Why Latin Americans Are Losing Trust in the News (2024)

Welcome back toForeign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week:A new report paints a worrisome picture of public trust in the region’s media, rival naval delegations avoid confrontation in Cuba, and Honduras announces new security policies.

Latin America’s Media Mistrust

Antagonism toward the mainstream media has helped fuel the rise of several Latin American leaders in recent years. They include former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, current Argentine President Javier Milei, and outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

So it was no surprise when a survey released this week showed a continuous drop in public trust in the media across the biggest countries in the region.

According to the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report, a global study by the Oxford University-based research center, the portion of people who said that they trust “most news most of the time” fell by 16 percent in Brazil over the last six years. During the same period, that figure dropped by 14 percent in Mexico and 11 percent in Argentina.

Among most large Latin American democracies included in the survey, trust in news as measured by the aforementioned survey question hovered in the mid-30 percent range, worse than the global average of 40 percent. However, the region’s levels of trust in news were still generally higher than that in the United States, a mere 32 percent.

Elected leaders are not the only ones to blame for this decline, according to the study. The internet has also transformed news consumption, reducing the need for print advertising and introducing social media algorithms that privilege certain types of content over others.

Political polarization and skepticism about the credibility of news are often interconnected in Latin America. In Argentina, the report noted that most media were perceived to be divided into pro-government and opposition camps. Shortly after Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist,” took office last December, he laid off more than 1,000 employees of public television and radio stations—groups that he had criticized as friendly to the outgoing Peronist government.

Television news shows in Argentina “have tended to reflect the country’s political polarization,” Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo J. Boczkowski of Argentina’s Center for the Study of Media and Society wrote in the report. Argentina has the lowest “trust in news” ranking among the Latin American countries studied by the Reuters Institute. (The report did not survey audiences in countries such as Venezuela, where media freedoms are far more limited.)

A similar dynamic has occurred in Mexico, Alex González Ormerod wrote in The Mexico Political Economist newsletter this month. After López Obrador came to power in 2018, he cut large amounts of government ad funding from private media outlets that it had long supported and shifted some of that financing to a different set of publications.

Old media elites looked for new funding and found they were often able to secure it from investors if they produced anti-government coverage, González Ormerod said. “People are incentivized to become more extreme as they go, not only because of the way algorithms work, but also just because that’s the way you get people to cough up money,” he told Foreign Policy.

But the Reuters Institute survey was not all gloom: The authors offered observations about where and how news organizations may yet win over audiences. Video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are becoming more popular as sources of news, especially among younger viewers. Although misinformation can flourish on these platforms, news organizations can also be savvy about using them to regain public trust.

One up-and-coming media outlet that has found success specializing in short videos is Colombia’s Economía Para La Pipol. Founded in 2021 by reporters with experience at some of the country’s most established newsrooms, the team dives into macroeconomic and financial topics using clear language that is often peppered with slang and delivered in a playful style.

With a team of just six people, Economía Para La Pipol has gained 160,000 followers on its platforms. The site’s growth demonstrates that there are other ways to engage Latin American media consumers besides trafficking in hyper-partisanship.

“We wanted to break a barrier,” Economía Para La Pipol co-founder María Camila González told Foreign Policy. With a stylistic and rhetorical shift, “you can get people much more interested in these topics.”

Upcoming Events

Thursday, June 20, to Sunday, July 14: Soccer teams from across the region compete in the Copa América tournament, hosted by the United States.

Wednesday, July 3, to Friday, July 5: Grenada hosts a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit.

What We’re Following

Migration management. Colombia announced on Tuesday that it would grant temporary protective status to the undocumented guardians of some 270,000 Venezuelan underage migrants who reside in the country. The children and adolescents already have protected status in Colombia. Since 2017, the country has regularized over 2 million Venezuelans fleeing economic and political turmoil.

Ecuador, meanwhile, tightened its migration policies this week. On Tuesday, officials said that they would reinstate visas for Chinese nationals beginning on July 1. Ecuador is one of two countries in South America that allows visa-free travel from China (the other is Suriname), and it has become a key entry point for irregular migrants on their way to the United States.

Uncomfortable waters. A group of Russian warships departed Cuba on Monday after a five-day stay during which military ships from the United States and Canada were also docked in the country. Russia and Cuba have a history of close bilateral ties. Washington, meanwhile, had planned a routine naval transit to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base that coincided with Moscow’s visit.

The Miami Herald reported that U.S. officials did not initially realize the two countries would overlap. The United States debated canceling the deployment of a nuclear-powered submarine but ultimately decided that doing so would set a bad precedent, officials told the Herald. Washington, Havana, and Moscow all made public statements stressing that the Russian and U.S. naval visits did not pose a threat.

Canadian military spokespeople, meanwhile, issued mixed messages, first saying Canada’s visit to the port of Havana was in “recognition of the long-standing bilateral relationship” between Canada and Cuba and later stating the goal was “deterrence” of Russia.

Although all three countries have now sailed on from Cuba, the Russian naval delegation was expected to continue its travels elsewhere in the Caribbean; U.S. officials said that it could be headed to Venezuela.

A stylistic innovator. Chilean-German artist Lorenza Böttner did not achieve mainstream fame during her lifetime. But her body of work from the 1980s and 1990s has been celebrated internationally in recent years for its innovative treatment of disability and transgender identity.

Böttner was born in Punta Arenas, Chile, in 1959. She studied art in Germany and later became a fixture of the queer New York City art scene, the New York Times wrote this week. The article was part of a series of obituaries for historical figures whose deaths the paper had originally overlooked.

Böttner, who was transgender, lost both arms in a childhood accident and did not use prosthetics. Instead, she drew and painted with her mouth and feet—often while dancing in public. Her works were later gathered in a traveling exhibition that gained acclaim for its treatment of atypical bodies; its curator called Böttner’s work “full of hope, transformation, and emancipation.”

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In Focus: Honduras Eyes Bukele’s Playbook

In a late-night television address last Friday, Honduran President Xiomara Castro announced a new suite of security policies that include prosecuting those suspected of drug offenses under anti-terror laws, conducting mass trials, and building a new “mega-prison” with capacity for 20,000 people.

The announcement continues a Honduran trend of emulating the hard-line security policies of President Nayib Bukele in neighboring El Salvador, where the government built a mega-prison that it says can hold up to 40,000 inmates. As in El Salvador, Honduras has already enforced a national “state of exception” in parts of the country since December 2022, which handed certain law enforcement duties, such as prison supervision, to the military.

Honduras’s state of exception was tamer than El Salvador’s, as its security personnel were fewer in number and faced stricter oversight, the International Crisis Group wrote in a 2023 report.

An assessment of the first year of Honduras’s state of exception by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data research group said its results were mixed: By the end of 2023, monthly levels of civilian deaths in incidents with armed groups fell, but law enforcement operations often pushed gang activity to new areas rather than eliminating it.

This displacement effect on gang activity may have prompted Castro’s new policies and announcement of the larger prison. It remains to be seen whether authorities will fully adopt the detention and sentencing postures like those of the Bukele administration, which have been criticized for lacking due process.

Although crime fell in El Salvador following Bukele’s crackdown, human rights groups have also reported an erosion in the rule of law.