This is a CTP of initiative: ICA/COVILPI (Argentina)
This CTP addresses the creation of a cooperative radio station, "FM Riachuelo" by the members of COVILPI. The cooperative radio station, created on July 8, 2011, is used by the social organization as the main organ of communication and dissemination. Through FM Riachuelo to communicate activities but mainly as an innovative politics tool to propose social change.
"We saw the need to start communicational tools that allow us to develop the task of being a contribution to the construction of a new narration from La Boca, from the neighborhoods of the South of the City of Buenos Aires. That is the feeling that brought us to conceive FM Riachuelo, with the deep conviction that participation and protagonism are the practices of the plural subject that carries the interests that push towards a higher instance of our History."
For the organization, the creation of FM radio station was a fundamental milestone in its trajectory because it represents the possibility of communicating to the mass public beyond the interests of the big media networks and the lobby of the concentrated economic groups.
"From this new communication media, the organization Los Pibes aimed to reflect the aspirations and hopes of the people who struggle against injustice. This inauguration was nurtured from diverse points of view that give us the first effort to undertake the task of setting up a radio station of a popular and community character."
A central aspect of COVILPI in relation to radio and other channels of social expression is that they should not respond to the conceptions of the commercial communication. In this sense, members of COVILPI and especially those that work on the radio station believe that they must be extremely careful because the popular media should not follow the criteria of sustainability from strengthening the capabilities of "marketing" or "Sell advertising ". For them, the mercantile logic is contrary to the possibility of law and therefore has no place within the popular economy and cooperation.
"In this sense, we have a identical perspective to the one that the National Interuniversity Council, for example, expressed in a recent document celebrating the worldwide consecration of higher education as a basic right, something that, as the document points out, in Argentina Has been achieved due to a centuries-old history of popular struggles for a public university for all. What if we say that the public university has to be supported by selling advertising or creating a marketing department? Or the public health system? Probably, the best thing they would call us would be neoliberals."
The creation of the FM radio Riachuelo was supported by several institutions and social organizations. For example, Néstor Busso, the Argentinian Forum of Community Radios (FARCO, in it spanish initials), Néstor Piccone and Luis Lázzaro for the COPLA Project, Ernesto Lamas for the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), Carlos Aznárez (Latin American Summary), as well as referents of Radio Gráfica, 88.1 Quilmes, Radio Sudaca and FM Bajo Flores.
Also collaborated people from state institutions like Enrique Deibe, Pablo Madera and Matías Barroetaveña (Ministry of Labor), Monica Ghirelli (Ministry of National Security), and the Judge Andrés Gallardo. In addition to them, leaders of social movements such as the August 17, Popular Cause, New Encounter of the City of Buenos Aires (led by Legislator Gustavo Ruanova), the Humanist Party, Coco Blaustein, Facundo Taboada, María José Lubertino, public media reporters (Channel 7, Télam and Radio Nacional), among others.
On June 22, 2015, FM Riachuelo presented a research work (conducted together with the National University of Avellaneda and Radio Gráfica) at the Office of the Public Defender of Audiovisual Media Services of the Nation about an audience measurement experience on Popular and community media in the geographical space of La Boca and Barracas. The work reported on the penetration and reach of popular communication in the territory where communication appears as a value outside the market logic, which forces us to consider other issues. He also proposed to think of communication as an inalienable right that must be upheld by the Law on Audiovisual Communication Services and by State policies.
The FM Riachuelo radio station was created in Argentina in the context of the application of the new Law of Audiovisual Communication Services (LSCA, in it spanish initials). This law, which was confronted by concentrated (even judicially) hegemonic media, promoted not only the inability to concentrate media to corporations, but also forced the granting of radio and television spaces to grassroots organizations, universities and other civil institutions.
Are the practices promoted by the LSCA that undoubtedly contribute most to the realization of the right to communication among the popular sectors and that push us to a series of questions. For that, the members of COVILPI ask themselves: How to relay, assess and measure the territorial network that is expressed, participates and represented through our media? How to relay, evaluate and measure the actions that our broadcasters undertake outside of the radio station, the programs and the emitter-receiver relationship, the interventions in the public space, the debates that are organized in our spaces? How to evaluate the impact that occurs in the subjectivity of the thousands of children of the schools that in the last few years traveled and participated in our radio stations?
In the radio space, COVILPI found a set of institutions that joined its project of new forms of grassroots communication. For this reason, it was promoted an articulation between popular organizations and the National University of Avellaneda to build more precise and concrete instruments so that the cooperative and / or community radios continue to build the condition so that the people can count on the right to the communication as a tool For their struggles and whose most significant fact involves the recovery of the voices of the people.
The LSCA, along with its most widespread anti-monopoly aspect, recognizes in its text the different expressions and experiences that, since the return of democracy, created and experienced the diversity of forms that today are combined In the construction of a paradigm of popular communication. The very way in which the social and political process that led to the LSCA, with ample instances of debate and organized popular participation accompanied by massive street mobilizations, demonstrated that the democratization and the access to a new and variable type communication are demand and Popular clamor in this historical stage. The broad growth of the community radio sector, alternative or popular in recent years also ratifies this trend.
The social movement that promoted the popular communication from the return of the democracy was developed in parallel with the movement identified with the popular habitat claims. In the case of COVILPI and FM Riachuelo, both movements joined together in the same articulated process.
The creation of the FM Riachuelo represents in itself a controversial action, which contests with the mass media concentrating its own existence. From that place, radio represents for the large media groups, the possibility of a protest, which denies communication as one more commodity.En ese nivel, los propios actores sociales expresan que:
"The time of the cultural battle puts us before the challenge of composing, from the popular field, a narrative according to the political action that can define in favor of the majority of the People this moment of historical opportunity, this change of era in which The People of all of Our America warns of the necessity and the possibility that on this road we can achieve a better reality. That is why we saw the need to start communicational tools that allow us to develop the task of being a contribution to the construction of this story from La Boca, from the neighborhoods of the South of the City of Buenos Aires. That is the feeling that brought us to conceive FM Riachuelo, with the deep conviction that participation and pragmatism are the practices of the plural subject that carries the interests that push towards a higher instance of our history.”
The social movement Los Pibes considers that the cultural field and communication within it, is the scenario defined by the hegemonic bloc as the center of the strategy of domination. It is therefore essential to create basic media as alternatives to the status quo. In this way, defining a National and Popular project, against the pro-globalization means is a strategy to promote equality.
The other contestatory element of the creation of the FM Riachuelo is the recovery of the territorial, of the neighborhood, in front of the universalization of the culture and the forms of life in general. From the bottom, the movement aspires to the construction of localized and coherent identities, which respond to the interests of the community and not to the imposed from the concentrated media.
"Our aim is to give reasons of the social and the political from the tension that dynamizes the rhythm of history, between interests that sustain injustice and those who push for ever higher levels of equality, justice, sovereignty, freedom and solidarity . For COVILPI, the radio station open, cooperative and libertarian, becomes in this way a transforming tool of the social"
The creation of the radio station was an objective thought by COVILPI shortly after its constitution like social movement. The limited and negative way in which the hegemonic media covered the cooperative's own activities and struggles was a first symptom of the need to create grassroots media that communicate from a solidarity and transformative perspective, social reality.
In this process, radio is assumed as a channel with political interests, and therefore responds to a set of meanings, strategies and actions. In this it differs from the mass media that appear neutral, without position taken, but in fact respond to economic, cultural and political interests.
The radio station is presented as a contribution to a battle that has no limitations other than overcoming this historic stage:
"FM Riachuelo is not a neutral radio, we make a militant, partial communication, so that it makes available to the districts, and its listeners in general, a critical vision of the real and conclusions that are synthesized by actions, consistent practices with that reading and with belonging, rooting. The identity in the popular field and its interests, the composition of who we are and what we want to be."
The radio station, in fact, was anticipated because before creating their own radio, COVILPI participated in spaces in other cooperative radio stations. By the middle of 2010, the new laws allowed him to get both space and financing for the equipment. Less than a year later, the radio station began transmissions with the aim of communicating, but fundamentally of operating in reality, to create tools of social transformation.
The creation of FM Riachuelo constituted important learning for COVILPI as an institution. First, learning in the formalization of the identity and the objectives of the institution since they had to be clear in order to be able to communicate them. In this way, the cooperative reflected on and discussed the objectives of communication and created very important collective learning dynamics. Working groups were created to occupy the spaces of the radio station and the members of COVILPI specialized in different areas of communication. The cooperativists learned tools of communication, locution, journalistic production, etc. Subsequently, the creation of the web radio, also allowed to generate capacities of image design and audiovisual production.
On the other hand, the creation and social acceptance of radio allowed COVILPI to postulate that the importance of popular communication, and its social and political recognition in terms of State policy, as a fundamental aspect for the peoples of the region can Continue to drive and deepen the process.
The survey of community media represented for FM Riachuelo a great learning. On the one hand at the methodological level, to carry out the survey itself, but on the other hand, as a political tool to discuss with society the role of the media.
For a cooperative experience it was very important to have the survey that in many ways allowed ratify some strategies for social organizations and popular media:
1) Building a communication tool such as radio station: the survey showed that cooperative radio and/or social organizations are heard, much more than the mass media recognize.
2) The importance of investing in equipment and continue to claim the importance of legality: radio station is still mostly heard on the air, despite the diffusion of new technologies and the Internet, even among younger populations.
3) The validity of what the actors call "production in unity". This consists of articulating and agreeing on the diversity of popular media to achieve joint content and broadening the dissemination of ideas and projects.
At that level, the survey showed a significant amount, although a great diversity of community radios is observed (sometimes it could even be thought of a fragmentation of the sector), it is also true that the sum of all community, neighborhood and popular experiences Audience to any of the radio stations of media corporations.
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