It has been over two years since the Community Radio Bill 4087 was introduced to the Guatemalan Congress in August, 2009, with a promise from President Alvaro Colom to give special priority to the bill, which would reform the current tele-communications law to include the category of community radio as a legitimate use of radio frequencies. Yet, at the close of his presidency, Bill 4087 remains among the pile of other Indigenous-authored bills, marginalized from the political congressional agenda.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held its 143rd regular session from October 19 to November 4 this year in Washington DC. During this session, partners of the community radio movement, CONIC (Coordinadora Nacional Indígena y Campesina) presented the following intervention declaring the systematic disregard for Indigenous interests as unconstitutional:
“The Indigenous and Campesino organizations in the country have made very concrete proposals to the state, in order to begin the process of integration- that the Indigenous communities may be part of development rather than its subject. Most importantly, there are the following bills of law; the general law of Indigenous peoples, the rural development law, the community radio law, and the law of sacred sites. These bills have not prospered in congress and we have declared this unconstitutional- when it is a right, a legitimate right that Indigenous Peoples claim”. Listen to the session here.
Meanwhile, right-wing political party Lider has entered a new bill into congress, Bill 4404. This bill also proposes to reform the current telecommunications law, but rather than democratizing the radio airwaves, it ensures the quick and uninterrupted extension of commercial radio licensees that have allowed media moguls like Mexican-born Angél Gonzales a monopoly over the Guatemalan broadcast spectrum for the past 10 years. This bill, just as the law it reforms, fails to contemplate the needs and rights of the Indigenous Peoples that make up a majority of the population.
The community radio movement in Guatemala has joined together to denounce the bill as anti-democratic. “It is a violation of our rights as Indigenous peoples to manage our own local forms of media, in our own native languages,” they wrote in their press release, in Spanish and English, here.
We urge you, once more, to exert international pressure by sending an email and writing a letter to the President Alvaro Colom and members of the Guatemalan congress, to put Bill 4087 on the agenda and vote for its approval.
