Google News: http://news.google.com/news?q=telesur
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesur "It began broadcasting on a limited schedule on July 24, 2005 and began full-time broadcast on October 31, 2005"
Some history below of progressive and grassroots media in Latin America.
From NarcoNews.com
http://www.NarcoNews.com
Journalistic Zapatismo
Marcos by Latuff |
Marcos, the writer (the journalist!) found humor in the seeming futility of launching a war of words into the din of an over-mediated world, where ideas do not easily gain traction. From his earliest known essay, the 1992 Chiapas: The Southeast In Two Winds, a Storm and a Prophecy, first published in 1994, he addressed the problem of media. His text brought the reader along on a tour through the impoverished Mexican state of Chiapas:
In Ocosingo and Palenque, Cancue and Chilón, Altamirano and Yajalón, the Indigenous people are celebrating. A new gift from the supreme government has made life a little happier for the peons, small landowners, landless campesinos and impoverished inhabitants of the ejidos. They have been given a local radio station that reaches the most isolated corners of eastern Chiapas. The stations programming is fitting: Marimbas and rap music proclaim the good news. The Chiapaneco countryside is being modernized. XEOCH transmits from the township of Ocosingo and can be found at 600 Mhz AM from four in the morning till 10 at night. Its news shows abound with lies. They tell of the disorientation that subversive lay-workers spread among the peasantry, the abundance of aid credits that are never received by the Indigenous communities, and the existence of public works that have never been built. The viceroy is also given time on the air so that he can remind the population with threats that not all is lies and rap music; there are also jails and military bases and a penal code which is the most repressive in the Republic. The penal code punishes any _expression_ of discontent. The laws against demonstrations, rebellion, inciting to riot, etc., demonstrate that the viceroy is careful to maintain everything in order
Marcos reported the existence of a different voice, a voice from below. He called it a wind
Not everyone hears the voices of hopelessness and conformity. Not everyone is carried away by hopelessness. There are millions of people who continue on without hearing the voices of the powerful and the indifferent. They cant hear; they are deafened by the crying and blood that death and poverty are shouting in their ears. But, when there is a moment of rest, they hear another voice. They dont hear the voice that comes from above; they hear the voice that is carried to them by the wind from below, a voice that is born in the Indigenous heart of the mountains. This voice speaks to them about justice and freedom, it speaks to them about socialism, about hope the only hope that exists in the world. The oldest of the old in the Indigenous communities say that there once was a man named Zapata who rose up with his people and sang out, Land and Freedom! These old campesinos say that Zapata didnt die, that he must return. These old campesinos also say that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesinos when to cultivate the land, when to plant and when to harvest. They say that hope is also planted and harvested. They also say that the wind and the rain and the sun are now saying something different: that with so much poverty, the time has come to harvest rebellion instead of death. That is what the old campesinos say. The powerful dont hear; they cant hear, they are deafened by the brutality that the Empire shouts in their ears. Zapata, insists the wind, the wind from below, our wind.
After midnight on January 1, 1994 when the Zapatistas seized four city halls in the region, they also seized another seat of power: the XEOCH radio station. From its occupied studios they broadcasted their declaration of war against the Mexican state and against the global neoliberal economic system. On May 28 of that year, Marcos, in another communiqué, joked, Yesterday we ate the XEOCHs control console and two microphones. They had a rancid taste, like something rotten.
These old campesinos say that Zapata didnt die, that he must return. These old campesinos also say that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesinos when to cultivate the land, when to plant and when to harvest. They say that hope is also planted and harvested. They also say that the wind and the rain and the sun are now saying something different: that with so much poverty, the time has come to harvest rebellion instead of death. Subcomandante Marcos Photo: D.R. 1998 Al Giordano |
That was the same communiqué in which Marcos introduced the character of Old Antonio, the chain-smoking indigenous elder who adapts the legends in the ancient Maya book, the Popul Vuh, as modern-day parables: Old Antonio told me that the golden people were the rich, the whites, and the wooden people were the poor, the ones who forever work for the rich. They are both waiting for the arrival of the corn people. The rich fear their arrival and the poor hope for it. I asked old Antonio what color was the skin of the corn people, and he showed me several types of corn with different colors. He told me that they were of every sort of skin color, but that nobody knew exactly, because the corn people dont have faces. It was also the same communiqué that the hunted rebel spokesman issued the much-quoted postscript: To those of you who are wondering if Marcos is homosexual: Marcos is a gay person in San Francisco, a black person in South Africa, an Asian person in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, an indigenous person in the streets of San Cristóbal He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak, their way to speak. Everything that makes Power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable this is Marcos. Youre welcome, dear sirs of the Attorney Generals office. Im here to serve you by filling you full of lead.
Maybe you were reading it then. Or maybe you have read it since. Or maybe you are reading those words for the first time today, in which case you may notice, with a smile, that these are the words of a writer on fire. Hes not writing for money. Hes not auditioning for a sinecure at a glossy magazine or elbowing his way up the ladder to a movie deal. Hes not trying to impress anyone in power. In that essay, he was threatening to shoot them. And that is how he won his freedom of the press at an hour when no other writer enjoyed it.
Again and again, in what now number hundreds of communiqués, the Zapatistas have returned to this quest of searching for a way to speak. And they showed the world that the path to authentic freedom of speech does not require sucking up to the Commercial Media, but, rather, by treating it as the adversarial force that it is. For most of the past twelve years, for example, after the national network TV Azteca broadcast a plethora of knowing falsehoods about the indigenous struggle, the Zapatistas have simply refused to talk to the network. And instead of relying on newspapers to tell their story, they tell it themselves, in their communiqués.
Most impressive is that they get their communiqués published in newspapers and across the Internet in full, without editing or censorship. For those of us communicators who have struggled for years against editors and bosses to be able to speak freely through the media, what Marcos achieved as a writer winning the previously unthinkable right to publish his texts exactly as he submitted them was an astounding feat. It did not go unnoticed that he and his compañeros first had to take up arms in order to create that editorial space.
When the Mexican government took two Zapatista militants as prisoners in 1996, the rebels seized XEOCH radio again, provoking the state to free their comrades. But as Zapatismo evolved, its doctrine of autonomy from below instead of seizing existing power structures became more refined on the matter of media: Two years ago, the Zapatistas, without pleading license or permission from the government, simply erected their own radio network Radio Insurgente broadcasting in Spanish, and the Maya languages of Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal and Chol, on five FM frequencies blanketing the state. And the official station, XEOCH, has withered into irrelevancy.
In Latin America there have long been popular models for unlicensed radio in the service of popular struggle, such as Radio Soberanía in Bolivias coca-growing region of the Chapare. In Caracas, Venezuela, the pioneering independent neighborhood television network Catia TVe arose from the barrio, challenged, and won from its government the right to broadcast. In recent years, as weve wandered around América with our candles lit looking for the people who were also holding candles and also once thought they were alone in it, weve introduced these people to each other, and to Narco News readers, through the School of Authentic Journalism and other projects and reports.
What we have lived in recent years is nothing less than a hemispheric laboratory solving the problems of media and communications between peoples. As the Zapatistas of Mexico developed the model for a different kind of journalism, media and speech from below, Community Media stations like Catia TV in Venezuela would hand the Commercial Media its defining defeat in Napoleonic terms, its Waterloo and show the world what media from below can do in April of 2002.
The Turning Point
Part of the Commercial Medias self-perpetuating and profitable mission is to mask how powerful it really is. The rise of media as the seat of power was a silent coup, unspoken, unseen. In place of reporting that story indeed the most significant story of the late 20th century in terms of its impact on peoples daily lives its journalists kept telling us that we had governments, elections, that we could choose the men in power. After all, election campaigns are very profitable for media companies, the primary beneficiaries of all that advertising. Its the perfect con. It maintains the public illusion that we live in democracies and can choose who makes decisions for us.
And since things often go awry, the media provides a never-ending list of scapegoats to point the finger at, including elected officials, who simply get replaced by another elected official, who promises change, and only those who can raise buckets of money (that is to say, who serve the interests of those who have it) can get near the microphone and have a chance at competing. The golden rule of this con is that presidents can come and go, governments can change hands from one party to another, as long as none of these cowards confront the economic powers of which Commercial Media is gatekeeper.
Your alienated manifesto-writer noted in 1997 that a popular revolt against media upon gathering sufficient steam, may in fact have the effect of forcing the powers behind the screens to uncloak. A year later, in a country called América, a former paratrooper and once-imprisoned leader of a failed rebellion, Hugo Chávez, won an election for the presidency of Venezuela. But the Medias script for yet another politician promising change to be domesticated did not go according to plan. A major fissure erupted between the Media and the State and its repercussions including todays launch of Telesur are still exploding.
Charlie Hardy displays a Venezuelan newspaper with an article censored by a pre-Chávez government at the 2003 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico. Photo: D.R. 2003 Jeremy Bigwood |
The big media barons were also upset that the Chávez government would not harass the small, neighborhood, Community TV and radio stations that were gaining popularity parallel to his own rise. The truth is that, prior to 2002, the Chávez government, although it did not repress the Community Media movement, did not embrace it either. That came later. But it was a thorn in the side of the Commercial Media that these small TV and radio stations from below existed even though, being nonprofit, they did not compete for advertising money. Miguel Angel Martínez, president of the private-sector Chamber of Radio Broadcasters has railed that the Community TV and radio stations are illegal, should be shutdown, and has publicly advocated that commercial broadcasters interfere with the low-power signals of the smaller media from below. The motives for such threats probably have more to do with the role that the Community Media stations are playing in Civil Societys rising political consciousness: Nothing is more annoying, or discrediting, to professional liars than pesky truth tellers showing them as such with regularity. On the day that the Commercial Media can no longer maintain public illusions will be the day that its entire racket crumbles.
Another factor in what is now an adversarial relationship between the Chávez government and the Commercial Media is that Chávez didnt just tax or criticize the media he became the media. In 2000, Chávez started his own TV show Alo Presidente! and with a very different format than, say, the weekly radio monologues by George W. Bush in Washington or Vicente Fox in Mexico City. Every Sunday, on VTV - Venezolana de Televisión (Channel 8) and Radio Nacional Venezolana (RNV) Chávez brings all his cabinet secretaries into the studio (sometimes the show goes out into the provinces, too), as well as a live studio audience, and he takes phone calls from the public. If a caller mentions, say, a problem at a local school, Chávez then calls the Education Minister up on camera, asks him how the problem will be fixed, and comes back a week later to report how the problem was fixed.
President Hugo Chávez on the set of Alo Presidente! Photo: D.R. 2002 Al Giordano |
So, as everybody now knows, in April of 2002 the Commercial Media in Venezuela, including international media companies that report about Venezuela, participated openly in fomenting and supporting a violent coup detat.
Or maybe not everybody knows yet? In which case lets take a brief stroll down amnesia lane and summarize our report when it happened: Three Days That Shook the Media, in which an elected president was kidnapped at gunpoint by rogue military officials as the Commercial Media national and international shouted in unison a big lie, that Chávez resigned. A new president, oilman Pedro Carmona, was installed. His first actions were to shut down the public television and radio stations, raid the Community TV and radio stations, dissolve Congress and the Courts, and launch a house-by-house search to round up members of Congress, political leaders, journalists, and others that were unlikely to recognize his legitimacy.
Media barons like the aforementioned Miguel Angel Martínez signed the decree supporting the Carmona government. The New York Times cheered the coup in an editorial. Its correspondent Juan Forero dispatched an immediate puff piece titled Manager and Conciliator Pedro Carmona Estanga. The Inter-American Press Association, the trade group of the owners of commercial daily newspapers in América issued a statement cheering the coup: President Robert J. Cox said today that political developments in Venezuela demonstrate to nations throughout the world that there can be no true democracy without free speech and press freedom.
As Le Monde Diplomatique reported, the military vice admiral that led the coup went on national TV, on the Venevision network, and boasted, We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you.
And there they were, our deer in the headlights: the Commercial Media uncloaked, bearing its anti-democracy teeth, and the first grand battle of Journalisms Civil War began.
A then 32-year-old worker at the Catia Community TV station that had been raided and shut down by the coup forces, Blanca Eekhout, and her colleagues gathered and decided to fight back. They went to the closed public television station, Channel 8, broke the padlocks off the doors, overpowered the police, and put the station back on the air with a call for the people to fight back against the coup. As Chávez minister Jesse Chacón later acknowledged, the recovery of Channel 8 was owed, in great measure, to the help given by Community Broadcaster Catia TV. Its people were already taking great risks, among them their lives, but they helped to retake the transmitter. Their lives were in danger throughout those days. Their own headquarters had been raided. They succeeded in escaping. They took their cameras and stayed mobile, as did the people from Radio Perola. There was a very fierce persecution against them, something that has not been reported in the daily newspapers.
Blanca Eekhout Photo: D.R. 2003 Al Giordano |
And so Pedro Carmona would go down in history as dictator for a day. The coup collapsed, and the elected president was restored to power. One of the heroines of our story, Blanca Eekhout, of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, is now the director of the public television network she and her colleagues brought back to life.
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