Abstract
Latin American telenovelas draw huge television audiences and exert vast influence.
La Reina del Sur is a narconovela, a growing subgenre of Latin American soaps featuring drugs, violence, sex and lavish lifestyles. These soaps started as a sensational spin on the hugely popular telenovelas (soap operas), but they are now going global. In June, TV audiences in the United States will be able to tune in to Queen of the South, an English-language remake of La Reina del Sur.
Not everyone, however, is a fan. Venezuela’s telecoms regulator takes a very dim view of the narconovela. “The genre known as narconovela exalts and promotes a series of anti-values […] and it glorifies the lives of people involved in the crime of drug-trafficking,” announced the regulator Conatel, in February this year. The regulator went further and asked the cable company that was broadcasting Escobar: El Patrón del Mal, (Escobar the Drug Lord) to remove the series from its programming. Previously, it had banned other popular narco-series, including La Reina del Sur and El Capo.
Andrés Cañizalez, a media analyst at the country’s Andrés Bello University, told Index: “This is the result of a tendency to censor. The government blames the media for promoting violence instead of looking into why Venezuela has become one of the most violent countries in the world.” A study released earlier this year by the Mexico City-based Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice ranked Venezuela’s capital Caracas as the world’s most violent city.
After Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, the Venezuelan government introduced tougher controls on media, and soap operas came under scrutiny too. A strict media law was approved in 2004, and then revised in 2010. The law went hand in hand with legislation to protect children from exposure to violence. It set strict limits on what could and could not be said in fiction as well as in the news media. And it did not just affect narconovelas, but also other TV series. In 2011, Conatel banned Chepe Fortuna, a Colombian soap opera, which President Chávez said “insulted national pride” and “incited violence”. The comedy series featured a secretary called Venezuela whose small dog Huguito (little Hugo) gets lost during a walk with her boyfriend. In the series the woman is seen crying into her phone: “What is Venezuela going to do without her Huguito?” Her boyfriend replies: “She’s going to be free.”
A scene from Queen of the South, an English-language remake of Mexican narconovela La Reina del Sur, to be premiered in the USA in June
Credit: NBC Universal
Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Georgia in the USA and author of 2015 book Telenovelas Adentro (Inside Soaps), told Index: “They put a straitjacket on soap operas, and that’s when the products stopped being contemporary and international.
“You can blame soaps for so many things because they are imperfect products. And it’s easier to talk about soaps than about the economy. The [Venezuelan] government carried out a very efficient intimidation campaign.”
In 2010, Venezuela’s government shut down the private cable TV channel RCTV International, after the channel refused to broadcast a government campaign message, which was compulsory for national broadcasters. The closure had a devastating effect on Venezuela’s telenovela industry. The number of soap operas made was halved in one go because RCTV was one of the two main channels that produced them. Since then a combination of economic hardship, insecurity and self-censorship in Venezuela has meant there are fewer soap operas produced and there has been an exodus of professionals towards other countries in Latin America. Venezuela, a former telenovela powerhouse, has started disappearing from the Latin American soap opera market, while other countries’ have seen their production surge.
Of the 10 most watched soap operas in 2014 in Latin America, five were Brazilian, three Peruvian, one Chilean and one Mexican, according to the latest report by the Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction (Obitel). Between 2012 and 2014, the country producing the greatest number of telenovelas was Mexico (49), followed closely by Brazil (45) and Chile (44). Venezuela only produced 17, none of which were exported abroad.
Heavy-handed government control is far from typical in the telenovela world. Although Bolivian President Evo Morales was vocal against telenovelas, saying they contribute to teenage pregnancy and violence, he did not take action. In fact, with the exception of Venezuela, commercial interests tend to prevail.
“Writers have a lot of freedom in general. The main limits are not moral or ethical, but market limits,” said Guillermo Orozco Gómez, chair of social communications studies at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and a research coordinator at Obitel. “Only what doesn’t sell is censored,” he said.
Hugo Benavides, chair of the sociology and anthropology department at Fordham University in New York City, agreed. “There is no doubt that telenovelas are a big media enterprise, and as such they are ruled by elite and transnational interests,” he told Index. “However, big media companies do not define what sells, rather they try their best to find out what would work.”
“Traditionally certain topics have been dealt with very poorly in telenovelas,” said Acosta-Alzuru. “One of them is the representation of gender, another is sexual orientation, and finally ethnicity. Soap opera actors have to be white.” There are exceptions, she added, but these three topics remain controversial across Latin America, more so in some countries than others.
In 2015, the Peruvian TV station ATV put a warning message on a scene from the hugely popular Brazilian soap opera Amor à Vida (Trail of Lies) when two male characters kissed, saying it could “offend sensibilities”.
Another popular telenovela in Peru, La Paisana Jacinta (Jacinta the Peasant), was criticised by the United Nations’ Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for featuring a man in drag, wearing a wig with plaits, a fake nose and blacked out teeth – a blatant caricature of an Andean indigenous woman. The committee said in 2014 that it was “worried for the discriminatory attitudes that are still deeply rooted in Peruvian society and regretted that the media persisted in broadcasting negative stereotypes of indigenous and African-Peruvians, as it is the case in the TV show La Paisana Jacinta.” The show lost its prime-time slot as a result, but was still broadcast, very early in the morning.
“Audiences should speak out against machismo and ‘narco’ values, but I am against any type of censorship,” Orozco Gómez told Index. “TV stations have to warn their audiences about controversial content. We as audiences should keep our right to choose for ourselves.”
Cañizalez also believes people shouldn’t overlook “the potential of telenovelas as a positive space to generate public debate”. Many series tackle current social problems. This year Mexican soap opera Sueño de Amor (Dream of Love) has explored the new challenges brought by the Zika virus via a pregnant character who worries about the risk of getting infected.
Back in Venezuela certain topics remain off-limits. “After publicly questioning [Presidents] Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro, I have been vetoed. My latest soap opera and TV series have been put on hold,” said Leonardo Padrón, one of Venezuela’s prominent telenovela writers, now a vocal opponent of the government. Padrón’s work has not been aired since 2011. TV channel Venevisión commissioned him to write a 120-episode soap opera and then a 60-episode psychological thriller TV series, but neither were shown. “I used to write whatever I wanted. The only censorship that a TV writer would use was common sense,” said Padrón.
Cesar Miguel Rondón, another leading soap opera writer who has occupied high positions in several TV stations and now presents a show on a private radio station that is very critical of the Venezuelan government, said he has felt similar restrictions. He believes self-censorship is growing. “Censorship starts from the idea that reality is bad and one has to make it look nice,” he said.
A new fictionalised series based on the life of Mexico’s Guzman, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán: El Varón de la Droga (Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán: The Drug Baron), will air on US-based, Spanish-language broadcaster UniMás network later this year. It is unknown whether it will air in Venezuela.
Soap operas: censored
China
Chinese online soap opera Go Princess Go was taken down by video streaming site LeTV in January 2016. No official explanation was given, other than the “relevant department” asked LeTV to do so. The site said the series would go out again after “optimising” content. Go Princess Go is about a playboy who travels back in time to an ancient dynasty, finds he is trapped in a woman’s body and marries the crown prince. The show explores bisexuality and gender identity as the boy begins to fall in love with his husband and has sex with him.
North Korea
Watching soap operas is highly dangerous in North Korea because those caught watching illegally imported shows risk execution by the state. In September 2015 three North Koreans were executed within the space of a month for watching South Korean TV dramas on their mobile phones, according to a report by Daily NK, a Seoul-based online newspaper.
Australia
In 2009 Australian soap opera Home and Away faced criticism for censoring a lesbian kiss. Australia’s Channel 7 cut intimate scenes between two female characters, after the station received complaints from Christian groups. Channel 7 denied allegations of censorship and responded later by broadcasting another kiss between the two women.