Page 175 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Global Commun ty Med a

the dangers oF doCuMenting CoMMunity struggles
In May 2006, 70,000 public school teachers of the state chapter of the National Educational
Workers’ Union called a strike to protest the declining support for public schools in the state
of Oaxaca, Mexico, after the governor refused to meet with educators to discuss the issue.
As the civil action grew, the teachers were joined by other unions, groups, and organiza-
tions, and the strike became a burgeoning people’s movement protesting the accelerating
economic hardships brought on by seven years of the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA). On June 14, 2006, Governor Ulises Ruiz sent in state police to dislodge over
600 protestors who had set up an encampment in the town’s main square. Sixty civil associa-
tions together drafted a letter of support for the protests condemning the police violence
and the growing attacks by extra-judicial military forces. The teachers broadcast their mes-
sages using a community radio station, and when their station was destroyed, university
students helped organizers broadcast over theirs. The protest lasted for months.
By the fall of 2006, working with Indymedia in New York City, American journalist Brad Will
went to Mexico to report on the protest for the Independent Media Center. On October 27,
2006, Brad Will was shot and killed while filming and reporting from Oaxaca. Human rights
activists continue to call for a full investigation into the death of Brad Will and other Oaxa-
cans who have been killed during the protests. Independent New York–based filmmakers
Tami Gold and Gerardo Renique released a videotape titled Land Rain and Fire: Report
from Oaxaca, distributed by Third World Newsreel (www.twn.org), which offers background,
analysis, and documentation of the events leading up to the protest and police brutality
against the demonstrators.

took many decades to be ended, just as many decades passed before women
were allowed to vote, and the labor movement took a long while to win the right
to the eight-hour working day, to a paid annual vacation, to health care (all of
which are seriously under siege again at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury). Measuring the true impact of community media requires we grasp this
essential contrast in a time frame.
Overall, then, we need to avoid lumping all media clumsily together as though
they all operate the same way. Only then can we understand the roles of com-
munity media.

CommuniTy mEDia in ThE TwEnTiETh CEnTury
Examples from the twentieth century have been very numerous indeed. Most
have yet to receive a proper description and analysis. Two interlinked develop-
ments, according to the German writer Walter Benjamin, have been decisive in
this mushroom growth, though his argument is adapted slightly here to bring it
up to date.
One is the emergence of cheap and accessible media technologies. In his day
he pointed to the still camera and to film, and their production in vast quantities.