20 May 2011 | Americas, Mexico
Community radio stations have had a difficult time in Latin America in the last four years. In Mexico, Brazil and Chile, community radios have been penalised for operating without a government license, according to Aleida Callejas, local director of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC Mexico). In Mexico, the authorities have began using a 2004 law that protects the country’s patrimony or “Ley de Bienes Generales” to punish community radio stations that operate without a government license with prison sentences and fines. This move has been criticised by both the Organisation of American States and the United Nations Special Rappourteur for Freedom of the Press. The new law, which applies its article 150 to community radios, is more draconian than the Radio and Television law used in similar cases in the past.
The case of Hector Camero of Radio Tierra y Libertad in Monterre is the most recent example, Canero was sentenced to two years in prison for operating his station. His case will probably be appealed before the country’s Supreme Court. “The law is draconian” says Callejas.
The debate over whether community radios are legal has been argued robustly across Latin America. In Mexico, promoters argue that they serve underrepresented communities, including indigenous areas. Several community radio stations have eventually managed to obtain operating licenses, a move criticised by commercial networks, who argue that their business is being affected by unlicensed pirate stations. Callejas worries that now, the commercial radio stations are pressuring regional governors across the country to follow the Canero’s example and penalise community radio projects.
9 May 2011 | Americas, Mexico
Mexico City is the third largest city in the world. And like every major city, its citizens have a love hate relationship with governability. But in the 2010 barometer of the Americas, conducted by Vanderbilt University, 40 per cent of Mexican citizens believed that the rule of law must be respected, a higher ranking than Argentina and Chile, an important comparison given that Mexico is facing unprecedented violence due to its drug war. But citizens want to get involved, and there is a proliferation of citizen journalists.
One of the most interesting citizen groups is called Ciudadanos en Red, or Citizens Connected, an internet portal that was founded in 2004 and has grown to be one of the most important independent citizen journalism groups in Mexico City. The group is consulted daily by journalists, analysts and just curious city residents. It’s director, Rene Solis Brun, says they are different than any other group because they don’t apply filters and only place in their portal the information submitted by citizens. Unlike other citizen internet sites in Mexico, it is not an activist group. It receives announcements, denunciations, and criticisms from 1700 citizen committees, from throughout the city, which it runs on its site without changes. The site has comments on events in the city, including incidents of corruption by government workers. In another the site runs a story of violence at another elementary school in a working class neighborhood. The group Citizens Connected is a project of Metrópoli 2025, a citizen awareness group.
Brun says the site is evidence that people in Mexico City care about their city. His only worry is that most of those involved in citizen groups are people 40 years and older. His organisation is working towards engaging the youth in the city, and has joined Twitter in an attempt to reach out to a younger audience, you can follow them at @ciudadanosenred
29 Jan 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
These striking images from a Tehran production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler caught my eye on the Revolutionary Road Facebook page. Sadly the accompanying statement announced that the play had been shut down by the authorities; the director and cast had been “summoned”, accused of promoting “degeneracy”. Iran’s state television Fars had called Vahid Rahbani’s production a “platform for degeneracy and normalising polyandry, the intermingling of men and women and other worthless proceedings”.
However unreasonable such claims may seem, it’s no surprise that Ibsen’s idealistic heroine doesn’t sit comfortably with the powers set on controlling every outward voice in Iran, however fictional. Fear of impression and influence is paramount.
Later that same week I saw a rather beautiful poster for a August Strindberg play in the heart of Iran and far from the frenzied pace of Tehran. Gleaning as much information as I could from the thumbnail images, I extracted the name of one of the actresses and set out to make contact with her. Strindberg’s The Stronger was opening that Saturday in a small town in a province of Iran in the same week that Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was banned in the capital.
I arranged an interview with the 28-year-old actress who held the main speaking part in the play. I was eager to find out how they had staged the production, the significance of the work of a Swedish playwright to her environment and if she was aware of the Hedda Gabler story. Days later I was still waiting, anxious because, even though she’d been enthusiastic, I was aware that she may have had second thoughts about the possible exposure — the consequences of which can’t be taken lightly.
Strindberg’s published short stories were openly anti-establishment and as an atheist, socialist and anarchist, he was tried for blasphemy in Sweden in 1882. Today, more than 130 years and many civilisations on, the people of Iran are tried for blasphemy on a daily basis.
Two weeks later we’re in contact again. She tells me that the owner of the venue where they are performing The Stronger has been threatened and photographic evidence of “activities” has been obtained. The group have dispersed and cancelled performances. She felt compelled to contact me. We begin the interview. The following are her reflections on her involvement in the production and her short-lived performance:
The speed at which they land on you doesn’t allow for articles or interviews before it’s all over. From the first day I always said that [the play] was likely to be cancelled, so I set out to at least enjoy the rehearsals. We hadn’t had a good experience of putting on a production. We’d done some Pinter but there was nowhere to show it. As a student in Tabriz, things weren’t as limited. Here, even non-political playwrights are hot eggs.
We had about two and a half months of rehearsals; with everyone in different jobs, twice a week at first, then more in the last month. We met at an empty house that belonged to a friend’s family. It was freezing. The director would say “the cold is character building”. We kept going with hot drinks and coffees. My role in the play is full of extremes — happy, then depressed. Our plan was to travel with our performance — to take it to Badar Pahlavi, Rasht, Tehran. In the performance our prop was a table. We didn’t care what we’d find, whether we’d have a table or not, we’d improvise, we just wanted to perform. That was our plan. The coherence of it was precarious but we thought we’ll perform for one day, one hour and must be prepared for anything that transpired.
One of the main reasons we chose the café was that there’s nowhere else. There is a public hall that we theoretically could use but it has so many pillars there were blind spots everywhere. I’d heard of a café society in Tehran. Here everything is taboo. There are only two cafés in our town — both relatively new — one is completely glass-fronted and therefore not appropriate. In the café we used, you enter in darkness then go through upstairs. The owner has an artistic background. It worked out well. We thought: let’s overcome our [restricted] situation. It’s not worth our consideration. We thought we could put on a play and at the same time promote a new culture.
People of all ages came, from 17- and 18-year-olds to 60-year-olds. It was exciting. Scenarios arose, like I’d be playing with a cigarette and it would make someone in the audience ask a stranger for a cigarette. The café has WiFi so someone would be sitting with a laptop and before long two or three people would strike up a conversation with them and they’d share online stuff together. There was no control in this situation. The place was packed. What we were presenting became almost irrelevant. We were linking people. It was so busy and there was a sense of disorder. The result is that we had no control over who could be filming. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance contacted saying “we’ve heard that you’re gathering 15, 16 people”. That was too many. In reality there were 50-60 people in a café with capacity for 30. On “stage” I was fully in hijab, it was in character and I had envisaged this happening. But the problem was our audience. We previewed twice for feedback and held five public performances before we were intimidated and shut down.
On Tuesday [the day of the following performance] my friends said “You mustn’t go, don’t expose yourself”. We’ve all dispersed and I haven’t contacted the café since.
We hadn’t put posters up. It was all through Facebook and word of mouth. After the performance people would stay and hang out. They were on a high. The artistic community appeared. One guy who was much older came three times and I said to him “Tonight I will improvise differently so there’s something new in it for you” but he said no, that he was coming to see the original performance, gaining a new perspective each time he saw it. We had a box. At each performance we said, “This box has many roles…it’s for you to give your comments and it also accepts donations, according to your enjoyment.” We decided to wait until the last performance before opening it, so I don’t know what it holds.
When I was at university, there was a committee that came to oversee productions before any stage performance. There was always a mullah among them controlling what you wore, checking how tight our clothes were. We did Chekhov’s The Proposal, I wore all black — which falls in line with regulations — but they still pulled me up for my leggings. The undercurrent of our work — and I never want to forget this — has always been pressure.
I liked my character [Strindberg’s ‘Miss X’] very much. Maybe it’s pride, or vanity, but I like monologues, so I enjoyed it. I enjoy talking. I probably couldn’t write with the same audacity. My character puts all her effort into expressing herself. In some respects it’s like her last breath, an outpouring of everything, a last chance. The scenario is the character but the speech and deliverance was mine. We changed the ending. I was supposed to exit but a friend said, what are we left with? This is a cut, a slice of life. There is an oral tradition in the work of a Chilean group, it inspired the new ending we composed. When I leave the stage the other character is bereft and shaking. So I return, in a worse state than ever, I offer my cigarette and we share it. We realise that even Bob [the unseen male character] isn’t strong. If we’re weak, he’s not stronger. Ultimately, we’ve shaken the foundations through theatre. It’s a nightmare for the authorities.
Later that same day she contacts me to ask that I remove all names and locations as the situation has escalated and members of the production team have been summoned to answer for their actions. The café owner has been implicated and is still “under enormous pressure”. She still wants this interview to be published.
7 Oct 2010 | News and features
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel prize in Literature 2010, explains in an article published in Index on Censorship in 1978 why Latin America’s writers became the most reliable interpreters of political reality
The Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas killed himself on the second day of December 1969 in a classroom of La Molina Agricultural University in Lima. He was a very discreet man, and so as not to disturb his colleagues and the students with his suicide, he waited until everybody had left the place. Near his body was found a letter with very detailed instructions about his burial — where he should be mourned, who should pronounce the eulogies in the cemetery — and he asked too that an Indian musician friend of his play the huaynos and mulizas he was fond of. His will was respected, and Arguedas, who had been, when he was alive, a very modest and shy man, had a very spectacular burial.
But some days later other letters written by him appeared, little by little. They too were different aspects of his last will, and they were addressed to very different people; his publisher, friends, journalists, academics, politicians. The main subject of these letters was his death, of course, or better, the reasons for which he decided to kill himself. These reasons changed from letter to letter. In one of them he said that he had decided to commit suicide because he felt that he was finished as a writer, that he no longer had the impulse and the will to create. In another he gave moral, social and political reasons: he could no longer stand the misery and neglect of the Peruvian peasants, those people of the Indian communities among whom he had been raised; he lived oppressed and anguished by the crises of the cultural and educational life in the country; the low level and abject nature of the press and the caricature of liberty in Peru were too much for him, et cetera.
In these dramatic letters we follow, naturally, the personal crises that Arguedas had been going through, and they are the desperate call of a suffering man who, at the edge of the abyss, asks mankind for help and compassion. But they are not only that: a clinical testimony. At the same time, they are graphic evidence of the situation of the writer in Latin America, of the difficulties and pressures of all sorts that have surrounded and disoriented and many times destroyed the literary vocation in our countries.
In the USA, in Western Europe, to be a writer means, generally, first (and usually only) to assume a personal responsibility. That is, the responsibility to achieve in the most rigorous and authentic way a work which, for its artistic values and originality, enriches the language and culture of one’s country. In Peru, in Bolivia, in Nicaragua et cetera, on the contrary, to be a writer means, at the same time, to assume a social responsibility: at the same time that you develop a personal literary work, you should serve, through your writing but also through your actions, as an active participant in the solution of the economic, political and cultural problems of your society. There is no way to escape this obligation. If you tried to do so, if you were to isolate yourself and concentrate exclusively on your own work, you would be severely censured and considered, in the best of cases, irresponsible and selfish, or at worst, even by omission, an accomplice to all the evils — illiteracy, misery, exploitation, injustice, prejudice — of your country and against which you have refused to fight. In the letters which he wrote once he had prepared the gun with which he was to kill himself, Arguedas was trying, in the last moments of his life, to fulfil this moral imposition that impels all Latin American writers to social and political commitment.
Why is it like this? Why cannot writers in Latin America, like their American and European colleagues, be artists, and only artists? Why must they also be reformers, politicians, revolutionaries, moralists? The answer lies in the social condition of Latin America, the problems which face our countries. All countries have problems, of course, but in many parts of Latin America, both in the past and in the present, the problems which constitute the closest daily reality for people are not freely discussed and analysed in public, but are usually denied and silenced. There are no means through which those problems can be presented and denounced, because the social and political establishment exercises a strict censorship of the media and over all the communications systems. For example, if today you hear Chilean broadcasts or see Argentine television, you won’t hear a word about the political prisoners, about the exiles, about the torture, about the violations of human rights in those two countries that have outraged the conscience of the world. You will, however, be carefully informed, of course, about the iniquities of the communist countries. If you read the daily newspapers of my country, for instance — which have been confiscated by the government, which now controls them — you will not find a word about the arrests of labour leaders or about the murderous inflation that affects everyone. You will read only about what a happy and prosperous country Peru is and how much we Peruvians love our military rulers.
What happens with the press, TV and radio happens too, most of the time, with the universities. The government persistently interferes with them; teachers and students considered subversive or hostile to the official system are expelled and the whole curriculum reorganised according to political considerations. As an indication of what extremes of absurdity this ‘cultural policy’ can reach, you must remember, for instance, that in Argentina, in Chile and in Uruguay the departments of Sociology have been closed indefinitely, because the social sciences are considered subversive. Well, if academic institutions submit to this manipulation and censorship, it is improbable that contemporary political, social and economic problems of the country can be described and discussed freely. Academic knowledge in many Latin American countries is, like the press and the media, a victim of the deliberate turning away from what is actually happening in society. This vacuum has been filled by literature.
What was, for political reasons, repressed or distorted in the press and in the schools and universities, all the evils that were buried by the military and economic elite which ruled the countries, the evils which were never mentioned in the speeches of the politicians nor taught in the lecture halls nor criticised in the congresses nor discussed in the magazines found a vehicle of expression in literature.
So, something curious and paradoxical occurred. The realm of imagination became in Latin America the kingdom of objective reality; fiction became a substitute for social science; our best teachers about reality were the dreamers, the literary artists. And this is true not only of our great essayists —- such as Sarmiento, Martí, Gonzáles Prada, Rodó, Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui — whose books are indispensable for a thorough comprehension of the historical and social reality of their respective countries, but it is also valid for the writers who only practised the creative literary genres: fiction, poetry and drama.
We have a very illustrative case in what is called indigenismo, the literary current which, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the first decades of our century focused on the Indian peasant of the Andes and his problems as its main subject. The indigenist writers were the first people in Latin America to describe the terrible conditions in which the Indians were still living three centuries after the Spanish conquest, the impunity with which they were abused and exploited by the landed proprietors — the latifundistas, the gamonales — men who sometimes owned land areas as big as a European country, where they were absolute kings, who treated their Indians worse and sold them cheaper than their cattle. The first indigenist writer was a woman, an energetic and enthusiastic reader of the French novelist Emile Zola and the positivist philosophers: Clorinda Matto de Turner (1854-1909). Her novel Avel sin nido opened a road of social commitment to the problems and aspects of Indian life that Latin American writers would follow, examining in detail and from all angles, denouncing injustices and praising and rediscovering the values and traditions of an Indian culture which until then, at once incredibly and ominously, had been systematically ignored by the official culture. There is no way to research and analyse the rural history of the continent and to understand the tragic destiny of the inhabitants of the Andes since the region ceased to be a colony without going through their books. These constitute the best — and sometimes the only — testimony to this aspect of our reality.
The participation of the Latin American writer in the social and political evaluation of reality has been decisive. Frequently, and often very effectively, he has taken the place of the scientist, the journalist and the social agitator in carrying out this mission. He has thus helped to establish a conception of literature which has penetrated all sectors. Literature, according to this view, appears as a meaningful and positive activity, which depicts the scars of reality and prescribes remedies, frustrating official lies so that truth shines through. It is also directed towards the future: it demands and predicts social change (revolution), that new society, freed from the evil spirits which literature denounces and exorcises with words. According to this conception, imagination and literature are entirely at the service of civic ideal, and literature is as subordinate to objective reality as history books (or even more so, for the reasons already discussed). This vision of literature as a mimetic enterprise, morally uplifting, historically fruitful, sociologically exact, politically revolutionary, has become so widespread in our countries that it partly explains the irrational behaviour of many of the dictatorships of the continent. Hardly installed in power, they persecute, imprison, torture and even kill writers who often have no political involvement, as was the case in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina not long ago. The mere fact of being a writer makes them suspicious, a threat in the short or long term to the status quo. All this adds considerably to the complexity of something which in itself is difficult to explain, the misunderstanding at the back of all this.
This is an extract from an article first published in Index on Censorship in Nov/Dec 1978
