To Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Bolivarianism meant Latin American integration, anti-imperialism, and what he called “twenty-first-century” socialism. The new channel, teleSUR, was a collaborative effort of several left-wing governments: early on, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, and Uruguay. (Ecuador and Bolivia joined later, while Argentina left in 2016 after electing a right-wing government.) Uruguayan journalist Aram Aharonian, teleSUR’s first director general, has described the channel’s initial goal as “to see ourselves as we truly were. . . .  We were presented through a colonial mentality as blond and tall and European, and some of us are, but we’re also short, dark, Zambo, Indian. We needed to shake off our inferiority complex and tell our own stories.”

In Aharonian’s vision, teleSUR would function as a kind of news and information source that would accompany the new progressive governments’ efforts at social inclusion. “Our North is the South,” went the channel’s slogan, embracing a reordering of priorities and values, not just geography.