Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata claims that police held him and a group of journalists for over two hours at Simón Bólivar Airport in Caracas on Monday.

Lanata said that during this time the police erased the material he had recorded while covering the presidential elections in Venezuela.

Lanata, from Canal 13, is one of the most well-known figures of Argentine journalism and is an outspoken critic of Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a close ally of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s recently re-elected president.

The Argentine ambassador to Venezuela, Carlos Cheppi, said that he had been in touch with the Venezuelan Interior Minister after he heard Lanata was being held up at the airport and that he had assured him “no material was extracted or erased”.

“They told me that there was some form of provocation from Lanata, with him very visibly showing a dossier from Intelligence Services which is why they stopped him in the first place,” said Cheppi.

Lanata told TV channel TN that SEBIN (the Venezuelan intelligence services) wanted to interrogate him on suspicion of spying after he had revealed secret information. According to Lanata he had made public the fact that SEBIN had been ordered to monitor his team while in the country and asked whether this decision had been taken through pressure from the Argentine government.

“What they did was erase all our computers, all our telephones, which meant that we couldn’t communicate with anyone. I wanted to contact the Argentine Embassy and I couldn’t,” said Lanata.

“We felt very alone in those dark rooms of the SEBIN where we were threatened and robbed by policemen,” describes Nicolás Wiñazki, one of the journalists of Lanata’s group, in his column in Clarín.

The Argentine government, through Gustavo López of the President’s Office, has raised suspicions about Lanata’s description of events.

“It seems strange that with thousands of journalists, thousands of media companies, absolutely against Hugo Chávez’ government, with very strong interests, as are some of the North American media, the only one who had a problem is him,” López told news agency DyN.

López then called for “a bit more clarity” as to what happened and said that if freedom of speech had been impeded they would support Lanata as this “fundamental right should not be tainted by political interests”.

Government stockholders voted to close the publication La Nación permanently at a board meeting this morning. Assets will be liquidated and 117 workers will be left unemployed.

The Chilean government holds 70% of the company’s stock and therefore a decisive role in the publication’s future. According to a TeleSUR correspondent, government representatives were the only members who voted in favour of the closure. President Sebastián Piñera has advocated the liquidation since before assuming the presidency in 2010.

The decision is strongly opposed by private stockholders, journalist unions, social organisations, and several parliamentarians. Union representative Víctor Pérez told Radio Tierra, “The arrogance and tyranny of this government prevailed.” Representatives for La Nación employees slated for unemployment filed a case in the Appeals Court of Santiago to dispute the closure.

National Secretary General Andrés Chadwick defended the decision in front of the stockholders’ board, saying, “For 20 years we have seen a newspaper, La Nación, that has always had the tendency to be utilized under the government in power, and we believe that this is not convenient.”

Parliamentarian Hugo Gutiérrez has called upon the government to explain the decision in front of a special session of the Chamber of Deputies. “The citizenry wants to know what the motivation, the reason, is, and I believe that Chadwick must explain it.”

The publication stopped printing last December after a decrease in income, subsisting solely online since then. Nevertheless, according to Pérez, the company earned more than 2bn Chilean pesos last year, the equivalent of US$4mn.

La Nación has published continuously for 95 years.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (courtesy of Wikipedia)

When Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won last year’s presidential election with a landslide 54% of the votes, it was not only the amount of support but how far she was ahead of her competitors that made the victory so impressive.

The 46% of the votes she did not win were split between six opposition parties, with second-placed Frente Amplio Progresista (FAP) obtaining a meagre 17%. It was a pretty good reflection of the situation of government and opposition at the time.

After the government lost its parliamentary majority due to a disastrous result in the 2009 election, the opposition did not manage to live up to the expectations placed upon it. Renamed “Group A”, the illusion of a strong, coordinated opposition capable of snatching the political initiative from a weak government quickly faded away. It soon became evident that, unable to set a common agenda, the only thing holding “Group A” together was its animosity towards the government. To paraphrase Borges, they were not united by love, but by horror.

The lack of initiative and fragmentation of the opposition were apparent in the poor performance of an almost paralysed Congress throughout 2010 and 2011, when only 70 and 65 bills were passed respectively, well below the ten-year average of 116.

And so we arrived at October 2011. In the two years since the fateful 2009 election, the government managed to regain control of the agenda, aided by its own initiative, the shock caused by the death of former president Néstor Kirchner, and the lack of a serious and organised political opposition.

It only takes a quick look around, however, to realise that there is an important, and very vocal, sector of society that does not feel represented by the government. As opposition is an integral part of democracy, the question of who represents those people is one that must be asked.

It has become quite evident for many in the past few years, specifically since the campo crisis of 2008, that the weakness of opposition parties has resulted in certain economic groups affected by governmental policies taking political matters into their own hands. At the forefront of this new opposition are those with the most influence on public opinion: the media corporations.

The 'cacerolazos' in Plaza de Mayo (Photo: Luciano Signorelli)

In Argentina, politics has become to a large extent a war between pro and anti-government media groups unabashedly campaigning for their own interests, without much regard for the traditional laws of journalistic ethics.

An interesting debate about the role of the media has since ensued, not only in Argentina, but also in Latin America and other parts of the world. The sanctity of journalism and its classic role as the “fourth estate” have been brought into question as big media groups are, analytically speaking, stripped bare and shown for what they mostly are: businesses. Powerful businesses, with political interests and a massive influence over public opinion and politicians alike.

There is a positive side to this situation, as nothing in a democracy should be immune to analysis, discussion, and criticism. Media groups have always had political and economic interests, and it is a positive thing that people have become more aware of this and can see through their supposed neutrality.

The obvious negative side is that businesses are not elected and are not accountable to society as politicians, government officials, union delegates, and other political institutions are. This is not exclusive to media businesses, as it is becoming clear all over the world that uncontrolled corporations are openly displacing elected politicians from their decision-making roles.

In Argentina, this situation has evolved from a more-or-less open support of certain media groups to specific political parties and candidates, to the current situation where they seem to have mostly given up on politicians altogether. Nowadays, it is journalists like Jorge Lanata with his Sunday TV show that seem to set the opposition’s agenda for the rest of the week.

The debilitating effect of such political weakness was demonstrated by the recent cacerolazos in Buenos Aires. They were small, unorganised gatherings of individuals without any clear direction or common ideas, other than a visceral rejection of the government. It is worrying that for many, being unorganised was seen as a virtue rather than a weakness.

A political movement without solid ideas and organisation is doomed to fail. And politics, like nature in Aristotelian physics, abhors a vacuum. If the vacuum left by a weak opposition is not filled by legitimate and solid political institutions, it is going to be filled by whoever has the power to impose their point of view.

On 21^st June, the Paraguayan House of Deputies voted 73-1 to hold a hearing that would decide whether Fernando Lugo should be impeached from his position as president. One day later, on 22^nd June, the Senate voted and Lugo lost his job to his vice-president, current president Federico Franco.

Congress called it democratic impeachment. Lugo called it an “express coup d’état.”

Foreign media jumped on the words “coup d’état” and ran images of the protest in Asunción on Friday evening. Many countries took drastic diplomatic action, with Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner going as far as to pull its Paraguayan ambassador.

Local media reports, on the other hand, have varied. Along with cries of censorship regarding the country’s public television station, there have been reports of deep corruption in some of the nation’s newspapers.

The only time “Paraguay” has been googled more than now has been during major sports events, and the country’s internet presence is growing.

In this war of words, every newspaper line, television image, radio clip, tweet or blog post sharing a slogan or point of view can move the public and change the narrative.

And with so many voices crying to hijack the discourse in Paraguay, the truth of the situation is hard to discern.

Protests and Local Reports

The night of the impeachment, thousands gathered in Plaza Independencia, in downtown Asunción, to protest Congress’ decision. In images circulated around the world, riot police and water cannons pushed people from the government offices after the decision.

By the 23^rd June, there were just a handful of protestors left in the plaza. Packing up their blankets and bags, the half-dozen youths occasionally shouted chants, calling for democracy in Paraguay.

Celso Velázquez and Concepción Oviedo were two of those protestors. Both are members of the student movement CREAR. Oviedo said although the movement started with students’ interests in mind, they found the situation too important not to protest.

“The parliamentarians – the senators and deputies – in one day decided the future of the country, and put in place a person who was not elected [as president] by the citizens in 2008,” she said. “And so, they cut the democratic process that started in 2008.”

Velázquez said he started protesting 21^stJune. He noted that although he does not support Lugo, he supports democracy and believes the process to remove him was undemocratic. “Now, Paraguay is under a dictator,” he said. “It was the opinion of Parliament, not the fruit of popular vote. The international community is not recognising this government, and there could be an economic decline and blockades against Paraguay.”

By 23^rd June, most protestors in favour of Lugo’s return to the Presidential Palace were in front of TV Pública, Paraguay’s public television station. There, hundreds of people took their turn in front of the camera during the station’s “Open Microphone” – a program which usually lasts two hours, that ran straight for a couple of days.

Rodrigo Tellez runs the new-media company SEO Paraguay. Soon after the Senate’s decision, he started the website Noticias Desde Paraguay to crowdsource information from various social media. From the site, he broadcast TV Pública’s continuous coverage of the protest.

“When it started, there was a little bit of repression of information,” he says. “[Citizens] were speaking what they were thinking, how they feel about the recent situation, and you couldn’t see that on TV or on any station. [Government] even tried to pull the plug on their energy – they sent the energy company to cut them out. But after a time – thanks to social media – everybody could see what was really happening in the country, and it forced the politicians to put that on air.”

José María Costa is a professor of journalism, information law, new technologies and cultural industries at the National University of Asunción. Now a columnist, Costa has decades of experience in the field as a journalist for the Paraguayan daily Última Hora and a voice on radio. Having reported in Paraguay during Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship, he says he thinks the media today is quite free to report what they want. He says the freedom of media to criticise Congress and the sequence of events is the “most palpable and most conclusive evidence that there is.”

“In the period of transition from 1989 to today, Paraguayan society has recuperated many freedoms,” he says. “One of the freedoms, obviously, is freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”

He says he believes TV Pública was practically in Lugo’s party’s hands, and did not permit opinions and visions contrary to his political thinking. “[It was] the state’s own television station, none other than its own voice criticising the [new] government,” he says. “I would find it difficult to find another situation like it in Latin America. The public television station of Argentina doing this – Cristina Kirchner allowing this at this time, or TeleSUR in Venezuela doing the same – it wouldn’t happen.”

As far as traditional forms of media are concerned, in Paraguay as around the world, the almighty dollar is a driving force in what makes it to the evening news. “What is emerging now is journalistic media that exploits sensationalism, as a mechanism to increase ratings,” Costa says. “They create journalism and communicate with a feeling that is much more sensational.”

The Growth of New Media

Paraguay is one of the continent’s least connected nations. When Lugo became president in 2008 Paraguay had 530,300 internet users – 7.8% of the population – according to the United Nations’ specialised agency for information and communication technologies. Costa says that in just four years, that number has risen to about 20% or 30% of the population.

“It’s a real growth,” he says. “I believe that accompanying this real growth of internet penetration, there was growth in the use of internet for freedom of speech and the expression of ideas, debates, criticisms – expressions in respect to issues of public interest.”

Tellez says there are both negative and positive aspects to more people using social networks for news. As one positive, he says the diversity of viewpoints increased as Paraguay increased its internet usage.

“Everyone was watching TV, and you can’t really watch what’s happening,” he says. “The owner of one channel wanted you to get his point of view, and the owner of the other channel – I say channel, but it’s networks. The same owner is the owner of one channel, one newspaper and many magazines, and they use it in the same way.”

Tellez – who had to study his trade in Buenos Aires due to the lack of available training in Paraguay – also says the internet helped people around the country understand what was going on despite not being in the capital. “They were watching TV and it was Popeye or some canned film, instead of what was going on,” he says.

Argentina’s Coverage

While representatives from many Latin American countries have been reacting to the impeachment, Argentines have been especially vocal.

Argentine political theorist and professor Atilio Boron said in a recent article that the president’s dismissal was “one of the most blatant acts of fraud in the political history of Latin America,” noting the power of agribusiness, its power in Paraguay and the role it played in Lugo’s impeachment.

He also talks about deep corruption in the newspaper industry, arguing that the nation’s biggest newspaper, ABC Color, among other things “launched an intense campaign prior to the coup d’etat, preparing a political climate that permitted Lugo’s express political hanging.”

“The US embassy, together with the agro-industrial transnationals and the oligarchy, made up the gang that dominated Congress,” he said in the article, published with the Latin American television station TeleSUR. “Lugo realised too late what little democracy there is in the institutions of the capitalist state, which removed him in a tragicomic political show trial, violating with impunity all standards of due process.”

The Argentine daily newspaper La Nación also wrote an editorial about the impeachment/coup on Tuesday, noting that the critical countries are also ones with their own issues regarding democracy. “There is thus an asymmetry between the way the almost unanimous decision of the Paraguayan Congress to displace Lugo was attacked, and the indifference with which the continuing constitutional violations of governments with legitimacy of origin are taken,” the article said.

Costa says he believes the transition from Lugo’s government to Franco’s was through “a democratic process,” and that members of Congress “were elected in the same election as Lugo, and with the same quantity of votes.”

Tellez says he believes international governments also have their own interests in mind when it comes to their coverage of the situation. He noted that Latin American countries with “left-leaning” governments would have a special interest in Lugo’s downfall as his party tends toward what is considered the “left” side of the political spectrum.

“Other countries are a bit worried, because they are run by social parties,” he says, bringing up Argentina as an example. “Now, with this happening here, Cristina Kirchner is afraid it could happen to her in her country. She has a lot of stuff that her politicians could say about her to get an impeachment – easy, easy, easy.”

As different forms of social media take hold in Paraguay, the country will be able to represent itself better in the future. Costa says while there is not yet the depth or power seen in Egypt or Tunisia, Paraguay is on its way.

“Obviously, it’s a process that is going to create force,” he says. “But yes, [the crisis] demonstrates that the seed is there, and the feeling is there, too.”

World Press Freedom Day took place on 3rd May this year, celebrated in cities around the world. Sponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organisation), the event’s purpose is to examine the promise and challenges facing media of various forms, as well as inform citizens on violations of press freedom that continue to this day.

In Latin American countries, the press has made many important strides, often through some of the most difficult present day conflicts. In cases such as Mexico and Honduras, however, reporters are frequently intimidated and targeted for violence by members of organised crime. In other countries, such as Venezuela and, to a debatable extent, Ecuador, hostile relationships between the government and certain parts of the press have produced censorship.

In order to find out what residents of Buenos Aires think about the current state of press freedom in Argentina and throughout Latin America, we took to the streets and asked for some opinions.

Photos by Kamilo Hernández

Jorge Alberto Vajanella, 62, Caballito, Public Accountant

Here in Argentina, freedom in the press is very broad. No matter who or where you are, you can say what you want. In the newspaper, on television, on the radio, on the streets, wherever. In Mexico, of course, there is a profoundly serious problem, and in Venezuela the government has considerable control over media and communications. I think the press faces repression in Chile as well, partly because of the right-leaning government. In general, I think the press in Latin America is becoming freer every day, and young people have the resources to continue this trend in the future.

Christian Savloff, 25, Caballito, Works in Film Post-production

I think it’s important to highlight that the press has commercial interests beyond informing us, like Clarín’s role here in Argentina, as well as La Nación. While the point is to truly inform us, in many cases there is a lot of subjectivity, so the reporting is not objective. In places like Venezuela, the government can be very fanatical and tilt the press in favour of Hugo Chávez. To me, respect for the media is very important. I think that if you educate people with various points of view, they will listen and decide.

 
Sara Martínez, 25, Palermo, Works in Fashion/Design

For me, I don’t read the newspapers here as much as I see the news on television or listen to it on the radio. There are plenty of channels, with many different programs, and people can choose from a variety of perspectives to interpret what is going on. I think the trend in Venezuela, with radio stations and newspapers censored by the government, doesn’t seem very good to me because it is cutting away freedom in the press.

 
Angel Benitez, Caballito, 36, Hotels and Tourism

Throughout Latin America, each country’s situation is very different, and the image of the real community we have here gets complicated by propaganda. In Argentina, liberty in the press is very divided. Some think the press is very free, some don’t, and there are also particular situations when it is and it isn’t. Ideologies among citizens and certain outlets will influence how one sees things. I think the background problem uniting all Latin American countries has to do with education. The formation of values, the small details. Partly as a result of fear, partly because of insecurity, the values that truly unite Latin Americans have gotten lost. People are on guard. To me, the fundamental problem is educational, and it’s something that has to change not just in schools, but especially in the family.

Laura Fraguas, 23, Belgrano, Medical Student

I think there is freedom of press in Argentina. I don’t really know the full context of other examples in Latin America, but I think that here, it is free. There exist programs like that of [Jorge] Lanata, or 6-7-8, as well as many that give a full spectrum of political views and information in Argentina. Freedom in the press exists here.

In a recent Quilmes advertisement by advertisement agency Young & Rubicam, a battle is staged between the sexes, with male and female leaders spurring on their respective flag-bearing, animated ‘tribes’. The woman shouts to her clan “We’ve come a long way…do you want to return to not having the vote?”, while her male counterpart retorts “men have reached the moon and now we can’t even get to 10pm” without having to deal with female issues.

Tired of losing his male ‘authenticity’, he rallies his troops with a vengeance. Sticks are waved, chests are bared, hair braids are shed and tribal marks are daubed on with lipstick, in preparation for battle. But in the ultimate of bathetic moments, the battle dissipates into passionate embraces with the tagline “when machismo and feminism meet (later adjusted to ‘men and women’), equality is born.”

Aside from the tangentiality of Argentina’s iconic brand in the staged reconciliation of these age-old social movements, the advertisement serves to reinscribe essential notions of gender, all too common in the advertising industry in Latin America. Rather than reaching a compromise between alternative agendas, as one would conjecture from the tagline, the implicit conclusion of the advert is that when women are put back in their place – in the sanctioned world of domesticity – society, and by extension, one is lead to assume, consumerism thrives.

An Imported Ideal

A well-known perfum label ad at a bus stop (Photo: Agus Carini)

In a country which generates myriad cultural myths, and which remains in thrall to European ideals, according to Sharon Haywood, founder of Any-Body Argentina, it comes as no surprise that advertising is thriving in Argentina. With a 20% increase in the last five years alone, Argentina currently holds claim to have the fastest growing advertising industry worldwide, according to statistics from MagnaGlobal.

The Argentine internet is, accordingly, an assault cause of prurient pop-up boxes, which require so much clicking and manoeuvring

that, by the time the viewer reaches any pertinent information, their attention span is already besieged by commercial plugs, multiplying their needs exponentially.

As print editions of newspapers continue to decline, overtaken by the web’s ceaseless wellspring of information, the media has become more dependent than ever on the revenue of an industry whose intrusive techniques and subliminal messages are in direct

contradiction to the seemingly transparent agenda they uphold.

According to Haywood, the predominance of advertising in this country is intimately related to the propensity of Argentines to look to Europe as its cultural mirror.

“We in the west have exported this perfect image of beauty….and Argentina is a prime example of how that image has been imported and manipulated to an extreme.”

Take the recent L’Oreal advertisement which sets up the old-style glamour of Cannes with the tagline “All that, Argentine women have it too.” According to Haywood, this imported ideal serves as an indicator of allegiance to European models and as a determinant of social status.

For the sociologist and historian Dora Barrancos, exporting western images is an integral tool in the mechanics of globalisation, obsessively drawing attention to alternative, stylised worlds.

The white, fair-haired, western figures which confront the passerby from magazine stand and advertising billboard alike, argues Haywood, have few natural counterparts on the capital’s ethnically diverse streets. It is perhaps unsurprising that the world’s first store dedicated to Barbie, frequently held up as the Trojan horse of western influence, was launched in Buenos Aires in 2007. And that plastic surgery, often included in personal health plans, has become a national phenomenon.

Insistently, the message propagated by the press is that “the key to happiness lies in reproducing this aesthetic ideal and in successfully nailing down a man.”

The demand for beauty in Argentina is insatiable. As in Catherine Hakim’s mantra of erotic capital, beauty – in its marketised form – is all too often equated with instant success.

Images of women baring-it-all in suggestive poses are the currency of television, advertising and the printed press. The country has imported the western world’s fixation with Andy Warhol’s ready-made celebrity culture and transformed it into something more unsettling. Television dancing contests are morphed into prurient, titillating strip tease, with a camera that obsessively zooms in on silicone-enhanced assets.

The whole notion of personality, individuality and uniqueness are subsumed within a standardised maxim that the body is an asset to be exploited. Women are, accordingly, expected not only to emulate, but to exhibit a model-like physique, air-brushed to perfection.

Digitally or surgically enhanced, this ideal exists solely as a construct, a profitable commodity exploited by the supremely powerful fashion, beauty and diet industries.

“This is a society that is constantly telling you that you need to fix something physically about yourself,” says Haywood. The hypersexualisation of images of women in the media serves not only to objectify the fairer sex, but to systematically discredit their sexuality.

Media Straitjackets

In The World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, attended by representatives from 189 countries, communication was considered to be a fundamental area in the advancement of gender equality.

The media, it was decided, should “develop, in terms that do not conflict with freedom of expression, professional directives and codes of conduct, and other forms of self-regulation, to promote unstereotypical images of women and increase the participation of women involved in decision making in the media.”

Ethics do not yet appear to have entered the media agenda in Argentina. Whilst European adverts have at least registered the need to address the ethnically and physically diverse characteristics of 99.9% of its consumers, albeit it in often self-congratulatory guises, Argentina still remains culturally enthralled by an exclusive, exclusionary ideal of beauty.

“All countries, and Latin American countries in particular, are profoundly contradictory,” says Barrancos. “Argentina remains backward in its representation of women, whilst in the legislative field, it has become very dynamic.”

According to Barrancos, since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s, Argentina has made significant advances in achieving a certain level of parity between the sexes. A number of critical laws have been passed in Congress in recent years, safeguarding and sanctioning female rights. Law 26,485, passed in November 2009, includes several critical clauses prohibiting the publication and dissemination of images and messages in the media which “naturalise the subordination of women.”

But, Barrancos argues, there has “not been a strong, concerted effort to address the treatment of women in the media” on a social level.

“Second-wave feminism never happened in Argentina because we were too occupied with social revolution… As a result female objectification and the marketisation of the body has not come into focus.”

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner famously sought to distance herself from the term feminism during her 2007 election campaign, declaring that she was “feminine, not feminist,” with the implicit suggestion that the two attributes were incompatible.

More recently, following a bombardment of media scrutiny, she has at least conceded that women face significant discrimination in the press on a daily basis.

For academic Carolina Escudero, the election of a female president and the significant increase in female deputies (41%) is a significant step in motivating Argentine women with the belief that they too can attain positions of power.

The ‘quota law’, a positive discrimination bill to promote female representation in legislative offices, was passed in 1991, making Argentina the first country to require a minimum number of female candidates in political parties. The law stipulates that for every two male parliamentary candidates, there has to be at least one female, thus affirming women as active agents in public policy.

But, Escudero argues, “there is a tendency to treat women in positions of power as celebrities.” By focusing on their physical attributes, the media systematically demeans and disqualifies these women from occupying the same status accorded to their male counterparts.

Haywood concurs. Having been dubbed the “queen of botox” by the opposition, “if anything, [the portrayal of] the president reinforces the standard.”

According to statistics from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a biannual study which analyses gender inequality in mass media, only 24% of news stories feature a woman as the protagonist. And when women do feature in news stories, most frequently they are represented as victims (36%), according to a study conducted by ELA.

“Developed and undeveloped countries are both faced with the same problem” of under- or mis-represented women in the media, says Escudero.

“Women are frequently treated as pure decoration, as accessories to male protagonists. Only very rarely does a woman make a televised appearance in which she is consulted or asked to impart knowledge.”

The media is still a man’s world. “The fact that more women are visible in the workforce,” says Escudero, “does not necessarily correlate to a change in the quality and content of those media. When you do find women in managerial positions, they have often adopted a masculine perspective.”

“We need women who are prepared to bring a gender perspective to bear in terms of image and content, if we are to change that.”

The A la PAR network and the recently closed Artemisa Noticias have been collectively instrumental in providing alternative gender-based forums to the male-dominated mass media.

Over the past seven years, Artemisa has brought a gender perspective to bear on the mass media, drawing attention to the slant of the reportage, language usage and image selection. Besides training and sensitising more than 600 journalists and officials in Latin America, it held the first national conference on media coverage and access to abortion in 2008. A section of Artemisa’s team will continue to work under the newly launched organisation, Communication for Equality.

“It is undeniable that your culture or environment is going to affect your own perceptions,” says Haywood. Like her colleague, the British psychotherapist Susie Orbach, founder of Endangered Species, she argues that the monopoly of visual culture in contemporary society has resulted in a morphed, narrow concept of femininity.

“Society, of all ages, learns more from the media than any other single source of information,” according to an Artemisa study. The paucity of real women, of identifiable role models, inevitably conditions social and behavioural mores.

For Haywood, our current warped model leads to a dysfunctional relationship with the body. Divesting it of its practical and creative function, it is reduced to a fetish, a cultural artefact subject to the whims of the marketplace.

A recent study conducted by the lingerie brand Triumph, revealed that 87% of Argentine women are not happy with their bodies. Far from democratising beauty, the objectification of the female body by the mass media results in a propensity to self-objectify in a radically disempowering process.

In a mediated culture, representation is everything. “There is a still a real backwardness in the press.” says Escudero. “All too often you see images of nude women which have no bearing on the story they accompany.”

“The decree to ban Rubro 59 was a critical step, but much remains to be done,” says Barrancos. “Our problem is cultural, not legislative. But there needs to be strong intervention by the state to raise consciousness and regulate the marketisation of our media.”

A new ‘Law for Regulation and Control of Market Power’ was created to regulate markets and economic concentration in Ecuador. The law intends, amongst other things, to create a regulatory board and a superintendent to control prices and competition.

The new law will settle on reference prices for food products and new public policies will be created to preserve the sovereignty of small and medium sized food companies. The minister of coordination of the economic policy, Katiuska King, stated that “there is a high concentration of economic activity in a very few large enterprises”. Adding that according to the 2010 Census there is a need to accelerate the process of production of Ecuadorian industry.

The bill is controversial because it will create an insecure environment for investment and business. The law also forbids financial institutions and broadcasting companies’ shareholders, partners and directors to have investments outside their area of work.

Weeks after 11-year-old Candela Sol Rodríguez was kidnapped and murdered, the media have only just begun to move away from the case that captured the attention of the nation. But although six suspects remain in custody, police are still working to figure out who murdered the girl, and why.

Candela went missing on August 22nd, after which time the government deployed thousands of police officers, and a “48 hours for Candela” campaign brought celebrities and NGOs together in the search. She was found a week later by two cartoneras (rubbish collectors) who discovered her body in a bag in a trash dump.

The Argentina Independent hit the streets to find out what the public thinks of the coverage Candela’s case received and the government’s response. How well do locals think the press and the government responded to the Candela Case? And was the press coverage good or bad for the investigation?

Photos by Lili Kocsis

Erla, Clothing retailer, 60

The majority of journalists did a bad job because they focused on the family and the mother. No one can judge her until we know who is responsible. Even though the father is in prison the child doesn’t deserve what happened to her. The government doesn’t seem to have done such a bad job. It tried to look for the girl, but the police didn’t find the right lead. If the police had gotten on the right track faster, maybe it would have saved her life.

Germán, real estate employee, 34

What happened is a disaster. Sometimes the press seems very morbid and shows things that they don’t need to show, like when the child was inside the bag and they showed the mother seeing her. But it sells papers, that’s the problem.

Jose Alberto, Retired from Consruction materials Business, 65

The justice system has to be allowed to act first, and only afterwards can you or I or whoever get involved. Here the press distorted everything and now we don’t know who is at fault because today it’s the carpenter, tomorrow it’s the fruit seller, and we just don’t know. You listen to the news and every day it’s a different version.

Florencia, Housewife and student, 36

The government in this case seems to have acted as it should have. There are many suspects but we don’t know whether they are the real people at fault. But at least there has been movement, probably because we’re in election season. It gave the opportunity for the government to act and say ‘we’re against this.’

Estefania, student, 18

Thanks to the press they found out a bunch of things. People made calls and gave information. They put us all on alert as to who she was and where to go if we saw something. Every morning they said whether there had been a new clue, a new call. This seemed good to me because every day you learned something.

Social organizations and alternative media from the “initiative for the democratization of information” denounced the current media filtering in Paraguay. It was during a ceremony for the World Day of Freedom of Expression.

The “initiative for the democratization of information” brings together community and educational radio, digital and print media.

Rubén Ayala, a member of the Association of Community Radio Broadcasters and Alternative Media, Voces Paraguay, said that the concentration of media ownership “is a threat to democracy”.

The communicator said that this situation is an attack “against diversity and plurality of media ownership and the information sources”.

In this regard, the situation could be corrected with a new Telecommunications Act, which has been considered in congress.

“Paraguay needs a new Telecommunications Act to ensure communication is a right of all people and not as a market product,” said the journalist.

For his part, Ángel Giménez, a leader of the Coordination of Rural Organizations, described it as “dangerous” to democracy in the country that “a few media sources filter the fountain of informations the reaches the public”.

He added that due to the filtering of information, “the mainstream media have unlimited power”.

Story courtesy of Agencia Púlsar, the news agency of AMARC-ALC.

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration, declaring that the government had committed an act of discrimination by refusing to award official advertising to Perfil Editorial, the publisher of both a newspaper and the magazines ‘Noticias’ and ‘Fortuna’. According to the ruling the government is obliged to ‘not discriminate’ and seek balance concerning official advertisement.

The Supreme Court ordered the state to provide official advertising to the newspaper Perfil, which intentionally has been entirely excluded from distribution of government advertisement since Néstor Kirchner came to power in 2003.

In the ruling that has national scope, the court reaffirmed that the state should ignore discriminatory criteria and maintain a reasonable balance between the various publications as a guarantee of freedom of expression.

“All media should get official advertisement: that is the difference between equal treatment and discriminatory treatment,” stated the Supreme Court.

The ruling orders the state to take “a period of two weeks to arrange distribution for advertising in various publications of Perfil, while ensuring a reasonable balance with others who have similar characteristics”.

According to Gustavo González, director of Perfil, “the court’s decision is important for the institutional message that it sends, stopping the government using public funds for political purposes.”

Following the ruling, the state can not make arbitrary differences in distributing publicity, because it violates the principle of equality.

The Association of Argentine Journalism (ADEPA) described the ruling as “excellent” and called on the government to correct “distortions”.

Of the ruling, juridical counselor of the ADEPA, Gregorio Badeni, said: “Advertisement should serve to disseminate information to all citizens, without favouring media related to the policy of government. We must fulfill the right to information and pluralism.”

His colleague Daniel Sabsay further added that it was “a breakthrough in anti-discrimination to the media”.