Media in Latin America have traditionally been consolidated into the hands of a few wealthy families and large media conglomerates. Over the last decade and a half, however, several governments in the region, including Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay, have moved to democratize media.
Carlos Ciappina is the Secretary of the School for Journalism and Social Communication at the National University of La Plata, which awarded Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez its Rodolfo Walsh Award for Popular Communication in 2011. According to Ciappina, the right to communication means not only free speech, but also access to the means of communication.
During the first decade of the 21st century, Bolivia’s “classic” newspapers have disappeared. Beyond print, radio has traditionally dominated Bolivia’s media landscape, a reality due in large part to the country’s multiethnic and multicultural makeup. For perhaps the same reason and also because of its high degree of politicization, Bolivia leads the world in community broadcasting.
“Mic check!” The Occupy movement has created a new medium for collective listening.
Groups in Rio de Janeiro are using media to stop evictions in the lead-up to the World Cup and Olympics.
It would be impossible to summarize Fernando Coronil’s work in a short essay. I thus offer a few reflections here on dimensions of his work that have provided challenges to my own scholarship.
Regional elections do not usually attract international media headlines. But Sunday’s gubernatorial race in Venezuela was not a typical regional election. This was the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999 in which he was unable to actively campaign in an election.
On a cool morning in the central plaza of the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, a group of volunteers wearing identical black t-shirts stands under a small tent. They are part of Jornaleros Safe, a project funded by several Mexican and American organizations whose members have spent the last year researching the exploitation of Latin American workers contracted for agricultural jobs in the United States.
Deforestation accounts for about a fifth of all global carbon emissions, second only to the burning of fossil fuels, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But ever since the Kyoto Protocol was drafted in 1997, countries have been divided over how to incorporate forest protection into global emission-reduction plans.
Now that President Obama has come out in support of marriage equality, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dedicated a small budget to defend LGBT rights internationally, it’s the perfect time to remind them that the abuse and killings of gay and transgender people keep piling up in Honduras—even as Washington heralds the country’s return to “democracy.”