Mark Camp Archive

Cultural Survival: Using radio to preserve endangered cultures

Tracy Barnett

Published: July 14, 2010Posted in: Belize, Community Radio, Environmental education, Featured, Guatemala, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Mexico, Mining, Spiritual, WhyTags: Community Radio, Cultural Survival, environment, Guatemala, Indigenous People, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Mark Camp, Mayans

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

Ex-combatant changes gun for microphone

Tracy Barnett

Published: May 18, 2010Posted in: Community Radio, Featured, Guatemala, Indigenous rights, WhyTags: Alberto Ramirez Recinos, Community Radio, Cultural Survival, Guatemala, Mark Camp

It’s been 14 years since the brutal civil war that gripped this country for over three decades finally came to an end, and the former combatants that once manned guerilla posts in the mountains have all gone back to civilian life. For many of them, though, the battle for justice and equality has just taken a different form.

Take Alberto “Tino” Ramírez Recinos, for example, a community radio organizer who fought with the guerillas from the age of 15 after his father was kidnapped and killed by the military.

Alberto “Tino” Ramírez Recinos diagrams the logistics of the wartime guerilla radio operation in a Xela café.

“The war was my university,” said Tino, who was one of nine children in a poor campesino family. “I learned things I’d never dreamed of learning. I learned broadcasting, producing, technique – the war gives you the opportunity to learn other things besides killing people.”

After nearly a decade on the front lines, Tino was assigned to La Voz Popular, the short-wave radio station that transmitted the voice of the Guatemalan resistance. He worked with the production crew on the Mexican side of the border. And then, once a week, he’d wrap a cassette tape tightly in plastic bags and swim across the river that divides the two countries and through enemy territory to a broadcast post on the Guatemalan side. There they set up their short-wave radio and broadcast up to Tajumulco volcano, where that crew caught the message and transmitted it to the world.

The station reported the atrocities committed by the military, the massacres of villagers, the kidnappings, the terror campaign targeting the civilian population in the countryside. Most of what was happening was hidden from the rest of the world, because the mainstream media was censored and controlled by the military.

“People knew there was a war in Guatemala,” he said. “But what they didn’t know was the policy of targeting civilians on the part of the government and the military.”

An estimated 200,000 were killed during the war, most of them indigenous farmers in the countryside. Many of Tino’s compañeros died in that conflict, but he survived to carry the battle to a different field.

When the war finally came to an end in 1996, the peace accords called for a network of community radio stations to provide the people in the rural communities with a means to broadcast in their own language. But the government set up a bidding process for the frequencies, and the mostly indigenous groups that wanted to do community radio couldn’t afford the frequencies. So they set up their own pirate stations and began broadcasting anyway.

Currently some 200 community radio stations are operating without a license, broadcasting news, public health, educational and environmental programming in the native languages, but have been subject to harassment, raids and even imprisonment by local governments who dub them “pirates.”

Now La Voz Popular has evolved into Mujb’ab’l yol, whose name means “Meeting place of expression” in the Mam Maya language. Tino is one of its lead spokespeople, rallying groups around the country to support a new law that would legalize nearly a thousand community radio stations around the country and guarantee a frequency for at least one station in each of the country’s 333 municipalities.

“The war has ended; the guns have gone silent,” said Tino. “But since 1996 we’re continuing the struggle with a weapon that can be much more powerful: The microphone.”

It’s not the first such initiative; several others have been presented in the national legislature, but have all died in committee. Mark Camp, the director of operations for Cultural Survival based here in Guatemala, has been working with Mujb’ab’l yol to support their efforts, and he says he’s optimistic about its passage. It’s the first time the bill has gotten out of committee, and it’s garnered the support of the party currently in power, as well as the major opposition party and a number of smaller parties.

Meanwhile, the congress is in a recess until Aug. 1 and he, Tino and other community radio activists are meeting with each legislator to try and persuade them to support the bill. Their goal is to be ready to take the issue to a vote on Aug. 9, International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

“We’re not there yet, but we feel our prospects are very good,” Camp said.

Below, a few photos Tino shared from the front lines of the battle to legitimize community radio in Guatemala.