Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia

3. The Portrayal of Colombian Indigenous Amazonian Peoples by the National Press, 1988–2006

3.ThePortrayalofColombianIndigenous AmazonianPeoplesbytheNationalPress,1988–2006 JeanE.Jackson In this chapter I examine articles published in Colombia’s two national daily newspapers on the country’s Amazonian indigenous communities . I explore the ways the journalists and photographers working for El Espectador and El Tiempo construct the differences between indigenous Amazonians and the country’s nonindigenous citizens, and between Amazonian indigenous communities (referred to here as pueblos, “people,” “town”) and pueblos located in other regions. The articles were collected as part of a larger, ongoing research project investigating these two newspapers’ representations of indigenous Colombia during the period 1988–2006. When conceptualizing this larger research project I assumed that the two dailies would offer a seriously distorted picture of the country ’s indigenous people. I envisioned uncovering the newspapers’ participation in “opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak 2001:2). I hoped to “investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized . . . by language use” (2), working to make such discourses more visible 71 colombian indigenous amazonian peoples and transparent (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000:448). I assumed such symbolic domination would be easy to document. I certainly uncovered examples of bias, ignorance, insensitivity, and ethnocentrism in these two newspapers. Especially in the Amazonian corpus I found examples of texts that masked the effects of power and ideology in the production of meaning, so that unequal power relationships came closer to acquiring stable and natural forms and to being accepted as “given” (Wodak 2001:3). I found many instances of “othering,” at times extensive. “Othering” refers to depictions that highlight alterity. Negative othering in its mildest form disparages; in its most blatant form it sends virulently racist, sexist, and xenophobic messages. I found that, overall, Amazonian pueblos are more othered than non-Amazonian pueblos, the contrast sharpest between representations of Amazonian and Andean pueblos. I also found much more pronounced othering of Amazonian women than men, some of it verging on negative othering. However, I found no case of clearly negative representations of pueblos or their members. (Some articles published prior to 1988 do contain negative stereotypes and at times exhibit shockingly biased attitudes.) The absence of explicitly negative othering is surprising, especially when we take into account the fact that these two newspapers are by no means left-liberal; both are owned by families in the oligarchy. Nor are they especially good. El Espectador has challenged government policy more aggressively than El Tiempo, and its coverage of the nation ’s indigenous pueblos has been more extensive and favorable. (Financial problems eventually forced ElEspectador to publish weekly, although it still publishes daily on the Internet.) The absence is even more striking when we consider the highly negative treatment of indigenous populations in the national press in several other Latin American countries, for example, Brazil (Ramos 1998) and Guatemala (Hale 2006). Clearly, understanding the historical context is critical if we are to explain my main finding: the absence of truly negative images. The 72 jean e. jackson country’s problems, among them poverty (see Ramírez, this volume), rampant corruption at all levels of government, and above all a conflict that has lasted half a century, are vital elements of this context. I argue that the manner in which indigenous Colombians appear in the press, ranging from neutral to positive and though often romantic or stereotypical , is at times a means of critiquing nonindigenous Colombian society, in particular the various loci of power and authority where so many decisions harmful to the country are made. In this respect mainstream Colombian media continue a tradition that hearkens back to Montaigne’s and Rousseau’s enlistment of New World inhabitants in these philosophers’ efforts to critique the European society of their respective eras. My findings fit within this volume’s broader argument —that constructions of Amazonian indigenous peoples, whether as nobly savage or ignobly savage, emerge out of specific historical contexts and cannot be understood in isolation from them. To be included in the corpus being analyzed, an article had to either be about Amazonian pueblos or mention some variant of the word “Amazon.”1 I did not include articles about elections whose reference to the Amazon simply consists of listing candidates from the region. Also not included were articles about pueblos in other parts of the country illustrated with photographs of indigenous Amazonians, a frequently occurring practice. Colombia’s politico...