When I arrived at school just days after major developments in Venezuela, no one mentioned it. Instead, conversations focused elsewhere. That contrast stayed with me. Why do some crises dominate our attention while others remain invisible? When we speak of “global” issues, perhaps we should ask: who is actually included in that definition, and who is not?
Author: Alexia De O. Camilo
To primarily understand why I wrote this, you must first understand my background, the same one I share with millions of others. Hi, I’m an immigrant. More specifically, a south-of-the-equator immigrant.
For the past couple of months, I have been silently observing my surroundings: the news, how people react to it, the type of news they concern themselves with, and more importantly, the type of news they do not. This piece is not written to undermine the social, political, and economic issues the Western North faces, but rather to bring to light the peculiarities I have since noticed regarding not only their interest but their lack of incentive for learning and teaching when it comes to what is often labelled a “third world country.”
The first time I noticed this, I am almost embarrassed to say, was only a handful of months ago. In early January, discussions and reports emerged regarding possible United States action against Nicolás Maduro, and his transportation to New York to face charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. A situation that, depending on how you look at it, raises serious questions about international law, particularly Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
This was followed by Trump’s explicit interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, to be exact. Call it what you want, radical and effective; brutal and illegal. For many Venezuelans, it represented a moment of cautious relief after years of political and economic hardship.
For the moment, however, that is not what I ask you to indulge, but rather I press you to imagine my surprise when I arrived at school not even three days later, and all I hear anyone talking about is the tragedy of Crass-Montana’s fire on New Year’s Day. The loss was indescribable, young women and men, and children. A tragedy, yes. Except when it comes to issues below the equatorial, it seems.
Here is some data for your eyes to feast upon: According to various media analyses conducted, in 2022, only an average of 9% of airtime and column length was given to the Global South in differe European countries, despite it facing major, often fatal crises. The war in Tigray in Ethiopia, for instance, often described as one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century, received significantly less coverage than the war in Ukraine across major outlets. Yet both Venezuela and Ukraine had 6,8 million people displaced. Finally, in 2025, humanitarian reports suggest that more than 43 millions of people were affected by the 10 most under-reported crises that failed to enter “global” consciousness.
So why it is that such a large portion of the world’s population gets underrepresented, and very low percentages of media time in northern media?
The reasons may lie in what some describe as the “tropicalisation” phenomenon, the process of reducing a complex region to a caricature of exotic tropes, rather than treating it as a serious political or intellectual peer. Countries in the Global South are framed through vibrancy, bright colours and passion, idealised as the perfect places for vacations, and not countries of innovation and science. Framing it as a nature-heavy but theory-poor, the Global South provides raw data, and the Global North gets to be depicted as the experts giving out solutions.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “History is written by the victors”? Well, it is mostly true.
Having lived in three different countries, two of which are European, during history lessons I have been taught about colonisation in different ways. And while none of those versions are entirely false, some are not entirely accurate to what it actually was and is.
In Europe, colonisation is viewed as a historical period, where countries just happen to travel to another, and declare it as their own, establishing systems and improving the country’s economic and political status. Sometimes resistance is mentioned, sometimes not. It is described as a sequence of events, a means to an end.
All of this absolutely true, except it fails to mention the centuries of trauma, exploitation, systemic inequality, and full cultural destruction. Colonisers would bring priests to “teach” the indigenous, and “civilise” them. As if they were not already civil, with their own hierarchy and trading systems, as if they had not been a fully operational society of their own.
History gets told by the winner. Colonialism, as it was before, is now basically extinct, except their old logic remains. The Global South is uncivilised, they do not matter, so why should Europe, the “superior ones”, care about what happens to them?
I cannot and I will not blame the citizens, empathy follows familiarity, and familiarity is built by the stories we are fed. So when we talk about “global” issues, let us at least be honest about the fact that the globe, apparently, starts somewhere north of the equator.
Because at the end of the day, who gets to decide what is a global issue and what is not?
