Derechas, comunicación política y debates presidenciales televisados en América Latina en el ascenso del neoliberalismo

Abstract

With the rise of neoliberalism forms of political communication were modernized. This has been evident in several countries of the region since 1989, when refurbished right wing forces affirmed themselves in the practice of democracy. In the electoral campaigns a new tool was introduced: the transmission of the debate between presidential candidates on television. Undoubtedly, the model that opened the way to this practice was the debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960. But unlike what happened in the United States, in Latin America this practice has not been vertebrally incorporated into national political cultures. However, it is possible to track several cases that invite reflection. In this article we state that in Latin America the presidential debates are a conjunctural political fact that assumes their own characteristics (“the originality of the copy”) both in its form and in its content according to the socio-historical conditions in which they occur. To account for this, we observe a set of audiovisual records of presidential debates and offer a cumulative and comprehensive historical view. The heterogeneity of this group reinforces the idea of short-term conditions that surround the debates rather than an attachment to formats imported from the northern hemisphere's political systems.