Colombia: Audiovisual Media Landscape in the Age of Democratic Security

Abstract

In a media landscape dominated by private information conglomerates, television documentary should be a key format to ensure a diversity of points of view because it has the possibility to open alternative spaces or heterotopias. This article points out the concept of heterotopic documentaries and applies it to the Colombian case of study of the documentaries of armed conflict produced during the period of Democratic Security Policy in Colombia, a political period in which armed conflict was systematically neglected. In this context, television documentaries of armed conflict that that could be initially understood as a reaction to media invisibility reveal the contradictory character of heterotopia. From the cases analysed in private, public, and transnational television, the idea of heterotopic documentary emerges as a paradoxical audiovisual space that tends to regularize the access of the viewers to the ‘other spaces’ that it promotes.

Keywords:

• war
• conflict
• communication
• media
• documentary
• television
• Colombia
• film
• geography
• heterotopia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Josep Maria Català, Dean of the Faculty of Communication at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Dr. André Jansson, Professor at Karlstads Universitet. Thanks also to Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch, Michael Wise, Pau Pérez, and to the anonymous reviewer for their readings on earlier versions of this paper. This research is funded by the PIF Scholarship of the PhD in Communication Contents in the Digital Age, Dept de Comunicació Audiovisual i Publicitat, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.