Monday, March 22, 2010
Should TV 'Narco-novelas' be banned in Latin America?
By Patrick Corcoran
Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli opened up a minor controversy earlier this year when he criticized
the popular Colombian soap operas for glamorizing the life of a drug lord. "These telenovelas are inflicting great damage
to the moral fiber of our country," the president reportedly said in a meeting with media heavyweights in his nation. He also
ominously referred to the possible passage of a restrictive law if the broadcast titans neglected to regulate the content
of their programming.
The concern over the shows is misguided for a number of reasons.
The first is that it takes a willfully jaundiced view of the novelas to suggest that they are
selling drug culture as a risk-free entree into the high life. Probably the most famous of Colombia's narco-novelas
is El Cartel de los Sapos (in English, The Cartel of the Toads). If one were to sum up the theme of the series
in a single word, it would be betrayal. Indeed, "toad" in Colombia is slang for snitch, and the inevitable progression from
friendship to betrayal is written into the series' theme song. Business interests nearly always trump personal ties, with
childhood friends turning on each other with the same predictability (though with much greater heartache) one sees in a Globetrotters’
defeat of the Generals.
Beyond the thematic elements, El Cartel de los Sapos has one notable fixation that also runs
contra to Martinelli’s thesis. The body cavity search one evidently receives on his way into federal prison in the US
is handled with such excruciating detail and mind-numbing repetition that one feels violated himself halfway through the first
season. This is, of course, not the sort of detail that one includes to entice impressionable youths into a life of shipping
cocaine to the US.
As one would expect with all the back-stabbing and bottom-inspecting, the drug lords are portrayed
as a perennially fearful, overwhelmingly unhappy bunch. Sure, there are some beautiful, only partially dressed ladies walking
around their ranches, and the protagonists treat seven-figure sums of dollars with roughly the same reverence that most of
us reserve for pencils or bread crumbs, but even a not particularly careful viewing of El Cártel reveals the drug lord’s
life to be a little more than years of bloodshed, anxiety, and depression, all culminating with a prison guard's latexed fingers
being jammed into your rectum.
Even if we concede Martinelli’s point that the soap operas offer an overly glamorized portrait
of life as a modern-day Escobar, television is a tangential element of Latin America’s security problem. If Martinelli
could wave a magic wand and the Colombian shows vanished from the airwaves forever, the drivers of the drug trade (notably
the American prohibition, the huge American market, and the stratospheric profit margins) would still be in place, which means
drug traffickers would continue running amuck around Latin America.
As an illustration of this fact, consider Mexico, where drug culture basically doesn’t figure
into the nation’s television programming whatsoever (aside from, of course, the nightly news, where it unfortunately
occupies a prominent role). Despite the barren landscape for Mexican crime drama, the world’s most violent city is Juárez,
and public security is ever more problematic. Mexico's government hasn't (as far as we know) prohibited narco-novelas,
but it does demonstrate that the evils of the drug trade cannot be addressed in any meaningful way by censoring TV programs.
Furthermore, if the US is any indication, the prevalence of narco-novelas could be taken as
good news. By the time a violent social force reaches the point of cultural currency in which it spawns movies and television
shows, it’s often already in a descendent phase. When the Godfather appeared in the 1970s, the mob was already less
powerful than in generations past. Twenty-five years later, the decline of the mafia was a major subplot of The Sopranos.
The five year-run of Miami Vice coincided with the decline of the city as the vital entry point
of all Colombian cocaine into the US. The same is true of inner-city violence surrounding the crack boom; when Boyz in
the Hood and Menace II Society arrived at movie theaters in the early 1990s, crime numbers were already on their
way down, and the US stood at the beginning of a two-decade decline in violent crime.
Presumably, the ideal replacement to all these narco-novelas for Martinelli would be 24-style
television in which selfless, heroic government officials overcome any obstacle to defeat the bad guys. I actually do think
it would be a positive development to have more Spanish-language programs in which the government represented the forces of
good, but that’s not to be confused with actually tamping down on organized crime. This, rather than the TV schedule,
is what should concern governments like Martinelli's.
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Patrick Corcoran (corcoran25@hotmail.com) is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila. He blogs at Gancho (http://www.ganchoblog.blogspot.com/).
