World Social Forum Threatens to Oust Community Radio

The World Social Forum is threatening to evict the only broadcasting community radio from the social forum.

Porto Alegre, 28 January 2005. A convergence of community radio activists from all over Brazil has set up a low-power FM community radio station for broadcasting to the World Social Forum. In a strange turn of the table, the World Social Forum, which is supposed to be a tool of popular struggle and resistence all over the world, has informed the station that it is going to evict it in the coming morning to make way for the government data processing department, which suddenly needs to move into this small loft at the top of the Social Forum's media center.

In the days leading up to the World Social Forum, the Forum had agreed through internet that community radio stations would set up an official radio station to operate on 87.9 FM as the official station of the World Social Forum. A great many community radio stations in Brazil, however, lack any Internet connection and were unable to take part in the official, and apparently exclusive, community radio--whose member stations seem to be funded by international NGOs. In response, the community volunteers set up their own station which is operating on 87.3 FM. They were furthermore incensed that the Social Forum was paying the government for five days rights to the frequency, which goes against the practice and ethic of local low-power community radio stations.

The station just decided to call itself "The Other Radio FM," although since the official station blew out two transmitters, including one loaned to it by Stephen Dunifer of Free Radio Berkeley, the Other Radio turns out to be the only radio of the social forum. The official radio was furthermore to have broadcast the AMARC coverage of the World Social Forum, and without the Other Radio, there would have been no broadcasts.

This evening, after getting its eviction notice, the Other Radio volunteers have been frantically organizing a resistence which furthermore is going to bring out the Forum's treatment of its volunteer workers who have come from local and indigenous communities all over Brazil. There was a women wearing her traditional dress up with them who had been promised reimbusement for transport, food and lodging, but who found herself working 24 hours a day with no reimbursement or lodging at all.

In effort to resist this action, the youth camp has promised to rebroadcast the station's programs. AMARC volunteers here are publicizing this unfortunate decision to its listserve and asking everyone to write to the Social Forum to desist from this action, which is entirely against the spirit of the World Social Forum.

Persecution of community radio under the Lula government is not a new thing, as more community radio stations have been shut down under Lula, at the behest of the large commercial broadcasters, than under the previous government. Some of the volunteers here are themselves from the community radio Radiro Comunitaria, of the local Barrios, which had its transmitters and equipment confiscated on August 4, 2004.

For more information about this, see the IndyMedia article: http://www.midiaindependente.org/en/blue/2004/08/288655.shtml