In the highland market township of Solola, Guatemala, Radio Roca is broadcasting phone calls from local Indigenous listeners. “I feel sad that we don’t perform the traditional bull dance anymore, can you please play the music for this dance?” requests an elderly man. Others ring in to talk about road blockages following tropical storm Agatha, the algae spread in nearby Lago de Atitlan, and Solola’s upcoming annual street festival. This is healthy community radio at play, yet at any time this popular station could be raided by police and shut down, just like others of its kind around the country. Because in Guatemala, community radio is illegal.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. In 1996, when the Peace Accords drew a close to Guatemala’s 36 year-long civil war and genocide, Indigenous people were promised the right to set up their own hyperlocal stations, play their own music, run their own programs and speak in their own languages. Given that around 60 percent of the Guatemalan population is Indigenous – mostly Mayan – that most Indigenous people live in remote rural areas with no access to television or the internet, and that a great many cannot read or speak Spanish, this was a coup.
Little radio towers popped up in backyards and people took their beloved battery-powered radios out into the fields, or their favourite weaving spots, and listened to stuff that mattered to them as they worked. Stuff like how to care for workhorses, the warning signs of tuberculosis and how to register for voting. Stuff that never featured on the Spanish-centric mega-stations. “The people of the town had never heard anything like it before,” says Ancelmo Xunic of the Radio Ixchel station he built by hand in Sumpango, a village renowned for its kite making tradition. “For the first time they could hear women’s voices, and familiar voices, on the radio. For the first time they could listen in to talkback programs, not just music.”
The trouble was that back in 1996, the right to community radio was never actually written into the telecommunications law. So today, while these volunteer run stations – stations that often feature the police, Mayan spiritual leaders, Catholic priests and mayors as guest speakers – are broadcasted in towns right across Guatemala, they’re still not legally recognised under Guatemalan Law.
The joke among city folk is that these community radio volunteers are eye-patch wearing pirates. They’re classed as criminals. Thieves of the airwaves. If they want to broadcast, then they should pay the million-odd Quetzals (about USD$125,000.00) for a licensed frequency, at auction, like everybody else. This attitude has been carefully concocted and filtered down by the big commercial stations whose frequencies are occasionally, if unintentionally, interrupted.
The commercial stations have advertisers to keep happy after all, so they don’t want their audience poached. To complicate matters, for every community radio station on the air there is a multitude of unlicensed Evangelical and Catholic stations preaching their word to the exclusion of other religious voices, and ‘for profit’ stations that sell advertising spots without paying taxes. Community radio has been lumped in with the lot of them.
Community radio stations can’t stump up the cash for their own frequencies though; many of them are backyard jobs whose volunteers hold fundraising dances, sell eggs and gather listener donations just to pay the electricity bills. And when the police confiscate their transmitters, it can keep them off the air for months. It’s just not sustainable.
Right now community radio in Guatemala has its best chance of clearing up this mess. Cultural Survival – an international organisation dedicated to indigenous empowerment – has been working with community radio activists to fight for a new law that would grant at least one available FM frequency to community radio in each of Guatemala’s 333 municipalities, on the proviso that each station is ‘non-profit’ and open to all community voices.
This year – following 12 years of pushing and significant lobbying cash injections from Cultural Survival donations and grants – they’ve come further than ever. At the time of research in August, 95 representatives of the schmooze-or-lose Guatemalan Congress said they would ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ vote for the bill. To get it over the line, 105 votes are needed. The great hope is that the bill will be voted on while the same guys are in office.
On a Friday twilight in the lakeside village of San Pedro, I pay a visit to Radio Sembrador, a tiny cement room kitted out with a CD player, microphones, various mixing gadgets and a program schedule listing things like ‘children’s health’ and ‘rubbish collection’ on the wall. There I meet Vicky Garcia, a bubbly young presenter dressed in a vibrant skirt in the Mayan woven style; not a pirate eye-patch in sight. I am told that community radio has helped to rekindle the wearing of traditional clothes. She cues the next track – a folky Mayan piece featuring the marimba – and I watch the people out in the street, giggling with neighbours and clutching their radios.
Gretel Hunnerup is convinced that in a past life she was a carrier pigeon, such is her love of taking fanciful flights and posting little stories about her discoveries to her independent online pigeon hole: www.thecarrierpigeonpost.com.
The Australian sticky beak now writes about the little-known delights that make London hum…stuff that wouldn’t make the papers, like quirky establishments, not-for-tourists pursuits, and ordinary folks doing surprising things.
A trained journalist with six years travel and lifestyle writing for print and web, Gretel has taken a new post heading up internal communications for STA Travel’s Northern Europe and Africa Division, geared for maximum on-the-road reportage. Oh and she’s a sucker for documentaries, dress-up parties and dolmades.
