News Coverage of the 2021 Colombian National Strike: An Agenda Setting Operation
Colombia National Strike, May 2021. (Photo: Oxi.Ap from Medellín, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Following the first round of national elections in Colombia on May 29, the country now looks ahead to the runoff elections on June 19. The runoff will pit leftist candidate Gustavo Petro against Rodolfo Hernández, a “politically incorrect populist” who will seek to capture the support of Colombians who voted for the traditional conservative candidate, Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, in the initial round.
Analysts are framing the elections as “the most important advance for the Colombian Left in its history,” and news reports have foregrounded the role of Petro’s running mate, Francia Márquez, “the first black female vice presidential candidate in the country’s history.”
Regardless of the outcome of the runoff, the defeat of Gutiérrez in the first round appears to signal that Colombians are tired of the “business as usual” politics that have solidified the military’s repressive role and its links with narcotraffickers.
A look back at the country’s 2021 general strike provides a useful window into the forces that have led the country to this point. In particular, a critical analysis of establishment media coverage of the strike reveals the continuing role of dominant institutions in seeking to extend the status quo and undermine the people’s desire for peace and justice after decades of structural violence, dislocation, and corruption.
Putting the 2021 strike in context
Between April 28 and mid-July 2021, the Colombian National Strike stopped and shaped the nation’s daily life. Dances, marches, concerts, and other gatherings were the main methods of resistance. Nevertheless, due to lack of government action on protestors' demands, violent methods of resistance later emerged as they seemed to be the only way to draw the attention of the relentless Colombian government and the international community.
What most establishment news media outlets did not speak about, however, was that this “violence” happening at the protests was an outcome of state violence. In fact, lack of good healthcare and education systems, increasing poverty, massacres of social leaders, environmental crisis, forced displacement, and the refusal to implement the 2016 peace agreement are just some of the ways that the government has harmed Colombians on a daily basis.
A shift in establishment media coverage
During the beginning of the strike, most news reports focused on explaining why there was a national strike happening. For example, establishment outlets such as El Tiempo and El Espectador published headlines such as:
“We strike because we have no other option': Colombian Federation of Educators”
“National Strike: What are the reasons for the mobilization?”
“What do labor unions say to defend a national strike during a Covid 19 peak?”
Even though many of these news reports were clearly opinionated, and there were many others discouraging people from joining the strikes, they at least provided the public with a rough context of the atrocities and human right violations that regularly happen in the country.
As the strike evolved, however, and as the government refused to act on the demands of hundreds of thousands of outraged Colombians, the coverage shifted significantly. Rather than contextualizing the violence and discussing people’s demands, the establishment media foregrounded the actions of protesters and the violence in the streets.
Violence in the front
Beyond collaborating with the government to shape and limit the perspectives being primarily shared, only a few days into the strike, establishment news outlets like El Tiempo and El Espectador featured prominent headlines such as:
“A month of the strike leaves more than two thousand injured between civilians and police”
“A day of violence in Cali in protests: 7 dead and 36 injured”
“The testimony of the owner of the hotel burned during protests in Neiva”
This kind of coverage served to highlight protestors’ violence, weaken support for the strike, and delegitimize grassroots perspectives, because even when ordinary citizens were given a voice, they could not openly criticize the government. In this coverage, which follows a pattern that scholars have described as the “protest paradigm,” it is common to find an overwhelming number of quotes from government officials and a lack of perspectives that speak about and criticize the root of the problems.
The importance of alternative coverage
Because establishment media refused to cover the police brutality, governmental infiltrations and paramilitary threats happening, alternative outlets such as La Oreja Roja and La Silla Vacía attempted to counter this pattern by demonstrating that protesters' violence arose as a response to state brutality. They granted people on the ground a platform to share videos and information that clearly revealed the extent of the state violence.
This grassroots work was crucial to drawing the international community’s attention to the atrocious reality in Colombia and helped initiate the June 2021 visits of the Inter-American Commision of Human Rights (IACHR).
Why does this matter?
The establishment media's focus on demonizing violent protests led directly to alternative coverage that focused on sharing people’s experiences of state violence. Despite the different intentions of reporting these issues, such coverage resulted in a wider foregrounding of violence that ultimately benefited the government because it backgrounded protesters’ demands. The lack of attention to both the national strike committees and people’s grievances served to lessen the pressure on the Colombian government to end the structural violence that had initiated the strike back in April 2021.
Supported by educators, indigenous people, labor unions, farmers, students, feminist and LGBTQ+ groups, and a range of lower, middle and even some upper-class Colombians, the 2021 national strike was the biggest in the recent history of the country. Nevertheless, Colombia’s overwhelmingly violent reality portrayed in the daily news helped exacerbate divisions among these groups and helped fuel a decline in support for the strike.
Impactful agenda setting
The trend toward coverage emphasizing violence in the streets, even in alternative outlets seeking to counter establishment narratives, appears to be connected to the agenda setting plans of the Colombian government.
Even though Petro’s 40.32% of the votes in the first round fell short of the 51% necessary to win a presidential election, he had been in top of the polls for months. Thus, it makes sense that the government and establishment media were once again collaborating to create a sense of instability and insecurity. Apart from weakening Petro’s popularity, such narratives serve to prevent citizens from fully grasping the reality on the ground and disrupt the possibility of an effective coalition against the status quo.
While it is important to acknowledge and inform people about the violence happening on the ground, it appeared that we, Colombians, were being led into an ideological trap - a trap in which we were encouraged to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.
Looking ahead to June 19
Almost a year later, however, the results of the first round of elections suggest that Colombia’s government agenda setting failed. The defeat of Gutiérrez, the candidate of the far right, left two candidates who both claim to be “anti-system” and are not directly linked with the traditional parties that have dominated Colombian politics for decades.
The runoff will provide Colombians with the opportunity to choose between Hernández, whose plans and rhetoric revolve around ending corruption (whilst he is investigated for it), and Petro, who proposes implementing many of the structural changes that millions of Colombians have been asking for.
