Rádios comunitárias na transamazônica: desafios da comunicação comunitária em regiões de midiatização periférica

Abstract

The community radio stations established in the municipalities along the BR 230 that crosses the State of Pará, better known as the Transamazon Highway, are pioneers in the use of communication as a strategy of political action in this region which has inherited one of the most combative movements of popular organizations seeking a more protagonist role in the development of the region. The study of the community radio stations in this unprecedented scenario has allowed us to verify situations which may be considered as emblematic for a wider universe of radio stations in small municipalities in remote regions such as the Amazon, and in situations which reflect the more general dilemmas of the community radio stations as a whole in the country. Especially two theories sustain this study: the theory of social fields of Bourdieu and the theory of mediation by Martín-Barbero. In the same way the authors of the critical Latin American upstream about communication give a light upon the collected data during the field research, especially Beltrán and Mattelart. The question is then how do the community radio stations become established and function and if, in fact, they succeed in acting as a model of alternative communication, based on participation and dialogue in a field characterised by what we call the peripheral mediatisation, , in which the pattern of concentration of means of production and the flow of capital that take place at national and global levels, albeit, with growing precarious nature and insufficiency of living conditions and the increasingly evident promiscuous relationship between the media and power. The community radio stations arise in this context as a potential counter position to the unidirectional (monologic), and vertical (authoritarian), which, with growing strength, still dominate peripheral territories. Meanwhile, in practice the tearing up of the identity of the resistance of the social movements, a crisis which is not exclusive to the study region, weakens and distances the movements and compromise the mechanisms of participation of the community radios in everyday life. However, the institutionalities, translated into diverse conditionalities such as laws, rules or public policies, which are paradoxically traversed and dominated by the logics of private enterprise, which limit the development of community radio stations in the country and which, in a very particular way, impede them from complying with their intended role in either rural or isolated regions, precisely those regions which are most excluded from access to communication. These generate diverse barriers, a prime example is the limit imposed on the capacity (25 Watts) and range (4 km) of the community radio stations. If the legislation that regulates the sector is not made more flexible the possibility of operating community radio stations under current conditions in territories characterised by considerable distances and low population densities, as is the case in much of the Amazon region, or will be relegated to fiction.