The Indigenous Peoples of Argentina have publicly expressed their support for the new Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which received preliminary approval by the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation Congress on Thursday, September 17. “It responds to the proposal presented by the broadest spectrum of social sectors” and allows for “an increased awareness of our worldview and the establishment of a means of interaction with other Peoples,” they stated through a press release entitled “The Right to communicate through our own voice.”
As groups with their own cultural identities, the thirty-six Indigenous Peoples of Argentina speak sixteen different languages apart from Spanish and have their own ways and means of communication. “They are an expression of worldviews different than those of the Western world, insofar that they are horizontal, not-for-profit, democratic and necessarily collective,” they explain.
The new law has among its objectives “the preservation and promotion of the identity and cultural values of the indigenous peoples” and considers them as a fourth category of communication service providers, in the proposal made by the National Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples and Organizations after having participated in the twenty-four forums organized by the Federal Broadcasting Agency (COMFER).
As individuals subject to non-state controlled public law recognized by the Argentinian constitution, the indigenous peoples could be permission holders for the installation and operation of broadcasting services. Such a possibility, however, was not recognized by the current legal framework, approved as decree-law during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983), nor by successive decrees signed by the executive power since the return of democratic rule.
“The participation in society through information and knowledge constitutes one of the principal instruments through which one exercises the right of identity and the preservation and development of one’s own cultural models, the right to self-organization and the right to participate in all of the matters that affect us,” they state.
Currently, there is a substantial gap between the implementation of the rights recognized by the national constitution and the reality in the aboriginal reservations. After years of colonization and repression by the state, the Indigenous Peoples lack access to paid work and basic services such as healthcare, education and communication.
Moreover, “we are continually marginalized by the media,” they denounce. “Our voices are silenced, censored, and as such we condemn this as a form of colonialism on the part of the mass media, which only shows a stereotypical, racist and Eurocentric image of us when not praising the values of a single white Western culture”.
And they add: “These same information monopolies are those that depict the reality of the Indigenous Peoples as the ‘indigenous issue’ or ‘indigenous situation’,” ignoring “the intrusion of the provincial governments in the communities,” “the violence grounded in profound racism to hide the economic interests that motivate it” and “the evictions, the mining industries and the damn soybean that wreak havoc in our lives.”
This understanding of indigenous communication (its cultural elements and political and social philosophies, rooted in the profound history of the Indigenous Peoples) by the new law marks an advance in the construction of a media map “that reflects its people, that contributes to the establishment of democracy in our societies, that restores the voice silenced for so many centuries,” they conclude.
*(translation: T.M. Orzolek)*
