Global Kiosk

Inside Voladora Radio

There are often odd stories coming my way from Mexico – the kinds of stories that leave a person indignant and that invariably highlight the vast gulf between the people who run that country and those who have just have to deal with them with their greed and obtuseness.

Just yesterday I learned of a verbal attack on a humble community radio station in the town of Amecameca in Estado de Mexico called Voladora Radio. Up and running for ten years now, it is one of many such under-funded little stations maintained usually by poor or ethnic communities to provide information on what matters to them rather than what matters to politicians and corporations selling them stuff.

This latest attempt to bully Voladora comes from one Jaime Ramos, a consultant with the largest, if not only, body representing Mexico’s largest and wealthiest media owners (television and radio), the National Television and Radio Industry Chamber, or CIRT.

Now the background to what has inspired Jaime Ramos’s fit of pique is the requirement by the official electoral authorities that all media devote time to commercials produced by all the different political parties already jockeying for position in next year’s presidential election. What Voladora has been doing is running the ads with a proviso, before and after each, stating that they do so against their will and obliged by political parties in which they have no faith. In other words, they tell the truth.

But what really bothers Jaime Ramos is that these small radio stations are being officially recognized now, given airspace that the oligarchs of the CIRT want in order to make more money for themselves. The idea of grassroots radio stations getting broadcast rights for programming without ads for junk food, or news casts that tell only half a story, or inducements to watch crappy telenovelas  — without, in sum, the cheery party line that all is well in Mexico as long as the status quo is not challenged – is what is really driving them round the bend.

For the Mexican powers-that-be, especially in the intellectual desert that is the media, losing even a little bit of control is portrayed as catastrophic. Yet the fuss they are making only illuminates just what idiots they so often are. And their assumption that broadcast rights are something to be divvied up among enterprises with money and profit motives is yet another indication of how comfortably they rob the general populace of their nation’s resources.

Another great shot from Ivan Daniel.

Well it’s time to begin restocking the Global Kiosk; in fact, it’s more like long overdue. But work and travel have kept me too busy to do anything but collect clippings on things I would like to write about. There was my book launch to organize in early June, and copies to send out to the many people in the social movements I wrote about in it.

There was also the speech I had to prepare for a panel at Toronto’s Centre for Victims of Torture, a very valuable but insufficiently funded  service that helps immigrants to Canada who have suffered in their homelands from political upheaval, imprisonment without trial, much less anything like legitimate charges, and torture.

I spoke on the connection between poverty and human rights abuse, an obvious connection, really, that has everything to do with the lack of accountability of repressive governments towards most of their populations  but especially the poor.

Then on a completely different note, I visited a farm this week in the Toronto suburb of Brampton for an article on FarmStart for the Globe and Mail. Flanked by malls and newly built housing complexes,  factory stacks and apartment buildings looming in the distance, the McVean Farm was a muddy oasis of flourishing market gardens. The urban folk who rent its plots cultivate all kinds of healthy organic produce for growing numbers of Torontonians, and bring fresh thinking to modern, family-based agriculture in general. As they put it, projects like FarmStart can meet the challenges of farming head on “with a variety of solutions that promote a sustainable, healthy and regional food supply.” It does so by encouraging new farmers from all walks of life and different countries to look for entrepreneurial strategies through small-plot, high-value, intensive agriculture.

While carrying out my interviews in its 19^th-century wooden barn, I had to make an effort to not be distracted by the constant swoopings of the resident barn swallows. Their dive-bombing raids on mosquitoes and other flying insects were difficult to ignore when I needed to be concentrating on listening and asking questions. But it has been so many years since I’ve even seen a barn swallow, I just had to add a photo below. (They’re the tiny pale specks on the slanted beam in the top left-hand corner.)

In fact, this is going to be one Globe and Mail article I will probably link to this blog once it’s finally published in its on-line Your Business/Sustainability section.

In the meantime, the most I can do is put in a link here to an article from the Guardian on how the International Monetary Fund is set to interfere in the popular aspirations for a better economic future in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. Even as its president Dominique Strauss-Kahn languishes in luxurious house arrest in Manhattan, the IMF is hoping to lock in its “neo-liberal projects” before elections can be held in those countries.

Then there is an article on the need for the OECD to “give up control of the aid agenda” by Jonathan Glennie, whose book on the structural shortcomings of aid to Africa I am in the process of reading.

There should be lots more coming now that I seem to have time to take a breather from conventional journalism. There is certainly a constant supply of stories out there about the depredations of big corporations and feckless governments on world’s poor. Maybe I’ll even get around to finally cleaning my house.