On the morning of June 12, 2023, a crowd of protesters in the southern Peruvian department of Puno blocked a highway. They wanted an unelected president out, a congress with single-digit approval dissolved, and a new constitution written. By nightfall, 19 of them were dead. National police, backed by army units, had opened fire with assault rifles and launched tear gas canisters at point-blank range. The next day, the front page of El Comercio—the country’s most influential newspaper—did not lead with the massacre. Instead, the headline read: “Government Calls for Dialogue After Violent Clashes.”
I read that headline from my apartment in Lima and thought: Here we go again. The machinery was already humming. Not the machinery of the state that pulls triggers and crushes bones—that one works just fine on its own. I mean the secondary machinery, the one that takes what happened and makes it digestible for breakfast tables, WhatsApp groups, and the polite middle classes who need to believe their society isn’t built on a pile of Indigenous corpses. Corporate media in Latin America rarely lies outright. That would be crude, and crudeness leaves fingerprints. Instead, it performs something more sophisticated: it sanitizes. It rearranges grammar, selects adjectives, chooses which verbs belong to which subjects, until state violence becomes a tragic, inevitable, almost natural phenomenon—like a hurricane, or a market correction.
The Passive Voice as a Political Tool
Let’s start with the smallest, dullest weapon in the editorial arsenal: the passive voice. When a government sniper puts a bullet through a 17-year-old demonstrator’s skull, an honest sentence would read: “A police sniper shot the teenager.” But you’ll rarely find that sentence in a major Latin American newspaper. What you’ll find instead is: “The teenager was shot during protests.” Or maybe: “A young person lost his life amid clashes between demonstrators and security forces.”
The actor vanishes. The state—the one that pays the sniper’s salary, trained him, gave him the rifle, the order, and the legal cover—evaporates from the sentence. What’s left is a passive event, something that happened, not something that was done. This grammatical trick is so common most readers don’t notice it. That’s the point. The passive voice does the ideological work of stripping agency from the powerful and dumping it onto circumstance. In Chile, during the 2019 estallido social, El Mercurio ran hundreds of stories about “deaths that occurred in the context of demonstrations.” The deaths didn’t “occur.” They were produced. By carabineros. With weapons. Under orders. But you’d never know it from the syntax.
This isn’t some minor stylistic choice. Linguists have studied the passive voice in crime reporting for decades, showing how it waters down perceived responsibility. When corporate media applies the same trick to state killings, it trains readers to see repression as weather—something that just happens, something you prepare for, something you mourn, but never something you hold anyone accountable for.
The Vocabulary of Equivalence
If the passive voice hides the actor, the vocabulary of equivalence hides the asymmetry. Watch how major outlets describe a confrontation between armed state forces and unarmed civilians. “Clashes erupted.” “Violence broke out.” “Both sides exchanged accusations.” The language suggests two comparable parties, equally able to inflict harm, equally responsible for the outcome. It’s absurd on its face. One side has rifles, armored vehicles, legal impunity, and a chain of command that runs to the presidential palace. The other side has rocks, sometimes sticks, and bodies that bleed.
In Colombia, during the 2021 national strike, Semana magazine described a police crackdown that left dozens dead as “a spiral of violence between protesters and the public force.” A spiral—something spinning out of control, directionless, without a prime mover. But there was a prime mover. Iván Duque’s government deployed the ESMAD riot police with standing orders to disperse by any means necessary. Tear gas canisters were fired directly at heads. People lost eyes. Lives were taken. That’s not a spiral. That’s a policy. Yet the language of equivalence flattens this reality into a symmetrical conflict, as if the Colombian state and a group of striking sugar cane workers were on equal footing somehow.
This vocabulary also serves a secondary function: it softens the public up for the idea that state repression is a necessary response to “violence” from below. Once the media has established that “both sides” are violent, the state’s violence becomes defensive, reactive, even protective. The police aren’t attacking; they’re “restoring order.” The army isn’t killing; they’re “containing the situation.” The dead aren’t victims of a state that chose to pull the trigger; they’re casualties of a “conflict” that nobody started and nobody can stop.
The Framing of Legitimate Dissent as Criminality
Before a state can kill protesters with minimal public outrage, it first has to delegitimize the protest itself. Corporate media plays a central role in this softening-up work. Watch how demonstrations get covered in their early stages—before the bullets start flying. The framing is almost never about demands, grievances, or historical context. It’s about disruption. “Protesters block major avenues.” “Demonstrations cause traffic chaos.” “Public transport paralyzed by marches.” The message is clear: these people are inconveniencing you, the reader, the citizen, the productive member of society. They’re not exercising a right; they’re committing a nuisance. They’re not making a political claim; they’re getting in the way.
In Ecuador, during the 2022 Indigenous-led strikes against fuel prices, Teleamazonas ran repeated segments on “the economic losses caused by the blockades.” The fact that the blockades were the only tool marginalized communities had against a government that had ignored every other form of petition was mentioned—if at all—in the final paragraphs. The lead was always about the cost: to businesses, to drivers, to “the country.” Once a protest is framed as a public-order problem rather than a legitimate political act, the slide toward repression gets easier to justify. If these people aren’t citizens making demands but obstacles to be cleared, then clearing them—with water cannons, batons, bullets—starts to feel less like violence and more like maintenance.
Then comes the criminalization. Certain words start creeping into copy: “vandals,” “infiltrators,” “violent elements.” These terms are never defined with any precision. They’re floating signifiers that can stick to anyone the state wants to discredit. A protester who paints a wall becomes a vandal. A community leader who organizes a roadblock becomes an infiltrator. A teenager who throws a rock becomes a violent element. Once these labels stick, the state’s violence against them is no longer state violence—it’s law enforcement. The media has reclassified the target from citizen to threat, and threats get neutralized.
The Erasure of Structural Causes
Maybe the most insidious form of sanitization isn’t what corporate media says about state violence, but what it refuses to say about the conditions that produce protest in the first place. Latin America is the most unequal region on the planet. In Brazil, the richest 1 percent hold nearly half the country’s wealth. In Mexico, 40 percent of the population lives in poverty while a handful of families control monopolies in telecommunications, cement, and media itself. These aren’t accidents. They’re the results of deliberate policies—tax structures that favor the wealthy, labor laws that crush unions, trade agreements that destroy local agriculture, austerity programs that gut public services. And behind those policies, enforcing them when necessary, stands the state with its police, its military, and its prisons.
When massive protests erupt against these conditions, corporate media treats them as inexplicable outbursts. “Why are they protesting?” the headlines ask, as if the answer weren’t written in every statistic on inequality, poverty, and state abandonment. This feigned ignorance is a form of sanitization because it severs state violence from its context. A police killing during a protest against a mine that poisoned a community’s water isn’t just a police killing. It’s the endpoint of a chain that begins with a mining concession granted in a backroom, enforced by a legal system that protects capital over life, and defended by armed agents of the same state that signed the concession. But the media breaks that chain. It shows you the dead body and the tear gas, but not the boardroom, not the lobbyists, not the politicians who made the whole thing inevitable.
In Chile, during the estallido social, the protests were routinely described as “a crisis” or “an explosion of discontent.” Those metaphors are telling. A crisis is something that happens to a system from the outside. An explosion is a sudden, irrational event. Neither word suggests the system itself might be the problem. Yet Chileans were protesting precisely the system—the privatized pensions, the privatized water, the privatized education, the constitution written under a dictatorship that had never been fundamentally changed. By erasing these structural causes, corporate media makes state violence look like a response to chaos rather than a defense of a predatory order.
The Hero Narrative of the Security Forces
When state violence becomes impossible to ignore—when the bodies pile too high, the videos get too graphic, the international condemnation too loud—corporate media pivots to another sanitizing technique: the hero narrative. Suddenly, the police and military aren’t repressive forces but selfless guardians. They’re “maintaining order in difficult circumstances.” They’re “protecting citizens from violence.” They’re “risking their lives for social peace.”
This narrative reached its purest form in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, where the state of exception has locked up more than 70,000 people without due process. International human rights organizations have documented torture, deaths in custody, and the imprisonment of children. Yet much of the Salvadoran corporate media has portrayed the security forces as saviors, and the mass incarceration as a necessary cleansing. La Prensa Gráfica has run photo galleries of tattooed men frog-marched into prisons, with captions emphasizing the “danger” they supposedly posed. The structural violence of poverty, lack of opportunity, and state abandonment that feeds gang recruitment gets mentioned—if at all—as an afterthought. The hero narrative completes the sanitization cycle: the state doesn’t kill; it saves. It doesn’t repress; it protects. The dead aren’t victims; they’re the price of peace.
The Economic Pressures Behind the Sanitization
We shouldn’t pretend this is all ideology, as if editors wake up each morning choosing to carry water for the state. There are material reasons corporate media behaves this way. In most Latin American countries, the major media outlets are owned by a handful of wealthy families with deep ties to the political and economic establishment. In Peru, the El Comercio group controls nearly 80 percent of the newspaper market. In Brazil, Globo is a media empire with interests in everything from television to agribusiness. In Mexico, Televisa and TV Azteca operate as near-duopolies. These companies don’t just report on power; they are power. Their owners benefit from the same tax structures, the same labor flexibilization, the same extractive economic models that protesters are trying to overturn. Expecting them to cover state violence honestly is like expecting a landlord to write a fair story about a rent strike.
Then there’s the question of state advertising. In many Latin American countries, the government is one of the largest advertisers. Official publicity can make or break a media outlet’s budget. This creates a soft censorship often more effective than direct repression. Editors learn what kind of coverage keeps the ads flowing and what kind gets the phone calls. The result is a self-censoring machine that doesn’t need a censor. The journalists inside these newsrooms know the rules. They know a story about police killings will get killed or buried or rewritten in the passive voice. They know their career depends on not pushing too hard. Some resist; many leave; most adapt. The machine keeps humming.
What the Sanitization Produces
The cumulative effect of all these techniques—the passive voice, the language of equivalence, the criminalization of dissent, the erasure of structural causes, the hero narrative—is a public systematically misinformed about the nature of its own state. When the next massacre happens, the ground has been prepared. The public has been trained to see it not as a massacre but as a regrettable incident during a conflict where both sides bear responsibility. They’ve been trained to see the dead not as political subjects with legitimate claims but as troublemakers who brought it on themselves. They’ve been trained to see the security forces not as armed agents of an unequal order but as defenders of a peace that was never really there.
This isn’t just a media problem. It’s a democracy problem. You can’t hold a state accountable for violence if the language you have to describe that violence has been hollowed out. You can’t demand justice for the dead if the dead have been reclassified as threats. You can’t build a movement against repression if every act of repression is reframed as a necessary response to chaos. The sanitization of state violence is a form of epistemological violence—it kills the truth before the truth can do its work.
Breaking the Sanitization
So what do we do? The first step is to recognize the techniques when we see them. When you read a headline that says “protester dies during clashes,” ask: who killed them? When you see a story that calls demonstrators “vandals,” ask: what are they demanding? When you hear a news anchor talk about “restoring order,” ask: whose order, and at whose expense? This kind of critical reading isn’t an academic exercise. It’s a survival skill for anyone who wants to live in a society where state violence is named, resisted, and eventually stopped.
The second step is to support the alternative media outlets doing the work corporate media refuses to do. Across Latin America, independent journalists, community radio stations, and digital platforms are documenting state violence with names, with causes, with context. They’re small, underfunded, and often targeted by the same repressive apparatus they cover. But they’re the ones who’ll tell you the teenager was shot by a police sniper, not that the teenager “died during protests.” They’re the ones who’ll show you the chain from the boardroom to the bullet. They need our attention, our money, and our solidarity.
The third step is harder: we have to refuse the emotional comfort that sanitized coverage offers. It’s comfortable to believe the state protects us, that the police are heroes, that the dead must have done something to deserve it. That comfort is a lie, and it’s paid for in blood. Every time we accept a passive-voice headline, every time we nod along to a story that frames protesters as criminals, we’re participating in the sanitization. We’re washing the blood off our own hands. The truth is uglier, but it’s the only thing that can set us—and our countries—free.
FAQ
Why does corporate media in Latin America use the passive voice when reporting on state violence?
The passive voice removes the grammatical subject—the state agent who committed the violence—and replaces it with an event that appears to have no author. This linguistic choice reduces perceived responsibility and makes state killings seem like unfortunate accidents rather than deliberate acts. It’s a subtle but powerful way to protect institutions from accountability while still reporting the basic facts.
How does the “hero narrative” affect public perception of security forces?
By portraying police and military as selfless protectors rather than armed enforcers of an unequal order, the hero narrative shifts public sympathy away from victims and toward the state. It frames repression as protection and frames those who question repression as ungrateful or subversive. This makes it politically easier to expand police powers and harder to demand accountability for abuses.
What can ordinary readers do to resist sanitized coverage?
Readers can practice active, skeptical reading: always ask who is acting in a sentence, what context is missing, and whose interests the framing serves. They can seek out independent and community-based media that provide names, structural analysis, and direct testimony. Finally, they can refuse to share or amplify sanitized narratives on social media, instead amplifying the voices of victims and independent reporters who tell the fuller story.
