Speech analysis of “memes” in regard to the paramilitarism debate at Congress of the Republic of Colombia (2014)

Abstract

In this article we expose a rhetoric characterization made from multimodal discourse analysis approach, of memes about the debate of paramilitarism taking place in the Congress of Colombia in 2014. The entire corpus was composed by four memes, in this article we describe two of them. All selected memes had the highest circulation on social networks Facebook and Twitter, in which, according to authors’ opinion, were found highly critical points of view regarding the incidents in the debate and the attitudes or political background of the characters involved in it, diversity of cultural contents and visuals elements used to produce the discourse and humor. The analysis allowed us to conclude that these memes used rhetorical and burlesque resources to express different political positions to specific events of the debate, and mainly, to explain the antagonistic ideologies of senators faced in the debate: Álvaro Uribe and Ivan Cepeda.