The Latin American region, spanning from Mexico down to the southernmost Strait of Magellan. Within 15.2% of the world’s land area, there are 33 countries, home to 8.6% of the world’s population. It is an important supply region, rich in mineral resources essential to industry, such as oil and iron ore, as well as food resources. 41% of the world’s copper, 12% of iron ore, and 47% of lithium are produced from the Latin American region. It is drawing attention as a major deposit area for rare metals such as lithium, whose demand for use in batteries for laptops, mobile phones, and electric vehicles is expected to grow further, as well as for shale gas. In terms of food resources, about 50% of soybeans, coffee beans, and sugarcane are produced in Latin America. In relations with Japan, the share of imports by region was 3.8% (mainly automobile-related), and the share of exports was 5.3% (mainly iron ore resources). By item, 90% of chicken, 61.9% of coffee beans, and 59.1% of salmon and trout are imported from Latin American countries.

Despite playing such an important role in the world, as noted in this article, coverage of the Latin American region accounted for only 2.1% of international news reported by Japan’s three major newspapers (Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi) in 2015. It shows that Latin America receives less coverage than other regions. So what exactly was reported?

Regarding Japanese reporting on Latin America, we analyzed coverage by country, focusing on the top five countries that together accounted for 81% of all Latin America coverage. The data consist of articles about the Latin American region among the international news reported in 2015 by the three domestic newspapers (Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun). The countries included in the Latin American region follow the criteria of UNSD (United Nations Statistics Division), and for GNV’s definition of international news, please see here.

First, let’s look at the share of coverage by country within Latin America.

(Graph 1)

Graph 1 shows coverage by country measured by the total number of characters across the articles of the three newspapers. In coverage of Latin America, Cuba alone accounts for 46%, nearly half. This is overwhelmingly more than Brazil, which had the second-most coverage at 18%, more than double. The reason Cuba accounts for such a large share is that the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States on July 20, 2015—formally reestablishing ties after 54 years since 1961—was widely reported throughout the year.

Please see the graph below. It shows the proportion of Cuba-related articles that were about the United States versus those that were not.

More than half of the coverage of Cuba was related to the United States. Even if the restoration of diplomatic relations was a historic event, the gap in coverage compared to other Latin American countries is far too large. Do stories that receive significant attention in the United States also receive significant attention in Japan?

Next, let’s look at the content of the stories covered. For the analysis, we categorized each article’s topic into three groups: “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral.” The topic refers to what the article is about, and in principle is determined from the headline. For example, “peaceful/democratic” items such as peace agreements are “positive,” “undesirable” items such as conflicts and incidents are “negative,” and items that are neither or are ambiguous such that judgments vary by person are “neutral.” For detailed criteria for the three categories, please see here.

(Graph 2)

Graph 2 categorizes each article’s topic into three types (positive, negative, neutral) and shows the number of articles for each of the top five countries by coverage. What we’d like you to note is that whereas Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile had more negative articles, in Cuba the number of positive articles was about four times higher than the number of negative ones. How did this look for Latin America as a whole?

(Graph 3)

Graph 3 applies the same categorization to all articles on Latin America and shows the proportions of positive, negative, and neutral for the region as a whole. Positive articles (24.1%) exceeded negative ones (21.7%) (however, Latin America was the only region in the world where positive articles outnumbered negative ones. For details, please read this article). As noted above, because overall coverage of Latin America was limited, the strong focus on the positive news of the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba resulted in tipping the region as a whole toward the positive.

Upon analysis, coverage of Cuba—particularly the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States—stood out, but does that mean there were no other important events in the region? At least one article appeared in one of the three newspapers for 21 of the 33 Latin American countries, and for six of those countries (Honduras, Ecuador, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador), the total text was less than 500 characters and the stories were carried by only one of the newspapers. Does a lack of coverage or scant treatment mean those events were unimportant?

In 2015, presidential or general elections were held in Argentina, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Guyana, Suriname, Guatemala, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Belize, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. In Argentina’s presidential election, the left-leaning government that had been in power for 12 years was defeated, and in Venezuela’s parliamentary elections the leftist ruling party lost, among other noteworthy political developments. There were articles about elections in Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Haiti, but there were none regarding the other countries. In addition, 2016 was also a crucial year in building the consensus that led to the peace agreement in the Colombian conflict, the world’s longest-running conflict, which lasted 50 years. Mexico’s drug war and the Nicaragua Canal construction project, started by a Chinese-backed company in December 2014, also saw repeated protests by local residents over impacts on housing and the environment. Yet these issues, too, were scarcely covered.

As we can see, there are many important events that, while not reported in Japan, are very real. Yet overall coverage of Latin America in Japan today is sparse, and when even one story draws major attention, coverage can become heavily skewed toward a single country, as in 2015. This hampers understanding of the situation in Latin America, which constitutes a significant part of the world and of humanity. For the general public, images of distant regions are often formed through media coverage. Recognizing that what is reported is only a portion of reality may enable us to read the news from a different perspective.

Writer: Miho Takenaka
Graphics: Miho Takenaka