The construction of the enemy: from telenovela to Tik Tok, Latin American melodramatic telepolitics

Wide and diverse criteria have been planned on melodrama, from its overvaluation as a cultural reference, to its marginalization in contemporary academic debates. However, it constitutes one of the most representative discourses in Latin America, on which various types of cultural industries and forms of social coexistence converge. This paper proposes a position that identifies melodrama not only as a cultural scenario, but also as a political one. The objective is to reflect on how these discourses have been narratives appropriated by politicians to seduce the population with promises of social change and how they have shifted from traditional media to social networks. The question that articulates this essay is: In what way has melodrama become the prevailing political discourse in the region, and which have assumed the stories of soap operas as a platform to conquer the votes of the population, and which have been massified thanks to social networks?