Certain telenovelas, those popular and melodramatic television serials that are the Latin American equivalent of soap operas, should be banned from the airwaves in Costa Rica, according to a legislative proposal considered by a legislator from the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) political party earlier this year.

According to a news report published by Pablo Rojas of online news daily Costa Rica Hoy, Legislator Jorge Arguedas plans to introduce a legislative proposal to prohibit telenovelas made in Colombia from being broadcast in Costa Rica. Legislator Arguedas brought up his idea during one of the sessions of the Security and Drug Interdiction Committee of the Legislative Assembly this year, and he explained that these TV programs portray dangerous content related to street violence and drug trafficking.

Legislator Arguedas is not the first to target telenovelas. A few years ago, former Legislator Luis Fishman of the Christian Social Unity Party (Spanish initials: PUSC) commissioned a research study on 27 telenovelas broadcast in Costa Rica between the hours of 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. The evaluators who sat through the arduous task of watching episodes of 27 telenovelas determined that 13 of them portrayed content related to violence, loose morals and sex.

When legislators mulled the above-mentioned proposal in 2010, a lot of the discussion was centered on how much skin these productions show. Many telenovelas from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela tend to be very popular in Costa Rica, particularly those that feature curvy and alluring actresses who go through a dozen wardrobe changes in 60 minutes, each outfit tighter and scantier than the previous one. This gratuitous practice is known as “cheesecake,” and producers ostensibly make use of it to attract male audiences.

Legislator Arguedas is less concerned about cheesecake than he is about the violence and lifestyle portrayed by the Colombian telenovelas he wants off the air. Some, but not all, of the most popular telenovelas made in Colombia deal with topics related to drug trafficking, and they also lay on the cheesecake. Legislator Arguedas believes that these telenovelas are dangerous insofar as they portray people entering the drug trafficking lifestyle from an early age, and such storylines may tempt young men in Costa Rica into giving up school for a reckless and violent lifestyle that will reward them with illicit monetary gains and plenty of cheesecake.