UC San Diego

This thesis explores the portrayal of the Colombian Indigenous mobilizations - or Mingas - in 2008 and 2009 by domestic mass media outlets, specifically news paper and television news reports. This analysis is done in four main parts. First the paper provides a background on the Colombian indigenous movements in the years leading up to these protests. It illustrates some of the challenges and achieves of the Indigenous movement in Colombia, one of the most successful grassroots movements in Colombian history. The second part of this thesis shows three structural problems of mass media that affect the coverage of the Indigenous political process in mass media : the monopolization of mass media, the problems endure by journalists, and the racist and Eurocentric hegemonic ideology embedded in mass media structure. The third part explains the most important events of the 2008 and 2009 Mingas. This part evidences the violence and the unfounded accusation of the government against the Indigenous people, some of the conflicts of the indigenous movement with illegal groups, and some of the internal challenges of the Indigenous movement. The final chapter is the content analysis of the coverage of the 2008 and 2009 Mingas in the most important newspapers and television news in Colombia: El Tiempo, El Espectador, Caracol News, and RCN News