Latin America

Latin America constitutes twenty nations in all, which have without exception been fed commercial, US-style television since its inception. Spanish telenovelas cross borders freely, but the trading of programming generally finds its way through Televisa of Mexico or Venevisión of Venezuela. Satellite and cable are still the preserve of the financial elite, with most households dependent exclusively on terrestrial broadcasting.

In Mexico, Televisa continues to both dominate the home market, and play a significant role across Spanish television geolinguistically, but since 1993 TV Azteca has offered noteworthy competition. Mexican telenovelas are more romantic and less political on the whole than their Brazilian equivalents, targeting largely working-class audiences.

In Venezuela, Venevisión (owned by CGC-Cisneros) is half of a duopoly shared by RCTV (Radio Caracas Televisión), which is part of the Phelps group and is represented in the USA by Coral Pictures (Miami).

In Chile and the USA, CGC operates in partnership with Televisa under the banner of Univisión. Univisión has a clear edge over Telemundo (part-owned by SONY) in captivating the 35 million-strong US Spanish-speaking market. Univisión and Telemundo are largely US-owned, due to a law which prevents foreign companies from gaining a stake exceeding 20% in any channel. NBC bought Telemundo in 2001, bringing Spanish TV in the US in from the cold: it is said that the USA is the world’s fifth-largest Spanish-speaking television nation.

Deregulation continues across all Latin American nations, and the use of media by private organisations to partisan, political ends is widely seen as a viable alternative to similar misuse by the public sector. This is because of Latin America’s unique political history. Mexico’s television in particular is ostensibly a private monopoly.

Free trade agreements have also played their part during the nineties, in the shape of NAFTA (USA, Canada, Mexico) and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uraguay). US competition has been in evidence for some time (CNN en español, HBO Olé, MTV Latino), and digital direct-to-home satellite (DTH) services have forged strategic links between Latin American producers and distributors and US satellite and cable providers.