Univisión teaches you to be an escort

Doctorates in the University of Life.

Juanita is a fifteen year old girl in Central America. Her brothers and her dad earn ~$100 a month mixing cement. Stinking of beer, they yell at her from Friday to Sunday to fry them snacks with her mother. Well, at least they talk to her during these days. From Monday to Thursday, she's ignored, because they have work to do, and football matches to watch. They order her to bed early, so they can't miss "Decisiones" on TV.

It's the piercing that sells her, right?

Her brothers have posters with girls that look like that. They even bike to the cybercafé and send messages to them through Twitter. Each brother has "his own girl". Even their father, almost blind from an industrial accident (cement dust is not kind to corneal tissue) enjoys looking at them. Until, that is, Juanita comes home with her grades.

At her ripe age of fifteen, Juanita already knows -- through her friends -- that guys enjoy the company of prostitutes at all ages. That nearby circus-like structure, full of whores, is where all of them go. Contemplating her future isn't pleasant: she understands that staying there dooms her to be miserable like her mother, fantasizing emotions through re-runs of "Gata Salvaje" or "The daughter of the Mariachi" while she does laundry, cleans the house up, and withstands abuse and infidelity.

The solution for all the Juanitas of the world is clear: tits. She's got to become a mijita. She has to hook up with a hardened criminal -- preferably a drug dealer -- who can afford her "rescue", her "reinvention" and eventually her "graduation" to hotwife or other desirable item. She'd rather have the world see her as a desirable whore than spend her life frying snacks for the same-old same-old poor machistas.

Ironically, this new narrative has been cleaned up and translated for mass media:

Yep, that's correct, a TV show called No tits, no paradise.

The common complaint is not that the TV stations profit from the very same tragedy that they create... it's that the book is better than the telenovela.

While Juanita places a phone call to the local leader of the famous MS-13 (a.k.a. Mara Salvatrucha), Univisión breaks all records: in September 2010, Univisión wins in ratings over English-speaking TV networks in the United States. Univisión's programming (telenovelas) competed with American networks' reality TV shows, and won... demonstrating that the true religion of Latin America is television.

The most interesting fact, of course, is that most of the media content aired through Univisión, Venevisión and Telemundo (the big three in the telenovela production world) is primarily produced in L.A. and Miami. These three TV networks offer us wonders like the poverty porn of "Primer Impacto", the Social Darwinian outlook of "The war of the sexes" and the I.V. infusion of "Western" (contextual, contemporary translation: litigious and self-serving) values in "Caso Cerrado".

These networks are the property of the richest Latin families of the planet. For example, Venevisión belongs to the Cisneros Group, whose valuation is around ~5 billion dollars. If you go to Caracas, Venezuela, and ask for a Coke on any restaurant, you'll receive a puzzled look. Why? Because Diego Cisneros decided that in 1940, when he obtained the monopoly of sodas and decided to sell Pepsi-Cola instead, kicking the competition off Venezuela.

But, before we go into those details, let's focus on the first picture. These three girls are the famous "Senators" of the "Republic of Sports", a TV show that airs through all of Sunday in Univisión, and is heavily watched in North and Central America. They're experts in saying nothing... that is, nothing smart, nothing that interferes with the basest desires of their audience -- all they do is jump, smile and send kisses while they read the idiocies that Juanita's brothers tweet to them.

So, where did I get this picture from?

You'd guess I got it from the Web site of the show itself, right?

Nope. Guess again.

Outta my ass then? That's a reasonable guess, right?

Nope again. I pulled that out from the Web property called Univisión Health.

Let's meditate for a minute on that. How big of a scandal would this picture create, if CNN airs this picture on a health segment to, say, talk about obesity?

It would be enough to bankrupt CNN on the spot.

But, you see, the audience for Univisión Health is an entirely different one. That is, their audience is composed of people who aren't completely miserable, thus they have the luxury of reflecting over the social role of media. The fact that Univisión can afford to transfer these images from the world of sports shows -- men's kingdom -- into the world of health "news" segments, shows us that the real audience for this network is Juanita.

And the message from these shows to Juanita is rudimentary, but clear:

If you are a woman, and you want to escape from the Third World, you have to sell your ass. Look at your father, look at your brothers, look at how they idolize and drool over these prostitutes. School? Bitch please, don't make me laugh -- your mom got good grades too.

Can reality even begin to compete with this toxic propaganda?