This thesis set out to explore the representation of the fourth world inhabitant as a violent actor, and in particular focused upon the city of Medellín’s marginal spaces. It took into account the pre-existing myths regarding the division of the city into two halves: Medellín – the central city – and Medallo – the supposed home space of violent actors. This division was explored through Manuel Castells’ concept of the network society and the existence of black holes, which he labels the ‘fourth world’, of which mythical Medallo is representative. The aim of this thesis was to analyse the presentation of the fourth world space’s violent actors in four of the nation’s most visible cultural products of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It took into account not only the text itself, in each case, but also the marketing paratexts that comprise the cultural product. In this way it was able to consider the importance of the audience/readers and their engagement with the cultural products in question.
One of the principal aims of this innovative approach to representations of violence in Colombia was to allow the myth of the sicario to be distinguished from that of the drug baron. The latter is a figure who has dominated cultural production in the late twentieth century and, as discussed in Chapter One, has his own mythology. He is a powerful figure, yet with his myth comes individuality. His personal traits, ruthlessness and cunning, are incorporated into the basic characteristics expected of a drug baron. He also has clear ties to the Colombian nation, and in many ways has become a key representative of it. On the other hand, although the sicario has also been a focus of cultural production, his myth is very different to that of the drug baron. He exists as a desechable, an extreme symptom of consumer society in which a human being can be discarded and forgotten, as graphically illustrated in La Sierra’s opening sequence. His myth is tied to this sense of easy replacement, and as such, it thrives on his anonymity, which contrasts markedly with that of the drug baron. The sicario continues to be a presence, a feared Other for the first world audience, because he does not have a story. In death he is not grieved, and as such, his myth is transferred to another youth who fits that same myth because of his home in the fourth world space and his participation in violent action. In this way, he has a continual presence as a myth, despite the increasing number of deaths of the individual young men who represent him. This fourth world violent actor came to prominence in the media as the sicario, but over the course of time all young men of the fourth world space in Medellín were associated with perpetrating violence and early death.
The ways of representing the fourth world actor were another aspect of the analysis undertaken in this thesis, which considers the different approaches taken by the filmmakers/authors to engage with their audiences in order to change the way in which this space and its actors are consumed. In this way, Smith’s concepts of alignment and allegiance were used to indicate different methods used to achieve this. The two cinematic cultural products provided a very interesting contrast with each other since the audience were aligned in one case to a first world actor and, in the other, to a fourth world inhabitant. The result is surprising, in that allegiance is garnered with the fourth world inhabitant rather than the character from the first world, as might have been expected given that the majority of the consuming audience belong to the latter category. Schroeder, in his fiction film La virgen de los sicarios, chose to align the audience with the first world actor Fernando, yet then presented him as a character with which the audience are unlikely to feel allegiance because of his abhorrent discourse regarding the fourth world inhabitants of the city. This technique contrasts in an interesting way with that of La Sierra, in which the audience is aligned with the fourth world inhabitant and violent actor Edison, and are given the opportunity to develop a sense of allegiance to him, because they are given access to his hopes and dreams of an alternative life free of violence. This allegiance is made more powerful by Edison’s death and the journey taken by the audience with his friends and family to mourn this event. In the contrast between these two cultural products, the question of responsibility for the representation and consumption of the violence perpetrated by the fourth world actor is illustrated as more complicated than simply stopping violent actors from perpetrating their attacks. It highlights that attention must be directed towards first world consumptive practices as well as to the lives of the fourth world inhabitants.
The written cultural products too provide interesting examples of audience engagement. In Leopardo al sol the narrative voices have a clear alignment with the drug barons, and illustrate that without the fourth world space, the sicario does not have a context. The collective voice therefore cannot be aligned with him, and as a consequence cannot feel allegiance to him. In contrast, the narrators’ closeness to the drug baron’s actions, knowledge of his family life and their respect for his morals mean that they feel allegiance to the characters.444 This allows the reader to
differentiate between the two myths – those of the drug baron and the sicario. It also enables the identification of the sicarios’ essential mythical criteria by isolating them
444 In this way, Dalton And Martinez’s presentation of Edison in La Sierra serves as a model for allowing an audience
to feel allegiance to the fourth world violent actor by giving access to all aspects of his life rather than just his role as an assassin.
as missing elements when audiences were not aligned with the fourth world actor as the principal violent actor. His myth is attached to his status as a fourth world inhabitant, and this is missing from Restrepo’s novel. The analysis of Salazar’s relationship with his reader in No nacimos pa’semilla is most interesting in its difference because, in this case, I argue that the effect of the writing style is not what the author intends. Having attempted to write a testimonio that would give an insight into the hidden lives of the sicarios in the years in which they were first introduced to the global consumer, the author fails to create that sense of alignment. Instead, his own thoughts and feelings overwhelm the short testimonies because his voice gives a sense of cohesion to the overall text, and so the reader is aligned with the first world editor. In this way, there is little opportunity to foster a sense of allegiance with the individuals who give testimony. This methodology of considering audience engagement with the cultural products and their ‘characters’ has proved most illuminating, and in this way, the thesis makes an original contribution to scholarship in the field of Colombian cultural studies.
In previous scholarly analysis, the fourth world violent actor’s existence in the media and in cultural products is tied to the networks of the narcotics industry and thus this thesis the first full exploration of him as a mythical figure linked to the wider global sphere. Although scholars such as Kantaris and O’Bryen have engaged with Manuel Castells’s theory of the fourth world when analysing Colombian and Latin American cultural products, they have not tied this to the wider global sphere of cultural production. Nor have scholars attempted to make a comparison of paratexts and texts within the same analysis, and this too forms an original aspect of this thesis, whose conclusions I now summarise.
The paratextual analysis has provided evidence that the myth of the fourth world inhabitant as a violent actor is closely tied to the sicario. The first paratexts explored – those of Leopardo al sol - illustrate that the drug baron, in contrast to the sicario, is difficult to represent, and so the publishers have chosen to focus on different aspects of the novel instead. This is significant because it highlights the centrality of the sicario in the subsequent three cultural products. The paratexts of the film La virgen de los sicarios indicate the centrality of the anonymous young violent actor to the myth of the sicario, and this is emphasised by the first paratext of No nacimos pa’semilla. In the latter, the sicario’s myth is clearly linked to how he is represented and consumed – a character who appears on the back of a motorbike to carry out the business of death. He was widely feared during the era in which he was most frequently visible in the media, but as the second paratextual image of No nacimos pa’semilla suggests, as the twentieth century closed and the sicarios were
less visible after the demise of the major drug barons and their war against the state, fear centred more on the fourth world spaces surrounding the city. This is reflected in the imagery of the blurred, and therefore not individually identifiable settlements on the hillsides surrounding the city. It is also illustrated in the final paratext analysed: that of La Sierra. This paratext illustrates the fourth world violent actor in the fourth world, and portrays the watching audience through the taxi driver’s mirror. It also illustrates the links between this local fourth world violent actor and more global representations, because of the visual encoding that resembles that of Hollywood blockbusters. In this way, the paratexts themselves reveal a trajectory from 1990 to 2005 in which the perception of the fourth world violent inhabitant and his home space was adapted over time to be more closely aligned with a globally homogenised representation rather than a localised focus.
The homogenisation of the representation of a global fourth world inhabitant who is a violent actor is one of the major conclusions of this thesis. The analysis of different contexts in the introduction indicated that there is a growing sense of homogenisation surrounding this space and the presentation of its inhabitants. Primarily, it is the most violent actors, or those who enact the most spectacular actions, who gain the attention of and coverage in the media. In this way, the inner city ghettos of the US and the French banlieues are presented as more similar than they actually are. The underlying structural issues in each context are very different, yet their presentation in the media is similar. I argue that the presentation of the Colombian fourth world actor follows suit, as discussed in this thesis.
It is the sicario’s anonymity which also links him to more global representations of the fourth world inhabitant as a violent actor. As time progressed between 1990 and 2005, the representation of Medellín’s fourth world violent actor more closely corresponded with that of Other fourth world inhabitants in the global setting. In La Sierra, Edison was not labelled as a sicario, but a violent actor, despite admitting on camera to carrying out killings for money. Instead, he is one of a growing number of young men who have been captured in cultural products living a life dominated by violence in the fourth world space. The death of the unknown young man in the opening scenes of the same documentary closely resembles the reporting of death in Other fourth world spaces, as illustrated by Sontag and Butler in their discussions on this topic. This trend is, I argue, one which must be explored at a local level and tied to the global pattern in order to be better understood. The issue of mourning is an important one, as Dalton and Martinez make clear in La Sierra. In order to fully understand the lives of those we fear – the violent fourth world actors –
we must listen to their stories, not only of violent actions, but of day-to-day life in these spaces which are not connected to the network society.
The analysis of the four cultural products has also revealed some aspects of life in the fourth world space of Medellín which are very rarely represented. The violent actor has come to be the representative of this fourth world space. However, as illustrated in the cultural products in question, this practice masks all other aspects of life in the fourth world space. The lives of women, for example, are barely given attention unless they are linked to violent actors. The testimony of Doña Azucena in No nacimos pa’semilla is the single female voice in the entire document, whilst in La Sierra, the portrayal of young women contrasts with the typical presentation of women as competitive bidders for the affections of violent actors and of silent mothers who have neither a voice nor a role in the popular imagination. The similarities in these two non-fictional representations highlight that in fact women are important yet under-represented fourth world actors. As suggested in Jazmín’s experience, women are still subalterns, whilst men are fourth world inhabitants. The distinction can be drawn because violent men, although not able to access the benefits of the network society, are able to circulate within it through their representation in the media and in cultural products. This of course has serious implications for men, but they are at least visible, even if their representation is clearly mythical. In contrast, women, and in particular those who have fulfilled their reproductive function, are forgotten. They are overshadowed by the violent actors of the fourth world. They cannot speak because within the network society there is no space afforded to their representation. In this way, Castells’s notion of the fourth world as a series of black holes in the network society can be supplemented by the lack of interest from the first world audience of the network society who consume these representations. Women exist in a black hole of representation, in contrast to their violent male counterparts.
It is this which brings me to my final conclusion. The cultural products analysed in this thesis illustrate that it is not only the fourth world inhabitant as violent actor that has become a consumer product, but the fourth world space itself is now a consumable myth. The fourth world is excluded from the first world space, meaning that its inhabitants are unable to represent themselves, yet it remains ever-present for those who are able to consume its presentation. The myth of the fourth world inhabitant as a violent actor must be dismantled through a re-representation of all aspects of life in these spaces. Those who present the space must allow all of its inhabitants to be seen and to speak. In global markets, the fourth world cannot
continue to be marketed as a space of violence. And the Colombian fourth world space cannot continue to be represented as the home of urban violence.