The U.S. Army is looking for a writer to script eight episodes of a radio soap opera that conveys to Colombian guerrillas messages of demobilization, and counters the recruitment into armed groups. The last four episodes will focus on promoting family values, the respectful treatment of women, democratic alternatives to violence, and support of a U.S.-Colombia partnership.
The army’s radio novella will be paid by the Military Information Support Operations (MISO), an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, which produces propaganda to influence foreign audiences. But it will use true life stories lifted from the testimony of former combatants.
The episodes will be in Spanish and a mix of regional Colombian dialects (paisa, llanero, costeño, pastuso).
Radio broadcasts have proven to be the most effective means of communication for the MISO team, particularly when their target audience is located in remote areas.
The radio novella will break from the mold — in Colombia, such genre tends to be violence-obsessed and misogynistic. It glorifies the narco-culture of fast money, gold and diamond-studded guns, and beautiful expendable women.
Related:
Talking About Colombia 
It’s amazing how many people claim to know about a specific country when they’re just generalizing. The radionovela genre was born with the radio itself, long before tha accentuation of the drug trafficking problem and it’s more like the soap opera, in terms of melodramatic romanticism, than the narco novela, a MEXICAN form of expression. Discern these things, even though we might look alike for you, our history branches in many forms, just like the “dialects”, that in reality are the ones spoken by indigenous groups, NOT regional groups, that’s a basic anthropological disctinction, the paisa, costeño or pastuso are ACCENTS of spanish speaking population.
By: Carlos Pérez on June 10, 2013
at 3:12 pm