Visions on Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon in Spanish Media: Case Study of the Newspaper El País

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the construction of the notion of development in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the media, by studying a globally reaching medium. For this, the Spanish newspaper El País was selected, a private medium with broad international coverage and disconnected from the local context. The analysis period from 2013 to 2017, is characterized by contrasts between a legal framework focused on recognizing the rights of nature and a political environment centered on oil extraction. The research methodology employed content analysis with a syntactic and semantic approach. The findings reveal that in most of the journalistic articles published by El País about the Ecuadorian Amazon, the most frequent terms are related to oil exploitation, using development narratives associated with modernization theory. The conclusions indicate that El País has primarily chosen to represent the Ecuadorian Amazon as a place destined to extract natural resources for economic benefit generation.