Portrayal of State Institutions in Colombian Telenovelas: The Mediation of Citizenship

Telenovelas have been shown to provide a historical framework for an ample viewership in Colombia. Despite being fictional narratives, recent telenovelas have been constructed upon important historical figures or events, that become easier to appreciate and engage with by audiences than journalistic articles or documentary films. In other words, telenovelas are fundamental for the development of a public sphere, as the lure of a narrative becomes more useful for prompting discussion of contemporary issues. Exploring En la boca del lobo (Teleset, 2014) and Bloque de Búsqueda(Teleset and Sony Pictures, 2016), two Colombian telenovelas that address the war against drugs of the 1990s, we take a look at how state institutions are presented for debate in the public sphere. The two works focus on opposite protagonists, either a member of the Cali cartel who opts to betray his criminal kingpin, in the former, or the main police squad tasked with capturing, disbanding or decimating drug cartels, in the latter. This audiovisual and textual analysis of the telenovelas is contrasted with focal groups and personal interviews with audiences and creators to establish the alignment between the portrayals and the social expectations about state institutions, or to ascertain whether telenovelas sway the audience’s perception of them. The importance of telenovelas for a social construction of citizenship by bringing certain issues to the public debate in a more comprehensible matter is thus established in the intersection of the shows’ representations and the interpretation given in the mediation and decoding processes of the audiences. The analysis has shown that the representation of the telenovelas of the XXI century in Colombia create a contradictory sense of identity no longer based on the construction of a national imagined community, but in the collective configuration of a weak institutional State as its core premise.