Community Radio Urgent Appeal

When Tropical Storm Agatha hit Guatemala recently, opening enormous sinkholes, causing landslides, flooding villages, and killing hundreds of people, the government was overwhelmed. It couldn’t reach remote villages and couldn’t get information out to them, and thousands of people were at risk in an escalating crisis. But where the government failed, tiny, local, volunteer-run community radio stations stepped in. When the rain finally stopped in the hilly towns of Solola around Lake Atitlan, for example, it was Radio Roca of Solola and their partner community radio stations that were on the air, coordinating search and rescue teams to dig for the bodies of missing loved ones. When the government disaster response finally arrived to help, their supplies sat in offices for days, never reaching those in desperate need. Working with the local authorities, the radio was able to mobilize volunteers and donations from the community and bring them to listeners who called for help. 

In Ciudad Vieja, mudslides tore down houses, carried mud, sewage, and boulders into homes, and left 24-year-old Maria, a recent mother, with a deep gouge down her left leg. With roads impassable, and no word from the local government, Maria’s family heard the broadcast of their local Radio Colonial and called in for help. Within the hour, radio listeners had found transportation for Maria to the nearest hospital, and community donations later paid for antibiotics she needed to ward off infection. Thanks to Radio Colonial’s volunteers, who spent three days after the disaster taking shifts sleeping at their station and broadcasting at all hours, Maria still has her leg. 

Community radio, in fact, is the ideal tool for disasters like this, but the stations do much more. They broadcast essential information in local languages, bringing those languages back from the brink of extinction. They play each valley’s distinctive marimba music, restoring those traditions, too. And they tell Indigenous people about their rights—to their ways of life, their unique clothing, their participation in the electoral process. Despite all these obvious benefits, the stations are forced to operate without the protection of the state because of an outdated telecommunications law, and the government can (and does) shut them down and confiscate their equipment.

Right now, we have an unprecedented chance to change that law and fully protect these cultural lifelines, but we need your help. For the first time, we have a bill before the Guatemalan Congress that would replace the old telecommunications law with one that recognizes community radio. This bill has garnered a lot of support but not enough. Since Congress now is in recess, we have an opportunity to lobby the remaining legislators before they reconvene and vote. We have volunteers and staff people standing by to travel to the capital and the towns where legislators live, but getting them there requires money. We quickly need to raise $30,000 to pay for bus fare for thousands of volunteers, along with housing, food, and other needs. Your donation right now will not only change a government for the better, but will also bring back vanishing languages, rescue unique traditional music, and revitalize Mayan cultures that have suffered 500 years of abuse and neglect. The opportunity is enormous, but the time is short. Please donate today by clicking here.

"Without the partnership with Cultural Survival, the community radio movement in Guatemala would probably have ceased to exist over the past year."--Francisco Macu, president of the Guatemala Radio Network.