The present Master Thesis extensively examines news texts by Central American online newspapers related to the Costa Rica’s diplomatic alliance switch from Taipei to Beijing. The diplomatic shift of Costa Rica (June 2007), with a prior one-year secret round of talks between San José and Beijing, was disclosed as result of an appeal at the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court by the newspaper “La Nación” (La Tribuna, 2011, March 4). The shift was highly controversial and covered by many Central American online newspapers, by the international press and evaluated by scholars and analysts. The theoretical framework is composed by the Contrapuntal Approach (Said 1983, 1993 and 1997), drawn from Post-colonialism and Orientalism. The methodology includes Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 1995, 1998, 2001 and 2011) and Political Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012). Combining three instruments (i) “The structure of practical reasoning” and (ii) “The structure of practical reasoning (counter-claim)” by Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) and (iii) “Discourse Structure of News Stories” by Bell (1991 and 1996), a new instrument is proposed: the Integrated Model of Contrapuntal Approach, Discourse Structure and Practical Reasoning. The sample collected is from three articles by La Nación (Costa Rica), elPeriódico (Guatemala) and Panamá América (Panama), which are broadly analyzed. An extensive Research Question is formulated: taking into consideration the Contrapuntal Reading (Said 1983, 1993 and 1997) that discloses the complex interactions of international relations in the post-colonial world and acknowledges alternatives to the official discourse, how are the counterforces of resistance and power presented in the news texts in the three Central American online newspapers about the overall process of Costa Rica's diplomatic shift?
