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

Nation-State Communication Practices and the Long History of Indigenous Communication

Indigenous peoples’ current identity and place-based memory of their long history challenge two sequential frameworks of nation-state citizen identity, both of which are outcomes of the project of modernity since the Conquest (Escobar, 2010). The first is as individual citizens of nation-states in which they reside, consolidated only in the nineteenth century, and the second is as individual consumers, intensified in late-twentieth-century neoliberal states following the transition from dictatorship to neoliberal democracy.

Only within the past 10 years have researchers analyzed the nineteenth-century visual practices that enabled an invisible state to employ multiple, dispersed sources of power in the guise of the impersonal forces of nature, progress, and history, which permitted the ruling elite to achieve its goals through museum exhibits, paintings, and public monuments. Jens Andermann’s The Optic of the State: Visuality and State Violence in Argentina and Brazil (2007) draws on this research to examine the role of the museum and public art in formalizing a disavowal of genocide as a civics lesson. The display of artifacts of human “types” in a hierarchical order taught citizens to take as given the inevitable linear progress of European knowledge opposed to a primitive indigenous culture that was destined to die out. It was not unusual to include human skulls in these displays, and some museums even offered live indigenous people such as the Mapuche prisoners in Paris in 1883 as examples of disappearing cultures (Huinca Piutrin, 2012). Although the state has shared with and sometimes ceded hegemony over this civics lesson to the culture industries, the ethnographic representation of the inevitable death of indigenous peoples has not ended. The controversial Before They Pass Away photography of Jimmy Nelson (2013) constitutes a visual “othering” of indigenous peoples, updated with glamour, that derides their relationships to their environment and uses their images to sensationalize their eventual demise.

Nineteenth-century liberalism for the most part homogenized previously heterogeneous and autonomous nations and peoples through liberal precepts and war. Following the American wars of independence from Europe beginning in 1776 in the North and 1810 in the South, liberalism informed the creation of sovereign states with imagined nations by denying the existence and humanity of indigenous peoples through processes of coloniality that limited citizens’ employment on the basis of ethnicity, defined as “race” (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992). Civil wars eventually secured the boundaries of sovereign states, and constitutional struggles defined the political and legal concept of the individual citizen with specific rights protected against powers allocated to the state. This citizen was narrowly defined as an individual adult Christian male Euro-descendant (creole) property owner who was legally bound to negotiate with the state to secure his property rights. Restricted, then, by age, religion, gender, ethnicity, and social class, indigenous peoples, African-descendant peoples, castas (people of mixed ancestry), and most women, children, and landless workers were rendered noncitizens, minors, and in some cases nonhumans until the twentieth century.

The denial of legal standing to other collectives to claim rights to land and “culture,” including indigenous politics, law, history, and language (all forms of communication), is a major legacy of the nineteenth-century liberal definition of citizenship (Anaya, 2006). Over centuries of struggle to live collectively with autonomy, indigenous peoples, in spite of their forced modernization, have maintained knowledge of their history and identity from before the nation-state was created. This knowledge, embedded in languages and other forms of communication, has enabled them to provide leadership for new social movements to effect changes in international law, which is becoming responsive to demands for the decolonization of nation-state history. Amid the major changes in subjectivity caused by modernization, across the world many indigenous peoples maintained their languages and forms of autonomy until well into the late nineteenth century despite laws passed to enforce individual property rights. O’Malley, Stirling, and Penetito’s (2010) summary of laws intended to privatize land in New Zealand, for example, demonstrates how ineffective settler laws had been over decades in modifying Maori settlement. As a result, in the late nineteenth century, settlers turned to state-sponsored genocide when military forces massacred and displaced families from their ancestral territories, introducing virtual slavery and assimilation policies such as removing children from their homes and denying their rights to language and communication (Pavez, 2008; Wolfe, 2006). It is this history that has been celebrated by nation-states as the arrival of the modern era—visualized in paintings, monuments, and museums throughout the Americas—and referenced in national anthems, coins, sports mascots, bicentennials, and other icons and rituals of identity (Andermann, 2007). Ulises de la Orden’s 2012 documentary film Tierra adentro brings this history into sharp relief in the case of Mapuche peoples.

Latin American indigenous peoples were once again targets of state violence in the late twentieth century during the dirty wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when their alliances with and occasional leadership of the militant left prompted the state to target them as communist or subversive enemies of the nation, the armed forces, and allied security institutions. The best-known example of indigenous leadership created through alliances with the left in that era is Rigoberta Menchú’s experience with the Comité de Unidad Campesina (United Farmworkers’ Committee) in Guatemala and with religious organizations influenced by liberation theology. Although the political parties opposing the dictatorship promised a more inclusionary state throughout these years, the postdictatorship electoral state continued and accelerated policies that facilitated the transnational corporate occupation of indigenous territories, and structural adjustment policies drove down workers’ wages and ignored and criminalized indigenous claims. At the same time, citizens’ demands for commissions of truth and reconciliation set a precedent in offering the wider society a legal, ethical, and historical basis for indigenous peoples’ claims that state terrorism had a longer history in their communities. It was becoming clear that when nonindigenous citizens became victims of state terror as indigenous peoples had been, these acts were defined as crimes against humanity. In Tierra adentro, indigenous descendants of the nineteenth-century wars describe their families’ experiences with state terrorism and crimes against their humanity that have yet to be officially acknowledged as such.

In the communities where material survival remained possible, it is this memory that is now being reconstructed. Although the dominant cultures continue to describe this knowledge as tradition, culture, heritage, identity, and subjectivity or as myth, legend, folklore, and superstition, indigenous researchers are reincorporating these forms of knowledge from narratives that are carved, woven, sung, danced, and practiced in material culture as well as in the print and audiovisual media. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 111–164) describes 25 projects in which indigenous peoples worldwide are currently engaged in decolonizing knowledge production by placing self-determination at the center of their communicative strategies, and unravels the ways in which indigenous peoples have survived attempts by both popular and elite cultures to dehumanize them. Thus testimonials, naming, reframing, celebrating, networking, revitalizing, and other traditional and modern forms of communication allow for the transmission of knowledge that consolidates communities and resists the logic of late capitalism.

In the Latin American context, Boone and Mignolo’s (1994) and Rappaport and Cummins’s (2012) work on alternative literacies and Marisol de la Cadena’s on cosmopolitics (2010) suggest that these epistemologies and ontologies are not just other ways of knowing and being in this “shared” world but other worlds or what Dussel (2008) calls the “pluriverse.” ¹ This decolonizing (and decolonial) role of indigenous knowledge transforms communication. The long, painful struggle to decolonize one’s community and the larger nation-state in order to survive as peoples nevertheless has celebration at its heart (Smith, 2012: 146–147).

Most of this history remains unknown to the society at large, including many academics. The transnational media have played a significant role in rendering it invisible, especially in the neoliberal era, when former public media organizations have been privatized, resulting in a high concentration of ownership through which information for citizens has been filtered by owners’ interests, and the commodification of exotic others is highly lucrative. At the same time, the orthodox left tends to view indigenous communities as a subset of the proletariat, lumpen or subaltern, and indigenous thought is considered primitive, tribal, or precapitalist, requiring modernization to abandon these autonomous ways of being by denying that alternative knowledges exist. Even the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued in a 1929 paper delivered at the Latin American Communist Conference that indigenous peoples could not form their own republic but should struggle for equality within Peru (Becker, 2006). Indigenous movements often utilize socialist thought for their own purposes, but in the contexts to be described here they directly challenge the denial of alternative knowledges common in leftist theorizing.

Throughout the twentieth century, apart from exceptional moments, the nation-state often shared and at times ceded hegemony over public audiovisual displays to culture industries (Martín-Barbero, 1998). As telecommunications developed across the globe, the concentration of media production and distribution created one-way flows of information from the most powerful states to the rest of the world. Beginning in the late 1940s as part of the postwar global process of decolonization, nations joined together to confront this unequal system, and by the last decades of the twentieth century these efforts had produced the UNESCO (1980) publication Many Voices One World, also known as the MacBride Report. This report directly addressed the way the control of information was linked to development and proposed a new world information and communication order that would reverse the one-way flows of information (Mansell and Nordenstreng, 2006). Published at a critical moment following a decade of organizing to establish a New International Information Order proposed by the United Nations, the goals of the report came to an abrupt end with the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Both the United Kingdom and the United States withdrew from UNESCO a few years later, arguing that these proposals would limit “freedom of expression.” This lack of support led UNESCO to drop its call for more equitable global access to media and instead focus on technology, information, and capacity building. The 2003 World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva promoted information and communication technologies for the opportunities they provided for participation in the media but dropped its foregrounding of existing inequalities and proposals for reducing the gap between the strongest and weakest media producers.

Although most former colonies have now been decolonized as nation-states, indigenous peoples continue to confront this legacy as stateless nations, and their cultures are repeatedly represented in the transnational media as disappearing because of natural forces. The process of othering in communication systems is not, however, limited to nation-state ideology, culture industries, or telecommunications ownership. State institutions such as universities have traditionally housed the study of indigenous peoples in the social sciences, especially anthropology, where research on native or indigenous peoples requires distanced methodologies that prevent the indigenous researcher from being taken seriously as an authority on his or her own culture, let alone an authority on history, politics, or other cultures from an indigenous worldview. Indigenous academics struggle to have their ideas deemed rigorous enough to compete in an increasingly neoliberal university system that values “high-impact” ranking of publications; the criteria for “excellence” tend to privilege publishers in English—publishers from Europe and the United States (Nahuelpan, 2013; Smith, 2012). All this makes indigenous peoples suspicious of research; Smith (2012: xi) explains that indigenous communities are “the most researched people in the world” (xi), yet they see little or no benefit from the research to which they have been subjected, finding their own cultures scarcely recognizable from what is published about them. Her work and that of many other indigenous researchers has begun to reverse this trend, insisting on asking of every research proposal who identified the research problem, for whom the study is relevant, and what knowledge the community will gain from it (2012: 175–176).

While many of the processes described here pertain to indigenous peoples across the world, legalized plurinational statehood and the role of indigenous media in achieving it are specific to Latin America. What all the cases under consideration here share is an emerging concept in communication that underpins these social transformations. The term most often used by indigenous peoples in describing the work of a media producer is comunicador/comunicadora or comunicador/a social (and it is now intentional in Latin American Spanish to include the entire feminine form even if repetitive). “Media producer” is inexact because it does not include the social role or ethical responsibility assumed by indigenous comunicadores, and the English “communicator” is generally reserved for politicians or business media specialists. The comunicador/a must listen empathetically to community members and make their voices accessible to the society at large. He or she not only mediates between indigenous communities and their larger society but also participates in transnational networks, often mentoring individuals from other communities to enable them to participate as well. This work goes beyond that of the journalist, filmmaker, video producer, community organizer, or activist and includes an important set of cross-cultural ethics and translation capabilities, commitments to others in situations of personal danger, ways of reaching consensus to negotiate with funding bodies, and other complex skills that enable communities to survive. In addition, a horizontal structure of noncommercial media production works against capitalist production hierarchies that create the celebrity characteristic of dominant audiovisual media production.

In the next section I offer examples of Mapuche comunicadores who are contributing to participatory democracy by advocating for the collective rights of all peoples as they challenge the nineteenth-century concept of citizenship. This challenge gained momentum during and following the late-twentieth-century era of dictatorship, when all protest was criminalized, and continues in the neoliberal era, when Mapuche protest in particular is criminalized. I will show how their work has contributed to recent developments in international law that have “softened” nation-state sovereignty in certain areas (Anaya, 2006). In the section that follows it, I contrast the Mapuche experience with indigenous communication in Bolivia and Venezuela, which challenges the neoliberal notion of citizenship that reduces citizens to individualized consumers. When the neoliberal state makes economic decisions that favor transnational interests, it effectively marginalizes citizens in their own lands. The realization of plurinational socialism in Bolivia and Venezuela has redefined citizen-state relationships, and indigenous media have propelled this process forward by insisting on a decolonizing form of communication.

Autonomy and Participatory Democracy in Wallmapu

The Mapuche people were the only indigenous nation recognized by the Spanish Crown, which was forced to sign the Quillín Treaty of 1641, recognizing Mapuche sovereignty south of the Bío Bío River in Chile. This was followed by 28 treaties up to the Negrete Treaty of 1803, after which the Chilean state assumed sovereignty in Ngulumapu and the Argentine state in Puelmapu (Mariman, 2006: 79). Extending across territories on both sides of the Andes, Mapuche communities were militarily divided and incorporated by the nation-states of Chile and Argentina in the late nineteenth century. Offering one of the strongest challenges to neoliberal nation-state citizenship today, this recent memory of centuries of success against European colonialism has emerged from a history of autonomy amid great diversity in which there was no centralized authority but instead a long tradition of negotiation with others. Mapuche media recover this history by exposing these nation-states as recent creations of colonialism.

Jeannette Paillan’s 2002 film Wallmapu was the first documentary produced by a Mapuche comunicadora on the long struggle to maintain and recover land and autonomy. It included footage of current communities living in the area they call Wallmapu and interviews with a dozen Mapuche elders, healers (machi) such as Irma Chehuan, and leaders including Víctor Ancalaf Llaupe of the Colli Pulli community, José Llanquileo of the “Juana Millahual” community, and José Huenchunao Mariñán, some of whom would later become political prisoners, prosecuted in the military court system as terrorists for starting fires in traditional Mapuche territories recently occupied by forestry companies. In the documentary these leaders explained how they had lost their right to collective ownership in 1981 under the dictatorship and how the successive governments of the Concertación (under Aylwin, Frei, and Lagos, 1990–2006) in the era of “electoral democracy” had provided financial support to the forestry and hydroelectric industries to displace Mapuche communities from lands to which they had customary rights. The film intercut interviews with historians Pablo Mariman and José Bengoa with statements by community leaders. Introduced in this way, the history of Wallmapu was transmitted to a wide audience for the first time, and the autonomy of these communities was presented as a legitimate defense of their right to recover their land. This challenged recent nation-state history in that the dominant narrative about postdictatorship Chile assumes that citizens are treated far better now than under the dictatorship, ignoring the culture-specific antiterrorist legislation that makes Mapuche people prisoners, foreigners, or “terrorists” in their own lands.

The 1984 Antiterrorist Law had been introduced by General Augusto Pinochet to criminalize acts resulting in property damage during attempts at land recovery as terrorism (contrary to its definition in international law) and eliminated the basic legal protections afforded suspects in the rest of the Chilean legal system. On July 29, 2014, after a legal process lasting more than a decade, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights released a binding decision ordering the Chilean government to release eight members of the Mapuche community and a filmmaker who had been arrested in 2000 and 2002 on charges of terrorism. The court found that Chile had violated their legal rights, not affording them the basic presumption of innocence (Latinamerica Press, 2014). This decision highlighted only the most egregious of violations; dozens of other cases have not yet been tried, and Mapuche media are the only sources that regularly publicize the names and details of minors and others who have been detained, tortured, and murdered by police, prisoners on hunger strikes for months, and victims of other ongoing violations.

Wallmapu critiques the Chilean media by opening with a series of sensational newspaper headlines that refer to Mapuche as terrorists and then placing viewers within Mapuche communities to learn about their history in their own words. This critique has never been presented from this perspective, and the authority accorded Mapuche-speakers as cultural historians is new. In this way, Mapuche media present a serious challenge to nation-state narratives for many Chilean, Argentine, and international viewers.

Media studies have argued that the context in which Mapuche media operate is hostile to independent media. The concentration of media ownership is one of the highest in the world, with two private communications corporations (Agustín Edwards’s El Mercurio and Álvaro Saieh’s Consorcio Periodístico de Chile) owning an estimated 95 percent of the print media in Chile and 60 percent of radio stations owned by the Prisa Company of Spain, while community media are criminalized (Reporters without Borders, 2013; Mönckeberg, 2013). Because these owners have major financial interests in the forestry, hydroelectric, and other industries and in spite of their outspoken promotion of the free market, both groups continue to receive millions of dollars in government subsidies and have had close relations with governments and the military throughout the twentieth century (Reporters without Borders, 2013). Ignacio Agüero’s riveting 2008 documentary El diario de Agustín exposed not only the close financial and political collaboration between the Edwards family and the CIA leading up to the overthrow of President Allende in 1973 but El Mercurio’s fabrication and publication of stories based on false information about individuals whom the regime had targeted as enemies of the state.

In 1999 the web site Mapuexpress began to address issues of human rights and the defense of collective ownership, autonomy, and self-determination. Its founder, Alfredo Seguel, began publishing first-person information directly from individuals at the sites where communities were facing police brutality during moments of conflict so that readers could compare what was printed in the major media with what Mapuche communities were experiencing. Based in Temuco, the group is a collective of Mapuche organizations with a branch in Santiago and a radio program in both locations. The regular announcements of conferences, workshops, marches, film festivals, books, and other events that promote Mapuche and other collective rights create an alternative narrative to that established by the private media. Dedicated to securing the right to information and communication for all citizens, the web site has become increasingly professionalized in a technical (visual and aesthetic) sense and is a major reference point for information about current affairs.

The web site and collective Azkintuwe, established in 2003, is another outlet for Mapuche creativity, one more akin to traditional journalism with its colorful graphics, comics, artwork, and articles signed by individual writers from a wide spectrum of human and indigenous rights organizations. Pedro Cayuqueo, who served as editor-in-chief, has become a national and internationally recognized journalist and press secretary of the first Mapuche political party, Wallmapuwen. The journal Ñuque Mapu (Mother Earth) has brought together the poets Rayen Kvyeh, Leonel Lienlaf, and Elicura Chihuailaf with the linguist Anselmo Raguileo for the collaborative publication of art, poetry, and work in the Mapuzungun language (Gutiérrez, 2014: 81).

Nation-state history and traditional research perspectives on it have been seriously challenged by the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (2006) in the groundbreaking ¡Escucha winka! Cuatro ensayos de historia nacional mapuche y un epílogo sobre el futuro (Listen, Winka! Four Essays on Mapuche National History and an Epilogue on the Future), with contributions by Pablo Mariman, Sergio Caniuqueo, José Millalén, and Rodrigo Level. Addressed to winka (“invaders” or “thieves,” a term used for non-Mapuche people), the introduction explains that traditional histories are incapable of narrating Chilean and Argentine history because the historical tradition has no language for describing the Mapuche nations and retrospectively separates the Mapuche communities in Ngulumapu (southern Chile) from the rest of the nation in Puelmapu (Argentina). Important terms in Mapuzungun describe not just the territories of the varied peoples that make up Wallmapu but their relations to different ecological systems. In having access to these ideas, citizens of these nation-states learn for the first time what the place-names surrounding them mean and may begin to understand the claims of Mapuche people both historically and currently.

The authority of the nonindigenous intellectual to write the history of these nation-states was also directly challenged in the introduction to Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün: Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Our Different Forms of Thinking about Ourselves: History, Colonialism, and Resistance from Mapuche Country [Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2012]), whose first pages are in Mapuzungun without translation. The five opening chapters focus on the colonial relations that consolidated the nation-state, demonstrating the role of the treaties that secured rights for indigenous peoples in both Chile and Argentina, which made the later land grabs illegal from the perspective of both Mapuche and nation-state law. Six articles analyze the means by which Mapuche communities reorganized in the twentieth century when migration to the urban areas posed new challenges for the health of communities, including the specificity of gender as a coordinate of identity. The articles that close the volume study literary production and radio in the context of ongoing violence. Rigorously and meticulously researched, this study highlights the autonomous thinking that is natural to the Mapuche peoples represented in the book, and it was published by the collective itself.

The heterogeneity of current Mapuche media practices means that it is impossible for individual Mapuche authorities to speak for other groups, and these media reflect the commitment to asserting and securing the right to communication by normalizing the presentation of many opposing viewpoints. It would be wrong, however, to assume that Mapuche are weakened by this apparent fragmentation. To have arrived at the current moment—with a new generation of thinkers, activists, community leaders, and comunicadores demanding changes in their relationship with the Chilean and Argentine states—has required a systematic exchange of ideas and negotiation among varied groups of Mapuche collectives and other social movements over time. Interest in the wide range of Mapuche communication in Wallmapu is represented in three recent books about the Mapuche media released in 2014. Rakizuam Tañi Wajmapu, Mapuexpress. Informativo mapuche (Mapuexpress, 2014) offers a series of thought-provoking essays by members of this collective residing in Chile, including an article written by a current political prisoner, Pascual Pichun Collonao. We Aukiñ Zugu: Historia de los medios de comunicación mapuche (Gutiérrez, 2014) is a detailed history and description of the Mapuche media in Chile. Descolonizando la palabra: Los medios de comunicación del Pueblo Mapuche en Puelmapu/Decolonizing the Word: Communication Media in Puelmapu (Yanniello, 2014) describes the history of the Mapuche media in Argentina. It highlights the most important challenge for alternative and participatory media in all but the richest countries, which is finding funding where the media are highly privatized and the regulatory framework makes access to them difficult or impossible.

Mapuche media are almost entirely self-financing, although Article 16 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN, 2008) guarantees indigenous peoples’ right “to establish their own media in their own languages and to have access to all forms of non-indigenous media without discrimination” and stipulates that “States shall take effective measures to ensure that State-owned media duly reflect indigenous cultural diversity. States, without prejudice to ensuring full freedom of expression, should encourage privately owned media to adequately reflect indigenous cultural diversity.” One outcome of self-financing, however, is a level of autonomy that is not easily achieved in organizations that rely on the government, the private sector, or nongovernmental organizations.

On the other side of the Andes, the founding myths of national identity in Chile and Argentina are well articulated and critiqued in de la Orden’s Tierra adentro. The documentary follows the road trip of Marcos and Anahí, descendants of opposite sides of the Argentine Conquista del Desierto of 1877–1879, who are tracing the historical journey of Marcos’s great-great-grandfather, the Argentine General Eduardo Racedo (governor of Entre Ríos), who wrote a book on this state-directed massacre. Racedo’s three occupations (general, governor, historian) suggest the three sectors of oligarchical power (the military, the political structure, and the historical record) that provided order, law, and legitimacy for the emergence of the estancieros as a social class that played a leading role in the consolidation of an Argentine nation-state that would become a world agro-exporter. As Anahí and Marcos travel west, the Mapuexpress journalist Alfredo Seguel embarks on his own trip east from Chile to the coast of Argentina to interview Mapuche elders and piece together the history of his ancestors at the eastern edge of Wallmapu. The travelers listen empathetically to conversations about the murder, disappearance, starvation, and slavery of the generation of their great-grandparents and to the viewpoints of landowners who celebrate the victory of the Argentine military as their proud family heritage. Pedro, a student in the city of Bariloche, learns to deal with his divided national identity as an Argentine/Mapuche as he studies the official national history that represents the demise of his people as a sacred event in the stained-glass windows of the local cathedral.

Although the film’s director is not Mapuche, he worked closely with all of the Mapuche participants, assisting them as they wrote the script. By having their own stories reinforced by the analyses of historians Walter Del Río, Mariano Nagy, and Supreme Court Justice Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, the participants in the film together present a strong case that it is time to converse about this history more widely. The struggle that Mapuche communities continue to face in defending their territories from transnational corporate incursions suggests that the genocide of Mapuche and other indigenous communities in Chile and Argentina has not ended.

These examples show how indigenous groups “forge new ground within the human rights regime of international law by moving it to embrace collective rights” according to James Anaya (2006: 111), the first indigenous UN Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples. He argues that indigenous peoples have been working toward weakening the state’s power on four fronts: (1) the recognition of collective rights, including those of unions, women, children, and many other collectives; (2) the weakening of state sovereignty, which has “shielded states from scrutiny over matters that are deemed to be within the realm of their domestic concern” (114) such as crimes against humanity; (3) the expansion of the concept of self-determination in view of developments that have diminished the importance of the state in spheres of community and authority such as transnational corporations and trade agreements to include “the freedom of individuals and groups to form associations and to collectively pursue their own destinies under conditions of equality within the framework of the states within which they live” (117); and (4) the participation in decision making of nonstate actors through “advocacy efforts and consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its subsidiary bodies” (118). As Anaya points out, the UN Declaration reflects changes that were already taking place but also assists peoples whose governments have refused to acknowledge their rights. Mapuche media have been connected to the networks that successfully passed this declaration, and their contribution has offered a strong model of autonomy that challenges nation-state orthodoxy.

Indigenous Media and Plurinational Socialist Communication

The second form of identity challenged by indigenous media is a late-twentieth-century global trend toward the depoliticization of citizenship sometimes seen as “antipolitics” or an elite effort to “disarticulate, delegitimize, and criminalize” popular projects (Mandieta, 2008; Motta, 2013). Whereas Chile is one of the most open neoliberal economies in the world, providing the least protection for its indigenous peoples, in Bolivia and Venezuela neoliberalism has been directly confronted and indigenous peoples have provided leadership in writing new constitutions designed to reflect and codify ongoing reforms of the state to make it respond to the histories, goals, and interests of the people living within its borders.

Bolivia joins Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela in having state-sponsored policies to expand media participation as a right to communication that should be legally recognized and funded. Although their relationships to private media conglomerates differ, these nations share some approaches to state participation in regulating media access to achieve greater media participation. Kitzberger (2010) synthesizes these similarities and differences and repeatedly cites Chile as an exception. Paillan (2014: 4) summarizes this process as follows:

Article 164 of the Bolivian Telecommunications, Information and Communication Technologies Act of 2011 reserves 17 percent of the public radio frequency spectrum for Indigenous First Nations, campesinos, intercultural people, and Afro-descendants and also requires that autonomous municipal governments guarantee the creation of these spaces to enable full participation and social control. . . . Argentina’s 2012 Audiovisual Communication Services Act also reserves 17 percent for indigenous peoples, Article 113 of Ecuador’s Communication Law limits the creation of monopolies or oligopolies and guarantees, through Article 36, the diversity and plurality of voices represented in the media. Special attention is given to the worldview and culture of the peoples of indigenous nationalities, Afro-Ecuadorians and Montubios, reserving for them at least 5 percent of daily programming. Likewise, 4 percent of the radio frequency spectrum shall be free to air and allocated to nonprofit social organizations, indigenous communities, and Afro-descendants.

These laws are in compliance with Article 16 of the UN declaration and have effectively expanded citizens’ media (although recent elections in Argentina and a more general turn to the right across the region are reversing some of these laws). The leader in this process is Bolivia, whose social movements have forced the state to incorporate new actors who have destabilized elite power and reconfigured decision making through a constituent assembly and the resulting constitution. Bolivia shares a number of features with the less well-known case of Ecuador; in both nations, an active indigenous media culture accompanied the creation of new relations among the diverse sectors of their societies.

Article 1 of Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution establishes the country as the first plurinational state, and the same article in the Bolivian Constitution of 2009, with slightly different wording, achieves the same goal. Both constitutions outline the rights of nature; both use indigenous terms (suma kawsay in Ecuador and suma qamaña in Bolivia are those most cited) to describe living well together or well-being, which includes all living beings, not just humans; both were created and approved by constituent assemblies with the leadership (in Bolivia) or the participation (in Ecuador) of indigenous organizations. Both processes required indigenous communication strategies to achieve their goals. One of the most contentious articles in the Ecuadorian constitution prohibits financial institutions from owning media, and recent statutes are further limiting private control in order to open access. Article 312 states: “Financial entities or groups, along with their legal representatives, board members, and shareholders are forbidden to have any share in controlling the capital, investment, or assets of the media” (Republic of Ecuador, 2008).

The new Bolivian constitution introduces suma qamaña as a legal concept to propose a way of living sustainably. The preamble describes the diversity of nature and explains that human pluralism is a result of this diversity, making human beings interdependent with the environment. The first part of the constitution denounces colonialism and proposes a plurinational state with governance at different levels. While a constitution projects ideal forms of social organization, the laws and mechanisms designed to implement it take time to develop. A radically democratic communication system linking strong and autonomous Bolivian social movements with the dominant systems assisted the constituent assembly members in bringing the constitution into existence. The Plan Nacional Indígena Originario de Comunicación Audiovisual began in 1996 not with the government but with five First Nations indigenous and labor union organizations. ² The two major media centers, the Centro de Formación y Realización Cinematográfica (Center for Film Training and Production—CEFREC) and the Coordinadora Audiovisual Indígena Originaria de Bolivia (Coordinator for First Nations Indigenous Audiovisual Production—CAIB), produce innovative documentaries, feature films, and animation by indigenous communities that have drawn the attention of media studies researchers across the world for the way they serve the interests of their communities (Schiwy, 2008; 2009). The material is not commercially available because commercialization of these stories would run counter to those communities’ understanding of the media as communication for the transformation of their nation-states.

The major contribution of comunicadores, then, to indigenous peoples’ self-determination has been their participation in the Bolivian process that produced the constitution and the related laws, but the constitution itself is the discursive expression of a history of communication across the many nations that make up this state. The Agencia Plurinacional de Comunicación (Plurinational Communication Agency—APC Bolivia) defines communication as the inclusion of all peoples in a framework in which they become equipped to participate fully in decision making. Its web site describes it as integrative, communitarian, plural, participatory, educational, decolonizing, and intercultural. ³ These communication processes have also assisted the government in gathering support for major proposals presented at the UN such as the recognition of water as a basic human right and the decriminalization of the coca plant.

Bolivia has also been instrumental in supporting the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Cine y Comunicación de Pueblos Indígenas (Latin American Coordinator of Indigenous Peoples’ Film and Communication—CLACPI), a transnational indigenous communications network that has strengthened local indigenous media production, provided opportunities for technical training, debate, and reflection on the media and communication at a continental level, organized public screenings of work in film festivals, and provided guidance for implementing the legal protections secured in the international regulatory framework of the UN declaration, the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, and other agreements.

One of the most important outcomes of the Bolivian media plan is the ability of weaker communities to make their case to the national and international community when the government fails to consult them or come to an agreement, as is the case of the proposed Villa Tunari–San Ignacio de Moxos Highway between Cochabamba and Beni through the Parque Nacional y Territorio Indígena Isiboro-Secure (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure—TIPNIS). The charge that the government of President Evo Morales has failed to fulfill its obligations in negotiating with indigenous groups affected by the proposed highway has been effectively communicated nationally and to the international media. Since the election of Morales, the government has introduced these major changes through the strong support of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and this alliance has led to the creation of the Alianza Bolivariana para las Américas (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas—ALBA) as an alternative to alliances based on trade alone. ⁴ Although most of the world today is familiar with the name and image of President Hugo Chávez, even many who know about the Bolivarian Revolution will be unaware of the innovative communication laws and processes introduced in Venezuela or the role of indigenous peoples in bringing about twenty-first-century socialism. ⁵ What is proposed in the constitution and subsequent legislation may be different from what communities are able to achieve, but the space opened by the new regulatory regime is often enough to empower local groups to struggle for their own self-determination in new ways. New journalism and audiovisual production have made possible periodicals like Wayuunaki, which offers information about the Wayuu and other indigenous people in both Venezuela and Colombia. These new media are being used for recovery and revitalization of languages, health care, new forms of restorative justice incorporating indigenous concepts, and discussion of national and international legal instruments for defending territories and other resources. Media policies have enabled more than 700 communities to establish centers in which they receive training in the use of the Internet and produce local media (Lehman, 2014).

It may be that the greatest contribution that Venezuela has made to telecommunications across Latin America and Abya Yala has been the creation in 2005 of Telesur, a transnational, multistate-sponsored Latin American news outlet that has strengthened regional integration by offering news from a Latin American perspective. Coverage of indigenous issues tends to be more comprehensive than in national media outlets, and human rights violations silenced in national media may be aired here. The web page houses documentaries about indigenous peoples such as Tierra adentro. In July 2014 print versions of newscasts and original articles began to be published in English on the Telesur web site, and an English-language broadcast began in 2015. This is one of the few news sources that offers the entire speeches of Latin American heads of state at events such as the Summit of the Americas in April 2015.

Indigenous media producers have paid a high price for asserting their right to the media, not only because it is an expensive undertaking requiring the acquisition of a number of technical skills and the ability to relate to different groups locally, nationally, and transnationally but because it has sometimes been criminalized or subjected to violence by local corporations or authorities. Paillan (2014: 2) explains that

they do this not only with the scarce media resources that they have access to but also through their collective work inside their communities, and even with their own lives. From 2003 to 2012, 563 indigenous people were killed in Brazil. In 2012, 104 were killed in Colombia alone, and up to May 2013, 24 people were killed in the same country, where in addition there was a conflict between the state and the FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia]. Last March, Venezuela was shaken by the murder of the leader of the Yukpa people Sabino Romero at the hands of assassins. He had constantly fought against the unjust distribution of his people’s land by the government. In Ecuador, 194 indigenous persons have been indicted for sabotage and terrorism. In other countries, such as Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, Paraguay, and Chile, the situation is not much better.

Other reports support these statistics. The Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Indigenous Regional Council of the Cauca—CRIC) in Colombia documents as many as 12,000 indigenous persons displaced from their homes in 2012 alone (CRIC, 2013). Manuela Picq (2014: 29) offers a reason that so many indigenous persons face violence in that country: “In 2010, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues reported that Colombian mining concessions had been awarded in 80 percent of the country’s legally recognized indigenous territories. Colombia’s government has 8.8 million hectares of indigenous reserves designated as oil areas and granted 168 mining licenses on indigenous reserves in 2011.” The Commission for Historical Clarification (1999) found that in Guatemala, with one of the largest percentages of indigenous peoples, the proportion of victims was far higher than in any other nation during the era of state terrorism, when some 200,000 Maya people were murdered. In Peru, many of the strongest actors in resistance to mining are not affiliated with institutions such as political parties or unions, but their autonomy has enabled them to protect their communities although they have faced tremendous violence in doing so. ⁶ Comunicadores working in these and other contexts face considerable pressure from all sides, including from within their own communities.

Conclusion

These examples from Abya Yala are only a few of the more dramatic cases that provide evidence of the indigenous media’s contribution to the development of pluralist societies that Paillan has described. I have argued that indigenous peoples have taken control of the media to represent their fundamental claims and further their goals of autonomy or self-determination. The case of the Mapuche media offers a clear example of leadership in challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state when it ignores the rights of collectives. Other collectives have joined Mapuche organizations in working against hydroelectric projects, promoting food sovereignty, and protesting transnational agribusiness—issues that cross nation-state borders. James Anaya (2006) has argued that indigenous peoples have weakened state sovereignty and this work has strengthened the UN’s human rights projects.

Bolivia and Venezuela demonstrate the importance of indigenous leadership in constructing plurinational socialism for the twenty-first century. This work of transformation is of benefit beyond indigenous communities. As Paillan (2014: 6) has said,

We believe that setting in place the right to indigenous communication is a necessity that serves the well-being not only of our peoples but also of the whole of Latin American society because the minimum conditions for its realization require that the level of access to media increase, along with the transformation of the current cultural agenda, defined by the elitism, prejudice, conservatism, and commercialization that currently control the media.

Bolivian indigenous media collectives have demonstrated leadership in rejecting the commercialization of media control.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, new regional trade agreements have been proposed that, if concluded, will further restrict the ability of the state to protect its own citizens from transnational power. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement are just two agreements that appear to work toward weakening the state’s ability to regulate the media, which will further empower transnational telecommunications corporations and practices. The three Latin American countries included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership are Mexico, Peru, and Chile, but the rest of Latin America will be affected if they are effectively locked out of most-favored-nation status in a number of areas. Now more than ever, in considering how citizens facing these types of agreements might find the means to resist the loss of their collective rights, the ideas outlined by Paillan (2014: 6) offer a model:

We should be clear that securing the right to indigenous media is not a gift bestowed by the state but a mandate to be achieved. Both the legal reforms and the programs generated by them depend on the communities and the citizens at large, such that they must be an outcome of social work rather than loans from whoever is in government. The state funding that is allocated to the creation, development, and maintenance of indigenous media cannot be dependent on the friendliness of politicians toward a certain leader or sector of the indigenous movement. It is our duty to struggle to make these instruments work autonomously so that, independently of the governing sector, we can continue our documentary work over time.

The work of indigenous media producers is decolonizing the relations among humans and the environment that sustains life. Many more of us will need to learn this lesson as the twenty-first century unfolds.