Artistic capitalism, spectacle, and fear are added to the idea of new beauties as Zygmunt Bauman affirms: “Just like a good currency ready for any investment, the capital of fear can be used well in any business: both commercially and politically” (2005: 52).

The Mexican Rosana Reguillo (2001), places Bauman’s proposal in the Latin American context and focuses her attention on how contemporary fears are constituted in a frontier space in which processes, speech patterns, characters, politics, and stories converge, making it difficult to assign them a fixed terrain or isolate them. For this reason, studying them requires a nomadic view that follows them, since, for this author, fear can be defined as something that: “is always an individual experience, socially constructed and culturally shared” (Reguillo, 2000: 9).

Reguillo’s proposal touches on the media and the schemes they use to achieve expected results, according to the specific characteristics of the region:

“Media logic, modern Sherezadas that keep us on the edge, attentive to detail, of the microscopic amulet that allows us to elude the evidence that we face every night, like the sultan, the weakening of the imagination, of the impulse of life and we require another narrator capable of re-enchanting us through the mediation of the word-image, the meaning of a world from which, we think that we have already extracted all of its secrets. The media with its infinite capacity to surprise” (Reguillo, 2000).

The spectacularisation of the conflict has consciously or unconsciously contributed to the consolidation of an imaginary of fear that has taken root in the readings that Colombians make of their reality.

3. Methodology

This paper makes a documentary survey of the coverage of a selection of iconic events in the Colombian conflict between 1948 to 2008 (60 years), in the primary and traditional local media. These have been characterised over time as a government-type and some form part of the two largest economic groups in the country, in this spectrum, there are no opposing media with considerable audience sizes, the distribution is carried out in the following way:

Print:

- El Tiempo Newspaper: the leading newspaper in the country founded in 1911, owned by the Santos family. The former president Juan Manuel Santos from 2010-2018 and Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2016 is a part of it, the political behaviour of this newspaper has traditionally been government oriented.

- El Espectador Newspaper: founded in 1887, making it the oldest in the country, it is the second most read. Its director was murdered and its headquarters bombed in the eighties due to accusations against the Medellín Cartel. The political behaviour of this newspaper has traditionally been gubernatorial.

- SEMANA magazine: founded in 1946, is owned by one of the two largest oligopolies in Colombia, which have supported the government and right-wing ideas.