“You don’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do” (Henry Ford)
“It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation”
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
There is an interesting discussion going on about the new movie, produced by French director Jean-Luc Besson, “Colombiana”.
The movie depicts the life of a young Colombian woman (played by Zoe Saldaña) who, after witnessing her parents murder as a child in Bogota grows up to be a stone-cold assassin in the United States. With a plot summary like that, there’s very little chance that I will go and see the movie, but the controversy that has arisen around it is well worth the attention.
It’s no secret: “subtlety” was never Hollywood’s trademark. Tinseltown is not in the business of in-depth analysis and never has been overly concerned with nationaI sensitivities. Basically it boils down to this: the U.S. is the land of heroes, the Middle-East are the bad guys, Japan is Yakuza country, Russians are communists and all the rest is eliminated by Rambo or the Governator. It doesn’t need to get more accurate than that to attract large crowds. Hollywood is an entertainment factory. Full stop. And the factory produces what brings in the cash, meaning "exciting" stories based on stereotypes people recognize, because the worst thing that could happen is you wondering why it is that that bearded Arab is a respectable human-rights activist and not a suicide bomber, in the midst of that mental process missing fifteen of the special effects that have cost the production millions of dollars and that need to be recuperated by you telling to others how spectacular these were and thus sending in turn your friends scrambling for the box-office.
You think this is an oversimplification ? You’re absolutely right. A film like “Apocalypse Now”, just to name one example, is far more unsettling than to be able to fit into this sort of Hollywood stereotype. But I bet you felt familiar with my description. I bet you pretty much agreed, because … that’s Hollywoods’ reputation.
I very much appreciate the people who feel obliged to come to the defense of Colombia in the face of the insulting stereotype as seems to be presented in this new movie that is hitting the screens. It is absolutely necessary that people in the know keep pointing out how much the image presented in that sort of movies deviates from the reality in the country. Yet, there is no wonder in the representation: such is Colombia’s reputation. It’s a land where people get killed and shot on every corner of the street, at will. Because it was like that twenty years ago. Because nobody tells us how it has changed since then. Nietzsche, whom I quoted here above, was absolutely right.
When you are living in Colombia and know the situation on the ground, I imagine it is hard to realize how persistent this reputation remains in the world beyond the Colombian borders. If I were to do a poll among people of my generation and I would ask them to chip off the names that they are familiar with among “Juan Manuel Santos”, “Alvaro Uribe Velez” and “Pablo Escobar”, I am sure I would get a return of 70 percent or above with only Escobar. I remember, watching the news in the eighties, that the names of the Medellin and Cali Cartel were ubiquitous in the news. I had no interest in that part of the world at that time so I didn’t really pay attention to what was going on, but the names and the connotation of violence and murder and drugs keeps lingering, even now that those names have virtually disappeared (or unfortunately been replaced by others).
In 2002, in The Netherlands the rightist politician Pim Fortuyn was killed. The entire nation almost went into a frenzy, not because so many people sympathized with his ideas (well, actually quite a lot did), but because it was a politician. It were the institutions that were under attack and that was totally unacceptable. Compare with similar reactions to the murder of Olaf Palme or reporter / activist Anna Politkovskaja and then compare that to the news coming out of Colombia in relation to the upcoming local elections on October 30 where you have already now a score of local candidates threatened, or worst case, killed (look for instance here and here)
The news on Colombia reaching my part of the world is still primarily negative. Let’s just look at these two examples, which I consider the two main items that have been on the news in recent months in relation to Colombia:
- The Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. You may either be for or against it -which is a valid discussion- but normally this is the sort of deals going on between civilized nations, so you would expect this to throw a positive light on Colombia. It does, and then again it doesn’t. It does, because people tend to think that if the EU would consider to enter into this sort of cooperation with a certain country, it must be that that country is a friendly trading partner. So thumbs-up. Welcome ! … Think again ! It doesn’t because, in the case of Colombia, the main bulk of the reporting on the FTA is about the unions and all sorts of organizations fighting to block the agreement based on the fact that Colombia is still the most dangerous country for union people to live in, that there is a lack of respect for human rights, that reporters get killed in considerable numbers, that there are thousand, millions of people displaced from their land such that big corporations could take over for plantations, mining and so on. There goes your reputation …
- Colombia is not really a talking point here. I could imagine having a discussion at some length here with friends on Afghanistan, Iraq or China, but Colombia ? Couldn’t stretch it for any longer than five minutes, I guess, and presumably it would be about the accusation that the DAS has been wiretapping a number of ngo’s and European institutions here. The European institutions: no surprise there. I guess every secret service respecting itself has it’s taps there. But ngo’s ?? That’s quite shocking. That is not done ! Those are the institutions that try to bring some sort of relief to people who go under the radar in a whole lot of countries that can’t cope with those problems all by themselves, so wiretapping this sort of organizations (and worst part: getting caught doing it) is sending a very, very wrong message. There goes your reputation …
I was having this discussion with my friend, last time we met, about unionists and reporters being killed. I was surprised to learn she considered it as a secondary problem, where the country has much bigger problems to face. Maybe so, but for me, talking about Colombia’s reputation, it is the problem, because the foreign mainstream media –and I still consider this to be the one that shapes public opinion, not the specialized press- is enlarging this sort of token cases in size for they are clear in terms of guilt, they have a high David-against-Goliath factor (which audiences always like) and they fit perfectly in a politically correct discourse and ... and thus break the reputation of Colombia. Protect your reporters, your unionists and your human rights activists and then Colombia may really start to see some change to that tarnished image it has retained since Escobar’s times and earlier. Based on the news coming out of the country, it is hard to convince people that there actually can be a dramatic improvement in the security situation, in living conditions for millions when that country is not capable of protecting even a few hundred, highly visible individuals. And so the bad reputation lingers.
From what I read, I see a lot of good things happening in the country, one of the main eye-catchers being the new victims’ law and the start of a new land redistribution campaign. People I’ve talked to or whose experiences I’ve been reading in books or on the web, only confirm this feeling that civil and civic society is very much existing in Colombia and that there is a strong push to take it further down that road. But, referring to that other quote I put up there, reputation can not be build on what you are going to do, it’s built on what you have done in the past. So I think there is a huge job left to be done still by Colombian politicians, diplomats, PR people, journalists and mainly … its’ citizens itself. It’s “indigenous” voices of common people that speak the loudest, so if movies like “Colombiana” are motivating a whole number of people to speak out in defense of this peculiar country, we can only hope that those voices may be heard and that the next movie Hollywood churns out reflects that image already a bit more accurate.
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