The Media Counterforce of the Gender Ideology Campaign for Colombian Peace

• In Event: Women and Politics Research & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Women and Politics Research Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 peace plebiscite vote to ratify the final peace agreement between President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), some Christian evangelical leaders and right-wing politicians began a campaign that publicly characterized gender as a ‘dangerous ideology.’ This gender ideology campaign (GIC) defends traditional family values and considers women and LGBT rights a threat to society’s moral fabric. In the October 2016 plebiscite, Colombians rejected the peace accord by a slim margin. The public opinion believed the GIC was a substantial factor in the media for the successful ‘No’ vote in the plebiscite. Gender is socially constructed and shapes subjective identities through which we explore and interpret social interactions, gendered order of power, and gendered expectations of actors in politics. Therefore, this research examines the role of the ‘gender ideology’ campaign in shaping the national coverage of the Colombian peace plebiscite and how mass media play a role in disseminating the gender ideology campaign’s agenda.

This research combines qualitative and quantitative methods and proposes an interdisciplinary analysis from Political Science, Communication Studies, and Women & Gender Studies to identify the Agenda-Setting components and frames of the GIC political communication strategies attributes, such as information scope, sources, and sentiments to diminish minorities’ rights. My findings of the content analysis of 301 randomly selected plebiscite news stories published in the most popular Colombian newspapers El Espectador and El Tiempo online, 24 semi-structured interviews with key participants of the plebiscite campaigns, and archival research indicate both Colombian newspapers supported the peace plebiscite with positive sentiments but lacked the experience and knowledge to cover gender politics for peace. The most frequent information sources were elite politicians and promoters of the GIC and the ‘No’ vote. Meanwhile, the peace agreement opponents discredited the term ‘gender’ as non-scientific and focused on WhatsApp’s digital campaigns.

El Espectador and El Tiempo ended up providing a useful platform for the gender ideology campaign leaders to disseminate anti-gender and anti-peace agreement ideas. The confrontation coverage of these media outlets missed an opportunity for fact-checking and contextualizing the GIC messages, which diminished women and the LGBT population’s political recognition as negotiators for peace. As a result, the GIC campaign unveils before the plebiscite elections: first, social media platforms are major players in political transitions, despite their lack of legal regulation. Second, plebiscite news stories ended up supporting the opposition to peace due to their technical production nature. Third, gender ideology became a counterforce to the national consensus regarding women’s and minorities’ inclusion for gender equality in the peace agreement.

Gender ideology as a transnational movement disseminates their religious and political messages, primarily on the country’s most popular social media platforms. The popularization of the Colombian gender ideology campaigns on WhatsApp reveals the power of digital political counteractivism to shape unified communication strategies, and massive discriminatory and oppressive narratives against minorities with the cooperation between political and religious actors, despite their divergences. These findings encourage a more robust debate about the redefinition of traditional media’s role and news stories production standards in electoral campaigns. Social media is now a ‘discrete’ political player in gender ideology transnational movements counterpower across the Latin American political atmosphere.

Author

• Angela Bohorquez Oviedo, University of Delaware