Victims’ voice and representation in the Colombian press: ‘Dead of a Lesser God’

Abstract

The signature of the peace agreement between FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government has prompted reflection on the role that different sectors of society, including the mainstream media, have played in the perpetuation of the internal conflict. Based on CDA and SFL concepts, this paper contrasts the representation of victims in a 300,000+ word corpus of newspaper reports of violent acts committed by right-wing paramilitaries and Marxist guerrillas between 1998 and 2006, the most violent period of the conflict. The results clearly show not only a significantly higher word count for guerrilla victims’ statements, but also significantly more frequent examples of personalisation such as given names, kinship and emotional language. On the other hand, paramilitary victims are backgrounded by the significantly more frequent use of generic terms. These findings are consistent with previous studies on the topic which identified the systematic concealment of the responsibility of the paramilitaries in serious human right violations.

Keywords

Affect appraisal theory Colombian conflict corpus linguistics Critical Discourse Analysis direct speech exclusion FARC genericisation guerrillas media representation newspapers paramilitaries personalisation systemic functional linguistics victim representation voice

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