By ARK

Radio replaces telephone and newspaper in Oaxacan indigenous villages.

Alfredo Landa walks into a small room, the walls of which have been covered with egg cartons.

Landa sits in front of the microphone and chooses the same song he starts every morning with. At seven o’clock, the community radio of San Juan Guichicovi plays the Mexican national song in local Mixe indigenous language. Mixe is one of the many indigenous languages spoken in the state of Oaxaca.

This morning, Landa plays the interviews he did the night before by phone. In the interviews, people who participated in a demonstration against the Oaxacan governor describe the day. According to Landa the television presents the Oaxacan conflict purely from the point of view of the government.

After his shift is over, Landa sits down to talk about the importance of the radio to his village. “In this area, media is a tool of power. That’s why the community radio is significant. It can work to raise people’s consciousness, to tell people about the right to organise and the right to a better life. In small villages, the common cold still kills people. On the radio, we can educate people about prevention of diseases.”

Landa maintains that, in villages, formal education is less important than the education that happens in the family.

“If you study primary school, secondary school and high school, it is so that you can leave the village. The point of the radio is to educate those who stay in villages.”

In many isolated villages the real power isn’t held by the democratically elected local politicians, but caciques, PRI-linked informal leaders who govern like the mafia. Radio Ayuuk has criticised openly both caciques and the formal administration of Oaxaca. This has earned the radio reporters death threats – given by supporters of the PRI.

”Radio Ayuuk is an important change agent in this area, and this is why it has been threatened. It is only intimidation. I just have to change my style of speaking, stand in front of the microphone and make sure that the listeners don’t hear my fear,” Landa says, with a determined look in his eyes.

The community radio is open to all those who are interested in participating, but the programmes are made mainly by young people. “A lot of people think that we’re just fooling around. But at home they have their radios turned on. We know that 10 000 people listen to us daily.”

One can’t help but wonder what drives Landa to make radio programmes voluntarily, without pay.

”I’m a Mixe. The Spanish never conquered us, because we hid on our lands, rose up to the mountains. So I’m a winner. At present, it’s not the Spanish who try to conquer us, but multinational companies, caciques, Wal-mart, Plan Puebla Panama. We refuse to let them conquer us.”

Education of indigenous languages in the radio

In the city of Oaxaca, Laura Victoria Chávez Salar is soldering copper pipes. “This will be the antenna,” the 17-year-old explains. She is taking part in a workshop, in which she is building a radio transmitter and antenna for her village, together with her neighbour.

Chávez Salar hopes that the radio could be a tool in sustaining the local culture. One custom she would like to see kept in alive is “padiush”. “It means that when there’s a party in the village, local people share their food with those who come to visit. Guests go from house to house and the village residents give them a bit of tortilla or beans”