing the right wing agenda of Washington’s staunchest ally in the region. Playing in concert with the president’s messianic style, this was the leitmotiv that shaped the discourse in Colombia: the Madonna Effect or the woman of unbreakable faith who emerges triumphant from the clutches of hell.
The potency of this myth in Latin American cultures cannot be understated and Ingrid Betancourt, its latest incarnation, might have changed the course of events permanently if not for the scathing new critics of the Colombian Military by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay: “Colombia's U.S.-backed security forces are engaging in "systematic and widespread" extrajudicial executions of innocent civilians as part of their counterinsurgency campaign" (See the articles here and here).

In truth, while we can only condemn the FARC’s use of terror tactics, a careful analysis of the conflict reveal that human rights abuses by the military and their surrogates were far more widespread than we have been led to believe by the media (See the Human Rights Watch assessment of the present situation regarding Uribe’s government here.

Numerous NGOs, like the Colombian Commission of Jurists which has a consultative status before the United Nations, had completed extensive statistical research during Mr. Uribe’s first term:

-With regard to the presumed responsibility for the violations that occurred between July 2002 and June 2006, 75% of the deaths out of combat whose presumed generic author is known, were attributed to the responsibility of the State: either as a result of direct action by State agents in 14% of cases (908 victims); through tolerance or support of violations committed by paramilitary groups in 61% of cases (3,907 victims). Responsibility was attributed to the guerrillas in 25% of cases (1,591 victims)

It gets even more appalling:

-The unusual increase in violations of the right to life directly attributable to State forces is directly related to the implementation of the “democratic security" policy. The increase in extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances committed directly by State forces is a direct consequence of the non observance of the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians, derived from the government’s assertion that a sector of the civilian population is part of the combatant groups that it confronts militarily. (Ibid)

The work of these NGOs, human rights groups, and other civil awareness actors is critical to our understanding of the situation, yet their findings are rarely, if ever, disseminated to a broader audience. How does this media disruption occur? What are the deliberate steps leading to it and, consequently, what is the effect on our perception?
Freedom of the press is far from being a reality in Columbia. The number of journalists killed has declined under Mr. Uribe’s rule but the penalty for dissension is now exile: another way to silence those who would not go along with the official line. (You can find the Reporters Sans Frontieres annual Colombia report at this web page)

An overwhelming control of the media apparatus by the country’s dominant socio-political and economic actors is the first step in an exercise in media disruption. The second step is to excessively vilify and dehumanize the opposition. Asymmetrical information disruption is then the result of the diffusion of facts through the most negative prism: objectivism is simply evacuated from the equation. Let us see how this phenomenon took shape in Colombia regarding the media treatment of kidnappings by the leftist guerrilla:

In Colombia and around the world, abductions had been reported to the Nth degree as a preferred weapon of intimidation and source of illegal revenue for the FARC. The main targets of the kidnappings were mainly wealthy businessmen, preeminent public servants like Betancourt or officers in the country security forces. The Colombians who went through this horrific ordeal can only receive our deepest sympathy. However, at the same time, the numbers of peasants being forcibly displaced by the Armed Forces and the Paramilitary is staggering. According to the IDMC,

...the protracted internal armed conflict in Colombia had by June 2008 displaced 2,649,139 people according to the government, and 4,361,355 people according to a reliable non-governmental source. An alarming trend of rising internal displacement has been registered since 2006, and the highest rate of displacement in 23 years was recorded in the first semester of 2008.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), established in 1998 by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), is the leading international body monitoring conflict-induced internal displacement worldwide. Read all about its work on Colombia here.This reality has only now re-emerged in the mainstream news cycles after months of the media blackout manufactured by the Colombian Government. Fixating the spotlight on a magnification of the hostage crisis and as far away from the plight of displaced Colombians gave a clear advantage to the Uribe Government. Consequently, our perception of the conflict was strongly influenced by a deliberate and carefully crafted reframing of Colombia’s peasants in the overall picture. Until now. And how long will it remain at the forefront of the scene?

Strong words have been uttered by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding Mr. Uribe’s government:

An offence becomes a crime against humanity when it is widespread and systematic against a civilian population. We are observing and keeping track of the number of extrajudicial killings, which do appear to be systematic and widespread, in my view (Reuters article)

Unless international pressure and the media’s attention remain focused, the role of storyteller might revert to those who have been so perversely efficient at writing the script in the past.
And the voices of millions of displaced Colombian peasants could, again, fall back into silence.
Media distortions in Haiti or outright disruptions in Colombia are inevitably part of the Latin American landscape. By staying aware of these phenomena, our knowledge of the region can only be greatly enhanced and our policies will definitely have more impact, as they will be more attuned to reality.

 

Charles Arthur (charlesarthur11(at)yahoo.ca)

November 3rd, 2008