Cultural Survival’s Guatemala Community Radio Project (see CSQ Vols. 29.2 and 29.4 for a full description) was officially launched in January when representatives of six community radio station associations and their larger umbrella organization, Consejo Guatemalteco de Comunicación Comunitaria (CGCC), signed an agreement with Cultural Survival.
The agreement establishes a five-year partnership between the organizations and lays out four major goals: legalize the stations, improve their content, upgrade broadcast equipment, and increase training for station personnel.
The agreement assumes that at the end of its five-year term the 250 stations that are members of the associations will be self-sufficient at their new levels of quality.
Although these community radio stations are tiny and homegrown, they reach some 7 million listeners. In a nation where the majority of the population is indigenous, they are an essential tool for maintaining indigenous rights and culture—a principle that was recognized in the peace accords that ended 10 years of civil war in Guatemala.
"Guatemala has a 500-year cycle of violence, with its civil war ending only 10 years ago, and now there is fledgling peace and democracy taking hold," said Mark Camp, Cultural Survival’s director of operations and program manager of the Guatemala Radio Project.
"What’s most important for democracy? An informed populace that can participate in the body politic," Camp said.
Among other things, the accords promised the establishment of community communication media, but the country’s telecommunication law has no such provision, and without that the government cannot officially assign bandwidth to the radio stations. Working toward new telecommunication legislation is one of the four goals for the partnership.
The second goal—improving the content—is perhaps the most significant element of the project. Most of the community radio stations in Guatemala have been put together by local people who have widely varying degrees of broadcast expertise, so while the content each station creates may be helpful to its listeners, it is not as effective as it could be.
Also, the stations currently have no way to share their content with each other, nor do they have access to the enormous amount of international material available through the Internet. To improve all these elements, Cultural Survival has hired a full-time Content Coordinator and two producers, all with strong backgrounds in radio broadcasting.
Beginning in March, this team will sort through all the local, national, and international sources and work with association representatives to select the best content, downloading prerecorded material and recording audio content from written sources.
They will then burn that select content to CDs and distribute it to all the station representatives, with whom they will meet once a month for feedback and evaluation. Multilingual station volunteers will translate the material into local languages.
The last two goals of the project—upgrading equipment and training station personnel—are intended to support the content goal, by helping stations produce better local content and reach their audiences more effectively.
"All this is a means to an end," says Camp. "People need news, they need to hear what’s happening, so they can participate. Because of the multilingual nature of Guatemala, (it has 24 languages) information needs to be local and in local languages. Not everybody can read, but everybody can listen to a radio."
