Latin America and the Caribbean are vast and populous, spanning from Mexico in North America to Chile on the tip of the South American continent. They include 33 sovereign countries and as many as 17 additional overseas territories.

And yet they are among the most underreported regions in the Japanese media. GNV has gathered and analysed data on world news coverage by Japanese media organizations since 2015. This article draws from that data, focusing on the coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean in three major national daily newspapers in Japan over the course of the ten years since 2015.

A summit of Latin American and Caribbean states, Argentina (2023) (Photo: Palácio do Planalto / Flickr [CC BY 2.0])

Trends in world coverage

Coverage of the world as a whole by the Japanese media is quite limited to begin with, with world news making up 10-12% of the total quantity of news produced by major broadsheets and key television stations.

This relatively small amount of coverage is dominated by a small number of powerful countries and countries of concern to Japan in terms of security and trade. The US alone accounts for 25% of all world news in major Japanese newspapers. Regions and countries far from Japan, with high levels of poverty and little perceived strategic importance to Japan, tend to receive very little coverage. Latin America and the Caribbean are two such regions.

GNV measured world news coverage published in the morning editions of the Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun in the ten years between 2015 and 2024. All of the countries and territories making up Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for just 2.2% of world news during this period. On a side note, coverage of the region by television stations tends to be far smaller, to the point of being almost non-existent. In 2021, for example, coverage of this region by the national public broadcaster NHK made up just 0.03% of the world news aired by one of its key news programs.

Decreasing coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean

We now turn to changes in coverage of these regions as a whole over time. In the decade since 2015, coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean declined considerably, following a high point in 2016. This peak was something of an anomaly: the elevated coverage can be explained by strong interest in the Summer Olympic Games, held in Brazil that year (*1). Olympic coverage reflects the media’s interest in the Games’ themselves, alongside some political and social dimensions. It also shows that the overall volume of coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean is low enough to be affected substantially by a single, albeit large-scale, event.

But even excluding 2016, a decline in the quantity of news over the course of the decade is clear. This was seen most sharply in 2020, the year that marked the high point of the COVID-19 pandemic. For much of 2020, coverage of this pandemic dominated world news coverage, and although Latin America was one of the regions most impacted, this was not reflected in the coverage. Following this, in 2022 world news coverage came to be dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This further reduced the already small levels of coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean. Coverage of the regions do not appear to have recovered to pre-COVID levels.

The declining coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean by Japanese media outlets may also be linked to a general decrease in the number of foreign correspondents stationed in the region. As of 2024, only seven foreign correspondents were registered with Japanese media outlets in the region. This is less than half the number stationed 30 years earlier, in 1994 (15).

Coverage by country

An examination of the coverage of the region by country can help us better understand the news values of these newspapers. A breakdown of the coverage in the Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and Yomiuri Shimbun between 2015 and 2024 shows a heavy concentration of coverage in a small number of countries. Just three countries – Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela – accounted for more than half of the total coverage.

As a regional superpower, relatively heavy coverage of Brazil is perhaps to be expected. Coverage of Cuba is less easily explained in such terms. A breakdown of the coverage of the three most-covered countries by year offers a clear indication of what is behind the media interest in these countries. In each of the three cases, more or less one-third of the ten years of coverage can be found in a single year.

For Brazil, the year was 2016, with the Summer Olympic Games being the prime trigger for heavy coverage. Media interest in Cuba was concentrated in 2015. Coverage was so extensive in relative terms in 2015 that Cuba accounted for 46% of all coverage of the region as a whole. This can be explained by the events associated with the renewing of diplomatic ties between Cuba and the US, a process that began in December 2014. The high point of coverage of Venezuela in the period covered was 2019. This was the year that saw a presidential crisis in which two parties claimed to be the legitimate rulers of the country, with the US, among others, taking a strong stance in support of the candidate that did not hold the actual seat of power.

The concentration of coverage of Cuba and Venezuela reflects the strong impact of US interests in Japanese media coverage, a factor that GNV has examined in previous research. This can also be seen in coverage of Mexico, with US-Mexico relations being a major point of interest. In the case of Peru, it is the connection with Japan that appears to draw attention, with the Fujimori family featuring prominently in coverage of that country.

An uncovered region

As is clear from what we have seen so far, substantive coverage of countries such as Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela in certain years is quite rare. For the most part, Latin America and the Caribbean are largely out of sight of the Japanese media.

This of course is by no means an indication of a lack of the occurrence of newsworthy events. Over the course of the last decade, for example, a historic peace was reached in Colombia, although in many ways the peace has not held. In the same period, upheaval in Haiti has seen the political, security and economic situation largely collapse, leaving the country in a state of humanitarian crisis. In broader political terms, the decade saw the shifting fortunes of left-leaning and right-leaning political forces in several countries across Latin America. Sudden political shifts and long-running instability in Bolivia has been emblematic of this trend.

With the possible exception of Colombia (a total of 129,756 characters in all three newspapers in ten years), coverage of many such countries has been scant. Coverage of Haiti (40,792 characters) and Bolivia (30,514 characters), for example, averages out at roughly two medium-length articles per year in each newspaper.

Numerous small Caribbean countries and overseas territories (most of them belonging to European states) received zero coverage in any publication over the ten-year period. One such territory of note was the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory that plays a substantial global role as a tax haven. Neither the 2016 Panama Papers leak nor the 2021 Pandora Papers leak, which enabled detailed revelations about the massive problem of tax havens and shady offshore finance in the world, appears to have drawn the Japanese media’s attention to the territory.

Mass protests, Bolivia (2019) (Photo: Ariela2020 / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])

Further decline?

From a Japanese perspective, Latin America and the Caribbean may appear distant and perhaps even irrelevant. But it can also be said that such perspectives are in many ways out of touch with the reality of our increasingly globalized world.

While the overall levels of world coverage, and the number of foreign correspondents in Latin America and the Caribbean appear, to have stabilized for now, the Japanese news industry is clearly in decline. It would seem but a matter of time before the already low levels of coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean fall even further.

*1 GNV does not count on-the-field sports news per se as world news coverage, so the coverage counted here comprises political, social, and economic news associated directly or indirectly with the Olympic Games.

Writer: Virgil Hawkins

Graphics: Virgil Hawkins