Abstract, Digital Storytelling and the Dispute over Representation in the Ayotzinapa Case

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Digital Storytelling and the Dispute over Representation in the Ayotzinapa Case
by María Elena Meneses and María Concepción Castillo-González

Comparison of the narratives of civil society and the federal government on YouTube and Twitter in the case of the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, allows the identification of the codes of representation being disputed in this emblematic case of violation of fundamental rights. Digital storytelling that goes viral and across media offers the possibility of organizing protest in the offline world. Its reflective attributes favor the visibility of injustice and permanence on the local and global agenda and in some cases exert pressure on social actors and authorities to establish mechanisms to resolve the conflict.

Abstract, New Media and the Disillusion of Brazil’s Radical Left

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New Media and the Disillusion of Brazil’s Radical Left
by Catherine Morgans

In contrast to recent waves of ad hoc social-media-fueled protest, Brazil’s leftist social movements consider new media unreliable, supplementary, and dominated by hegemonic actors. Owing to a shift in power relations online, these virtual spaces pose an approximation to their capitalist adversaries, a degree of institutionalization, and a breach of traditional trenches of resistance, leading anticapitalist movements to restrict their use of new media. Their wariness counters resurgent cyberoptimism that regards the Internet as a politically neutral or autonomous space favored by marginalized and alternative political actors.

Abstract, Civic Organizations and Internet Social Networks: A Case Study in the Province of Buenos Aires

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Civic Organizations and Internet Social Networks: A Case Study in the Province of Buenos Aires
by Ana Cecilia Silva

A neighborhood assembly in a medium-sized city in the province of Buenos Aires formed in connection with a petition for designation as a historical protection area uses the Internet to generate visibility spaces alternative to those of the traditional media and install its own agenda, to include in those new spaces the voices and perspectives of new social actors, and to organize and improve its own participatory management. Its use of Facebook has acquired some of the features of “community media.” At the same time, its use of the Internet for internal communication and coordination is clearly accessory to face-to-face interaction. There is a generational difference in access to and decision making about the content to be posted in the various media, and spokespersons have become authorized voices. Appealing to both the traditional and the new media is a crucial aspect of the assembly’s positioning strategy, but the strategy is in constant revision.

Abstract, Hall of Mirrors: Media, Democratization, and the Public Sphere in Maranhão, Brazil

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Hall of Mirrors: Media, Democratization, and the Public Sphere in Maranhão, Brazil
by Julián Durazo Herrmann

Freedom of expression and access to diverse sources of information are seen as critical elements of democracy, although their concretization on the ground is subject to strong interference. Recent regime change in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, has led to the emergence of new media and some expansion of the public sphere. The traditional oligarchy continues to dominate the media, however, and the opposition media replicate its exclusion of nonelite actors. The Maranhão experience confirms that normative approaches to the media either as automatic contributors to democracy or as instruments of elite manipulation have little value for understanding media dynamics.

Abstract, Argentine Documentary Film and the Politics of Presence: Jorge Prelorán’s Valle Fértil

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Argentine Documentary Film and the Politics of Presence: Jorge Prelorán’s Valle Fértil
by Christopher Moore

Jorge Prelorán’s experiences directing and distributing his 1972 film Valle Fértil force us to reconsider what we regard as the significance of documentary. Far too often the historiography of Argentine and Latin American cinema rests either on director biographies, wherein auteurs’ party allegiances define their work, or on textual analysis of the final cut, wherein we isolate finished products from the history of their making. The case of Valle Fértil suggests that the localized, personal interactions inherent to production and distribution are an equally relevant legacy of the filmmaking experience. Given that other documentaries at this time were similarly predicated on sustained contact with select populations, the work of filmmakers ranging from Fernando Birri to Fernando Solanas might then likewise be analyzed through such a lens. For this reason, Jorge Prelorán, so often seen as unique or as a counterexample in the history of Argentine film, becomes instead exemplary.

Abstract, Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for a Decolonizing Transformation of Latin America and Abya Yala

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Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for a Decolonizing Transformation of Latin America and Abya Yala
by Kathryn Lehman

In resisting genocidal projects of modernity since the Conquest and their most recent phase, neoliberalism, indigenous peoples have provided leadership in maintaining pluralist societies and protecting the rights of all living beings. This role is little known even to many on the left because of the history of the nation-state and current communications and research practices. Drawing on community-based autonomous alternatives to neoliberalism, indigenous media contribute to twenty-first-century Latin American participatory democracy and plurinational socialism by defending communication as a basic human right. They evoke a long history of place-based narratives whose values are encoded in language, and their epistemologies are strengthened by transnational indigenous communication networks and practices. Moving beyond pluralism and media rights, indigenous communication transforms media practices in order to decolonize relations among humans, other living beings, and the environment that sustains life.

Abstract, Zapatismo as a Resonant Public Pedagogy

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Zapatismo as a Resonant Public Pedagogy
by James K. Anderson and Noah J. Springer

As a critical pedagogy similar to the type described by the philosopher-educator Paulo Freire, Zapatismo expresses resistance to the power-over relationships institutionalized in capitalism and the state through open-ended questioning. Previous analyses have argued that the Zapatista struggle has been incommunicable, that it can be defined in terms of new media, that Zapatismo advances a Leninist ideology, and that its resonance is rhizo-matic. A challenge to these assumptions drawing on negative dialectics suggests that, as prefiguration of other worlds beyond the neoliberal reality, Zapatismo resonates because it teaches the recovery of democracy by direct collective decision making and horizontal organization and communication. Philosophical inquiry shows that Zapatismo has recollected the radical imaginary and resonated through the Independent Media Center network and Occupy Wall Street and continues to be borrowed and adapted by Occupy offshoots, anticapitalist collectives, and ongoing initiatives.

Abstract, The Financing of TV Brasil: Limitation of Resources or Political Choice?

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The Financing of TV Brasil: Limitation of Resources or Political Choice?
by Sales Augusto dos Santos and Ivonete da Silva Lopes

The federal funds allocated to Brazilian public television are insufficient for its adequate maintenance and could be increased. Instead of advertising on public television, which was the flagship of the Brazilian public communication system, the Lula and Rousseff administrations turned to private broadcasting systems in the hope of co-opting them. In addition to robbing public television of critical funding, this proved a political mistake when TV Globo became one of their harshest critics.

Abstract, Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela

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Changing the Channel: Class Conflict, Everyday State Formation, and Television in Venezuela
 by Naomi Schiller

The formation of new state television outlets in Venezuela during the Chávez era was a process of dismantling and remaking hierarchies among social classes and between the fields of state and community media production. An analysis of the involvement of community media producers in creating a new state television outlet in Caracas and the collaboration between community and state producers in the first decade of the twenty-first century suggests that the influx of community media producers into state media projects and vice versa was mutually transformative. Such an analysis brings to the fore what vertical topographies of power obscure: the conflict and cooperation between different social sectors that were central to the making of both official and unofficial media projects aligned with the Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution. In these joint efforts we see the state as an unfolding process of negotiation and struggle.

Abstract, The Press and Classical Populism in Argentina and Brazil

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The Press and Classical Populism in Argentina and Brazil
 by Ariel Alejandro Goldstein

Comparison of the policies vis-à-vis the press of the classical populist governments of Argentina and Brazil reveals that the populist elites came into conflict with traditional media elites over exclusionary views that modified the contours of the public sphere. Newspapers committed to liberal principles engaged in intransigent struggle with populism, and this struggle created opportunities for new entrepreneurs to form political alliances with these governments to expand their businesses. The relationship between these “mediatized populisms” and the new media entrepreneurs contributed to the patrimonialism that came to characterize the link between the media and Latin American states in subsequent years.

Abstract, Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in Latin America

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Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in Latin America
 by Martín Becerra and Celeste M. Wagner

The emergence of new communication policies in Latin America from 2004 to 2015 took place in the midst of an unprecedented public antagonism between governments and media groups in Latin America. To understand the emergence of this conflict, the following variables are proposed: (1) the populist features of the governments involved, (2) a crisis of representation, (3) high levels of media concentration in a context of historically permissive regulation and a crisis of the traditional media, and (4) the governments’ perception of the media as opponents and even as threats to their power.

Abstract, Whose Rights? Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian Media Democratization

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Whose Rights? Freedom-of-Expression Critiques of Ecuadorian Media Democratization
 by Christian Tym

Despite its media reforms designed to democratize the country’s media landscape, the Ecuadorian government has been subject to constant condemnation from major U.S.-based human rights organizations on freedom-of-expression grounds. A close examination of these critiques and the Ecuadorian media reforms to which they correspond and a comparison of the Ecuadorian government’s and critical human rights organizations’ positions with liberal scholarship on the right to freedom of expression leads to the conclusion that Ecuadorian media reform is consistent with liberal social-democratic principles and, by contrast, human rights organizations uphold an early-modern interpretation of liberalism that is marginal within scholarship on freedom of expression.

Abstract, Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Communication with Identity in Argentina, 2009–2017

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Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Communication with Identity in Argentina, 2009–2017
 by María Magdalena Doyle and Emilse Siares

Argentine Law 26.522 on Audiovisual Communication Services recognized, among other things, the right to communication for indigenous peoples. The cases of three indigenous radio stations in northern Argentina reveal the limits and possibilities of this normative transformation and the challenges to indigenous media posed by the changes in communications policy since the 2015 change of government.

Abstract, Communications Policies and the Production of Audiovisual Content in Argentina

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Communications Policies and the Production of Audiovisual Content in Argentina
By Carla Rodríguez Miranda and Ornela Carboni

The introduction of digital terrestrial television and the passage of the Audiovisual Communications Services Act in Argentina in 2009 led to a series of competitions to stimulate the production of new content and help dismantle the prevailing center-periphery logic in Argentine television. An examination from the perspective of the political economy of communications of these efforts in 2011–2013 indicates that they were small steps in the right direction. Further progress will require a stable source of funding, a stronger role for public televisión, and new strategies for capturing viewers.

Abstract, Between Public and Private Media: Toward a Definition of “Community Media”

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Between Public and Private Media: Toward a Definition of “Community Media”
By Mauro Cerbino and Francesca Belotti


Constitutional reforms in Ecuador and Bolivia and the subsequent laws on communications have opened up the media space to new social and political actors: public and community media. While the former tend to be associated with the state in form and with governments in substance, the latter are not clearly defined and occupy a place in the midst of the hegemonic struggle between the public and private sectors to enable citizens to actively intervene in the competition for shaping public opinion. It is therefore necessary to lay the groundwork for a definition of “community media” that includes both its legal and sociopolitical dimensions. Indeed, operationalizing such a definition might allow community media to recognize themselves in it and to take the measures required to fully project themselves as subjects of the law.

Introduction, Media, Politics, and Democratization in Latin America

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Media, Politics, and Democratization in Latin America
by  Javier Campo, Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli


This issue has a predecessor from decades ago: Culture in the Age of Mass Media (Burton and Franco, 1978). Forty years may have gone by, but some problems and major concepts remain: resistance, ideological manipulation (though today we use the term “hegemonic cultural influence”), mass communication, and new media technologies. Latin America was then ruled by some of history’s bloodiest military dictatorships, while today the return of right-wing governments after a decade of popular governments is disconcerting. The hopeful ending of Burton and Franco’s introduction (“This repression has been unable to destroy the people’s culture, which continues to find avenues to express resistance” [1978: 10]) has led to a fruitful harvest in recent years, quickly provoking a backlash (often violent). Today we are witnessing a substantial investment in the militarization of police forces and electronic surveillance systems—in particular, the social networks used by young cyber-activists who have grown up with the Internet and, as Linda Herrera (2014: 2–3) points out regarding the riots in Egypt (the “Twitter revolution”), are accustomed to defending their political agendas online.

NEW LAP Issue! Media, Politics, and Democratization in Latin America

Edited by: Javier Campo and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

Issue 220 | Volume 45 | Number 3 | May 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This special issue of Latin American Perspectives investigates a matter that has undergone critical transformations in recent years. From the period of progressive governments to the current neoliberal restoration, the media went from being thought of as a public service to a private business. This issue features articles on Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Argentina and covers a broad disciplinary spectrum of studies: from the laws of communication put into practice or projected, to the deregulation of the most advanced legislations of Latin America, to communication rights, audiovisual analysis, memory studies and historiographies of the Latin American left.

The editors were committed to organizing a special issue about the favorable democratization of the media, but in the process, the media landscape was transformed into a reactionary onslaught of the monopolies of information and communication; a process that ended in the electoral victories of right-wing corporatists.

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