Framing violence in times of peace talks : El Tiempo’s news coverage of massacres committed during the 1999–2002 Colombian government - FARC peace process

Why a framing analysis?

Why a Framing Analysis?

words

metaphors

examples

descriptions

concepts

images

Why Colombia?

• 52-year, low-intensity armed conflict.
• Daily newsworthy events.
• Large research corpus critical of news coverage of conflict.
• Few framing analyses on Colombian news media.

Why Colombia?

El Tiempo's newspaper

Why El Tiempo?

• Daily newspaper.
• 112 years of existence.
• Largest and most consulted source of information.
• Reached 1.2 million people during 1999-2002
• CEOs, chief editors, columnists are part of the political establishment.

The 1999-2002 FARC - Colombian government peace process

Main acts of violence in the Colombian armed conflict during 1980-2012

Why the 1999-2002 peace process?

• A failed peace-seeking attempt.
• Coincided with the most intense phase of conflict.
• International interest; US' Plan Colombia.
• 109059 victims.
• No previous journalistic academic research focusing on this timeline.

Massacres during the 1999-2002

peace process

• "(A massacre is) the intentional homicide of four or more persons in a state of defenselessness." (CNMH, 2013, p. 36).
• Both the FARC and the AUC committed massacres.
• Personal motivation.

Why massacres?

Search Criteria

• Time frame of analysis: Jan 7, 1999 - Feb 20, 2002.
• Only massacres and no other acts of violence.
• Only massacres committed by the AUC paramilitary and the FARC guerrilla were included.
• Only news reports directly refering to the events (no editorials, opinion articles, etc.)

Search Criteria

Data collection

• National Centre for Historical Memory (CNMH in Spanish) - ¡Basta Ya! database.
• Rutas del Conflicto database.
• Five-day span after the massacres occured.

Units of Analysis

• Texts, headlines and the leads of news stories.
• Front-page headlines and their standfirsts.

Units of Analysis

"A discourse can be intuitively tracked through the headlines, standfirsts and leads as they give structural clues, synthesize the events of a news story and centralize the core topics of a social phenomenon. Most readers remember essential information on the front page of newspapers more than any other part of the story and that the structural organization of newspapers' front pages elicits a specific impact of these headlines on audiences" (Van Dijk, 1990, p.167)

KH-CODER

Text Analysis Software

• Free quantitative content analysis software.
• Allows Spanish texts.
• Offers varied data visualization options.
• Groups all tenses of verbs.
• Permits to organize words into codes.
• Used in +5900 research studies: Medicine, Linguistics, Political Science, Communications, and Journalistic Studies.

AUC

Para

Paramilitary

AUC

Self-defense

group

Official sources

Official Sources

• A lack of diversity and balance in sources.
• More than 70% of the news texts quote one of the actors in the conflict: The Colombian Military.
• The sources coming from the government shaped how the armed groups were identified.
• Official sources may have been the only source of information.
• Many massacres happened in distant areas.

The town's mayor, Sigilfredo Senior, said that it could not be officially confirmed that

these people were dead. However, that possibility is not ruled out either because some farmers have stated that they were recruited to bury corpses in the region of the Manso river. "We will have to verify this when the security forces enter the area," he said.

The situation is so alarming that members of the International Red Cross, NGOs and

humanitarian organizations had to postpone their intention to go to the massacre site

because the guerrillas have three checkpoints two and four hours away from Frasquillo,

the closest port to the site. The bodies of the 24 dead have not been recovered from the

area. (El Tiempo, 2001c)

Auxiliaries

Helpers

Traitors

Representatives

"They earned it"

"They asked for it"

Victim Blaming

THE FARC ASSASSINATED 6 EPL EX-COMBATANTS

The subversives, who also burned ten houses, accused the farmers of collaborating with the self-defence groups. (...)

The attack began at 5:15 am on Saturday, and according to the reports of the residents to the authorities, about a thousand militants entered the area. The attackers knocked down

the doors of the houses. (...)

Conrado Antonio Pérez was found in his house and was accused of being a collaborator with the self-defence groups. (El Tiempo, 2000e)

Victim Blaming

• The armed groups frequently justified their acts of violence by accusing the victims.
• News texts covering FARC massacres: 19%
• News texts covering AUC massacres: 20%
• Poor journalistic verification.
• The armed groups directly/indirectly sourced stories.

BETWEEN FEAR AND GRIEF

“I am not leaving because I have my job here, and I’d rather be killed by bullets than starve to death in another place,” said Ligia Carranza as she accompanied the funeral procession of 7 of the 11 victims of the paramilitary incursion last Friday in this rural part of Curumaní. (...) They spent a night of fear and grief, keeping vigil for their dead.

Like the other dead, they were accused of collaborating with the guerrillas.

In a conversation with EL TIEMPO, Carlos Castaño, head of the self-defence groups, said that he has proof that they (the victims) had a close relationship with the ELN. He affirmed that they were part of the ELN's Camilo Torres front, which had been making random roadblock kidnappings 24 on the road leading from Bucaramanga to the coast.

According to him, 24 men who deserted from the ELN in the past three months and 42 ex-FARC combatants took part in the offensive. (...)

Journalistic Verification

The guerilla members arrived at the El Embaretado farm, where there was a laboratory for processing cocaine. There they gathered all the farmers and killed them.

The commander of the XI Brigade, based in Montería, Colonel Jairo Ovalle Galvis, said that "these farmers had no weapons or military-exclusive uniforms."

The official version coincides with that of the displaced people who arrived in the urban area of Tarazá, who narrated that the guerillas attacked "the kitchen" where coca leaves 69 were processed and started a mortal carousel in the area of influence of the laboratory. (El Tiempo, 2001a)

Meanwhile, yesterday, the authorities confirmed the murder of seven farmers during the

weekend by an armed group in the sector of Bocas de Yurumanguí in the lower Naya

region. (...)

According to official versions, the farmers were shot and finished with hatchets. Signs

were left on their bodies: "We came down from Naya to stay here, massacre and death to

the guerrilla."

However, the Pacific Naval Force commander, Captain Alberto Rojas, reported that

according to the initial versions collected among the farmers, the massacre would be an

action of the FARC. (El Tiempo, 2001b)

Journalistic Verification

• Few texts quote members of the communities.
• Journalists did not go to massacre areas.
• No piece of investigative work confirming or denying the facts given by official sources and sources from the society.
• A few reasons may explain this finding.

The journalist who wrote one of the news stories about one FARC massacre in a rural part of Cajibio, in the Cauca department on October 7, 2000, describes the area as follows:

“It’s a village with 400 inhabitants, that can be

reached after 2 hours by car and another 2 hours on foot or riding a horse through a very thick forest.”

5-day span.

Dynamics of the armed conflict.

El Tiempo's journalistic/managerial decision.

16 journalists were killed in 2000, 2001, 2002.

FARC (SUBJECT) + VERB + COMPLEMENT

THE GUERRILLA MASSACRES 6 FARMERS

FARC guerrilla members forced six farmers to leave two farms/they killed them

The subversive ones went inside the "Montevideo" farm (...) and killed two more farmers.

Lexicogrammatical Strategies

(OBJECT OF THE ACTION) + VERB SER (TO BE) + MAIN VERB IN PAST PARTICIPLE VERB + BY AUC

ANOTHER MASSACRE IN NARIÑO

Four youth were killed yesterday, allegedly by members of the self-defence groups.

The self-defence groups were held accountable for the death of other seven people (...).

(The people) were found dead and tortured afterwards.

Lexicogrammatical

Strategies

• News texts covering FARC massacres: Active Voice.
• Passive Voice: 30% of news texts on AUC massacres, 23% on news texts on FARC massacres.
• Rearrangement strategy.
• Active voice: generates condemnation against perpetrators.
• Passive voice: obscures responsibility and avoids accountability. The act of violence was a natural consquence of the war.

Headlines, standfirsts

• FARC: Omnipresent across headlines, standfirsts.
• No direct reference to the AUC.

The use of active and passive sentences, and the agent or subject position of news actors in sentences, revealed much about the newspaper's implicit stance towards these news

actors. If authorities, such as the police, are agents of negative acts, they tend to occur less in the agent position. They may then be made less conspicuous in a prepositional

phrase of a passive sentence ("by the police") or remain implicit in an agentless sentence structure ("Many demonstrators were injured"). (Van Dijk, 1990, p.81)

The rearrangement strategy is the representation of social actors by transforming their discursive or social roles through various linguistic strategies and processes. (...) This strategy allows for the transition between exclusion and inclusion by appropriating processes such as activating or passivating the social actors involved. (...) the places of agent and patient are reinvented in discourse according to the proposals of meaning that require certain forms of exercise of power. (Pardo, 2007, p.162)

Top 10 most frequent words in front-page headlines and standfirsts covering

FARC massacres

Unreported Massacres

• The risk of venturing to far-flung, perilous locations.
• Newsworthy stories emerge in Colombia on a daily basis.
• Press freedom is harmed due to intimidation, murder and self-censorship:

A 2004 study showed that 65% of the journalists living in those areas had been intimidated by an armed group or the Military Forces of Colombia

Unreported

Massacres

• 107 massacres were not reported during the time frame selected.
• AUC: 73 massacres.
• FARC: 34 massacres.
• 589 civilians were murdered.
• A few reasons may explain this finding.
• Consequence: Colombian people did not have enough and complete information about the armed conflict.

"Only in the last week of February 2002, the FARC hijacked a plane, kidnapping, among others, Senator Jorge Gechem, president of the Peace Commission.

To stop military action, the guerrillas dynamited several bridges, which led to the death of four people who drove into the abyss.

President Andrés Pastrana then decreed the end of the Peace negotiations and gave the insurgents till midnight to abandon the area, which was bombarded early in the morning.

The next day, the presidential candidate Ingrid

Betancourt and her running mate, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped by the FARC while attempting to visit the area where the peace talks were being held.

There is hardly another place on earth where journalists have to work so hard to keep up with the pace of events." (Garcia, 2012, p 28)