Cultural Survival: Using radio to preserve endangered cultures

(Above: Concepción Aganel of Radio Niña in Totonicapan, one of the community radio stations fighting for legitimate status.)

Mark Camp, Operations and Interim Director, Cultural Survival

By Tracy L. Barnett

ANTIGUA, Guatemala – Between trips to the Guatemalan capital to stalk evasive Congress members and strategizing meetings with community radio activists from Huehuetenango to Lake Atitlan, Mark Camp is a tough man to slow down.

But I managed to catch up with him just as he prepared to pack up his big red truck and head north in his annual migration to Cultural Survival’s headquarters and his other home in Cambridge, Mass., to hear a little about what he’s been doing down here.

Cultural Survival is going on its fortieth year as the leading international organization in promoting indigenous rights and the preservation of indigenous cultures around the world. Mark, as its operations coordinator, can talk for a long time about needs assessments, political strategy, organizational development and the like.

But when he starts to talk about Miguelito, he really comes to life. Miguelito is the 8-year-old president of the youth auxiliary of Radio Sembradora, the community radio station of San Pedro La Laguna in Lake Atitlan, and in many ways he symbolizes the future of community radio and, indeed, the future of indigenous Guatemala.

Camp met Miguelito in a recent visit to the station, where Miguelito and his group of 8, 9 and 10-year-olds had created an alliance with local NGOs to organize a campaign to clean up Lake Atitlan. The iconic lake, once celebrated for its crystal-clear, volcano-encircled waters, has suffered epic proportions of wastewater and agricultural runoff, as well as a more visible problem: floating masses of plastic trash.

Miguelito’s group was broadcasting every Saturday morning, putting on a full lineup of environmental programming, encouraging listeners to fill up and bring in their plastic bottles to be used in building ecological housing.

“This guy’s going to be mayor one day,” Camp recalls with a chuckle.

Community radio in San Pedro and in towns and villages across the country has been giving voice to indigenous people young and old who are trying to preserve their environment, their cultures, their languages and their way of life, and Cultural Survival has tapped into this movement as a high-power way of supporting indigenous communities.

In Palin Esquintla, community radio helped to revive a culture and a language that was on the verge of extinction. In Sumpongo Sacatapequez, it brought a local musical tradition back to life. In town after town, community radio has given indigenous communities information about their rights, about their health, about local political and social issues, about their traditional teachings and much more – in their own languages.

Camp came to realize the potential of community radio when he was working on a publication for Cultural Survival called Voices, a publication aimed at disseminating information about indigenous rights and culture to indigenous groups around the world. The problem, he said, was that even with foundation funding, they were only reaching about 30,000 readers – less that a tenth of 1 percent of the 370 million indigenous people on the planet – and only in colonial languages – Spanish, English, French and Russian – not in their native languages.
Cultural Survival Quarterly, the organization’s venerable award-winning magazine, is an excellent publication, but it’s in English, and it’s mainly geared toward non-indigenous people.

Once the funding ran out, Camp was looking for other ways to get the message out among indigenous peoples.
“After thinking about it a very short while, the obvious choice is radio – and very local radio, because language in lots of indigenous communities is very local,” said Camp. “The people in the next alley might speak a different language – or at least a very different dialect. So we started thinking about community radio and how we could work with community radio stations to put more information on the air for indigenous listeners that might help them defend their own rights.”

In 2004 he began sounding out community leaders throughout Guatemala, and by 2006 they had found funding for a full-fledged Community Radio Project.

Access to community radio stations was one of the rights guaranteed to indigenous communities under the peace accords, but the government never followed through by setting up a system that would really give access to the communities. Frequencies were auctioned off to the highest bidders, and commercial radio operators were willing to pay sums that indigenous peasants would never dream of seeing in their lifetimes.

So the campesino groups decided to operate their stations anyway, and hundreds of them set up pirate operations in whatever facilities they could find and with whatever equipment they could cobble together. The stations were not technically legal, however, and they endured harassment from local government officials, raids on their stations, confiscation of their hard-earned equipment and even, in several cases, imprisonment of the broadcasters. Several associations of community radio stations had tried to get legislation passed that would solve the problem, but had failed. This was the situation when Camp came on the scene.

Cultural Survival’s goals were straightforward. First and foremost, the objective was to get all the community radio associations working together on a consistent piece of legislation guaranteeing each community the right to a radio frequency; second, workshops to teach radio volunteers how to generate high-quality content; third, to help the stations become financially self-sufficient; and fourth, workshops to help them with the nuts and bolts of running a professional radio station.

Three years into the project, the goals are well on their way to completion; most importantly, all the associations have agreed on the same piece of legislation and are working together, alongside Camp, for its passage. Camp is optimistic; all the major parties and many minor parties have signed on to the legislation, and folks at the grassroots, like Tino Recinos (see “Ex-Guerilla changes gun for microphone), are working hard to persuade the last holdouts.

A vote in the Guatemalan legislature is scheduled for Aug. 9, International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. Stay tuned to Cultural Survival’s page at www.culturalsurvival.org and to The Esperanza Project for news.

For excerpts from Mark Camp’s interview in Antigua, Interview with Mark Camp