The acronyms, which compulsively express the Latin American desire for integration, multiply: Andean Pact, Rio Group, Mercosur, Group of Three, Central American Conventions of Antigua, etc. On the other hand, the mass media have been integrating for years a Latin American imaginary that mixes film idols and vedettes of music, rhythms and songs that from tango to bolero through ranchera and salsa have become a "place" of expressive and creative encounter, in a way of coming together.
But both the economic integration groups and the mass media are today faced with a new situation that makes the integration of Latin American countries inevitably pass to a world-economy governed by the purest and harshest logic of the market. And as in no other field, it is in that of communication where what Latin American integration has today of inescapable need and contradiction that is difficult to overcome becomes visible. Well, if there is a powerful movement to overcome barriers and dissolve borders, it is the one that goes through audiovisual information and communication technologies. It is precisely these technologies that most strongly accelerate the integration of our countries into the culture and the world-economy through a revolution that makes the national a framework that is increasingly inadequate and insufficient to take advantage of or defend against it, at the same time that it reinforces and condenses the inequality of trade: in advanced countries, saving and substitution of raw materials that continue to constitute the key line of Latin American exports is increasing while the profitable exchange moves towards goods and services with greater degrees of technological composition.
Before these contradictions of integration, the Chilean Reyes Mata is right to ask what the meanings of Latin America are today. Because we have come a long way in identifying the content that is transmitted and in quantifying the flows of television programs, but we know very little about what communicational integration is producing in people's daily experience. What is the relationship established between the global offer external to the region with the Latin American one that reaches us via satellite? And what kind of intersections and resistance occur between national and local supply and that of the rest of the world? The insertion of communicational development in the processes of economic opening and privatization is rethinking both the understanding of phenomena and the scenario of policies.
The contradictions that cross and sustain Latin American integration finally lead to the question of the weight that the audiovisual industries are having in these processes. For these industries play in the strategic field of the production and reproduction of the images that these peoples make of themselves and with which they make themselves recognized by others.
What does it mean, in this perspective, the enormous and dispersed growth of television channels and the supply in hours, or the fact that in several Latin American countries there are more video recorders than in Belgium or Italy, if this is accompanied by a reduction in the percentages of endogenous production and a growing homogenization n of what is imported? And on the other hand, of course it is important that Televisa and Redeglobo are present in the audiovisual space of the world, the disturbing thing, however, is that these Latin American companies by molding the image of these peoples in function of increasingly neutral, more undifferentiated audiences, end up dissolving the cultural difference in folklore or the most profitable and cheap exoticism.
There is the evolution of advertising indicating in some way the path that much of our own production could follow: accelerated internationalization of content and displacement of quality criteria towards technical sophistication. Beyond its economic weight, advertising occupies a privileged place in the experimentation of images made possible by the computer and in the renewal of the modes of representation of modernity: the images of advertising and the video clip – aesthetically closer every day – are those that make mediation daily between technological innovation and narrative transformation. That which found in the images of the Gulf War a culminating moment by inserting a strong system of primary identifications in an aesthetic of simulation and visual play in which seduction prevails that makes the loss of cultural references painless.
The other palpable example of what we are proposing is that of cinema, which was the medium in which the national became an image for the masses, and which today is debated between a commercial proposal only profitable to the extent that it is able to "overcome" the national scope, and a cultural proposal only viable to the extent that it is able to insert local issues. in the sensibility and aesthetics of world-culture. Aesthetics that force the cinema to find video as a technology of production and domestic consumption: ten million video recorders in 1990, about twelve thousand video clubs for renting copies and three hundred and forty million copies rented per year. This is a challenge that is rethinking the relations between video film and TV, not only from the field of creators but also in the field of communication policies. To this is contributing the independent video movement that during the eighties has gained a formidable cultural importance. Legitimized as a means of mass communication along with television, and as a means of artistic expression with cinema, at the Havana festival of 1980, the video has in Latin America more than 500 groups of independent and popular production, and with several exchange networks between producers and video clubs from all over the continent such as Crocevia in Italy, the Videoteca del Sur in New York or Video Tires Monde in Canada.
Assuming the fact that in an increasingly globalized economy the scope of reference of cultural policies goes beyond the national, UNESCO stated at its Consultation Meeting of March 1991 in Mexico: "The Latin American audiovisual space can become a strategic area of integration if our countries they decide to arrange and exchange their own productions, promoting at the same time the export of our own and the import of what, produced anywhere in the world, comes to strengthen and enrich the identity and plurality of our peoples".
Note about the author:
For the editorial team of the magazine TV&Video Latin America it is very pleasant to present Jesús Martín-Barbero, a deep knowledge of the phenomenon of communication in Latin America and who from the third edition will be sharing with our readers his valuable analysis. Jesús Martín-Barbero is a Spaniard who has lived in Colombia for more than 30 years, with a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Leuven (Belgium), postgraduate studies in semiotics and anthropology from the School of Higher Studies in Paris and associate researcher at the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid. He has served, among others, as director of the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universidad del Valle, president of the ALAIC – Latin American Association of Communication Researchers – and guest professor in postgraduate programs of prestigious Latin American and European universities. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee of FELAFACS – Latin American Federation of Faculties of Social Communication – and collaborates as an advisor to numerous journals such as Sociedad de Argentina and TRAVESIA-Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies in London. His publications include: Mass communication: discourse and power; From the media to mediations; Television and melodrama; and Communication, Culture and Hegemony.
