Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez

9. Venezuela’s Telenovela: Polarization and Political Discourse in Cosita Rica

C h A P t e r n I n e Venezuela’s Telenovela Polarization and Political Discourse in Cosita Rica Carolina Acosta-Alzuru From September 2003 to August 2004, two melodramas intertwined reality and fiction as they shared the heated Venezuelan stage: the rocky road to the recall referendum of President Hugo Chávez and the successful telenovela Cosita Rica, which garnered top ratings during those eleven months.1 This show, a fascinating example of the world’s most watched television genre (McAnany and La Pastina 1994), was inevitably linked to Venezuelan reality and became the epicenter in which media, culture, and society evidenced their complex interaction .2 As Cosita Rica linked fiction to the country’s sociopolitical crisis, it became a key ingredient in Venezuela’s contemporary history. Cosita Rica was more than the love story of its suffering protagonists— Paula C. and Diego. The telenovela was a careful mix of melodrama, chronicle, editorial, and humor. Its chemical formula included two isotopes of fiction— fiction that creates an illusion and fiction that evokes reality. The ingredients were the genre’s usual: star-crossed love, intrigue, and misunderstandings. There was an important difference, though. These elements were soaked in the liquid—sometimes bubbly and refreshing, sometimes viscous and bitter—of Venezuelan reality. In Cosita Rica, its author—the poet, columnist, and scriptwriter Leonardo Padrón—presents his personal vision of his country. The script suggests an author who opposes Chávez but who resists booby-trapping his telenovela with a Manichean view of Venezuela’s political and socioeconomic crises. Therefore, even though he is open about his political position—“I declare myself openly, though not radically, opposed to Chávez” (Leonardo Padrón, June 18, 2003)— he writes characters and dialogues where “the depth of each side is never out of sight” (Beatriz Valdés, July 28, 2004).3 Cosita Rica also reflects Padrón’s un- VenezuelA’S telenoVelA 245 easiness with the pernicious effects of political polarization. The telenovela shows the terrible consequences of Venezuelan lack of disposition in 2003–4 for real dialogue and generalized predisposition toward violence—a lethal mix that was pervasive in the country’s political circles. It is not easy to separate the political and the socioeconomic Venezuelas in Cosita Rica. Both are tightly linked through the characters and storylines. Both are represented using narrative, metaphor, and humor. In this chapter, however , I focus on the telenovela’s political realm.Therefore, I center my attention on the characters that underpin Cosita Rica’s representation of political life: Olegario, La Chata, Juancho, and Tentación. Theoretical Framework and Methods Even though telenovelas are a key ingredient of Venezuelan everyday life, there are only a handful of books published in the country that focus exclusively on this media product (Acosta-Alzuru 2007; V. Alvarez 2007; Cabrujas 2002; Espada 2002; Guerra 2001; Rojas Vera 1993; A. Rondón 2006). There is also a small and influential body of literature comprising studies that reflect the stages and trends in mass-media research in Latin America and that have marked the examination of Venezuelan telenovelas (Acosta-Alzuru 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2004; L. Barrios 1988a, 1988b; Coccato 1978, 1979a, 1979b; Colomina de Rivera 1974; Fernández 1995; Güerere 1994; Hyppolite 2000; Ishibashi 2003; Mendoza 1992, 1996). And to these voices, numbers, and interpretations, we must add the valuable reflections and analyses written by telenovela writers who shed even more light on this understudied television genre (Barrera Tyszka 2002; Cabrujas 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Espada 2002; Garmendia , 2000; Martínez 2002, 2005; Padrón 1998, 2002; Policastro 2002). This chapter, an examination of Cosita Rica as a locus of mediated political discourse in Venezuela’s polarized Bolivarian democracy, contributes to this body of literature that is essential to the understanding of the television genre that is a key cultural ingredient in Venezuelans’ daily diet. In the case of Cosita Rica, this genre established a dialogue between fiction and reality, and television and country. My analysis draws on the cultural studies insight that media and culture are inextricably linked since “culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings—the ‘giving and taking of meaning ’—between the members of a society or group” (Hall 1997, 2). Recent cultural studies texts argue for an approach that examines processes of culture and communication from multiple perspectives using the “circuit of culture” 246 ACoStA-Alzuru (du Gay et...