Latin America, Media, and Revolution: Communication in Modern Mesoamerica (The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication)

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Author: Juanita Darling

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Latin America, Media, and Revolution

Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication Series editor: Philip Seib, University of Southern California (USA) From democratization to terrorism, economic development to conflict resolution, global political dynamics are affected by the increasing pervasiveness and influence of communication media. This series examines the participants and their tools, their strategies and their impact. It offers a mix of comparative and tightly focused analyses that bridge the various elements of communication and political science included in the field of international studies. Particular emphasis is placed on topics related to the rapidly changing communication environment that is being shaped by new technologies and new political realities. This is the evolving world of international political communication. Editorial Board Members: Hussein Amin, American University in Cairo (Egypt) Robin Brown, University of Leeds (UK) Eytan Gilboa, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) Steven Livingston, George Washington University (USA) Robin Mansell, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) Holli Semetko, Emory University (USA) Ingrid Volkmer, University of Melbourne (Australia) Books Appearing in this Series Media and the Politics of Failure: Great Powers, Communication Strategies, and Military Defeats By Laura Roselle The CNN Effect in Action: How the News Media Pushed the West toward War in Kosovo By Babak Bahador Media Pressure on Foreign Policy: The Evolving Theoretical Framework By Derek B. Miller New Media and the New Middle East Edited by Philip Seib The African Press, Civic Cynicism, and Democracy By Minabere Ibelema Global Communication and Transnational Public Spheres By Angela M. Crack Latin America, Media, and Revolution: Communication in Modern Mesoamerica By Juanita Darling

Latin America, Media, and Revolution Communication in Modern Mesoamerica

Juanita Darling

LATIN AMERICA , MEDIA , AND REVOLUTION

Copyright © Juanita Darling, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60443–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–60443–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Darling, Juanita. Latin America, media, and revolution : communication in modern Mesoamerica / Juanita Darling. p. cm.—(Palgrave Macmillan series in international political communication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60443–9 1. Mass media—Political aspects—Latin America. 2. Revolutions— Latin America. 3. Latin America—Politics and government— 20th century. I. Title. P95.82.L29D37 2008 302.23098—dc22

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2008 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

To my parents, Robert Lewis Darling and Joanne Mae Darling, who believed in me even when there was little reason to do so.

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C ontents

Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1 Media and Revolution

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Chapter 2 A Mesoamerican Media Backgrounder

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Chapter 3 Newspapers and Citizenship in Revolutionary Nicaragua

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Chapter 4

The Antenna in the Arsenal

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Chapter 5

Zapatismo in Mexico and Cyberspace

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Chapter 6 Refuting the Revolution

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Chapter 7

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Why Media Matter in Revolution

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Ack now ledgments

To complete this book, I relied on the support, encouragement, and generosity of many individuals and institutions. Despite the risk of offending some of them by omission, I would be remiss not to make an attempt to acknowledge those who helped me. Lucila Vargas, Lois Boynton, Richard Cole, Richard Kohn, and Wendy Wolford offered indispensable advice and insights. Debashis Aikat, David Griffiths, and Donald Shaw commented on early work that evolved into chapters, while John Berteaux and Mardi Chalmers made suggestions in the final stages of writing. The Institute for Latin American Studies and the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided crucial funding. I was able to stretch those funds further, thanks to the hospitality of my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Doña Graciela Bermudez de Centeno and Don José Antonio Centeno in El Salvador, and Doña Aracely Acosta de Jarquín and Don Oswaldo Jarquín in Nicaragua. The staff at El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador, the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América in Managua, and the Yale University Latin American Collection efficiently and cheerfully provided access to archives vital to my work, as did Doña Concepción Villafuerte at El Tiempo in San Cristóbal de las Casas. My parents, Robert and Joanne Darling, and my sister, Cindi Darling, provided encouragement. The SEALS and my office mate, Annisa Lai Lee, shared my journey, understanding obstacles and triumphs as only fellow travelers can. Finally, Marco Antonio Centeno made my research and writing possible by proofreading almost every iteration of the study and keeping our home cheerful, and our pets, Yin-Yang and Pandora, safe, as he has throughout our marriage.


CH A P T ER

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Media and Revolution

Presses that once belonged to a dictator printed, “We Won, Now Onward!,” the first headline of a new revolutionary newspaper.1 Deep into a night of bombing, when the emergency broadcast system had offered no explanations, much less instructions, a voice on a shortwave frequency explained that a recently formed guerrilla front had launched a nationwide offensive.2 Rebels took over four county seats and faded back into the jungle, sending their manifesto by Fax to major newspapers as quickly as the government could offer its explanation for the events.3 Within months, supporters were reading their communiqués on computer screens all over the world. In each situation, rebels took the initiative by taking charge of the media message. Revolutionaries no longer need risk standing on street corners to hand out pamphlets or rely on an intrepid correspondent to hike in and take their message to the world. In some cases, they can communicate their versions of events and responses to government proposals internationally more quickly than they can consult their own followers. These changes go beyond mere convenience. The medium that revolutionaries use limits or expands their potential audience. It also places demands on the organization to protect and finance the presses or transmitters that produce their newspapers or broadcasts. Differences in the media available to revolutionaries influence the way rebels use media, during both armed rebellions and the peace processes that follow them. Those distinctions may even alter the very nature of revolution. This study compares three Mesoamerican revolutions—in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas, Mexico—waged under similar conditions over a twenty-year period. Despite these similarities, each group of rebels chose a notably different medium as the primary focus of its communication strategy. Though in all three cases, the rebels utilized a variety of media, only one of those became the official or dominant medium. The purpose of this study is to understand how

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LATIN AMERICA, MEDIA, AND REVOLUTION

each group used its respective primary communication medium and the possibilities and limitations that the choice offered as well as the demands it made. Understanding those differences requires looking at communication as a relationship between producers and their audience that is conducted via a media technology. Each producer and audience member brings a background and set of assumptions to the relationship, some shared, some not. The technology provides a context that may either reinforce or mitigate any differences or similarities, a concept that Mark Poster calls “the mode of information.” Poster conceives of the mode of information as a successor to Marx’s mode of production and explains it as “forms of linguistic experience that have emerged in the course of the twentieth century.”4 Poster’s writing about twentieth-century forms of experience includes the context of their relationship to forms developed prior to the twentieth century, such as speech and print, providing a basis of comparison among those forms. He offered the theory, “to promote further theoretical development and empirical research.”5 This research further develops the concept by comparing radio, a mode of information that Poster did not fully consider, to newspapers and the Internet, two modes that he examined closely. This study also considers revolution, a context that Poster did not fully develop; it explores whether new forms of linguistic experience would affect revolutions as he posits they would affect a household or a business. Examining revolution as a context responds to Jeremy Popkin’s efforts to encourage comparative historical examinations of the role that media have played in revolutions. As he and fellow historian Jack R. Censer have noted, “In general, comparative studies of revolutions have more often been the work of sociologists rather than historians, who, by training and disciplinary inclination, tend to specialize in a single national history. Journalism historians, located in schools of journalism or communications, are often more ecumenical in their interests, but they, too, are limited by the problem of learning multiple languages and mastering disparate bodies of sources.”6 Comparison allowed me to recognize a need for expanding the commonly used definition of revolutionary media to describe their role more fully.7 This study considers the content of the media message, the technology that each rebel group chose, and the way both producers and audience used technology and content. It combines historical research with the tools of the anthropologist to place the technology within the social and cultural situation in which it was used to understand the mode of information as a connection between producers and audience.

MEDIA AND REVOLUTION

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Contemporary History The seeds of this study were planted long before I started the research. So, in a way, this study began during the thirteen months between 1994 and early 1995 when I roamed the highlands and jungles of Chiapas with other reporters. We recorded memories of exploitation and declarations of rebellion from peasants in ski masks. We drove for hours on rutted roads to sling our hammocks in rural school houses, waiting to be wakened by the strumming of guitars and a sniff of Subcommander Marcos’ cherry-scented tobacco. After serenades of revolutionary music, discussions about the legacy of Emiliano Zapata, and river baths supervised by armed guards of our own gender, we drove back out of the rebel-occupied area that we jokingly called “Marcoslandia” and took the story of the new Zapatistas to the world.8 By February 1995, Mexico’s army and its new president, Ernesto Zedillo, were fed up. Under the pretext of delivering arrest warrants to leaders of the rebellion that had begun in January 1, 1994, the army sent tanks into “Marcoslandia” and set up roadblocks to keep the media out.9 Confined to the charming colonial city of San Cristóbal de las Casas and isolated from the jungle where the story was developing, the reporters became restless and frustrated. And then the situation got worse. Colleagues began to get “rockets”: dreaded messages from editors accusing reporters of missing stories. Only the stories we were supposed to have missed—tanks in the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, bombing on the periphery of the city—were not true. Editors based their inquiries about the lack of reports from correspondents on readers’ complaints that the media were covering up the story about the army’s operations in Chiapas. The readers got their information from their computers or, more precisely, from their listservs, a relatively new form of communication in 1995.10 The people most interested in news from Chiapas were not relying on television or radio, much less newspapers, for information. They were getting minute-by-minute updates, albeit erroneous updates sometimes, from their computer communication networks. Further, they were using those networks to pressure news organizations and the governments of United States and Mexico. “Our” rebels were talking to “our” readers without us. That was when I became aware of how effectively revolutionaries could use their own media to communicate directly with supporters and potential supporters. Over the next five years, working in Central America in the wake of the Nicaraguan revolution and Salvadoran

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civil war, I became aware of how deeply attached audiences had become to their rebels’ media. The fates of Barricada, the Sandinista newspaper in Nicaragua, and the Salvadoran rebel radio stations were being hotly debated during the years I covered those countries. That awareness was part of the baggage that I brought with me when I began a doctoral program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001. It was part of the journalistic experience that I hoped to use to build a framework that would help me gain a deeper understanding of my experiences and find a deeper meaning in what I had witnessed. Thus, although these events took place within the lifetime of most readers, I have studied them as history. As Eric Hobsbawm has reflected, history is marked by the turning of a page, “turn[ing] a tract of time into a historic period with its own structure and coherence or incoherence.”11 In discussing his decision to write a history of the twentieth century in 1993, Hobsbawm stated: “It would be absurd to say that we can now stand back from it, as we can from the nineteenth century, but at least we can see it as a whole.”12 He was referring to the fall of the Soviet Union. In the same way, the 1990 Nicaraguan election and the end of the Salvadoran civil war in 1992 marked the turning of a page in the history of the Central American nations. From the perspective of the negotiated settlements, we can see as a whole the six decades after the first Somoza government took power and the 1932 massacre that ended the Americas’ first socialist uprising.13 In Mexico, the 2000 election that ended seventy years of one-party rule marked the close of an era that began when that party took power after a bloody revolution.14 As Manuel Castells noted in 1997, “The Zapatistas have already transformed Mexico, inducing a crisis in the corrupt politics and unjust economy prevailing in Mexico, while putting forward proposals for democratic reconstruction that are being widely debated in Mexico and throughout the world.”15 Similarly, the Mexican Army’s 1995 entrance into the Chiapas canyons set off a chain of events whose repercussions can clearly be traced to that action.

The Region An expanse of contiguous countries dominated by two similar languages and sharing interwoven histories, Latin America overcomes many of the challenges to comparative historical study that Popkin and Censer have recognized. One common factor that each country has been forced to contend with is the threat (realized repeatedly in


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the cases of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti) of U.S. intervention in moments of national crisis. Yet, each country also has a distinctive enough culture that make comparisons meaningful. Such comparisons have produced fruitful analyses in a variety of fields, including media studies comparing and contrasting the development of press and broadcast outlets in the region.16 Narrowing the focus to late-twentieth-century Mesoamerica brings the comparison into sharper relief. Mesoamerica is the middle of the Americas, a region that combines southern Mexico and the Central American isthmus. In pre-Columbian history, it was a region shared by the Maya and the Aztecs. During the colonial era, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas were all part of the same backwater viceroyalty, the Peoria of an empire that Mexican and Peruvian gold sustained. Their communication media developed in the same tradition

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of centralism, authoritarianism, and hierarchy. With independence in the 1820s, indigenous identity was discarded as an obstacle to creating a united, mestizo, or mixed-race nation.17 That internal identity formation accompanied a shift in external focus. Free of the crumbling Spanish empire, Mesoamerica faced the emerging influence of the United States. Selective military invasions reinforced economic control. Tying smaller nations to the global economy through a single crop or product made them dependent on international markets. An elite class controlled access to those markets, and through them the country, for the benefit of the international buyers.18 The effects of that early globalization based on elite control were among the factors that led peasants in Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to take up arms in the early twentieth century. Mexican peasants even marched triumphantly into the capital. Ultimately, all three movements failed or were hijacked. The memory of their failure as well as their principles influenced revolutionary movements at the end of the century, leading the later rebels to reexamine revolution as more than a military effort to seize control. In that context, all three insurgent groups recognized themselves as revolutionaries during the period under study. No matter when or whether a moment of seizing power occurred, all three groups considered themselves to be revolutionaries. As Manuel Castells has noted, “Social movements must be understood on their own terms: they are what they say they are. Their practices (and foremost, their discursive practices) are their self-definition. This approach takes us away from the hazardous task of interpreting the ‘true’ consciousness of movements, as if they could only exist by revealing the ‘real’ structural contradictions. As if, in order to come to life, they would necessarily have to bear these contradictions as they bear their weapons and brandish their flags.”19 All three of these movements said that they were revolutions. Because of these similarities, the three revolutions meet the criteria that sociologist Theda Skocpol has outlined for developing analytic, historically grounded comparisons using, what she termed, the method of difference. Skocpol has written that the method works best in comparing cases with “connections that either hold good across similar historical instances or else account in potentially generalizable terms for outcomes across space and time in otherwise similar cases.”20 Skocpol has been instrumental in developing the theory of revolution that was dominant from the mid-twentieth century until the 1980s: that revolutions result from outside pressures that cripple economies, and destabilize governments.21 Structuralist theories of that period minimized the role of ideology, and thus media, in


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revolution. Skocpol concluded that successful revolutions were preceded by international competition and internal structures that permitted elites to resist efforts to meet such competition, leading to a breakdown of the state. That situation combined with peasant uprisings to create a revolution.22 Sociologist Jack Goldstone, building on Skocpol’s work, focused more specifically on superpower relationships and rivalries with third world countries, as well as urbanization, inflation, and demographic growth. He broadened Skocpol’s analysis of causes to include the role of ideology and mass mobilization, creating a context for examining media activity. Goldstone has observed that on the eve of revolution, as the powers of the state weaken, a flood of “pamphlet literature” appears and new symbols representing conflicting viewpoints are created.23

Gramsci and Revolution More recently, scholars have reassessed structuralist theories, reexamining interpretations that see revolutions as forms of social movement, privileging media’s role in transformation. Those who reconsidered the theories, have found that Antonio Gramsci proposed a way to think about revolution that assigned media and journalists a significant role in social change. Revolution, he wrote, was not the moment of taking power but a process that began before that moment and continued afterward. Power is obtained and retained not only by coercion but also by consensus, a phenomenon he called hegemony. Historian Florencia Mallon has provided an insightful way to understand hegemony: First, hegemony is a set of nested, continuous processes through which power and meaning are contested, legitimated, and redefined at all levels of society. According to this definition, hegemony is hegemonic process: it can and does exist everywhere at all times. Second, hegemony is an actual end point, the result of hegemonic processes. An always dynamic or precarious balance, a contract or agreement, is reached among contesting forces. Because hegemonic processes have contributed to the emergence of a common social and moral project that includes popular as well as elite notions of political culture, those in power are then able to rule through a combination of coercion and consent.24

The hegemony of the ruling group—its version of history, interpretation of the present, and vision of the future—becomes the basis for

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the nation.25 Thus, as historian Eric Hobsbawm has written, “The basic problem of hegemony is not how to come to power, rather how to be accepted, not just as rulers but as guides and leaders.”26 Gramsci’s work, written as Italian socialism was being defeated by fascism, had a profound effect on Latin American leftists stunned by the overthrow of elected leftist governments in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973) and Che Guevara’s 1967 military defeat and death in Bolivia.27 As the United States and the Soviet Union split the world into two blocs, communist and noncommunist, a cold war corollary of the Monroe Doctrine developed: Leftist movements in Latin America became symptoms of extrahemispheric influence, this time from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, rather than the old European empires. The United States worked to prevent leftists from taking power away from the elite groups that sustained dependence and to overthrow any such movements that succeeded. With the notable exception of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, leftist military and electoral victories were short-lived. The forces that sustained the prevailing system of dependence crushed both before they could implement any meaningful change. “Systematic Marxist thought about the political strategy of transformation,” Hobsbawm has written, “grew not out of victory but out of defeat.”28 As a result, revolution became “no longer an insurrectional act of taking over state power process that includes intellectual and moral reform revolution in building a new hegemony. . . . Ideas and culture become positive, power is not an institution but a relationship among social forces. . . . Will, passion, and faith become more important than structure.”29 By the late 1980s, Susan Eckstein was writing about a “historicalstructural perspective [that] show[s] ideologies, values, traditions and rituals to be of consequence.”30 That new attention to the relationship among social forces, including ideologies, values, traditions, and rituals, led to a shift that was strategic as well as tactical, as Colombian communication scholar Jesús Martín-Barbero has written. “Proposals today are very different from those behind the left-wing theories and actions up to the mid-1970s—organizations built exclusively around the proletariat, politics of total transformation of society, the denunciation of bourgeois parliaments as a trap,” he has noted. Economic and symbolic battles become as important as military confrontations.31 In a Gramscian view of revolution, as opposed to the old structuralist view, neither a political approach nor an armed rebellion would be sufficient: The two had to be combined to create the kind of revolutions that took place in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Clandestine armed rebels in the hinterlands sought out and fortified alliances with


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public social forces such as the Roman Catholic Church, labor unions, students, and international sympathizers.32 In El Salvador, the guerrillas openly affiliated with a political, nonmilitary arm, the Democratic Revolutionary Front that maintained diplomatic missions in the United States and Europe. Those organizations served as both a source of recruits and allies in a struggle for legitimacy, a challenge for the identity of the nation. These were wars fought on multiple fronts, including a media front. Similarly, in Chiapas, the Zapatistas took the name of the most radical, indigenous hero of the 1910 Revolution as part of their effort to force a reexamination of the meaning of that earlier revolution, the source of legitimacy or hegemony for the class that governed Mexico for seventy years.33 All three resulted from what cultural scholar Néstor García Canclini has called “hybridization” and defined as “socio-cultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, which existed in separate forms, combine to generate new structures, objects, and practices.”34 The most obvious example of such combination is the fact that guerrillas in both El Salvador and Nicaragua were “fronts,” sometimes uneasy alliances of groups that had separately decided to take up arms. All three movements brought together urban intellectuals, peasants, and the devout, bringing elements of each into a hybrid identity that challenged the existing national identity. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters of this book recount how they used their media to reach out to potential national and international allies to share a new vision of what their region, their nation, and the world could be. As economist John Holloway and social scientist Eloína Peláez argue, the Zapatistas proposed a new form of revolution, “the struggle, not of a past to be defended, but of a world to be constructed. This understanding of their struggle means that, unlike almost all previous revolutions, the Zapatista Revolution does not aim to take power.”35 Instead, although these three Mesoamerican struggles included armed rebellion, they conformed to Gramsci’s vision of a form of revolution that may include a moment of seizing power, as it did in Nicaragua, but may just as legitimately result in negotiations, as it has in El Salvador and Chiapas (and ultimately in Nicaragua, as well). What matters is the transformation of society. In this view of revolution, intellectuals “see themselves as autonomous and independent of the ruling group” when, in fact, they influence the consensus that keeps one group in power or allows revolutionaries to seize control. For that reason, any group aspiring to control a society must develop its own intellectuals. While everyone has intellectual attributes, not everyone functions as an intellectual.36

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Among those who do are journalists “who regard themselves as literary men, philosophers, and artists, [and, therefore] regard themselves also as the ‘true’ intellectuals.” Using the example of the weekly Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci has advocated a type of journalism and a type of journalist that “no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, ‘permanently persuasive’ because he is not purely an orator.”37 Thus, Gramsci’s view of revolution requires a broader view of revolutionary media than the definition supplied by media scholars William and Harva Hachten: “Illegal and subversive mass communication utilizing the press and broadcasting to overthrow a government or wrest control from alien rulers.”38

Revolutionary Media The Hachtens’ definition was itself revolutionary when they introduced it in 1981. For the previous twenty-five years, studies on international communication had been dominated by the cold war paradigm of the four theories of the press as authoritarian, libertarian, Soviet, and social responsibility models.39 All these models conceived of the media as part of what Gramsci would consider the dominant hegemony. The Hachtens, experts on Africa, were the first to recognize that media also exist outside the dominant hegemony and are employed by groups seeking power. Their definition remains the only conceptualization of revolutionary media widely recognized in journalism and communication studies. While the conceptualization is a significant contribution to understanding the role of media, the Hachtens’ definition is limiting. If hegemony is a process as well as an outcome, then the media that influence the creation of hegemony are no longer ephemeral, simply an afterthought like taking a radio station at the beginning of a coup d’etat. Instead, revolutionary media become part of the process of challenging the existing hegemony and creating an alternative. The Hachtens’ definition is based in part on the ideas that Lenin explored in 1910 as he contemplated “Where to Begin” a revolution. He proposed beginning it with a newspaper as both a medium for spreading the revolutionary message and a medium for organizing the revolution itself.40 He defended that idea again strongly in What Is to Be Done?41 That view places the emphasis on an aspect of revolutionary media that coincides with what one proposed classification system for radio has called clandestine: “Generally short-wave, during certain hours of the day, normally broadcasting to a region or zone


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information to include news of an ongoing struggle and exhortations for support from the population, it is financed by the groups that use it; its portable equipment is not particularly expensive; these radio operations are part of a political movement and their importance is on the message more than the level of professionalism; it is associated with dissident groups.” However, the media I studied also incorporated elements of what this classification system considers popular, international, religious, and cultural or educational media.42 (All these forms of media are in contrast to what I call mainstream media and define as media that accept the established social and economic order. Such media may criticize individual rulers or isolated practices, even calling for reform, but mainstream media do not advocate overthrow of the government or a radical transformation of the society that keeps the current leaders in power.) The wealth of analysis of the pamphlets and newspapers produced during the French and U.S. Revolutions in particular, indicates that revolutionary media are complex phenomena and that their relationship to the movements they promote goes beyond the tasks enumerated for clandestine radio.43 Studies that undertook such analysis include Jürgen Habermas’ work on café discussions of newspaper articles, in which he found that as French subjects questioned the actions of the monarchy and debated current affairs, they became citizens. Thus, the importance of the newspapers was not only in their content but also in the way they were read: sometimes aloud and always accompanied by discussion. This style of use created forums for discussion that Habermas called Offentlichkeit, which is commonly translated into English as public sphere.44 Drawing on the work of Habermas, sociologist Alberto Melucci introduced the concept that “emerging power is increasingly based not solely on material strength but on the production and circulation of information.”45 For that reason, he argues, “The control of ideology and, more generally, the flow of information is an important leadership resource . . . necessary in the continuous adaptation of symbolic representations to the present state of the movement.” This concept is crucial to understanding how revolutionaries use media. First, control of a communication medium allows a revolutionary group to make a cultural offering, challenging the domination of the state by providing an alternative cultural model that challenges the dominant discourse.46 Second, communication media provide tools for introducing information into the public sphere, creating the opportunity to redefine what is public.47 That is precisely the function that rebel radio fulfilled, as Salvadoran guerrilla commander

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Joaquín Villalobos told an interviewer: “The role of Radio Venceremos has been to break down the information wall and make other information available. It became an instrument that expresses the complexity of the Salvadoran process, that instructs the masses, that becomes part of the diplomatic battle, that becomes part of the debate with the army.”48 Thus, part of the way that revolutionary media seek to overthrow the existing government, to establish the alternative hegemony of the revolution, is by opening the public sphere, making the bases on which society operates subject to discussion, reevaluation, and change. Revolutionary media seek to rewrite what Stuart Hall has called “the narrative of the nation,” the foundational myths and allegories that contribute to the formation of cultural identity.49 The cultural identity of the nation, in MartínBarbero’s view, is under continued negotiation to reconcile a wide range of contradictions.50 An important part of the allegories, as well as a source of the contradictions, are national heroes. In writing about monuments to heroes, García Canclini has made an observation that is more widely applicable: “Certain heroes of the past live in the middle of the conflicts that develop in the middle of any modern city among systems of political and commercial signs, traffic signals, and social movements.”51 Like their monuments, the legacies of the heroes of the past continue to exist in modern conflicts, symbolizing the contradictions that ebb and flow as the national identity is renegotiated. The media become one of the sites of negotiation, as Eckstein has noted: The media can become a channel through which alternative views, symbols, and meanings get expressed. This implies that media discourses frame issues for the public, and that the media may become an arena in which groups struggle over the definition and construction of social reality. For those reasons, the ruling classes in Latin America, especially, but not exclusively under military regimes, have often exercised tight control over what views get expressed. Illiteracy and poverty have further limited these media functions in the region. Nonetheless, the media have been of consequence to protest and resistance movements in the region. . . . The significance of the media may lie not only in enabling contesting groups to air their views, but also in exposing people to alternative ways of life and thought, and in so doing mobilizing the previously uninformed to seek change.52

To help them realize that media potential, revolutionary groups have sought to control their own media, putting their message beyond the control of the ruling classes. Revolutionary media are a means for


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questioning the existing hegemony, making it possible to conceive of a different hegemony, a different nation. Revolutionary media spread the concept of an alternative beyond the region where rebels’ physical presence can be detected—to the rest of the nation and to the international community. This role can be essential. As political scientist Jorge Castañeda noted in Utopia Desarmada, commenting on the failure of the Mexican guerrilla movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “In a country as urban and spread out as Mexico, no rural, localized guerrilla movement could have triumphed. . . . If [Lucio] Cabañas and [Genaro] Vázquez had received some external aid to break their isolation and increase their miniscule resources, if the middle class urban student movement had been more complex and committed, perhaps the story would have been different. The guerrillas might not have won, but they could have entered into contact with the students and obliged the government to negotiate.”53 In this way, he links breaking isolation with the potential for a negotiated outcome. Revolutionary media were a vital part of breaking isolation and setting conditions for a negotiated settlement for the three movements.

Revolutionary Community Understanding revolutionary media, for the reason cited above, also requires an understanding of how they strive to overcome isolation by creating a sense of community for the audience as well as facilitating the work of advocacy networks supporting a revolutionary movement. Until the Zapatista uprising in 1994, most of the research on advocacy networks concentrated on less radical forms of alternative media. Nevertheless, both the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran rebels used their media to build transnational advocacy networks such as those explored by geographer Paul Adams and political scientists Mimi Keck and Katherine Sikkink.54 As media scholar John D.H. Downing points out, “The utility of the notion of networks is that it gets away from the notion of audiences as atomized, composed simply of individuals or households. It also underscores the internal connectivity characteristic of social movements and the centrality of that process in the mesh between media and movements.”55 Keck and Sikkink have found: “Advocacy networks are significant transnationally and domestically. By building new links among actors in civil societies, states, and international organizations, they multiply the channels of access to the international system.” Networks are both communication structures and political spaces that allow their

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members to place pressure on governments.56 Adams has examined “situations in which subordinated social groups reach beyond the boundaries of place through communication media to substantiate their political claims, create openings for new ideas of scale, and new scales of connection.” While Adams erroneously dismisses the importance of technology in understanding how networks function, his research nevertheless provides important concepts for understanding the role of Barricada Internacional, the international solidarity groups that supported Radio Venceremos, and, ultimately, the national and international support generated via the Internet for the Zapatistas.57 Such networks, as sociologists Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier have pointed out, are crucial to the construction of collective identity.58 The collective identity of the readers of the same newspapers, listeners to a clandestine radio broadcast, or readers of Internet messages unabridged by gatekeepers forms an “imagined community” that challenges the dominant view of the revolution and the government, redefining the nation contested in a civil war.59 Through revolutionary media, rebels intentionally created the sort of “imagined community” that, historical anthropologist Benedict Anderson posits, initially formed national identities in Latin America, when colonials engaged in the same activities and that shared experience formed a bond among them: The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing— curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables—nonetheless for just this reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (imagining) of the newspaper-as-fiction. . . . The significance of this mass ceremony . . . is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.60

Just as Anderson points to that sense of “imagined community” as the beginning of nationalism, revolutionary media connect people not


15

directly involved in the armed struggle to a community-in-rebellion, inviting them to “reimagine” a different sort of nation.

Liberation Theology The every day life model for the reimagined nation was a new kind of visible community: the Christian base communities that were the foundations of liberation theology. Liberation theology emerged as a Latin American interpretation of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), particularly the pledge of a preferential option for the poor. Meeting in Medellin in 1968, Latin America’s bishops developed a plan for carrying out that pledge through lay participation, more active evangelization among the poor, and more attention to social justice. Not all Latin American church leaders agreed with these changes, much less the vehicles that emerged for implementing them, such as the Christian base communities. Political scientists Daniel H. Levine and Scott Mainwaring have described Christian base communities as grassroots organizations that began when “pastoral agents” went to live and work in villages and poor neighborhoods. Their activities included Bible study, taking up collections for those in extreme need, and often eventually forming cooperatives, such as credit unions. As programs developed, they provided leadership training.61 Led by religious intellectuals in Peru and Brazil, important segments of church leadership and numerous parish priests embraced liberation theology. Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (later a Sandinista cabinet minister) became a priest because he wanted to establish a Christian base community. Following the murders of rural priests in El Salvador, the once conservative archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, began denouncing abuses from the pulpit through the archdiocese legal aid office and on a new church radio station, YSAX. Another former conservative, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, also changed his position as he came to know the indigenous communities of central Chiapas, establishing the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center. Young priests, including European immigrants, felt called to minister to both the rural and urban poor by establishing Christian base communities. Much as they did in the U.S. civil rights movement, churches became vehicles for popular organization.62 Cardenal has stated that he saw the Christian base community he organized on the Solentiname archipelago as a model for Nicaragua.63 The guerrilla faction that controlled Radio Venceremos drew an important part of its support from the Christian base communities that had existed in northeastern

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El Salvador before the civil war.64 Anthropologist Xóchitl Leyva has found that in the canyons of Chiapas, catechists, or lay leaders who received church leadership training, became important in the development of community organizations, including the unarmed association that was a predecessor to the Zapatista movement.65 The Christian base communities helped develop the organic intellectuals who play a key role in Gramsci’s revolutionary process. They were the “new type of intellectual” that Gramsci advocated.66 Significantly, Levine and Mainwaring found, Christian base communities “are rarely spontaneous creations, springing full-blown and unbidden ‘from the people.’ They are born linked to the churches, specifically to initiatives by bishops, priests, nuns, or lay agents commissioned by the church.”67

The Revolutions Nor were bishops, priests, and nuns the only outside intellectuals influencing the three movements. Professors and students at state and church universities were active as combatants, advisors, and liaisons for all three movements. The Radio Venceremos transmitter was first tested at a protest rally at the University of El Salvador.68 Bayardo Arce, who became the liaison between Barricada and the Sandinista high command, was also a respected intellectual, as was Sergio Ramírez, who became vice president during the Sandinista regime. Subcommander Marcos openly recounted his days as an economics student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Unlike the isolated struggles of mid-twentieth-century guerrillas Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas in a corner of Mexico, these rebel movements were wired into the urban intellectual lives of their nations. Further, their leaders understood the importance of reinforcing and expanding those contacts to create a revolutionary community that united the combatants in the hinterlands to the marchers in the cities. Domestic urban intellectuals and internacionalistas played significant roles in rebel media, particularly in liaison with the international support networks each developed. Standing back safely into the twenty-first century, with the cold war’s threats replaced by worries about terrorism, scholars could be tempted to dismiss the significance of these backwater rebellions that ended in messy negotiations rather than a clear-cut seizure of power. Mesoamerica’s fifteen minutes of fame may well be past. However, the seminal historic works on Mesoamerica, from Matanza to Sandino, were produced at times when most scholars dismissed the


17

significance of the early twentieth-century rebellions those authors studied.69 Further, to ignore these later revolutions as minor aberrations is to overlook the role they played on the world stage at the time they were taking place, to fail to understand the impact they had on their admittedly small societies, and to underestimate their potential as harbingers of change in the way societies change. These were Gramscian revolutions in which the untidy business of hegemony was visible from inception to negotiated finish and left open to contestation after the military action ended. A better understanding of that process could help illuminate new directions for revolution that, media scholar Mark Poster has suggested, may be one result of changes in communication.70

The Mode of Information Poster’s work on an idea he termed the “mode of information” provides a theoretical base for a study of such changes. Poster posited that the type of media used alters not just the message but also the people who send the message, as well as those who receive it and the way senders and receivers perceive each other. This study seeks to understand whether that is true of revolutionary media. “Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that ‘the medium is the message’ points in the direction of the mode of information but does not go far enough,” Poster has written. “What the mode of information puts into question, however, is not the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in the world.”71 Thus, Poster anticipated the differences in levels of identification that the audience might feel with revolutionary media, from the gradual buildup of a feeling of community produced by newspapers to the complete identification found in the Zapatista Web sites. Poster conceived the mode of information as a successor to Marx’s mode of production. He has argued that just as machines replaced the arms and muscles of workers, computers have replaced some of their mental functions, such as memory and calculation. As machines shaped the minds of nineteenth-century workers, computers shape their users, who are “absorbed” by cyber capabilities.72 I posit that revolutionary media take the analogy a step further: A change in the mode of production that brought workers together in factories allowed them to see that the same complaints about living and working conditions afflicted them all, leading to the development of class consciousness. In the same way, revolutionary media connect otherwise isolated

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individuals into Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities. Through media, they can see their common grievances as injustices inflicted on a class of citizens and imagine a different system. Poster has argued that advances in the way information was exchanged altered the twentieth century as much as advances in production techniques changed the nineteenth century. Thus, the introduction of a new form, or mode, of communicating information become the beginning of a new historic era. Poster divided the eras into three—face-to-face, written, and electronic—with the last encompassing all electronic communication. However, he also recognized evolution within electronic communication, which is key to this study. “The current configuration [of media] constitutes a necessary totalization of earlier developments: that is, one cannot but see earlier developments from the situation of the present,” he has written. “The anatomy of the mode of electronic information . . . necessarily sheds new light on the anatomy of oral and print modes of information.” 73 Thus, Poster avoids the trap of linear progression, allowing for the coexistence of various modes of information and permitting comparisons between reading a newspaper and a computer screen, as well as comparing each to listening to a broadcast. Further, Poster’s new light includes observations about speech and community compared to reading and autonomy. According to Poster, “Speech constitutes subjects as members of a community by solidifying the ties between individuals. Print constitutes subjects as rational, autonomous egos, as stable interpreters of culture who, in isolation, make logical connections from linear symbols.”74 As face-to-face conversations and writing have been supplemented by telephones, television, and computer exchanges, they have changed communication patterns. Telephones allow strangers access to dialogue that once was reserved for acquaintances.75 Electronic media have even taken on the functions of culture, Poster has stated: “The more a language/practice is removed from the face-to-face context of daily life in a stable culture in which social relationships are reproduced through dialogue, the more language must generate and reproduce those features from within itself.” He has termed the result “media language,” which is characterized by a new speech situation in which the medium controls the context and a monologue in which the information receiver’s only active participation is choosing the program. Together, those two characteristics generate a third: a self-referential nature that creates its own culture. Cyber communication goes even further in removing context. Poster


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has found: “[T]he subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which to rationally calculate its options.” Expressing the concept in a slightly different way, he has stated, “In these circumstances I cannot consider myself centered in my rational, autonomous subjectivity or bordered by a defined ego, but I am disrupted, subverted, and dispersed across social space.”76 Readers of print identify with an imagined community of other colonials or rebels whose day-to-day activities are like their own. They learn about their similarities through newspapers, according to Anderson. The newspaper merely brings the similarities in their lives to the attention of scattered readers. In contrast, broadcast media create their own context. They bring the community to listeners and viewers. During the time that they are listening or watching, the audience is surrounded by the community. Finally, cyber communication absorbs users, making them part of the community. The idea that reading printed matter is essentially different from electronic communication, even written electronic communication, is widely accepted. As grammarian Lynne Truss has explained: The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order. We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. . . . Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proofread before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. . . . All these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations. The internet is a public “space” which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied. . . . Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revisions, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself.77

Truss’ observations, intended to explain the effect of technology on punctuation, eloquently capture the differences in the experience of reading a newspaper compared to electronic communication. Media scholar Chuck Hays has noted that while the Internet is apparently oriented to writing, it operates as if words were spoken instead.78 The differences in the experience of using different media technologies are what Poster has sought to explain through the concept of the mode of information.

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The Mode of Information in Revolutionary Media As Poster himself noted, his theories are a logical outgrowth of Marshall McLuhan’s alliterative verdict, “the medium is the message.”79 If that statement is true, it adds a dimension to Habermas’ concept of the public sphere. An important element in creating the new forms of communication that led to public sphere in the eighteenth century was the periodical press. Habermas credited newspapers, then a relatively new form of communication, with a key role in the creation of Western Europe’s liberal parliaments, including the regime put in power by the French Revolution. Habermas has written about the periodical press because that was the mode of information available during the French Revolution when subjects became citizens and began taking on a role in public policy. Does the mode of information—newspapers and the way they are read—shape the revolutionary message? Poster posits that print requires the subject, or reader, to autonomously make logical connections between symbols in order to interpret meaning. However, as Downing has pointed out, newspapers are not the mode of information used in many recent revolutions: “In nations with substantial illiteracy . . . radio has predictably played a more important role than the press.”80 Radio no longer requires the subject, now a listener, to make those logical connections. Instead, as an electronic medium, it creates a context for the listener, whose active participation ends with the decision to tune into the program. Revolutionaries must respond to that context to exploit the advantages and mitigate the disadvantages. Similarly, as computer equipment has become more widely available, cyberspace communication also has been employed in revolutions. The subject is absorbed into cyberspace, coming into direct, dialogic contact with other subjects. The line between producer and subject, or user, blurs. The subject is no longer confined to a single place. Poster compares the effect to a more intense version of increase in transport speed, from trains to automobiles to airplanes.81 These different modes of information, each with different characteristics that act differently on the audience, present revolutionaries with options, even a media repertoire, from which to choose. Part of making that choice includes considering how both the rebels and the audience will use the medium. To take the use of the medium, the entire communication experience, into account is to move from considering medium and technology to understanding the mode of


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information. Martín-Barbero has pointed out the differences between reading alone and listening as part of a group to a reading person, or listening to the radio, either in a group or alone. He also has considered the persistence of old forms, such as melodrama, in new types of media.82 The availability of a widening array of options and ways to use them could have profound implications if, as Poster has suggested, “Electronically mediated communication to some degree supplements existing forms of sociability but to another extent substitutes for them. New and unrecognizable modes of community are in the process of formation and it is difficult to discern exactly how those will contribute or detract from postmodern politics. The image of the people in the streets, from the Bastille in 1789, to the Sorbonne in 1968 and Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 may be the images that will not be repeated in the forms of upheaval of the twenty-first century and beyond.”83 Table 1.1 Revolutionary media studied Location

Years

Revolutionaries

Mode of Information

Nicaragua El Salvador

1979–1990 1989–1992

FSLN (Sandinistas) FMLN

Chiapas, Mexico

1994–1995 (active) EZLN (Zapatistas) 1995–(denouement)

Barricada Radio Venceremos Radio Farabundo Martí Chiapas-L list Mexico94 list

The late twentieth-century revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas may be forerunners of those new forms of revolution that Poster has foreseen. They were fought not only with guns and airplanes but also with words, whether written in newsprint, broadcast over the airwaves, or transcribed for transmission onto computer screens. All three conflicts ended not in the taking of power by insurgents but in negotiations that raised fundamental issues about the nature of their societies. Analyzing the similarities and differences in how these movements used media deepens understanding of rebel media strategy by taking into account the development of media technology: from newspapers to broadcast in the later part of the century, to the Internet’s emergence at the end of the twentieth century. Insights into how the revolutionary media and modes of information—not just media technology but also how revolutionaries, their supporters, and their opponents used that technology—have changed add to the understanding of what those changes have meant for the process of revolution.

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The content of the three media demonstrated remarkably similar goals: Each rebel group attempted to create from its audience an “imagined community” that shared a vision of an alternative hegemony that not only challenged the legitimacy of the rulers in power but also questioned the identity of the nation itself. Each movement chose an early twentieth-century hero as the centerpiece for reinterpreting the national history and constructing the image of a nation betrayed. Thus, they constructed their fights as the most recent chapters in prolonged struggles for control of their nations.84 This contrasted with detractors’ attempts to delegitimize the rebel movements by portraying them as Cuban or Soviet puppets created for communist cold war objectives. To press their cases, all three incorporated an international advocacy network into the “imagined community” they were building and all three encouraged audience participation as part of the mode of information. The differences in the three movements were in the combinations of history, tradition, and availability (including such factors as resources, availability of technology, and access) that led each to choose a different form of media as its primary mode of information. Once that choice was made, the capabilities and limitations of the mode of information each group chose and the way that the insurgents and their audience used it began to reflect and shape the movement. The choice of a newspaper complemented the Nicaraguan literacy campaign, and reading the newspaper in study circles encouraged the continuation of the literacy campaign experience: a Sandinista-guided education or reeducation. The newspaper also allowed the Sandinistas to segment the audience and the production staff: internacionalista foreign supporters in key roles on the weeklies produced the paper for readers abroad while Nicaraguans produced the daily domestic newspaper. However, as noted in chapter 6, that choice placed the new Sandinista daily in direct competition with an established rival that used its reputation and experience to challenge and embarrass the revolutionary government. Radio was the practical way for Salvadoran insurgents to reach an audience reluctant to be caught with pamphlets or other written material that could be used as evidence of rebel sympathies. Broadcasts let people know that the fighting was continuing, while the audio nature of radio provided the additional benefit of easily adopting the forms of popular culture, particularly melodrama, songs, and humor. To take advantage of immediacy, another opportunity that radio offered, proximity to the battlefield was required, while the need to transmit on schedule demanded protecting the transmitter. Radio


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required both a protected rearguard and access to the front. Internacionalistas from Venezuela and Mexico supplied the voices that listeners most closely associated with both rebel radio stations. The international audience listening on shortwave heard the same broadcasts as the domestic audience. Both in production and in audience, radio integrated the international advocacy network and the domestic movement. Just two years after the Salvadoran conflict ended, insurgents in Chiapas, Mexico, caught the first wave of a new media phenomenon: the Internet. Even when the rebels themselves did not have telephone lines, much less computers, their domestic and international advocacy network was able to get their message out quickly. However, to take advantage of the opportunity such access offered, the Zapatistas had to speedup their decision-making process and rely on different representatives to carry their message in an emergency. Intuition would indicate that for rebels in an isolated community to rely on a cutting-edge technology, the situated movement and the international advocacy network would inevitably be kept separate, linked only tenuously by the communiqués of leaders transmitted abroad by reliable couriers. However, instead, the international advocacy network the Internet brought together produced a strong identification with the movement, as Poster would have predicted. In fact, that identification was so strong that it drew members of the “imagined community” together to meet grassroots rebels face-to-face, breaking their isolation and blurring the lines between imagined and real communities. The balance between military prowess and reliance on the communication medium that connected the revolutionaries to their international advocacy network also differed among the three movements. The Sandinistas were able to operate a newspaper in part because they had achieved a military victory and military control of Nicaragua. The Salvadoran rebels used their military strength to defend their radio transmitters, then combined their military acumen with effective political communication, based largely on radio, to force a negotiated settlement of the civil war. Militarily the weakest of the three movements, the Zapatistas caught the world’s attention with a bold tactic, and then maintained that attention through the Internet. As a corollary, the role of the international advocacy networks that grew around each medium showed a progressively greater involvement in the mode of information. In Nicaragua, foreign supporters worked mainly on the international editions of the newspaper produced for distribution outside Nicaragua. International collaborators

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were in key positions in the daily operations of both Salvadoran rebel radio stations. The involvement of the international advocacy network was essential to the Zapatista online presence. Eventually, the network became a significant protection for the movement that did not have the military strength to protect its members.

A Note on Sources In studying these three revolutions, I was looking at discourse produced by various people through their varied relationships to the rebels’ dominant mode of information as well as the discourse in the mode of information itself. I wanted to see and hear what was actually written and broadcast, to learn what journalists, political leaders, opponents, readers, and listeners said about the media during the armed rebellion as well as what they say in retrospect. That helped me understand how the primary mode of information reflected tradition, ideology, and availability as well as the relationship among producers, medium, and audience, providing insight into the possibilities and limitations that the mode of information presented the movement and how those shaped its formation, maintenance, and strategy and to an evaluation of the influence of the revolutionary medium on the revolution. As William Sewell has written about his work on the discourse of the nineteenth-century French labor movement, “[T]he coherence of the thought lies not in particular texts or in the ‘work’ of particular authors, but in the entire ideological discourse constituted by a large number of individually fragmented and incomplete statements, gestures, images, and actions.”85 To find those fragments, I began with the texts of all three media. Iterations of Barricada are available on microfilm and in the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro America in Managua, recordings of the Salvadoran rebel radio stations are archived at the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador, and the old Zapatista listservs are in cyberspace archives.86 Besides the texts of the media themselves, the museum and institute provided rich archival data of contemporaneous speeches, tracts, and interviews, most notably a collection of 8,000 oral history interviews conducted in 1980 in conjunction with the Nicaraguan national literacy campaign. The Chiapas Media Project also allowed me to listen to interviews with community video producers and Concepción Villafuerte, editor of the newspaper El Tiempo, which played a key role in publishing the texts written by rebel leaders that later were posted to the Internet, reluctantly agreed to let me comb through the attic above her print shop and take notes


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from the back issues. On a visit to the remote northeastern department that was the rebel stronghold and home to Radio Venceremos for most of the war, I saw the Perquín War Museum collection that included the old radio transmission equipment and posters used to promote the stations in Europe. The forty-five oral history interviews I conducted with producers and audience members guided my reading of the media texts. I found both producers and audience members by using a snowball sampling method: one participant led me to another. In Nicaragua, editors Carlos Fernando Chamorro and Sofia Montenegro were especially helpful in making connections between the newspaper’s work and revolutionary theory, which I also discussed with Bayardo Arce, the comandante who served as a liaison with the newspaper. Luís Barbosa, leader of the Barricada printers’ union during the revolution and now secretary general of the Sandinista labor federation, was particularly helpful in putting me in contact with potential participants. Participants included two reporters, four union leaders from different production sectors, and one person who was a member of study groups as a student, a soldier, and a government bureaucrat. In El Salvador, Santiago, the announcer for Radio Venceremos agreed to three formal interviews over the course of the study and, as director of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, frequently allowed me to interrupt his work with urgent questions about specific broadcasts. Paolo Leurs, Sebastian Alejo, and Juan José Dalton, former insurgents who were involved with media policy or organization but not directly with the radio stations, provided a perspective on how they saw the stations with respect to overall strategy. Miguel Huezo Mixco, who coordinated communications for the rebel faction that controlled Radio Farabundo Martí, María Teresa Escalona, an announcer for Radio Farabundo Marti, and Astúl Ibarra, a social activist in a conflict zone, were especially helpful in putting me in contact with colleagues and acquaintances and explaining their respective roles during the war. In addition, Escalona’s senior thesis included her interviews with former colleagues at Radio Farabundo Martí, which provided helpful background in preparing for the interviews I conducted.87 In the case of Chiapas, the comments of rebel leaders and their audience were contained in the texts themselves. Realizing that one of the key differences between the Internet and radio or newspapers was that rank-and-file rebels did not have access to it, I sought interviews with Zapatistas in remote communities, both in the highlands and in the canyons, to discuss the media that they use and produce. The area

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of Zapatista influence includes both highland communities that follow customs and manners of dress that can be traced to those their ancestors practiced before the Spaniards arrived five centuries ago and the canyon or jungle communities whose founders are still alive. Members of the “reception committee” in the highland community of Oventic talked to me about the importance that CD recordings of their own music on sale in the community store had, and laughed when I asked about their contact with the Internet. That corroborated what local representative of the Chiapas Media Project had told me about the decision to drop an early effort to incorporate Internet access into the project, confirming my suspicions that the Internet was a mode of information that linked the Zapatista leadership to its outside supporters, but barely touched the lives of the rebel rank and file. A visit to the canyon community of Ibarra radically changed that perception.88 The main source of information there was a formal group interview conducted without a tape recorder, a condition the community set. I was able to corroborate much of what they told me through observation.89 I also conducted informal interviews with community members and the resident peace campers, corroborating that information with the Chiapas Media Project interviews and with Web sites used to recruit the peace campers. As Hobsbawm has pointed out, oral history has special problems of plausibility. As he has written, “most oral history today is personal memory, which is a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts. The point is that memory is not so much a recording as a selective mechanism, and the selection is, within limits, constantly changing. . . . Of course, we can also check it against some verifiable independent source and approve it because it can be confirmed by such a source. But this doesn’t get us nearer the crucial problem, which is to know what we can believe when there is nothing to check it against.” 90 Despite the challenges that oral history presents, it proved an important tool in introducing the insights of cultural anthropology into historical analysis. As Sewell has explained, “the deepest and most powerful message of cultural anthropology [is] . . . not only that certain kinds of activities can be analyzed to reveal popular beliefs and preconceptions but that the whole of social life, from such seemingly matter-of-fact activities as building houses or raising crops, is culturally shaped.” This study would add reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and communicating via the Internet to that list. As Sewell has pointed out, historians are at a disadvantage because they cannot live among the people of the past. Oral history allows historians to relive at least parts of the


27

remembered past, piecing together from various participants’ experiences what it may have been like to listen to rebel radio or to discuss a newspaper article in a study circle. I also caught a glimmer of that experience while transcribing the rebel radio broadcasts, leafing through archived newspapers, and scrolling down old listservs. Oral history interviews and recordings are examples of the ingenuity that Sewell has called for to “search out in the surviving records the symbolic forms through which they experienced their world. In part this means reconstructing the meanings of the words, metaphors, and rhetorical conventions that they used to talk about and think about their experiences.” For this study, those words, metaphors, and rhetorical conventions could be found in the rebels’ modes of information. Finally, this study is heavily influenced by who I am: a former U.S. newspaper correspondent married to a Salvadoran. My contacts repeatedly emphasized those facts in introducing me to potential participants. Personal relationships have affected my ability to gain access to key pieces of data that another researcher would have had to obtain in a different way. While they may just have been making polite conversation, particularly in Central America, participants mentioned their respect for the way foreign news media covered their wars. As Leurs, a European journalist who coordinated media policy for a faction of the Salvadoran guerrillas, noted when speaking with me: “There was a conflict between the foreign press and the government and the armed force. Even though they [the foreign press] were rightwing, the dead were the dead and the massacres were the massacres.”91 To complicate matters further, early in my career, from 1978 to 1980, I worked for a Mexican newspaper and learned firsthand about the controls that reporters there face. As a correspondent, I sometimes reported and frequently socialized with Mexican colleagues, hearing their assessments of the state of journalism in their country. Realizing how different the mainstream Mesoamerican media tradition is from my own, I felt the need to explain it and to explain the media studied here in that context. I remained a reporter in the Anglo-American tradition, who sees independence as vital to the role of the journalist, and very much an outsider in researching media that are openly committed to a political cause. I recognize that some journalists and scholars will question whether I am too close to this subject, or at least to a part of it, to research it credibly. I will leave it to readers to decide whether my personal experience has brought more bias or insight to this work. Meanwhile, I have been guided by the commitment historian Ronald

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Spector made to his readers in the introduction to After Tet, “While this book is informed by personal experience, it is in no sense a memoir or personal account. . . . I have frequently drawn from my own experience and memory. However, I have in no case relied on personal experience alone; all incidents, attitudes or practices described here can be documented by independent sources.” 92

CH A P T ER

2

A Mesoamerican Media Backgrounder

Nearly half a century ago, in a seminal text on international communication systems, Fred Seibert specifically mentioned El Salvador as an example of a country that professed libertarian principles but suspended protection of civil rights, including freedom of expression, in periods of national crisis.1 He did not consider the possibility that the system he was describing was not betraying libertarian principles, but rather conforming to an entirely different philosophy of what the press should be and do. This chapter explores that neglected idea, to provide some insight into the press philosophy of Mesoamerica and how it led to the media system that existed in the region before the late twentieth-century rebellions.2 The first printing press in the Americas arrived in Mexico City in 1536, when it was the seat of the viceroyalty of New Spain, one of Spain’s two richest mining colonies. At that time, Chiapas, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were part of the viceroyalty of Guatemala, a backwater of the Spanish empire that received its first printing press 125 years after Mexico did and just 6 years before Mexico’s first newspaper appeared. That was about the same time Milton published Aeropagitica with its plea to “let truth and falsehood grapple.”3 Thus, when Mesoamerican publishing started, libertarian ideas about free expression had barely begun circulating in Europe. In fact, censorship in New Spain was so strict that the momentous 1767 decree expelling the Jesuits from all Spanish domains was followed five months later by a decree forbidding anyone from discussing the expulsion.4 Presses, type, and even paper, which could not legally be manufactured in the colonies, were scarce.5 All printing was under government license.6 Victoria Goff has found that “[p]ublishing ‘under authority’ from government, plus ecclesiastical censorship, retarded the development of journalism in Spanish America for centuries.”7

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Spanish ideas about controlling written expression were not entirely different from those of pre-Columbian rulers. Leonardo Ferreira has noted that the Maya painted, carved, engraved, and inscribed a “biased and ‘official’ chronicle of rulers and aristocrats, legitimizing their power over commoners and captives from other places.” In what would become Mexico, the Aztec king Itzcoatl expunged the historic record by burning the old chronicles in the early fifteenth century. Memories of past events apparently impeded his efforts to form an alliance that became the foundation for the mighty empire the Spanish founded a century later.8 In all three cultures that formed colonial Mesoamerica, written media, subject to censorship and revision, told the official story. Writing was the authorized version, not always complete or even reliable, but the safe, accepted account. While the rulers wrote, the common people expressed themselves in less formal media, such as street theater. One of the few examples of popular expression from the colonial period to survive is The Güegüence. The word refers to both the Beowulf of Nicaraguan literature and the main character of the comedy-ballet originally performed in a mixture of Spanish and Nahuatl. The first published version of the text appeared in 1874, but scholars believe the work was first performed in the late seventeenth century.9 The basic plot of The Güegüence is the story of a mestizo merchant who is summoned to the governor’s palace to be rebuked and who ends up arranging a marriage between his favorite son and the governor’s daughter.10 Driving the story and the character is a set of survival skills that Nicaraguans call malicia india, the tricks that a subaltern group uses to protect itself against a power structure that is stacked against it: The character, the Güegüence is a merchant, who wears a mask, hiding his real thoughts. As Jesús Martín-Barbero has noted, in comedy, the mask “covers up, violates, and ridicules identity while, at the same time, it facilitates a metamorphosis and reincarnation of the person which gives a new life. The mask also operates on another level: it conceals, obscures, and deceives the authorities and overturns hierarchy.”11 The Güegüence feigns ignorance of customs that are against his interest and pretends not to hear or to misunderstand what is not convenient for him to hear or understand.12 When cornered, he resorts to bribery, then tries to trick his way out of actually paying the bribe.13 While he tries to manipulate the authorities, he is manipulated in his own home by an unfaithful wife and her son from a dalliance that took place when the Güegüence took his elder son on a sales

A MESOAMERICAN MEDIA BACKGROUNDER

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trip to Mexico.14 Meanwhile his favorite son, who shows his loyalty by swearing to the truth of his father’s lies, is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, the forerunner of the modern-day Nicaraguan who juggles several ill-paying jobs to make a living.15 Along the way, the comedy-ballet pokes fun at the decadent elite with frequent orders from the governor to “suspend the music, dancing, and amusements in the homes of the principal lords.”16 The Güegüence is a classic “trickster,” to use the term of political scientist James C. Scott: “Typically, the trickster makes his successful way through a treacherous environment of enemies out to defeat him—or eat him—not by his strength but by his wit and cunning. [Because the trickster is too small and weak to win any direct confrontation], only by knowing the habits of his enemies by deceiving them, by taking advantage of their greed, size, gullibility, or haste does he manage to escape their clutches and win victories.”17 Thus, in the colonial period, the authorities placed tight restrictions on media, and popular culture found a way to circumvent those restrictions, just as the Güegüence circumvented the imperial trade laws. Mainstream written media were the means of expression employed by the rulers and not a forum for discussion or reflection. The shortcomings of the system were expressed in face-to-face communication, such as street theater. The mode of information the masses used for expression was intimate and oral. The printed word was a mode of information for authority. These connotations of oral versus printed communication would play an important role in the choices that late twentieth-century revolutionaries would make about their own modes of information. The Güegüence both demonstrates and ridicules the skills needed to survive in a colonial system that Frank Tannenbaum has summed up as “centralism, authoritarianism, and aristocracy.”18 Even the Roman Catholic Church in the Spanish colonies was subject to the control of the king under a system known as patronato.19 Those three values also were reflected in the justice system that ultimately set the parameters for press freedom. As Alexander T. Edelmann has stated, “During the three centuries or more of colonial rule, the colonies all had the legal systems in effect in the mother country. The [Spanish] civil law was as firmly rooted there by the time of independence as was the English common law in the thirteen colonies that formed the United States.”20 While Benedict Anderson credits colonial newspapers with creating a sense of community among Latin American creoles, or colonists of pure Spanish descent, their role was circumscribed by that centralized, authoritarian, aristocratic system.21

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Even when that system broke down in the early nineteenth century, the rupture influenced the way Spain’s Mesoamerican colonies would understand the role of a free press. Events in Europe brought about a brief period of colonial press freedom: In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and imprisoned King Fernando VII, putting his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. In opposition, Spanish loyalists set up a shadow government in Cadiz, passing the liberal Constitution of 1812, which included a provision for press freedom: “All Spaniards have the freedom to write, print, and publish their political ideas without the need for licenses, review, or any approval before publication, under the restrictions and responsibilities established by law.”22 The new constitution removed prior restraint and licensing, but left room for regulation, including the requirement that printers post bonds that would be forfeited if they violated regulations. Even that much freedom was more than Mexican colonial authorities could tolerate. Facing a domestic rebellion led by priests Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, the New Spain viceroy argued that the delegates in Cadiz should allow him to suspend freedom of the press. He argued that “El Diario [de Mexico is] a paper that from the beginning of these unfortunate events has sewn seditious ideas behind the veil of anecdotes and misunderstandings understood by all and celebrated by the bad.”23 Like the Güegüence, the editors of El Diario operated on the edge of legality, using double entendres and veiled references that made obfuscation a virtue. Columnists and even reporters in the Mesoamerican press would use similar techniques a century and a half later. However, as the colonial editors were to learn, those techniques had limitations. Carlos Maria Bustamante, one of the three coeditors of El Diario de Mexico, joined the revolutionary newspaper, El Correo Americano del Sur, in March 1813. (South in this case was Oaxaca, the most southern region of New Spain.) As he explained in a letter to Morelos y Pavon, “On December 5 [1812] that barbarian [the viceroy] decreed the end of freedom of the press and began to persecute to death the poor writers who had been given this rope” to hang themselves. Joaquin Lizardi, who founded a newspaper under the new constitution, was arrested on December 8 for satirizing the viceroy. Bustamante feared that he would be next. “I decided to risk it all,” he wrote, and joined the insurgency.24 Bustamante would not be the last Mesoamerican journalist pushed out of mainstream publications into revolutionary media. El Correo del Sur succeeded El Despertador Americano [The American Alarm Clock]. Mexico’s earliest revolutionary


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newspaper published the first of its seven editions in Guadalajara on December 20, 1810, with the admonition, “[W]ake up to the rattle of the chains that have bound us for three centuries, open your eyes to our true interests, do not cower before the sacrifices and privations inherent in the beginning of all revolutions, fly to the field of glory under the direction of the new Washington that merciful heaven has raised.”25 Such direct language (reinforced by the use of the familiar “tu” compared to the formal “Usted” form of the second person that the mainstream press used) contrasted sharply with the wink-and-nudge style of the legal El Diario. Another revolutionary newspaper, El Ilustrador Nacional, was printed on a former Spanish government press that rebels had smuggled out of Mexico City to Zitacuaro in a cart of gourds.26 The revolutionary press cost twice as much as legal newspapers. Because the viceroy prohibited the legal newspapers from publishing news of the insurrection or any stories that indicated conflicts between American and European Spaniards, the revolutionaries depended on their own newspapers to gather support for their cause and even to get news of their battles out, sometimes disputing the official version of events. 27 They also tried to persuade compatriots fighting for the Spanish to change sides and referred to European Spaniards by the derogatory term “Gachupines.”28 While the authorities cracked down on the legal press, rebels published their own illegal newspapers with no regulation. Only revolutionary media were free to dispute the official story.29 The first issue of El Despertador Americano had called on the United States for support, pleading, “You are our surest Friend, the most faithful Ally that nature has destined for us, establishing us on the same continent. You are our model and our resource, your interests are ours, from you we hope for prompt and abundant aid to finish annihilating the atrocious Despotism.”30 That plea appeared thirteen years before President James Monroe announced a policy that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, “asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”31 The United States was among the earliest nations to grant the newly independent Latin American countries diplomatic recognition, but the Mexican hope for support in the struggle against Spain had been misplaced. The United States did not send aid in the decade-long fight for independence or when Spain attempted to invade

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Mexico in 1829.32 Instead, Monroe’s assertion of “the rights and interests of the United States” would form the basis for a policy that caused later Mesoamerican revolutionary media to write about the North Americans quite differently from the way El Despertador Americano did.

Early Independence Following the French and U.S. models, the newly independent nations of Mesoamerica drafted constitutions that guaranteed freedom of the press. However, freedom had to be understood within the context of the Spanish legacy of authoritarianism, centralism, and aristocracy. That included restrictions such as desacato, or insult laws, which could be broadly interpreted to prevent criticism of government, and the state of siege, when civil liberties are suspended because of a perceived threat to the state.33 The rulers’ determination to maintain hegemony and control over the process that creates hegemony severely limited the space for public action and even discussion. As Tannenbaum has noted, “When the power of government is so tenuous, the government must do everything because every public act, no matter how small, has political significance, and no one but the president can indulge in activities that have political implications. Any activity which the president does not control is a threat to his influence and power.”34 A public sphere for discussion of issues could not be allowed to develop into a civil society independent of the government. The rulers feared that their hegemony was in dispute and they were not willing to provide a forum for the expression of such challenges. Thus, the press was free within narrow margins dictated by the rulers. After a domestic monarchy failed in Mexico, two rival newspapers, the Aguila Mejicana and El Sol, debated how much free expression was desirable. A Sol contributor insisted: “The free press is the organ through which public opinion is expressed; the legislators should consult it if they want stable, enduring institutions.”35 A few days later, a contributor replied in the Aguila Mejicana, “V.J. scandalously argues that any private citizen may continue through the free press to discuss the laws once they are passed. If such abuse of the free press is tolerated, we will never have laws and without them as stable and respected as they should be, we never will have social order, which is to say we will never have a country.”36 Even active participants in the public sphere that newspapers provided sought to limit the debate. They accepted the idea that freedom of the press was a responsibility as well as a right and that it could be abused.


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The Salvadoran press actually began as a government effort to regain control over activities and discussion. The earliest Salvadoran newspapers available in archives of the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América in Managua were published on government presses following the 1839 breakup of the Central American Federation, which had governed Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in the eighteen years following independence from Spain. (Mexico annexed Chiapas in 1825.) The earliest of those newspapers available in archives, La Miscelánea, explained its mission clearly in its first edition, published on December 28, 1839, in the temporary capital of Cojutepeque: “The upset caused by the invasions that El Salvador has suffered: the dislocation of its government and then the ruin occasioned by the earthquake that has afflicted the Capital of the Nation had meant that our presses have been halted for a long time, leaving a void for the slander of foreign enemies and the gossip of domestic malcontents to fill unrestrained, disturbing the public order and causing misunderstanding about the government.”37 Similarly, El Noticioso was printed on government presses in 1844 “so that the Salvadoran people do not lack the most important news of the Salvadoran Army and to eliminate the gossip of persons with bad intentions and enemies of the people.”38 Newspapers were printed not to provoke discussion but to silence dissent. They helped maintain the authoritarian, centralized control of government, even when that government was dislocated by war or natural disaster. They were tools for maintaining ruling class hegemony during a volatile period. By the mid-nineteenth century, privately owned newspapers such as La Unión appeared, endorsing political agendas that also found favor with the Salvadoran government, particularly reunification of Central America. In its first issue, La Unión assured the government, “Under this name a newspaper will appear twice a month, its editors attempting to present the news of greatest importance in morality, politics, commerce and the economy. As long as the State moves toward progress, the editors do not wish to be anything more than organs that examine what it considers, works on and executes, as should be the right of the public.”39 Nevertheless, that first issue went on to point out alleged defects in the court system.40 The commercial press was claiming a role in democracy and marking its territory as a watchdog, a space for comment and criticism. Still, uncritical coverage of political acts, such as presidential speeches and legislative sessions, remained a staple in mid-nineteenth-century Salvadoran newspapers.41

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Partisan Press In contrast, the civil wars that led to foreign invasions in Mexico and Nicaragua during the mid-nineteenth century produced a feisty partisan press. Presses, tightly controlled by the Spaniards, had proliferated in just two decades of independence, permitting more voices to join the public discussion. Provincial presses told the Mesoamerican version of the Monroe Doctrine’s evolution into the filibuster era and Manifest Destiny, the U.S. drive to claim the North American continent from Atlantic to Pacific. In Nicaragua, the faction calling itself democrats (which would evolve into the liberals) invited U.S. mercenary William Walker to join their war against the legitimastas, or conservatives. Each of these two factions sponsored newspapers, the predecessors of twentieth-century revolutionary media. Newspapers that dissented from the rulers’ policies were part of movements that actively sought to overthrow the government. Media were either progovernment or revolutionary. Hence, media that criticized the government must be part of traitorous attempts to overthrow it. In Mexico, Federalists challenged the colonial legacy of centralism, authoritarianism, and aristocracy, while Centralists defended that tradition. They expressed their differences in the press and in a series of coups that destabilized the country, weakening its always precarious grasp on the northern frontier that stretched to California and Colorado. While Mexican leaders fought each other, the country lost half its territory to the United States from 1836 to 1854. Controlling the northern reaches of Spain’s American empire had long worried the crown, and Mexican leaders inherited that problem. Foreigners were allowed, even encouraged, to colonize those far-off outposts. When Mexico banned slavery in 1835, Anglo Texans rebelled. Mexican authorities did not recognize Texan independence but could not regain control over the breakaway province either. The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and offered to buy the disputed territory from Mexico. In an early example of investigative reporting, El Defensor de Tamaulipas on the new northern border uncovered a memo that the foreign minister had written in October 1845, when the United States offered Mexico $30 million for California and New Mexico. The memo concluded that United States was intent on having the territory and the only issue was how much indemnification it would pay. “Mexico is in the right to fight, but two other issues remain: possibility and convenience,” the memo stated, noting that the war would require immense expenditures of money and men, not to assure victory but merely to avoid sure defeat. “The issue is not


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who is right, but who can afford a war,” the memo continued. Mexico did not have the funds to equip a force to go to California as border guards, much less to sustain a war on its far-off northern border. The government had authorized 15 million pesos in bonds, but no one would buy them. “Is Texas worth what a war would cost in social order, in lives?” the memo questioned. Mexico’s army ended thoughts of negotiations, with a coup overthrowing the government, and declared war on the United States. When the story of the memo appeared in April 1848, the editor wrote, “This will allow us to more effectively judge the peace terms being discussed today . . . now that the fatal predictions have come true and this war, although just, has left us nothing but a peace on less advantageous terms than we might have celebrated.”42 A month later, the Mexican Congress ratified a treaty accepting $15 million for the territory, half the amount the United States had originally offered. Tamaulipas was among the states that paid the cost of war with Texas, as El Defensor reported. In November 1847, a front-page story announced that the state’s National Guard commander had written to the governor requesting a military burial for his 19-year-old son, who was killed in battle. The second page chronicled the funeral of the philosophy major who joined the fighting when the Monterrey Seminary closed because of the war. An editorial praised the local militia while sharply criticizing the army for abusing citizens. “Liberal principles will triumph in the constant struggle against military despotism as long as men can communicate through the press,” the editorial concluded, accusing tyrants of trying to suppress freedom of the press or abusing it.43 Besides the outspoken coverage in wartime Mexican newspapers, journalistic diversity included newspapers produced by the reporters who accompanied the U.S. troops. Twenty-five such papers were published in fourteen Mexican cities, for short periods and a few issues or for as long as several months, by renting or appropriating local presses. They kept the troops informed and through their bilingual pages tried to draw in local subscribers. While their main purpose was commercial, providing additional income for the war correspondents sending dispatches back to U.S. newspapers, they also “enable[ed the U.S. troops] to be their own trumpeters,” the New Orleans Delta observed. Despite their short duration, several of the newspapers had aimed to change Mexico. In keeping with Manifest Destiny, newspapers such as the Daily American Star, published in Mexico City, favored Americanization of the country, starting with a U.S.-style free press in the “hope . . . that the press would be active in completing the work begun by the sword.”44 While ignoring the war papers’ own subjugation to military censorship,

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such statements give the impression that at least some of those newspapers saw advocating social change as part of the role of the media. With their short, newsy articles written mainly for a foreign audience, these newspapers contrasted with the eloquent essays of El Despertador Americano and El Correo del Sur. However, both forms of newspapers drew readers in with war news they could not otherwise obtain, while making a case for their cause and their vision of how society should operate. A decade after the U.S. invasion, journalist and educator Francisco Zarco championed a press law that has become the benchmark for Mexican media law.45 The constitutional reform of 1857 guaranteed the “freedom to write and publish on any topic,” abolishing bonds for printers and editors.46 The only exceptions to complete freedom of expression were morals, privacy, and keeping the public order.47 However, the liberal reforms did not bring the rosy outcome the Star had predicted. Instead, they became part of the fighting between the Federalists and Centralists. Foreign debt mounted as the government struggled to maintain control of the country until, in 1863, Mexican conservatives welcomed Maximilian, the emperor appointed as France’s regent. Gripped in its own Civil War, the United States did not invoke the Monroe Doctrine by taking action against the invaders. During the four-year French occupation, conservatives tried to reimpose controls on the press, arguing that these were the same regulations in force in France. Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, the French ambassador, introduced the regulations (not unlike the Spanish colonial press laws) with a phrase repeated often over the next century and a half as Mexican rulers sought to rein in journalists: “[L]iberty is not licentiousness.”48 Indeed, press freedom had accompanied upheavals that subjected Mexico to the humiliation of two foreign occupations within two decades. While free expression was only one of a multitude of factors, and far from the most important factor, in this disastrous period, a lively press became a symptom of chaos rather than a part of democratic discussion. The situation was similar in Nicaragua. The editor of the oldest Nicaraguan newspaper available in archives of the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, El Mentor Nicargüense, was Fruto Chamorro, Nicaragua’s first president and founder of a newspaper dynasty whose influence would be felt into the twenty-first century. The 1841 announcement of the one-page weekly newspaper’s imminent publication by the Universidad de Granada Press promised that it would “try to illuminate the masses, presenting the clear doctrines and simple subjects that most interest them.”49 Despite that promise of accessibility, the first edition of the


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newspaper, which appeared ten days later, featured a motto in Latin, “Non solum nobis nati sumus; sed partim vindicat Patria” [We were not born just for ourselves, but also for the Fatherland]. The contents revealed Chamorro’s conservative politics. One article advocated stratified education: one level for the future leadership of the nation and a different level for future artisans, a theme that would be repeated in subsequent editions.50 Another article in the first edition touted the need for tariffs, even while recognizing that such measures would restrict internal consumption at first.51 The edition also refuted the Miskito claims for independence, noting the roots of a dispute that would cause conflicts during the revolutionary era more than a century later.52 Thus, Nicaragua’s media began as a partisan press that reflected debates within the ruling class. Media would become even more partisan as civil war engulfed Nicaragua in the following decade. El Eco Popular began publication in 1854 “fifty-one days into the siege of Granada,” the seat of conservatism, on the presses of the aptly named Imprenta del Orden, or Order Press. With a single untitled article on its four pages, the only two surviving editions of the biweekly publication resemble a pamphlet as much as a newspaper, both in format and the verbal attacks on the rebels who surrounded the capital. The newspaper labeled the insurgents “upsetters of order” and refuted their positions based on provisions of the 1838 constitution, which the rebels argued they were fighting to defend.53 In the same format, Order Press also produced El Defensor del Orden, published the same year. It was the official voice of Fruto Chamorro’s legitimista government, which advocated order and legitimacy. Perhaps because sixty-two editions of El Defensor del Orden have survived, providing a more complete picture of the publication, it appears to be more news oriented, with information about military battles and international diplomatic maneuvering as each side tried to attract foreign supporters.54 After Chamorro’s death in 1855, the same print shop published El Boletín Oficial (Granada), a publication of government documents similar to the Congressional Record in the United States.55 All three publications unabashedly defended the legitimatist cause against the democrats and later, foreign invaders led by William Walker.

Journalists and Filibusters A newspaper editor and lawyer, Walker epitomized the filibusters, or pirates, invading both Mexico and Nicaragua. If Mesoamerica’s

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homegrown journalists were spokesmen for the political factions responsible for political upheaval, foreign journalists were the voices of invaders. Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan is generally credited with coining the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” thereby giving a name to the philosophy that justified U.S. expansion across North America. The war papers that U.S. correspondents published in Mexico supported the invasion and seizure of territory. The editors of the filibuster press advocated carrying Manifest Destiny beyond the limits that the U.S. government supported through mercenary invasions of Mexico, Central America, and Cuba.56 Those editors sometimes became filibusters themselves, as in the case of Walker and many of his lieutenants. Short and slight, with gray eyes, Walker was born in Tennessee and supported slavery. He was living in California in 1853 and organized an expedition to invade northern Mexico while the United States negotiated its final purchase of land from that country. At the start of the negotiations, the United States proposed buying seven Mexican states, but settled for what are now southern Arizona and a corner of New Mexico, still paying the $10 million originally offered. The settlement was in part a way to compensate Mexico for the miserly terms of the 1848 peace treaty. Meanwhile, Walker raised a private army and invaded the Baja California Peninsula at La Paz. He declared himself president of Lower California and sent back reports of military victories to recruit more troops. In reality, he was short on supplies and facing more resistance than he had anticipated. He returned to the United States in May 1854, where he was arrested for violating neutrality laws. A jury acquitted him.57 A year later, Nicaragua’s democrats hired Walker to reinforce U.S. mercenaries already fighting for the revolutionaries, most of them miners returning to the East Coast from the California Gold Rush. “It has always seemed to us to be deadly for the Fatherland that men of good sense divide because they don’t agree on the reality of things,” El Boletín Oficial (León), the official organ of the democratic cause, wrote defending the decision to seek the help of filibusters. “That is the situation that has given rise to the presence of Americans in our Republic. Some claim to have knowledge that they have taken over this country and usurped our rights. That notion is mistaken. The American forces in Nicaragua do not oppress this government and have never once disobeyed it.”58 As Walker’s intent to rule Nicaragua became evident, his personal ambition outweighed his value to the democrats as a military commander. His status in the Boletín Oficial (Leon) changed. “The public calls him cruel, barbarous,


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bloodthirsty, murderer. We call him simply—William Walker.”59 The ease with which the Boletín Oficial changed its assessment of Walker reflects the extent to which the press remained at the service of the party leaders. By that time, Walker and his followers were publishing their own weekly, El Nicaraguense, printed in English with type they seized from the conservatives when they conquered Granada. “America has opened a new era in the revolutionary history of the world,” the first issue promised. After the military victory, Walker tried to create hegemony for his vision of Nicaragua’s future as the heart of a new Mesoamerican empire “extending from California and Texas on the North to the Isthmus of Darien [now Panama] on the South.”60 Walker deployed the experienced journalists among his lieutenants to write stories of his victories for U.S. newspapers, recruiting reinforcements to expand his conquest across the isthmus. He realized his dream of unifying Central America, but with a twist he had not anticipated: an alliance of Central American nations drove Walker from Nicaragua in May 1856. Four years later, he was arrested entering Honduras and executed by a firing squad. The opening that permitted a more vocal press resulted from deep divisions in the ruling class and a struggle for hegemony expressed in their respective media. None of the nineteenth-century Nicaraguan newspapers available in archives published for more than two years, hardly long enough for them to establish credibility with readers as reliable sources of information, indicating their function as the mouthpiece of their editor-publishers. That tradition of the medium as the means of free expression for the publisher, rather than for the society as a whole, meant that the public did not feel that it had a stake in freedom of the press, with consequences that carried into the twentieth century. In both Nicaragua and Mexico, the lively exchange of ideas in the press occurred during periods of upheaval. It was part of an exceptional, and not particularly desirable, era.

Into the Twentieth Century Interpretation of the principles of free expression established in the nineteenth century has varied, resulting in policies that were more or less repressive, depending on who was in power. During Mexico’s Porfiriato, a long period of stability when Juárez’s successor, Porfirio Díaz, remained in power, the government became increasingly repressive, persecuting the newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote and the Flores Magón brothers, who eventually moved their publishing operations

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across the border.61 El Imparcial, Mexico’s first commercial, as opposed to partisan, newspaper was founded in 1896. Setting a precedent of preferential treatment of the government by profit-centered media, its owners were Díaz supporters, as shown by its treatment of James Creelman’s 1908 interview for Pearson’s Magazine. Creelman, who had also interviewed Sitting Bull and Pope Leo XIII, had built his reputation on coverage of Cuba’s war for independence from Spain, which became known as the Spanish-American War. Determined to get a big story, he did: Díaz pledged not to stand for reelection. El Imparcial downplayed the news. Later that year, all the newspapers ignored Francisco Madero’s La Sucesión Presidencial de 1910, although he distributed it to publishers.62 As the dictator’s control collapsed, a freewheeling, partisan press emerged with the revolution that began in 1910. Once again, free expression through revolutionary media coincided with chaos. Francisco Villa and Venustiano Carranza both owned newspapers and developed press strategies. Carranza even employed a U.S. press agent.63 Lively as the newspaper debate was, print was still not the mode of information for popular communication. Instead, the foot soldiers of the revolution relied on corridos, narrative lyrics set to lively folk tunes, for their news and inspiration.64 Oral communication, with its regional accents and narrative format, remained the mode of information of the masses. The return to order, following the revolution and the Cristero Revolt against the government’s anticlerical policies, included a press crackdown. The newly founded National Revolutionary Party stifled dissent to reunify the country after two decades of fighting. A return to order meant a return to control of the media. That was the beginning of the political and media system that would dominate a stable Mexico throughout the twentieth century.65 The turn of the century also marked an era of a more assertive press in El Salvador, where independent newspapers began to appear and then disappear as rulers sought to keep order. Newspapers printed sometimes vague criticisms of the government, such as a two-paragraph article in El Unionista, which noted, “ [‘]You have fulfilled your duty, honorable congressmen.[’] This is the way the [legislative] Assembly always closes. To the ’95 [Assembly] we can say: You have fulfilled everything except your duty.”66 Miguel Pinto founded a political weekly, La Candela (so named because it cost a candle, a typical medium of exchange in the country, which was short on currency). When the print shop was destroyed in a fire of suspicious origin, he bought Siglo XX in 1892 and resumed


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publishing until another fire destroyed its presses four years later. In late 1903, Pinto began publishing El Diario Latino. Despite three more fires, the paper lasted four decades, until his son (who was also city editor) was arrested for writing an editorial demanding that a state of siege be lifted. Still in jail when the 1944 rebellion against General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez began, Jorge Pinto was taken into the street and machine-gunned. He died three years later from complications resulting from the wounds sustained in the attack.67 Such persecution of journalists appears not to have caused much of a public outcry in El Salvador or other parts of Mesoamerica, whether in the nineteenth century, the 1940s, or later in the twentieth century. In his study of Salvadoran mass communication before the civil war, Ricardo Sol found, “The Salvadoran media demand as a basic right for the exercise of their profession, freedom of expression, based on free business practices. For that reason, the owners of Salvadoran newspapers are among the most active members of the Inter American Press Association. In their own editorials, they have argued that freedom of the press is not based on the principle that different media should give space to various opinions, but on the contrary, that each medium should publicize its own opinions, pointing out that freedom of the press really is based on the freedom of every citizen to found his own medium of information.”68 Sol’s perception that the brand of freedom of the press advocated by the Salvadoran media was really only freedom for the owners of presses was widely shared throughout the region. In her study of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), an organization of U.S. and Latin American newspapers, Mary Gardner found that perception to be a significant obstacle to rallying popular support for a free press: “Some editors and publishers of IAPA, particularly the North Americans, may find it difficult to understand or believe that some of their Latin American colleagues, willingly or not, are antipathetic symbols of the aristocracy, autocracy, or oligarchy of their respective countries.”69 By the time she wrote that study, in the mid-twentieth century, the media system that had grown out of the Spanish colonial experience was so different from the one that had developed from British traditions that even members of a trade group, who ostensibly had common interests to defend, had difficulty understanding each other. Nicaragua illustrates Gardner’s point, while also demonstrating how one family, Fruto Chamorro’s descendants, nevertheless united a country behind its newspaper. For the four decades that the Somoza dynasty ruled Nicaragua, the newspaper La Prensa was the regime’s most

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tenacious critic. In the repression that followed the 1957 assassination of Anastasio Somoza García, his sons rounded up hundreds of suspects, including the nation’s most prominent writers, for imprisonment and torture. Prisoners included poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra, who followed the tradition of activist poets as an editor for the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and his boss, editor-publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.70 Released from jail, Chamorro and Cuadra resumed their attacks in the pages of La Prensa on the Somoza dictatorship, led by Luís, who had replaced his father in the presidency. By 1977 La Prensa was the only significant opposition voice in the country.71 It survived largely because of Chamorro’s talent for outplaying Somoza at his own game. The publisher cultivated ties to international media organizations, particularly the IAPA, which lauded his crusade against the dictatorship, putting pressure on the Somoza regime to loosen censorship against La Prensa. “His influence was based largely on the simple fact that he was the object of repression by one of the hemisphere’s more repugnant dictators,” according to one scholar.72 The more Somoza punished Chamorro, the more the publisher’s reputation grew. When La Prensa accused the government of killing peasants, the Somoza newspaper, Novedades, responded the next morning with rhetoric discrediting La Prensa.73 Vitriolic and sensational as the newspaper feud was, it was the closest thing to public debate available in prerevolutionary Nicaragua. The debate was restricted in both themes and audience. Because the debate took place in the pages of newspapers, it was directly accessible only to the literate half of the Nicaraguan population. In fact, with limited circulation, the newspapers reached relatively few of the Nicaraguans who could read. I found no record that reading the newspaper aloud to the illiterate was a common practice in Nicaragua as it was in Andalucia.74 Further, most Nicaraguan peasants and workers, viewed these papers as nineteenth-century French unionists saw journals of that earlier era: they “spoken to us in a foreign language because they were made by men who know nothing of our needs.”75 La Prensa accused the Somoza regime of corruption, election cheating, and torture. However, the newspaper did not question Nicaragua’s basic social and economic structure or demand change beyond the reforms of liberal democracy. The public sphere drawn in La Prensa and Novedades was as limited as the readership of the two newspapers. Nevertheless, La Prensa developed a code understandable even to nonreaders: Censored articles were replaced by photos of Hollywood star Ava Gardner. Newsboys would check each day’s paper for pictures of the star. Issues in which her photo appeared were hawked as


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“Ava Gardner, Ava Gardner,” telling everyone within earshot, not just readers, that the censors were after the newspaper again.76 Through such tactics, La Prensa became at once a symbol of resistance and a symbol of exclusion of the illiterate masses from public debate. Acceptance of the belief that literacy conferred the right to participation was reflected in Chamorro’s status as a hero. When he was fatally gunned down as he left morning Mass on the way to the newsroom on January 10, 1978, Nicaraguans honored him as a martyr. A crowd of 40,000 escorted his body from the hospital to his family home.77 “It was fantastic the way people poured into the streets to protest, with no fear of repression or death,” Silvio Vega, a 59-yearold sales manager in Masaya recalled two years later in an interview that was part of a campaign to collect oral history about the events leading up to the toppling of Somoza. “Really, it was a demonstration of repressed feelings.”78 Nicaraguans had no doubt who was behind the murder: “When Pedro Joaquín Chamorro died, of course all Nicaraguans loved him because of the courage he showed in confronting Somoza every day in his newspaper, we felt a tremendous impact because we knew that the decision to do this had to have come from the Somoza government,” recalled a 46-year-old former government employee in Masaya.79 For Francisca Pérez Miranda, a 48-year-old maid and grandmother of five in Estelí, Chamorro’s death was the moment that she knew the Nicaraguan people were against Somoza.80 After four decades of oppression, the assassination of this man of letters catalyzed the urban middle class, politically moderate business owners, and the church into opposition to the dictator.81 They formed a coalition with a ragtag rebel army, led by middle-class Marxist intellectuals and named after the peasant hero, Augusto C. Sandino. La Prensa led the charge with increasingly virulent attacks on the Somozas.82 The alliance drove the last Somoza from power the year after Chamorro was killed.

Expanding the Public Sphere If the public sphere as represented by the media had been circumscribed in Somoza’s Nicaragua, it was even more constricted in neighboring El Salvador. “The vacuum left by the press in identifying and discussing the great national problems is a congenital weakness inherent in a private enterprise dedicated to mercantile journalism,” Rodolfo R. Campos wrote in the prologue to transcriptions from a radio news and discussion program broadcast on the

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Roman Catholic Church station, YSAX. “Foreign correspondents have mentioned it as one of the worst faults of the Salvadoran political system.”83 To help promote more diverse views, the Church had founded YSAX in late 1978. The use of radio as a mode of information incorporated the oral tradition of popular communication into a mass medium. The station’s programming tended to be didactic, with an emphasis on Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s Sunday homilies and the commentaries of Ignacio Ellacuría, the philosopher who was rector of the Jesuit university. Radio proved a vulnerable choice as a mode of information: The station’s signal was frequently jammed, and its office and transmitter were repeatedly damaged by bombs.84 As Campos indicated, the two major newspapers were controlled by families aligned with the oligarchy and factions of the Salvadoran Armed Force.85 While nominally independent, they illustrated Gramsci’s contention that journalists were in fact aligned with the dominant hegemony. In one example of how little dissent was tolerated, print shop owner Américo Aldana recounted the experience of his brother, Guillermo, who was editor of the student newspaper at the National University of El Salvador in 1971. Known as a dissident, the student journalist was accused of participating in an early guerrilla group’s kidnapping of an oligarch. He went into hiding and tried to take out a paid advertisement in La Prensa Gráfica, the newspaper with the largest circulation in San Salvador, claiming his innocence. A friend wrote a check to pay for the advertisement. The publisher not only refused to run the advertisement, but also turned over the check to the National Guard, allowing them to trace it and arrest the friend who had written it.86 ‘‘There was very little space in the big mass media,” recalled Marvin Galeas, a reporter for the independent newspaper, La Crónica del Pueblo, who became an announcer for Radio Venceremos. “There weren’t many news broadcasts and they were not of good quality. La Crónica was a small newspaper, mainly urban, a daily, but with a long tradition of opposition to military governments.”87 Subject to repeated bombings, it closed in 1980, after the city editor was found murdered, his body dumped beside a road.88 The last remaining independent newspaper, El Independiente, owned by the grandson of Miguel Pinto, closed shortly afterward, “for the same reasons,” as Galeas stated.89 Pamphlets were not a viable option because being caught with guerrilla propaganda could have been fatal.90 Until Archbishop Romero’s assassination, his homilies were the main source of


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alternative information in the country.91 Once he was killed in late 1980, said one guerrilla radio announcer, “[T]hose on the right thought that only their voices would be heard.” 92 In contrast to the blatant military dictatorships in Nicaragua and El Salvador, the postrevolutionary Mexican government relied more on co-optation than coercion. Under Miguel Alemán’s presidency, beginning in 1964, economic development became the country’s focus, leading to what Daniel Cosío Villegas, founder of El Colegio de México, called a period of complacency. Writing in the early 1960s, Cosío Villegas saw hope for a more aggressive media in a new group of editors at Excelsior.93 Despite such hopes, the media in fact ignored the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the 1970s guerrilla groups in the southern state of Guerrero. Signs of change did not occur until the early 1970s, with Julián Scherer at Excelsior. In the mid-twentieth century, Mexico appeared to have a diverse range and variety of newspapers. Excelsior and El Universal dated from the revolution. Novedades and El Heraldo were on the Right. El Día was on the Left. In between were scores of other nationally distributed daily newspapers, few with circulations over 10,000. In fact, the Mexican press reflected the political system, the diverse groups that formed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which governed the country. Ideological variety was permitted, nominal opposition parties and their members even owned some publications, because it did not directly challenge the workings of the system.94 Any challenge to the workings of the system was dealt with quickly by what Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called the “perfect dictatorship.”95 Vargas Llosa described a facade of social democracy covering a system that isolated the opposition. The president’s authority to resolve squabbling among elites kept order while the question of succession was settled by the constitutional provision of no reelection, combined with the dedazo, the president’s final prerogative of choosing his successor. Thus, the government changed, but the regime did not. The legitimacy of the PRI was maintained through its revolutionary heritage, its rectorship of economy, patronage politics, and elections. Under the traditional system, public discussions were not conducted in the media. Print media was for elite opinion-makers; most people got news from television, or got it secondhand from newspaper readers. The system was similar to Jürgen Habermas’ description of prerevolutionary France. The rulers appeared in public to be admired and to demonstrate their authority in legitimizing ceremonies carrying symbols of their authority, such as scepters,

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and wearing luxurious costumes.96 The Mexican version was the president’s appearance in the media on state occasions, wearing the flag as a sash. The president appeared on the front page or in the lead broadcast story nearly every day, and dissenters were seldom quoted. The government controlled the agenda, demanding silence on select issues as well as biased election coverage.97 Every Sunday night, all the radio stations in the country broadcast La Hora Nacional, the National Hour. Using a soap opera format of dialogue and ambient music, the show presents the official version of Mexican history, reinforcing the story of the nation as told in government-selected text books. Within that system, press controls were an “iron fist inside a velvet glove.” In Gramscian language, hegemony was achieved with more co-optation than coercion. Print was less controlled than broadcast, and television was the most tightly controlled of all. First, in the tradition set by El Imparcial, media owners were mainly PRI sympathizers. Their main source of income was government advertising, usually in the form of gacetillas, or advertorials. The government also provided media owners with low-interest loans. As an additional measure of control, the government controlled licenses for broadcasters and newsprint for newspapers, through the government-owned company, PIPSA. Reminiscent of the Spanish colonial controls, PIPSA was the only importer allowed to import newsprint, which Mexico does not manufacture. Publishers did not usually complain because PIPSA sold newsprint at a subsidized price.98 The government also provided other subsidies, including an ingenious device for allowing media owners to pay lower wages and giving the government more control over reporters. To supplement their meager wages, reporters received commissions on advertisements, including government gacetillas. The government paid their travel expenses to cover stories. Then, there were direct payments, called embutes, money stuffed in envelopes. While foreign reporters scorned their Mexican colleagues for accepting bribes, the president’s office furnished the locale for the correspondents’ club and extended foreign reporters quasi-diplomatic visas that exempted them from income taxes. Repression was more common in the provinces than in Mexico City, as evidenced by the 1988 murder of Félix Miranda, cofounder of Zeta, in Tijuana. However, in extreme cases, prominent national reporters, such as Manuel Buendía, who investigated the government-owned oil industry, might also be murdered, as Buendía was in 1984.99 Commercial television had grown out of the traditions established by commercial radio in the days when a popular Mexican saying claimed that three things united the country: the Virgin of Guadalupe,


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the official party, and Radiosistemas, the radio network that brought soap operas and the trumpets of mariachi music into the most remote hamlets. With the invention of television, Radiosistemas evolved into the commercial television monopoly, Televisa, whose owners included the politically prominent Alemán family. It was dominated by Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, “The Tiger” to friends and enemies alike. Televisa became the nation’s commercial television monopoly in the early 1970s when President Luís Echeverría nationalized the few independent private stations into the government-owned IMEVISION. Televisa controlled three channels, a production company, and a recording company. It exported programs and owned foreign subsidiaries, including a U.S. network, Univision. It operated on the studio system, creating stars and blacklisting rebels. It set advertising rates and payment schedules. And Televisa was unquestioningly loyal to the PRI. When asked to give the party $1 million at a secret dinner of PRI supporters in 1993, Azcárraga Milmo pledged $25 million.100 Nevertheless, by the time Azcárraga made that pledge of support, Mexico’s political system and media were both beginning to escape the control of the institutionalized revolution. Lawson Chappell has written that the political opening was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for more independent media. He and Sallie Hughes have argued that the political opening and media opening were interactive and mutually supportive, refuting claims that the media were free riders on democratic reform. While perhaps not the locomotive of change, the media were not the caboose, either.101 As media independence increased, so did government repression. From 1986 to 1995, ten Mexican journalists were killed because of their professional activities, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.102 During those years, government efforts to control the media continued. What changed most was the media’s reaction, a change that was crucial to the chain of events that permitted the Zapatistas access to the early Internet.

Controls Break Down The change in Mexico’s media began with the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. That was a year of upheaval and protest throughout the world, with students leading demonstrations in Chicago, Paris, and many other cities, including Mexico City. As the student demonstrations grew larger, the then interior minister Luís Echeverría grew more uneasy about the prospect of protesters disrupting the upcoming Olympic Games. One night, as protestors gathered at the ancient Tlatelolco Plaza, surrounded by skyscrapers, tanks closed in. Soldiers fired into the crowd and chased

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the protestors as they fled into the surrounding buildings, and then searched the apartments. In the days that followed, the army occupied the campus of the national university and rounded up the leaders. None of this was reported in the media, justifying the signs that the protesters had carried: prensa vendida, sellout press. The story of Tlatelolco was not really known in Mexico until a young writer, Elena Poniatowska, published La Noche de Tlatelolco, the Night of Tlatelolco.103 The guerrillas published their own newspapers, including El Civico and Fuego Nuevo, Civic and New Fire, respectively, but they did not circulate widely.104 The guerrilla movement that Genaro Vázquez commanded only convinced the nation’s major newspapers to publish its manifesto as a condition for freeing a kidnapped rancher.105 The urban left heard the stories of Mexico’s guerrilla movements not from newspapers, television, or radio, but in the music of troubadours such as Oscar Chávez, who sang in peñas, the Latin American version of 1960s coffeehouses. The Mexican composers revived the old revolutionary form of the corrido to tell the story of contemporary rebels.106 Once again, oral tradition relayed the information that the mainstream media, the official voice in the tradition of La Miscelánea, tried to suppress. After the 1968 political crisis passed, the 1982 economic crisis undermined government’s rectorship of economy, an important source of legitimacy, and underscored the need for more independent financial reporting. The immediate result was the launching of El Financiero, an independent financial newspaper aimed at business people. As other media criticized the government’s handling of the financial crisis, President José López Portillo proclaimed, “No pago para que me peguen” (I’m not paying to get beat up) and withdrew advertising from the most critical publications, including the weekly news magazine Proceso. The result was that after a few lean months, Proceso figured out how to live without government ads and became even more independent.107 The economic crisis also set in motion changes that would develop throughout the subsequent two decades, changing the government’s relationship with the press. The crisis showed that the import substitution industrialization model was played out and left Mexico open to changes imposed by the International Monetary Fund, which insisted on cutbacks in government spending that eventually led to privatization of PIPSA, the newsprint importer, and the government television channels. Selling PIPSA cost the government an important mechanism for controlling newspapers. The sale of the television channels, breaking Televisa’s monopoly on commercial television, was even more significant because most Mexicans got their news from


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television. To be sure, the stations were hardly sold to a radical group. In fact, it turned out that the president’s brother was a secret partner in the investment group.108 Nevertheless, the new owners, Grupo Azteca, needed to develop an audience, and that led to a more aggressive approach to news reporting than Televisa had used. Televisa, already facing competition for its high-end customers from satellite television and a cable company called Multivision, was also forced to become more aggressive. By the time President Carlos Salinas was selling off television stations in the early 1990s, he was also modernizing government spending in ways that changed print media as well. He announced that government advertising purchases would be based on circulation, that a value-added tax would be charged on newsprint, and that media would have to pay payroll taxes in cash. (Previously, they had been allowed to charge them against government advertising.) He also established a minimum wage for journalists, to help compensate for the fact that the president’s office would not longer provide embutes (most other government offices would quickly follow suit) or cover the expenses of journalists on trips (the PRI picked up the tab for a while).109 In 1988, the left wing of the PRI broke from the official party to form the Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD. That defection, along with the growing influence of the National Action Party, or PAN, a longtime PRI rival on the right, provided journalists with even more nongovernmental sources. However, the fact that so few of them took advantage of those sources, thereby continuing the old system of biased election coverage, actually made the media an election issue in the 1988 presidential race.110 The media also were evolving during this time, with the change led by two groups: a collection of Mexico City journalists who became known as the Scherer group and provincial journalists. The Scherer group was a prime example of how government repression backfired. In the early 1970s, Julio Scherer led a group of young journalists who tried to revitalize the stodgy cooperative-owned newspaper, Excelsior. However, the cooperative also included the printer and typesetter unions that were linked to the PRI corporatist party structure. Through the unions, President Luis Echeverría engineered a coup to throw out Scherer and his followers. Cast out from Excelsior, they started Mexico’s first independent weekly news magazine, Proceso, which became the scourge of PRI governments for the next thirty years. Proceso veterans founded the independent newspaper unomásuno, and when the government co-opted it, journalists trained there created La Jornada.111 Proceso and La Jornada would become the two

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national media most trusted by the Zapatistas and the first point of publication for the communiqués posted on the Internet. Meanwhile, independent media were on the rise in the provinces. Indicative of the symbiosis between political and media openings, they were mainly in states with strong PAN organizations. The Diario de Yucatán so irritated the PRI that the official party helped finance a rival newspaper, Por Esto!, That’s Why! (Por Esto! also eventually ran afoul of one PRI faction.) In Tijuana, Zeta reported aggressively on local government. In Guadalajara, local intellectuals with no journalism experience started Siglo XXI in the early 1990s. The most spectacular of the provincial stories is that of El Norte/Reforma. U.S. educated Alejandro Junco took over his family’s stodgy Monterrey newspaper, El Norte, determined to make changes. He invited his journalism professor, Mary Gardner, to give classes to reporters during the summer. He recruited inexperienced, but uncorrupted, recent college graduates, paid them a decent salary, refused to let them take advertising commissions, and fired anyone who accepted an embute. He was so successful in Monterrey that he took on the competition in the capital with Reforma, using the same formula.112 In a more modest way, Amado Avendaño and Concepción Villafuerte were developing an independent provincial press in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the highlands of PRI-dominated Chiapas. Avendaño and a friend had founded the newspaper in 1968, the same year as the Tlatelolco massacre. However, they had no intention of writing about the protestors’ sort of social issues. “It was a pastime,” recalled Villafuerte, Avendaño’s wife, who was soon drawn into the project. “It was a very local paper with news about daily events: weddings, the birth of a new family member.”113 During the week, Avendaño was a lawyer and a law professor while Villafuerte was an administrative secretary. On Saturdays, they published the newspaper and distributed it on Sundays. “It became a habit and a commitment to keep the city informed of what was happening,” said Villafuerte, “and we did this for years without noticing that the situation was changing.”114 By 1980, the weekend publishers began to reassess their role as journalism hobbyists. A 1974 Indigenous Congress sponsored by the government and supported by the Roman Catholic Church had made residents of San Cristóbal de las Casas aware of problems in the indigenous communities surrounding the town.115 Religious conflicts led to expulsions, and the refugees from the countryside poured into the town. Murders became more common. San Cristóbal de las Casas was growing and with it grew violence, mainly among indigenous people. Convinced that there was enough news to support a daily newspaper,


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Avendaño and Villafuerte bought their own press and began gearing up for production while still keeping their jobs. In 1983, the first edition of Diario Hoy was printed. El Tiempo continued to appear on Sundays with society news. More urgent stories came out daily in Diario Hoy. “Nearly every day, there was news about indigenous people,” said Villafuerte. “We were the first to publish about Indians. Disagreeable news, but that’s what there was.”116 News coverage put the pair in closer contact with unions, teachers, and workers. When they published articles accusing the new governor, Absalom Castellanos, of repressing those groups, the newspaper began to receive threats. Despite the reports of repression, by the time Patrocinio González became governor in 1989, the social movements had grown.117 Avendaño and Villafuerte reported deaths of peasant and union leaders in accidents that on the surface appeared unconnected with the government. By then, threats that their children would be kidnapped or that they would be killed had become routine. Avendaño resigned from the university. “We couldn’t publish things and then be part of the system that caused them,” explained Villafuerte. The two amateur journalists recognized, as Gramsci warned, that they were part of the dominant hegemony. As other political parties mounted challenges to the ruling clique that had governed Mexico since the end of the 1910 Revolution, the newspaper alternately faced accusations of being aligned either with a right-wing party or the Communist Party. “We were always independent,” Villafuerte insisted. “We didn’t depend on the newspaper to make a living, so nobody could co-opt us.”

On the Eve of Revolution The Mesoamerican media developed within a system that valued order and respected the authority that maintained order. Indeed, the press was most free in times of national chaos, particularly civil wars, when authority was disputed, and the media became one of the instruments used by various factions to establish hegemony. In that context, a contentious press became a symptom of national crisis, an aberration, rather than a part of the normal functioning of a democracy. Foreign reporters allied with foreign interests arrived during those crises. Dissent came from the only domestic media not under leaders’ control: revolutionary media committed to overthrowing the government, which presented a threat to order and the hegemony of the rulers. Under those conditions, media were perceived as an instrument for claiming power. Freedom of the press was considered an individual

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right, specifically, the right of the publisher. It was not the more inclusive freedom of expression that would provide a forum to all viewpoints in a free marketplace of ideas. For that reason, society did not perceive freedom of the press as a civil right for all citizens that all citizens should defend. In fact, the press was not a forum for popular expression. Songs and street theater were the media that the masses used for self-expression. In that atmosphere, some journalists who tried to implement an Anglo-American model of independence were isolated. Salvadoran editor-publisher Jorge Pinto was fatally wounded by the same dictatorship that had ended a socialist rebellion with a massacre a dozen years earlier. Yet, the independent newspaper and the social movement had never connected. Later, Avendaño and Villafuerte proudly defended their independence as proof of their publications’ credibility. As Sol noted, “The weakness and possibly the failure of some intents to develop alternative communications experiences in Latin America and El Salvador itself are because they have tried to remain isolated from the development of social forces capable of giving them backing or a foundation.”118 That also left social movements without voices: Both the Mexican student movement of 1968 and the Mexican guerrilla movements of the early 1970s were isolated, virtually ignored by the national media. As Gramsci had proposed, the movements needed their own organic intellectuals, including journalists, to succeed. By the late 1970s, media and social movements were beginning to connect. The archdiocese of San Salvador put the weight of the Roman Catholic Church behind a radio station created for the express purpose of providing a forum for discussion. That audio mode of information connected to the oral communication of street theater and folk music. Furious at the assassination of their publishing dynasty’s patriarch, the Chamorro family in Nicaragua aligned La Prensa with a broad-based movement to overthrow Somoza. In Mexico, publications as modest as El Tiempo and as formidable as Proceso and La Jornada opened their pages to alternative views and groups that the media had traditionally ignored. Like independence-era editor Carlos Maria Bustamante, reporters such as Galeas and publishers such as the Chamorro family found themselves pushed out of the mainstream and into revolutionary media. The separation between media and social movements was breaking down as dissidents used media to challenge ruling class hegemony.

CH A P T ER

3

Newspapers and Citizenship in Revolutionary Nicaragua

A crowd toppled the statue of the mounted dictator at the entry to the downtown baseball stadium. Looters a few blocks away grabbed souvenirs from the presidential palace and a guerrilla threw herself on the dictator’s bed, wrapped in a red and black rebel flag.1 Then, a mob began to form outside Novedades, the newspaper that had used its columns to justify two generations of the Somoza dynasty to Nicaraguan readers. Guards stopped the jubilant, rowdy throng at the door.2 Even as symbols of the dictatorship were being torn down across the capital city of Managua on that July day in 1979, the guerrillas whose triumph provoked the destruction stepped in to save the ex-ruler’s newspaper plant. Six days later, the presses that had turned out the daily viewpoint of the Somoza regime were producing a different kind of newspaper. Barricada, the official voice of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the leaders of a revolt that toppled forty-three years of one-family rule, first appeared on July 25, 1979, and continued publishing throughout the eleven-year revolution and beyond.3 The Voice of Nicaragua radio station would not be inaugurated until three weeks after that first newspaper was published, indicating the difference in priorities between electronic and print media that would be evident throughout Sandinista rule.4 The decision to save and reconvert the Novedades facilities into a Sandinista newspaper was deeply rooted in Nicaraguan history and culture. It also had significant consequences for the Sandinista Revolution. Literacy and the newspaper became intertwined parts of the new rulers’ strategy to establish an alternative hegemony by developing Nicaraguan citizens who would “become protagonist[s] of history rather than spectator[s],” as Fernando Cardenal, coordinator of the National Literacy Campaign, said.5 In a little more than a

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decade, the Sandinistas transformed peasants and workers conditioned by four decades of military dictatorship into active citizens who regularly discussed political issues in study circles and expressed their views in letters to the editor and in opinion columns that were published in the newspaper. They challenged four centuries of practice that excluded most Nicaraguans from participating in government by denying them access to the elite print media because they could not read. They opened the print media to all Nicaraguans by making common people protagonists of the news, both as subjects and as writers. Traditionally marginalized groups became part of the imagined nation of newspaper readers. In making these changes, the new rulers reconstructed the concept of nation to include the groups that they hoped would support them as leaders. For that reason, literacy in revolutionary Nicaragua was more than reading: It was the opportunity to formulate and voice ideas. It became what William Sewell has said revolutionary rhetoric was for the nineteenth-century French labor movement: “It validated them as legitimate actors on the public stage and endowed them with the power of comprehensible speech.”6 The record of that change can be reconstructed from the pages of Barricada, from those who read it and wrote in it, either as full-time journalists, occasional contributors, or authors of letters to the editor. That record explains why a late twentieth-century revolution would choose a newspaper as its principal mode of information and how it used that newspaper to try to establish hegemony based on citizen participation. The Nicaraguan case clearly illustrates Antonio Gramsci’s point that seizing power is merely one moment in revolution. To rule, leaders must obtain the consent of the governed. The Sandinistas’ struggle for hegemony was barely beginning that July day when they marched into Managua. That their leadership was strongly contested during the decade they were in power is evident from their loss of the 1990 presidential election. Barricada played a significant role in that protracted attempt to establish hegemony, which included building an international support network. As Mark Poster has noted, readers are individuals who make independent choices based on the sense they make of the symbols that represent letters and words.7 Although readers may feel that they are part of an imagined community, they can also stand apart from the print mode of information that connects them to that community and make individual judgments about how their community should function. Thus, the ability to read becomes a tool for empowerment, but may make print a less effective medium for persuading and creating hegemony

NEWSPAPERS AND CITIZENSHIP

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than an electronic medium that creates a total environment. Thus, the newspaper’s strengths and weaknesses as a revolutionary mode of information shaped the Sandinista struggle for hegemony.

Poets and Periodicals The choice of a newspaper as the primary medium for the Nicaraguan Revolution challenges predictions of the declining importance of newspapers as revolutionary media. In the two centuries before the Hachtens incorporated that term in the lexicon of media analysis, the medium of revolution was print, mainly pamphlets and newspapers. Poster has suggested that revolution, as it has been understood for the past two centuries, is inextricably linked to the periodical press.8 His research, as well as that of John D.H. Downing, is based on the premise that the periodical press is no longer the dominant revolutionary medium. In countries with large numbers of illiterate citizens, radio becomes more important than print media.9 That premise overlooks the link between literacy, literary expression, and the empowerment of citizens that Ángel Rama outlines in La Ciudad Letrada, The Lettered City. As Rama has noted, the “paradigm of intellectuals in the revolution has a long tradition in Latin America and draws on a commonplace [theme] of the popular imagination regarding representatives of the lettered city: An undisguised awe of the intellectual’s ability to twist language, whether in speech or writing. In revolution, it falls to the man of letters to write the documents that provide the ideological justification for the struggle, the expected glorification of revolutionary leaders, and the plans to coordinate scattered forces. On the other hand, there is an abiding lack of confidence in the man of letters’ perseverance and real solidarity with those outside the lettered city, a suspicion that the fruits of the revolution will be lost through the betrayal of a man of letters.”10 The Sandinistas sought to minimize that possibility by inviting those outside the lettered city inside the city’s walls. They aspired to make all Nicaraguans men and women of letters. To demonstrate that commitment, they made publishing a newspaper their top media priority, raising the possibility that the press as a mode of information may still have a role in revolution. Bayardo Arce, the member of the Sandinista National Directorate who served as its liaison with Barricada, said that the new rulers chose a newspaper as the official medium because electronic media were ephemeral. A newspaper provides a solid record of what was said. Another important factor, he acknowledged, was Nicaraguan

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tradition.11 That is the factor that Mark Poster calls the “historical peculiarities” of the various modes of information, with their “continuities and breaks.”12 When Nicaraguans meet in the street, they do not call out “partner,” or “comrade,” or even “brother.” The appropriate greeting is “poet.” This casual practice is a daily reaffirmation of Nicaraguans’ belief that they are defined by their poets and writers.13 The noted writers of neighboring countries, Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, are closely identified with specific factions of their societies. In Nicaragua, the nineteenth-century poet Rubén Darío is universally revered as the artist whose work gave an international identity to a nation the size of Tennessee. Nicaraguans “have no more important hero than Darío,” a Nicaraguan sociologist has said.14 Just as significantly, from Darío on, Nicaragua’s poets have taken on a measure of social responsibility. In his best-known political poem, “To Roosevelt,” Dario invoked the Aztec poet-king Netzahualcoyotl to warn the U.S. president, “The Spanish lion has a thousand cubs.”15 Nicaraguan writers have carried out their activism in part through advocacy journalism. Poetry, often political poetry, is a fixture in Nicaraguan newspapers.16 Thus, the intimacy of poetry connects to the quite public nature of newspapers. The ability to practice each legitimizes the writer as a public figure with a right to a viewpoint on national issues. The protagonists of Nicaraguan history have been men of letters. Nicaragua’s first president founded the Chamorrro publishing dynasty with newspapers that took the Conservative side in the LiberalConservative debate that dominated the nineteenth-century press. In early twentieth century, Augusto C. Sandino, the peasant who led the fight to end two decades of U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, wrote extensively about his struggle in letters and pamphlets.17 After tricking and killing Sandino in 1934 to suppress the revolt he led, Anastasio Somoza García wrote El Verdadero Sandino, a biography that was a literary assassination of the rebel.18 Both sides in the struggle felt the need to justify their viewpoints and actions in writing. Military victory was not sufficient. They sought to control the written record of their fight, even following victory in Somoza’s case. They wrote to justify their actions and the legitimacy of their vision for the country. Writing was part of their effort to establish hegemony. Somoza García came to power in 1937, and poet-journalist Rigoberto López assassinated him nineteen years later.19 López was killed on the spot. The assassination did not spark a popular uprising or cause the regime to crumble as the young writer had hoped.


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Instead, Somoza’s son Luis replaced his father in the presidency, turning the dictatorship into a dynasty. La Prensa was the voice of resistance in the Somozas’ Nicaragua and the murder of its editorpublisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro is widely considered the spark that set off the rebellion that brought the Sandinistas to power. The Sandinistas sought a place in that literary-journalistic tradition. In the years before Somoza’s overthrow, the Sandinistas published their own mimeographed newspaper, La Trinchera, which had a limited circulation.20 In the final months before Somoza was removed from power, the Sandinistas also had a radio station, but it could not be heard across the entire country.21 Nicaraguans in different parts of the county who clearly recalled the Chamorro assassination told interviewers in 1980 that they had not listened to the radio station until after Somoza’s fall.22 While they were not asked whether they actually ever read La Prensa, they knew about the newspaper and its publisher. Newspapers had a historic place in Nicaragua that could not be filled by another medium. Print, not radio, was the accepted mode of information for discussing the life of the nation. For viewpoints to have legitimacy in Nicaragua, they had to be expressed in print. Even before they came to power, the Sandinistas were attempting, through La Trinchera, to enter that written dialogue about national issues. The Somoza regime succumbed to a coalition so broadly based that all that its members could agree on was to throw the rascal out. The successful insurgents named a five-member junta, or committee, to govern the country. Only one member, Daniel Ortega, was openly Sandinista. Two others were secret Sandinistas, forming a majority against the more moderate views of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro’s widow, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and an anti-Somoza businessman, Alfonso Robelo. Similarly, only two of the initial eighteen new cabinet ministers, Tomás Borge and Ernesto Cardenal, were openly Sandinistas. However, the Sandinistas had a secret majority and in Cardenal’s words, “[T]he few who were not soon left the government.”23 Once in power, Jorge Castañeda has written, the Sandinistas ignored the real reasons for their triumph in favor of a mystique that presented it as a purely military victory. “The Sandinistas slowly transformed their political victory into a military triumph,” he wrote. “In part, they erased from the collective memory the real causes of their victory.” Unwilling to rule with the coalition that brought them to power, the Sandinistas spent the revolution struggling to establish an alternative hegemony based on citizen participation, confident that most Nicaraguans agreed, or could be persuaded to agree, with their views.

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At the same time, they continued making significant concessions to business interests that, nevertheless, did not support them.24 Peculiar as that reasoning might appear to outsiders, it was in keeping with Sandinista history and philosophy. During the 1980s, Marxists in Nicaragua and neighboring El Salvador, which was engaged in its own civil war, took fraternal pride in recalling the 1920s alliance between Sandino and Farabundo Martí, the leader of a failed Salvadoran Revolution that is considered the first attempt at a Marxist uprising in Latin America.25 They tended to omit the fact that the two leaders had split precisely over the issue of communism. Sandino insisted that he was not a communist.26 As a result, integrating Sandino into the movement as a historical symbol for a socialist revolution required considerable agility on the part of Nicaraguan leftists. Carlos Fonseca, who died fighting Somoza’s National Guard in 1976, reconstructed Sandino as a radical leader who was unable to fulfill his “mission due to the limitations of his historical moment.”27 That approach became the basis for Sandinismo, a philosophy that incorporated uniquely national historic elements into a belief in socialist revolution. That interpretation caused a break with the Nicaraguan Socialist party, which insisted on following Moscow’s instructions to participate in peaceful elections until a suitable proletarian mass developed.28 Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Fonseca and Tomás Borge developed an alternative concept of Marxist-Leninism adapted to Nicaraguan conditions.29 The basic premise of this alternative was that Sandino’s fight against imperialism was the naive beginning of a popular revolutionary path. Fonseca dismissed the assassination of the first Somoza as “misguided,” advocating guerrilla warfare, modeled on Sandino with some influence from the Cuban Revolution, as the way to overthrow the dictatorship. Based on that premise, he developed what Steven Palmer has called, “the coherent nucleus of . . . Sandinismo: at once a settling of the possible contradictions inherent in the synthesis of Sandino’s discourse, political project, and a mythical legacy with a Marxist-based revolutionary ideology . . . and a captivating and symbolic national narrative intended to provide the popular classes of Nicaragua with meaning, purpose, and an entrée into their country’s historic currents of armed opposition to tyranny.”30 By reaching into that past to justify revolution, the founders of Sandinismo made it more difficult to ignore another part of their nation’s history of opposition to tyranny: the press. Street theater such as The Güegüence had provided a release for expressing popular discontent since colonial times. However, the


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authoritative version of events, even for revolutionary leaders, was expressed in print. Fonseca and Borge had developed a narrative that provided the popular classes entrée into the historic currents, but tradition demanded that full participation in the Nicaraguan national debate meant written participation. For their message to have authority, the Sandinistas needed to be convincing in print.

The Press Environment La Prensa had ardently supported Somoza’s overthrow, but it was, after all, the voice of the Conservative Party. The newspaper had fired Bayardo Arce in 1971 for being a Sandinista. Because La Prensa’s press and building had been destroyed in the final months of the Somoza dictatorship, both La Prensa and Barricada were printed on the old Novedades presses for several months. The new government awarded La Prensa’s shareholders compensation that allowed them to buy new facilities, a decision that remained controversial. “We should have given the money to the employees,” Arce insisted when I spoke with him more than two decades later.31 Its ties to the country’s history gave La Prensa tremendous credibility in Nicaragua, while at the same time making it strongly partisan and difficult to control. Within a few months, the newspaper’s management split over Nicaragua’s new rulers. Disagreements became so intense that Sandinista supporter Xavier Chamorro, brother of Pedro Joaquín, took 25 percent of La Prensa’s assets and a majority of the staff to start a new newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, the New Daily.32 With its founding, Nicaragua had three daily newspapers, each headed by a member of the Chamorro family. La Prensa slipped back into its prerevolutionary strategy of constructing itself as a symbol of press freedom in a dictatorship. El Nuevo Diario contended for the progressive mantle of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. Barricada played the role of official party organ. Both Adam Jones and Kris Kodrich have pointed out the remarkable diversity of voices in both the press and electronic media during the Nicaraguan Revolution, from 1979 to 1990. “Almost uniquely in the annals of leftist revolution, the Sandinistas never sought or exercised a monopoly over Nicaraguan media,” Jones has written.33 Throughout the Sandinista regime, opposition radio and television stations were allowed to broadcast, and the government facilitated the opposition newspaper’s purchases of imported newsprint at a time when foreign exchange was scarce.34

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However, diversity did not mean a level playing field or that the Sandinistas relinquished the controls that rulers could claim under a long tradition of linking press rights to responsibilities. Other newspapers did not receive as much newsprint as the Sandinista party newspaper Barricada did.35 Further, all the news media were subject to censorship, which delayed news at times to the point of making reports obsolete by the time they reached readers.36 Censorship also included outright closures, notably that of a tiny Maoist paper, El Pueblo.37 The party newspaper was not exempted from censorship. The restrictions became even clearer when Ronald Reagan took office as president of the United States in January 1981 and began supporting a counterrevolution. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had been wary of the Sandinistas and ultimately cut off aid to them in one of his last acts as president. The Reagan administration accused Nicaragua of supplying arms to insurgents in neighboring El Salvador as part of an international communist aggression sponsored by the Soviet Union through Cuba. Based on that belief, the United States funded a nine-year counterrevolution that ended in a negotiated settlement and elections that removed the Sandinistas from power. “In any war, the first casualty is information and we were no exception,” a Barricada war correspondent recalled. The government used the war as an excuse for censorship of everything from economic issues to coverage of the military draft, he said.38 For Barricada, dealing with La Prensa was straightforward: It was the competition. Barricada chastised La Prensa for alleged inaccuracies and outright lies.39 The government closed down the paper seven times in the first five years of the revolution. This, of course, was an old game for La Prensa. Calling on the expertise and reputation gained during its battle with Somoza, Pedro Joaquín’s eldest son and namesake rallied international support.40 For a time, Nicaragua-watchers, including media scholar John Spicer Nichols, speculated that the Sandinistas might have managed to change the rules a bit for La Prensa. “Because of the mass illiteracy before the revolution, La Prensa was more important for what it was than what it said. Now, with the impact of more widespread literacy in the country, La Prensa might be judged in the future more for its content than its tradition.”41 However, the Sandinistas lost patience before that idea could be tested. In June 1986, the government closed La Prensa, indefinitely.42 Complaints about the closure came from the usual quarters, media and human rights organizations. However, an unexpected voice joined the chorus: The journalists of Barricada felt that they had been deprived of their rightful prey and ultimate triumph by the


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closure. “Our greatest pride as revolutionary journalists should be for La Prensa to exist and for no one to read it,” a high-ranking Barricada editor told Jones.43 Citizen-readers were left with a choice between two revolutionary newspapers, one official and the other unofficial. As the official voice of the Sandinistas, Barricada had more access to sources of information and more resources, but also more constraints.44 Every word in Barricada was scrutinized as the official position of the government.45 El Nuevo Diario was under no such strictures. It grabbed the sensational stories that staid Barricada would not print.46 El Nuevo Diario created the sort of challenge for Barricada that, according to Jesús Martín-Barbero, the sensationalist press created for the Chilean workers’ press early in the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, he has written, the localized workers’ press became a national left-wing press. “The form of discourse of these newspapers, however, remained within the constraining matrix of the rationalistic Enlightenment, performing a function of popular education formation and political propaganda.”47 Unlike the Chilean press of the 1920s and 1930s, Barricada did attempt to move beyond the relationship of production to address issues of daily life such as gender relations and cultural practices.48 However, its status as the official Sandinista voice constrained Barricada. El Nuevo Diario was freer to indulge in the characteristics of the sensationalist press that Martín-Barbero has outlined: “The large headlines calling attention to the main story, the prominent graphics illustrating the story, the melodramatization of a discourse gripped by violence and the macabre, and the exaggerated fascination with the stars of sports and entertainment.”49 He has argued that such forms derive from the popular culture of melodrama. “The melodramatic aesthetic dared to violate the rationalistic division between serious and frivolous themes, to treat political events as dramatic events, and break with ‘objectivity’ by observing the situation from the perspective that appeals to the subjectivity of the readers.”50 While they enjoyed the resources and status of being an official organ, Barricada staffers said that they felt their paper was stodgy compared to El Nuevo Diario.51 Nevertheless, three former Barricada readers did complain about the sensationalism of the Nicaraguan press since Barricada ceased publication.52 While supportive of the revolution and subject to censorship, El Nuevo Diario was able to draw a larger public sphere than Barricada offered. In addition, Barricada was expected to be the official voice of the Sandinistas while still selling advertising and subscriptions.53 Although that made for a tougher competitive environment, other

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government policies were providing both newspapers with a potentially expanded reader base.

Revolution and Reading Typical of Nicaragua, the minister of culture named by the new government was an internationally recognized poet. Ernesto Cardenal initially named his brother, Fernando, to run Barricada, but he quickly left that post to coordinate the National Literacy Crusade.54 The Cardenals’ vision of literacy, which blurred the line between literate and literary, would strongly influence the campaign for civic education and, indirectly, the atmosphere in which the new Sandinista newspaper, Barricada, developed. That vision was drawn from the Cardenal brothers’ Jesuit backgrounds. Although only Fernando was a member of the Jesuit order, Ernesto had attended Jesuit schools in Nicaragua and Mexico. The Company of Jesus was founded by nine masters of the University of Paris, led by Ignatius of Loyola.55 Education has been at the heart of the order’s mission since its beginning. Significantly, the order admitted non-Jesuits and youths of various economic backgrounds (although not women), even to its earliest schools, and emphasized intellectual self-reliance.56 “Saint Ignatius wrote that when anyone is appointed rector or provincial, he’s supposed to set aside some time to instruct the rudi, the ignorant,” Fernando Cardenal explained to a Brazilian priest in 1983. “And he labeled this work with the ignorant a very important task to which we Jesuits were always to devote some time. And all of a sudden, the revolution gave me the chance to coordinate the work of teaching nearly a million illiterate Nicaraguans to read!”57 Further, Loyola advocated a plan for a systematic education in the belief that basic subjects, such as grammar or literacy, are the building blocks for learning more complex subjects, such as rhetoric. Ernesto Cardenal applied those principals beginning in 1965 in Solentiname, an archipelago of islands in Lake Nicaragua. He became a priest to be allowed to create a Christian base community with the inhabitants of the islands.58 They learned not only to read, but also to write poetry that was published: Night A black night in the month of July. Your hear the sad song of the pocoyo. The glittering of thousands of fireflies


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makes it look like a great city. But no: it’s a night in Solentiname.59

Community members began to paint and sculpt art that was sold in New York and Europe, and they created a pre-Colombian museum from objects they found. Solentiname also became a center of liberation theology and Cardenal transcribed and organized theological discussions with members of the community into The Gospel according to Solentiname, which became an influential text in discussions of liberation theology.60 Typical of their insights is this comment from a woman named Olivia: “Always when someone struggles for freedom, he is putting the gospel into practice and that is why the gospel of Jesus is never finished. And that is why the world would not be big enough to hold it if it were written down.”61 The islanders were not simply literate receivers of information and culture. They used their literacy to produce culture, in a process that Alberto Melucci has called offering. “To offer instead of asking represents another breakdown in the rules of the game, another challenge . . . domination is accomplished when the possibility of the reversion of the gift into the countergift is successfully precluded. It is the unilateral power of giving, of generating and providing cultural models which constantly reproduces the predominance of the apparatus in complex societies. Movements attempt to extricate themselves from this asymmetry with the offer of alternative models.”62 The Solentiname community offered an alternative model expressed through the traditional Nicaraguan forms of art and poetry. Further, as Poster has noted, the very process of reading and writing is conducive to independent thinking.63 The peasants of Solentiname extended the cognitive process that allowed them to turn letters into words and sentences into a process of making their own sense of both the sacred and the profane. Literacy and the expression that it permitted led from peaceful reinterpretation to resistance and then to radicalization. In 1977, a group from the community joined the first unsuccessful Sandinista uprising, attacking the barracks at nearby San Carlos. Even then, the poets of Solentiname wrote. I remember that October dawn when we fled from the National Guard after the assault on the San Carlos barracks and I was drowning as we crossed the River Frío and I yelled: ‘I’m drowning, Iván.’ But it wasn’t Iván who got there first— it was you, Alejandro.64

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After the defeat of the Sandinistas, the government destroyed the community. “I don’t plan to reconstruct our little community of Solentiname,” Cardenal wrote a year later. “I plan a much more important task that we all share, which is the reconstruction of the entire country.”65 Indeed, five years after he wrote those words and four years after the second Sandinista-led uprising, this one successful, he said, “What I have to do now as minister of culture is simply to do [what I did there] on a large scale, all over Nicaragua, and not just for the thousand inhabitants of the Solentiname islands.”66 In the time between those two statements, Nicaragua underwent a massive cultural transformation based on literacy. It was no coincidence that before 1979 half the population older than ten years of age could not read. As Valerie Miller has noted, “The logic of the system made the promotion of universal literacy irrational. It was neither economically necessary for the functioning of the system nor politically advisable for its maintenance.”67 Illiteracy was a barrier between the vast majority of the population and the men of letters in the opposition. La Prensa’s attacks had been marginally tolerable only because most Nicaraguans could not read them. Thus, it had taken years to form the alliance between the literate and the armed peasants that finally removed Somoza from power. It was in that context that the Nicaraguan literacy crusade began. As Ernesto Cardenal said, “The crusade for literacy . . . is not just for literacy, but also a political and ideological campaign.”68 The revolutionary government entrusted that campaign to Ernesto Cardenal’s brother Fernando, who had followed a more traditional priestly vocation, first as a teacher and then as a youth minister. The first hint of the literacy crusade appeared at the end of July 1979 in Barricada. The Sandinista student organization announced plans to participate, with the explanation, “We want to play the role that is ours and that so long was denied us by the Somoza dictatorship.”69 Thus, the process of teaching, as well as learning, became an act of citizenship and empowerment. Nicaraguans were embarking together, literate and illiterate, on a crusade to unify their nation. Those who knew how to read would bring those who had been marginalized by their inability to read and write into the national discussion. Days after the students’ comments appeared, the official announcement was made. “A national campaign for literacy that will cover some 650,000 illiterate people . . . has begun just two weeks after the triumph of the revolution,” the front page of Barricada announced. The article quoted Fernando Cardenal’s plea for volunteers: “We hope that everyone who knows how to read will collaborate in this


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campaign.” The priority, he said, would be the long-neglected countryside.70 Besides the practical consideration of paying for a literacy campaign in a country emerging from civil war, the volunteer program brought educated, urban Nicaraguans into direct contact with the poverty of the countryside, forming bonds between the men and women of letters and the people who had been excluded from public discussion.71 This mutual learning experience was explained by a peasant identified only as José when he met the mother of his reading teacher: “I am not ignorant anymore. I know how to read now. . . . And do you know, your son isn’t ignorant anymore either. Now he knows how we live, what we eat, how we work, and he knows the life of the mountains. Your son has learned to read from our book.”72 By breaking down the barriers that separated the educated from the ignorant, literacy was considered the most meaningful step that could be made toward transforming the stratified prerevolutionary culture. The new readers would become living memorials to the Nicaraguans who died in the war to overthrow Somoza.73 Thus, although Poster has noted that reading is an autonomous activity, the way reading was taught in revolutionary Nicaragua made acquiring literacy a community activity that brought the uneducated rural poor, and the educated urban workers together. The inherent characteristics of the mode of information were mitigated, or in Martín-Barbero’s terms, mediated, by the method of teaching people to read. Trained by teachers, 60,000 high school students became the foot soldiers of the Popular Literacy Army. Professionals and housewives could volunteer through neighborhood committees. Unions and peasant organizations identified the illiterate and organized accommodations for instruction and lodging. For five months, Nicaraguans taught and learned. By August 1980, a year after the literacy campaign began, the illiteracy rate had dropped to 13 percent. In September, Nicaragua was awarded first place in the UNESCO annual awards “for distinguished and effective contribution on behalf of literacy.”74

Revolutionary Reading Matter As the literate half of the country struggled to teach the rest to read, the staff of Barricada was developing what the newly literate Nicaraguans should read. The newspaper carried into print Fonseca and Borge’s efforts to bring the popular classes into Nicaragua’s historic currents. By including supporters and potential supporters in the life of the nation, Sandinistas tried to instill in their compatriots

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their vision for the nation and establish their hegemony. Reporters wrote about common Nicaraguans who had joined the fight against Somoza and later, against counterrevolutionaries. Barricada developed feature stories designed for reading by the study circles of workers, soldiers, and neighbors (many of them newly literate) who discussed current events and ideas. Those readers also became contributors, both in the news columns and in an expanded letters-tothe-editor section. However, the newspaper also published verbatim lengthy speeches by Sandinista leaders and government proclamations. In addition, the publication was censored. The newspaper undertook an ambitious distribution system that delivered copies even to the combat zones. A weekly version of the newspaper, Barricada Internacional, reached out to an international audience in Spanish and English, as well as, for shorter periods, in Portuguese and French.75 Both internationally and domestically, Barricada presented a new Nicaragua, broad-based and participative, the Nicaragua that the Sandinistas hoped would support their rule. The newspaper contributed to the discourse of the revolution and helped form a collective identity for Sandinista supporters, two of the cultural elements that Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier have found to be keys to collective action.76 Founded by Sandinista militants, rather than professional journalists, the newspaper was soon turned over to more experienced management, headed by Carlos Fernando Chamorro, son of the slain Pedro Joaquín. In contrast to the prerevolutionary newspapers with their elite audience, Barricada was determined to be a mass medium. For the first month of publication, the staff gave the newspaper away.77 Even before beginning to charge, the paper had proposed to readers, “Let’s make Barricada a wall newspaper so that all the people can read it. The staff of Barricada calls on military commanders, activists, and all of the [Sandinista] political organizations to use the newspaper as a source of discussion, orientation, and political education. . . . You can’t just think that everyone gets a copy of every edition of Barricada or much less that our daily should be filed away. Barricada is, above all, a tool for the organization of the masses, a transmitter of orientation from the National Direction, a tool for popular education and orientation. . . . Organize collective readings, make sure the newspaper CIRCULATES so that no Sandinista is left without reading it.”78 With that goal, Barricada mobilized militants to distribute the newspaper widely. Union members sold the newspaper outside the factory gates. “We started out with 500 copies,” recalled Antonio


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Aguilar, a textile worker. “We got up to 1,200 copies.”79 Barricada arrived at the combat zones with supplies and rations, often up to a week out-of-date. Political officers analyzed the newspaper, assembled the squadrons of about thirty soldiers, and in about fifteen minutes summarized the news. That provided an extra layer of censorship beyond what the authorities had imposed on the civilian population. It was effective because soldiers had no radio receivers to give them access to other news sources. For example, when Lake Managua flooded the city in 1982, the then political officer José Luís Lara decided not to tell his troops, “so that they would not be worried.”80 Thus, while distributing the newspaper was logistically challenging, it allowed the Sandinistas to segment their audience in a way that radio would not have permitted. Troops and Nicaraguan civilians reading Barricada and foreign supporters reading the weekly Barricada Internacional had the illusion of being part of the same community of newspaper readers. However, in reality, news could be tailored for different audiences. In keeping with its role as a tool for popular education and orientation, the newspaper introduced subjects that had not previously been topics of public discussion and reintroduced old subjects in a new way. Sewell found that old vocabulary could be adapted to express new ideas; however, he was examining six decades of change.81 The Sandinista Revolution was on a tighter schedule. “This was a cultural change with the implication that there needed to be a process to establish new codes to interpret reality,” recalled Sofía Montenegro, a member of the Barricada editorial board. “We had to re-name the world. . . . I believe the Bible when it says that the word came first. . . . In order to remake the world, we had to re-name it.” The revolution changed the rules of the game, the system of values, and the interpretation of reality. Nicaraguan society had to be reorganized with new ideas. Montenegro compared the change of ideas to a change of currency. Barricada’s charge was to put the new ideas into circulation.82 “The people” were prominent in Barricada’s news columns and photographs. “Reconstruction” could mean rebuilding bombed-out buildings or it could refer to the literacy campaign. Even the concept of “revolution” changed: It was not the uprising that had deposed Somoza. Revolution was the fundamental change in society that began when the new leadership took power. “Our revolution began just a few days ago,” started one front-page article.83 In contrast to Sewell’s laborers, who found that their corporate vocabulary worked well inside the trade but precluded them from public discourse, the Sandinistas turned their once clandestine

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discourse into the dominant discourse inside Nicaragua, largely through the pages of Barricada.84 As Taylor and Whittier have noted, “The public discourse about an issue can be thought of as a set of interpretive packages that frame or give meaning to an issue.”85 Changing the discourse changes the meaning. The Sandinistas put into practice Melucci’s insight that “emerging power is increasingly based not solely on material strength, but on the production and circulation of information.”86 To help Barricada and, through it, the newly coined information circulate, the Sandinistas called on labor unions and other grassroots organizations affiliated with their alliance. Labor leader Luís Barbosa recalled: “Both in the unions and in the neighborhoods, we organized study circles. News stories that were for study were identified with [a logo of] Sandino’s hat. When we saw the hat, those of us in charge [shop stewards and block leaders] knew that we should call together the study circle. This was a constant task of education, with both workers and neighbors. This also helped us maintain brotherhood, friendship, and contact and get to know each other better.” The subjects of discussions were wide-ranging, such as the advantages of monogamy or the instability of the Nicaraguan currency and how it was exacerbated by individuals’ attempts to protect their household economies by changing national currency into dollars.87 Besides the designated supplements that appeared about twice a week, the study circles also discussed editorials and international news. They supplemented Barricada with the union magazine and articles from El Nuevo Diario and even La Prensa. “But 90 percent of the materials came from Barricada,” said Aguilar. Groups of four to five workers, youths, or neighbors met about twice a week. They received the materials for study a day in advance. The sessions used adult education methods and were usually equipped with a blackboard.88 The circles reinforced reading for the newly literate, but they also were a way to turn reading into a group activity, rather than the autonomous experience that Poster has said reading inherently is. They incorporated face-to-face communication which he has noted “constitutes subjects as members of a community by solidifying the ties between individuals.”89 The study circles turned reading into a classroom activity rather than an experience that led to autonomous thought. It was a style of reading that was in keeping with the traditions of semiliterate societies as described by Martín-Barbero: “An oral reading or listening, very different from the silent style of reading of the literate.” 90 The study circles thus formed a bridge for the newly literate between the two styles of reading.


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The circles also took action based on what they had studied. José Luís Lara remembered that when he was working in a sugar mill where most employees had about a third-grade level of education, their study circle examined the health problems caused by polluted water: “The workers there took their water along in a jug and we proved that the water in the jugs was polluted, causing them kidney problems. We were able to get water trucks out to the fields during harvest, a highly positive action.”91 Such experiences confirmed the belief already instilled in Nicaraguans by their history that literacy was the ticket to political participation. Because they could read, they learned about the effects of polluted water and they were able to take action to improve their lives. Literacy and the availability of a newspaper that related to their lives and problems provided them with tools for citizenship. As part of the effort to make ordinary Nicaraguans protagonists of history, Barricada cast rank-and-file Sandinistas as newsmakers. “The Sandinista Combatant Speaks,” with a logo of the silhouette of a person wearing a beret and carrying a rifle, became a regular feature. In one column, Pedro Dolmus, peacetime chauffeur of a member of the ruling junta, recalled his combat exploits. “Now that it’s all over, I can’t believe that I am unwounded after being involved in countless battles,” he told readers.92 Union leaders also received ample coverage, such as the five-column profile of Carlos Pérez, sixty-eight-year-old cofounder of the Nicaraguan Workers Party, who had fought with Sandino.93 In the pages of Barricada, Nicaragua was no longer a nation of liberals and conservatives who could trace their family histories back to the era of William Walker and the filibusters. The newspaper had invited the rest of the country to join the debate, to appear on the newspaper pages, to be heroes. In that vein, the newspaper reported on the issues affecting the poor and marginalized, such as the mosquito-ridden neighborhoods of fishermen and the historic problems of the black and indigenous minorities on the Caribbean Coast.94 “It published union news, news about peasants, the daily news of the revolution: its progress and its problems,” Barbosa recalled. The newspaper also published historical articles, he added: “Many Nicaraguans learned the story of Augusto Sandino through Barricada.” 95 In its history lessons, the newspaper tied the present to the past. The headline on the lead story the day after the United States announced plans to embargo Nicaragua was a historic phrase: “I will not surrender and I am waiting for you here.” At the bottom of the page, beneath a photograph of demonstrators, their hands raised in fists, was a copy of what appeared to be the telegram that

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Sandino sent “Captain G.D. Hatfield, commander of the Yankee Marines.” It contained the phrase in the headline and was signed A.C. Sandino.96 The clear implication was that the embargo was another phase in the long history of struggle against oppression by the United States. The form changed from direct invasion in Sandino’s time to economic pressure against the Sandinista, but the struggle remained the same. Newspaper readers learned a different version of their history and saw a different version of their reality. Nicaragua was a diverse nation. Its people were not only mestizo, descended from European and indigenous ancestors, but also the descendants of Africans and of indigenous people who had remained isolated. Further, Nicaraguans had real problems, such as mosquitoes, not just abstract political issues, to concern them. And those problems were worth writing about and reading about. Barricada presented its readers with debates different from those that had occupied the pages of La Prensa and Novedades.97 The new newspaper showed them a different country. Besides writing for and about common people, Barricada encouraged them to write to the newspaper, not just about articles that had appeared, but also about their problems and concerns. “Buzón Popular,” “The People’s Mailbox: The Readers Ask, Suggest, Criticize” became a daily feature. “Communication is what Barricada tries to establish with it readers through ‘Buzón Popular,’” Sandinista ideologue Borge, by then the cabinet minister responsible for the party affiliate that owned the presses that published Barricada said in a 1984 speech. “Communication occurs each time the apparatus of diffusion latches onto the message of the receivers, breaking the scheme of dominant, unilateral, vertical, and verticalizing. This is about a process in which the receivers become transmitters, decodifiers, and encodifiers of the messages. This breaks with the privileged position of the transmitter to distribute messages the way a bank distributes currency, often devalued, for general consumption.” 98 This expanded concept of letters to the editor turned Barricada into a forum for discussing issues of national policy and private concern. It opened up the debate to the now-literate citizens. Aguilar recalled that in 1982 a major national discussion was in progress over whether agricultural reform should include distribution of land titles to peasants or whether the land reform decree was sufficient. Tall and thin, Aguilar wears a wide-brimmed, loosely woven straw hat, the preferred headgear of Nicaraguan workers and peasants that offers protection from the sun while keeping their heads cool. His colleagues at a 1,600-worker textile mill became concerned about


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the problem from the perspective of whether a decision would impact their cotton supply. A delegation visited a cotton cooperative in Chinandega to hear the perspective of the workers there. Through those discussions, they realized the outcome could have a more immediate impact on them: As a group, they owned the textile mill, but none of them or their union had a title or shares. If the peasants received titles, so would the workers. Based on what they had learned, the workers decided to write a letter to Barricada supporting the distribution of land titles. The letter was published in “Buzón Popular.” Workers were taking the initiative to investigate national issues, to reflect on what different policies might mean for them, and then to express their ideas in a public forum. They were empowered by the opportunity to join the lettered citizens of Nicaragua. The space also addressed more immediate concerns. Readers asked questions and Barricada got them answers. One reader suggested, “It seems to me that BEFORE cutting off electricity and water, the people affected should be given two or three day’s advance notice.” The reply began by pointing out that the huge number of consumers who were behind in their payments was causing severe problems for the government-owned utilities. However, it concluded that the suggestion was reasonable.99 Through Barricada, the government was being held accountable, both as a service provider and as an employer. When more than thirty employees were fired from the immigration service, the boss provided an explanation in the pages of the newspaper: They didn’t know how to do their jobs and kept coming to work late after repeated warnings. The story did not contain any reply from the fired employees.100 That omission is indicative of how Barricada’s role in developing citizens was circumscribed by the newspaper’s other function as “a transmitter of orientation from the National Direction.”101 There were subjects that the newspaper treated as “policy stories,” a term that journalists use to describe topics that are slanted in the news columns to reflect the views of the publisher.102 The restrictions became even clearer when Ronald Reagan took office as president of the United States in January 1981 and began supporting a counterrevolution. Barricada was the only source of news for soldiers at the front. As a result, when Barricada war correspondents arrived at military camps, they were welcomed as comrades.103 They ate, slept, and traveled with the troops as long as they liked. In contrast, reporters from La Prensa were regarded with distrust, and the few correspondents El Nuevo Diario could afford to send to the front lines were merely tolerated.104 Barricada reporters had privileged access to information

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precisely because the government was confident that they would not publish it. Barricada’s war correspondents were allowed on the frontlines, where they could see that soldiers wore worn-out boots, carried bags instead of backpacks, and ate rations that consisted of crackers and cans of sausages donated from Germany. However, they could not report on troop conditions. Similarly, when reporter Guillermo Cortés investigated a story on how a group of discontented peasants eventually became a counterrevolutionary front, it was never published because it contradicted the official line that all the counterrevolutionaries were mercenaries and ex-soldiers in Somoza’s notoriously brutal National Guard.105 Barricada published stories of soldiers valiantly marching off to war.106 However, the newspaper did not report on draft resistors or the worried parents of recruits, although reporters knew about many examples of both.107 One of the few hints of inconformity with the draft was a cautionary tale: A two-column, three-inch story on the front page of the March 22, 1985, edition noted that fifty-four youths had been detained and were scheduled for trial on charges of failure to report to their draft boards.108 The story ran next to the smiling photographs of six conscripts, with the headline “If We Don’t Defend the Fatherland, Who Will?”109 While Barricada included a wider range of citizens in the national debates on its pages, it also denied them information that they needed to make informed decisions. By refusing to report on stories such as draft resistors, even though the readers could learn about developments from other sources, the newspaper risked undermining its own credibility. Thus, while Barricada proposed a public sphere that was both more inclusive in participants and broader in subjects, the Sandinista leadership still sought to limit public discussion by limiting the information available. While trying to create a new society, the leaders were drawn back to the traditions of authority, hierarchy, and centralism and the belief, developed over centuries, that an unfettered press was a symptom of instability. Those tendencies may have been exacerbated by the counterrevolution. Speaking at an event celebrating a century of daily journalism in Nicaragua and the Day of the Journalist, Victor Tirado López, a high-ranking Sandinista, reminded his listeners of both the continuing war and the upcoming elections, the first since Somoza’s overthrow. “We must not forget the other war, the war that we fight every day in our communication media,” he said. “‘War is the continuation of politics by other means,’ the Prussian military theorist Clausewitz has said. Paraphrasing him, we could say that the current ideological war is the continuation of politics through the mass media. And like


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in any war, one must know how to use arms on the battlefield to achieve victory. . . . It is not about exposing one’s life, but rather about exposing ideas, doctrines, to analyze and interpret events, to debate and above all, to convince, to persuade.”110 That view of media as a valuable arm both increased Barricada’s perceived value and restricted its coverage. Its role as a forum for debate was subservient to its mission as a tool for persuasion. Barricada’s position as the official voice of the Sandinistas, a title that appeared on every front page of the newspaper throughout the revolution, not only circumscribed the newspaper’s coverage. It also prescribed much of the coverage. “The government agenda became the newspaper’s agenda,” Cortés recalled.111 In an era of newsprint shortages, reflecting both shortage of hard currency and a U.S. trade embargo, when the newspaper seldom exceeded sixteen pages, Barricada devoted full pages to the texts of speeches by revolutionary leaders.112 A study by two of the newspaper’s own reporters found that “there is a relative separation from the masses and a marked dominance of official information rather the facts and first-hand sources.”113 Their findings showed the contrast between Barricada and Martín-Barbero’s observations of the format that French publishers used to attract the newly literate readers in the mid-nineteenth century: Their publications used large type with plenty of blank space to accommodate readers who found reading an effort and who probably did not have good light for reading. Sentences and paragraphs were kept short, and stories were divided into episodes.114 Barricada could not always accommodate readers because, as the official party newspaper, it also had to accommodate political leaders who pressured editors to set the limits of public discussion. “Barricada could not get ahead of the news,” explained Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the newspaper’s editor throughout most of the revolutionary era. “Once a political decision was made by the [Sandinista] Front’s leadership . . . Barricada administered the policy, it got the word out, it made it public policy, but Barricada did not generate the policy. There was no public debate over Sandinista policy. The debate was private. I could go to a private debate, but as a journalist, I could not report on what was discussed. . . . The paper was not an organ of debate, it was an organ of diffusion of the [party] line that came out of private debates. . . . It was not the heart of the public sphere. Many things were discussed in the public sphere, but they were not the great changes.”115 However, the newspaper simulated the role of a public forum and many of its readers and contributors believed it to be such a forum.

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They believed this to such an extent that when I spoke with them years later, they lamented the loss of the newspaper, which had closed.116 “The [current] communication media are not sensitive to the issues of poverty,” said Antonio Aguilar. “They focus too much on Bolaños and Alemán,” a political scandal. “Barricada maintained the revolutionary family,” he added.117 Strikingly, the readers remember Barricada more fondly than many of the staff members, although that could be because of events that occurred after the 1990 election, when the party took control of the newspaper and eventually closed it.118

Imagining Revolution Abroad Staff members also asserted that the weekly international editions, called Barricada Internacional, enjoyed far more freedom in deciding what to offer readers outside the country.119 Sergio De Castro, the editor of Barricada Internacional, agreed.120 A Brazilian, De Castro was one of several foreigners on the staff of the international edition. The relative freedom that the international issues enjoyed could be an indication of an important advantage of newspapers as a revolutionary mode of information: the ability to segment audiences, providing different coverage for fighting troops, domestic readers, and international supporters. Twenty years after their publication, coverage in both English-language and Spanish-language editions of Barricada Internacional compared with the coverage in Barricada shows differences that are subtle but detectable. They could be ascribed as much to anticipated reader interest as to more freedom of expression. For example, Cortés specifically mentioned his embarrassment at Barricada’s coverage of the Miskito indigenous group.121 Living in the remote northeast corner of Nicaragua, near the border with Honduras and a four-hour boat ride from Puerto Cabezas, the nearest city, the Miskitos have resisted assimilation since colonial times. Their second language is English, rather than Spanish, reflecting their close contact with Great Britain into the mid-nineteenth century.122 They maintained amicable relations with the Somoza dynasty because the dictators basically left them alone. At first, Barricada covered the poverty and marginal conditions of the Miskito villages.123 However, once the counterrevolution began, with the U.S. backed troops using Honduras as a staging area and rear guard, the coverage changed. The Miskitos found that the frontlines were outside their villages. Miskitos were accused of aiding the rebels. In a typical counterinsurgency tactic, the Sandinistas insisted that the Miskitos relocate outside the combat zone.124 As Cortés noted, Barricada coverage portrayed them as happy


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and relieved with relocation, although, in fact, many were distressed at leaving their ancestral homes and uncertain how they would survive if they could not fish, following their traditional livelihood.125 Coverage of that sensitive issue in Barricada Internacional was not appreciably different, but it was more extensive, probably reflecting the international debate about treatment of the Miskitos. The February 20, 1982, Spanish-language edition of Barricada Internacional published both a commentary and a news story on the Miskito issue. The commentary disputed information given as fact in a television debate by Jean Kirkpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.126 A feature article illustrated with a photo from a birthday party at the new resettlement village told the readers how much safer villagers felt in their new homes.127 Two months later, the Spanish-language edition ran an extensive interview with a Maryknoll nun from the United States who had spent five months as a nurse in a Miskito relocation camp and praised conditions there while criticizing the U.S. policy that, she said had, led to the camp.128 In 1985, the English-language edition of Barricada Internacional gave a full-page of coverage to the grant of amnesty for Miskitos and other “members of Atlantic Coast ethnic groups imprisoned for counterrevolutionary activities.”129 Barricada did not cover the story. A month later, Barricada Internacional made the Miskitos’ return to their homelands from relocation camps its lead story.130 The only coverage of Miskitos in the daily domestic edition during that time concerned families that had returned from camps in Honduras.131 That story was one of several articles that Barricada ran that week about relocated war refugees.132 A week later, the English-language edition of Barricada Internacional reported on the resettlement of non-Miskito families in similar glowing terms, with the requisite sidebar headlined, “I feel safe here.”133 That could indicate an effort to coordinate coverage between the daily domestic and weekly international editions of the newspaper. The same edition included a cultural feature story about the folktale told in the Creole English spoken on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. The article notes, “Revenge is a characteristic element in the Anancy tales. The protagonists often choose cruel and violent means to get back when they’ve been wronged.”134 However, the article does not explore why that theme might be so common in the stories. Instead of examining the stories as a means of insight into the concerns of the Creole-English-speaking population, it simply offers them as a quaint folk tradition without further meaning. Barricada Internacional appears to have been allowed some flexibility in addressing stories of concern to readers with access to

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reading matter not subject to Sandinista censorship. Besides the difference in coverage of the Miskitos, the English-language edition of Barricada Internacional reported that Spain had suspended export credits to Nicaragua until the country brought payments on an $8 million loan up-to-date.135 That story was not reported in the domestic edition of the newspaper. It appears to have been a story that had to be explained internationally, but could be kept out of the news domestically. Other differences between the domestic and international editions appear to reflect recognition of audience differences. Both the domestic daily and the international edition ran stories and photos that demonstrated international solidarity with the Sandinistas.136 Calls for peace from other nations and international organizations were also prominent.137 However, the international weeklies reported more on citizen diplomacy, actions by people who might be Barricada International readers. For example, the newspaper gave a full page to an interview with the Sandinista Workers Confederation leader who had organized a campaign to persuade workers all over the world to donate a day’s wages to Nicaragua.138 It also covered a brigade of twenty-five German workers who spent four weeks of their vacation working in Nicaragua.139 However, Barricada Internacional was still at times subject to prescribed coverage, such as running the speeches of Sandinista leaders. One-fourth of a twelve-page edition one week was devoted to reproducing a speech by Vice President Sergio Ramírez.140 There also appears to have been uniformity in the handling of sensitive stories. Both the daily and the weekly displayed the news of Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo’s investiture as a cardinal in exactly the same place: the lower right two columns of the front page. The Englishlanguage edition noted that he was an outspoken critic of the Sandinistas. That information was missing in the domestic story, presumably because Nicaraguans would already know it.141 The international editions also tried to simulate the reader participation of the domestic edition. The equivalent of “Buzón Popular” was “Buzón Internacional,” or “International Mailbag,” which in one edition contained letters from France, Holland, and Menlo Park, California. All supported the Sandinistas and the newspaper.142 If anything, “Buzón Popular” was more lively and controversial than “Buzón Internacional.” Nevertheless, the letters-to-the-editor column gave members of the Sandinistas’ international support network a space to air their views to other readers who were likely to support them. Like the stories about citizen diplomacy and international


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solidarity, the letters contributed to a sense of community among the readers. The use of print allowed the Barricada Internacional staff to publish in various languages and to target the publication to a foreign audience. A weekly publication also condensed the message, attracting readers who might not have been willing to read a foreign newspaper every day. Using the Barricada name, even for a different product, maintained the sense of an imagined community of readers linked by a newspaper that supported a revolution. That provided a space for nurturing the Sandinistas’ international advocacy network, perhaps best known through the work of international solidarity committees. As Mimi Keck and Katherine Sikkink have noted, such networks multiply channels of access to the international system and are especially useful in issues in which information plays a key role by providing “information that would not otherwise be available, from sources that might not otherwise be heard.”143 Barricada Internacional gave the Sandinistas a back channel to directly provide information to citizens of other countries who could foment international pressure against the Reagan administration policies in Nicaragua or dissent about those policies in the United States. Neither the domestic nor the international editions captured the essence of Nicaraguan popular communication that is the legacy of The Güegüence. That spirit was abundantly evident in music produced during the revolution, notably the work of the Mejía Godoy brothers. One of the best-known songs of the era contained the refrain. “Now that you are free, dear little Nicaragua, I love you much more.”144 Another compared the birth of a peasant child to the humble birth of Christ.145 Many of the songs mixed politics with humor that was sometimes ribald.146 That sense of mischief was missing from the serious, sometimes pedantic, columns of Barricada.

The Readers Get a Choice The real test for Barricada came in early 1988 when La Prensa reopened as part of a cease-fire agreement that would lead to elections almost a year later.147 The new political atmosphere meant a freewheeling discussion of what Nicaragua’s political and economic system should be, a topic that was never raised when La Prensa took on Somoza or during early Sandinista rule. Further, a literate Nicaraguan majority was able, and just as importantly, enabled, to take part in the discussion. As elections approached, Barricada promoted the Sandinista campaign with fervor, announcing the day’s campaign-stop in a

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full-page advertisement on the back page and covering the previous day’s stop on the front.148 One story about the Sandinista presidential candidate even appeared on the sports page.149 The “Debate” page gave candidates from minor parties the same space as those from the main opposition coalition, discussing such points as “Will the opposition accept a Sandinista victory?”150 The only other coverage of the opposition was to report small turnouts for rallies and polls showing the Sandinistas gaining ground.151 Campaign advertisements did also provide point by point explanations of the electoral platform.152 Barricada was nominally providing its readers with information that would help them make a solid choice on election day, while promoting the idea that a Sandinista victory was not only desirable, but inevitable. The biggest issue was whether the opposition would acknowledge the imminent triumph. On election day, February 25, 1990, many Nicaraguan voters expressed their support for literacy and the Sandinista version of public debate by voting for the former guerrillas who had led their country since Somoza’s overthrow. However, more voters used the new power of citizenship and public debate to express their disapproval of a decade of civil war and economic hardship.153 They voted the Sandinistas out of office, replacing them with a coalition led by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.154

Newspapers’ Role in Literacy and Revolution Access to the old Novedades presses made production of a newspaper possible initially. The Sandinistas also were willing to spend scarce foreign exchange on newsprint and ink and to undertake the logistical challenge of distributing a newspaper. While radio and Internet place the responsibility for receiving the message on the receiver, who must have access to a radio or a computer and telephone line, newspapers require the producer to also distribute the message to readers. Of the three modes of information analyzed in this book, newspapers place the highest demands on the senders of the message. The one demand that newspapers place on receivers is the ability to read. The great drawback of newspapers as a revolutionary medium is that they require literacy. That makes them useful mainly in the struggles among elite groups, such as those that took place during the filibuster era in mid-nineteenth-century Nicaragua. The Sandinistas, however, were not content to lead a nation of illiterate and semiliterate peasants and workers. Literacy was as important to them as land


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reform. Given their country’s literary tradition, they realized that their followers would only feel empowered to participate in public debate if they could express their ideas in writing. Barricada provided the forum for those debates. They wanted to create a new hegemony based on the support of the previously marginalized Nicaraguans who now participated in the public debate through the pages of Barricada. However, because Barricada was also the official voice of the political party, high-level editors felt that party leaders sought to limit and direct that debate. They attempted to create an appearance of a public sphere when, in reality, they were producing a modern version of the king’s public appearances to legitimize his rule. Further, by choosing a newspaper as their primary mode of information, the Sandinistas agreed to confront an influential rival on its own turf. While Barricada coined and circulated a new discourse, La Prensa used the familiar discourse of freedom of the press to undermine both its competitor and the regime Barricada represented. Literacy is a powerful, unpredictable tool. It allows people to gather their own information as a basis for their opinions. Just as important, it is like a secret handshake or code that admits them into the society of decision makers. That is especially true in a society such as Nicaragua, where self-expression through the written word is at the core of how people define themselves as a nation. Further, reading is an isolated experience. The Sandinistas tried to use study circles to break down that isolation and encourage a communal experience in reading, but as Poster has noted, reading is an autonomous activity in which each reader interprets the symbols based on a common understanding of their meaning but according to his or her own criteria. Using one’s own criteria can mean resisting the decisions imposed by rulers. Martín-Barbero has recalled the anecdote of a sixteenth-century Italian miller, Menocchio, who was condemned by the Inquisition. Menocchio combined the oral traditions of his village with what he read in seven books to arrive at conclusions that the Inquisition considered a deviant reading. He made sense of what he read from the context of his own life to arrive at an understanding that was different from that of the Inquisition, which presumably had approved the books: a collection of Bible stories, a travel book, a chronicle, lives of the saints, a humorous poem, the Koran, and the Decameron. Martín-Berbero’s point was that how the books were read was as important as the technology of printing that made the books possible.155 Technology, the manner of using it, and how that use affects the subject explain reading as a form of information that requires independent thought to connect symbols and create meaning.

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Whether readers discuss the information later with neighbors as the miller Menocchio did, or in Paris cafés or in after-work study circles, the first process of those who read for themselves (as opposed to those who listen to another person reading) requires autonomous thought. Further, Barricada allowed its audience not to just read the newspaper, but also to write in it, expressing the readers’ views, thus encouraging the process of independent thought. Independent thought led the peasants of Solentiname to join the ill-fated rebellion against Somoza. More than a decade later, the majority of Nicaraguans, now members of Rama’s Lettered City, elected an alternative to the rebels who had seized power by overthrowing Somoza. Literacy and its expression in newspapers did create a new hegemony, although not the hegemony that the Sandinistas had envisioned.

CH A P T ER

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Explosions shook the Valley of Hammocks, where El Salvador’s capital crouches at the foot of a volcano. Seasoned to the swaying from earthquakes, residents were unpracticed at coping with the new form of disaster that jolted the city starting at just past dusk that Saturday, January 10, 1981. Soon afterward, automatic gunfire echoed through the coffee-growing capital of Santa Ana and two other western cities. Bazookas could be heard in the east and near the El Paraiso military base just outside the northern city of Chalatenango. Armed gunmen stopped drivers passing through Soyapango, north of the capital, to deflate their tires, making the streets impassable. Citizens who turned to the radio for guidance found little of it. Salvadorans who happened to have tuned into a popular commercial station, Radio Femenina at twilight heard a recorded message from a guerrilla commander advising them that the long-anticipated “final offensive,” the country’s first nationwide rebel attack, had begun. After that, radio listeners’ only option was the equivalent of the emergency broadcasting system that linked all the country’s radio stations. Instead of explaining the night’s events and offering instructions on how to react, the nationwide show aired a detailed description of a military ceremony that had taken place earlier in the day.1 A little past 9 p.m., radio buffs desperately scanning their shortwaves for news came across this announcement: “Brothers of El Salvador and the world: From this moment, transmitting from someplace in El Salvador, Radio Venceremos,2 station of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front,3 to accompany the Salvadoran people step by step on their road toward final victory.”4 This was the first program of Radio Venceremos, one of two rebel radio stations that would transmit from inside rebel-controlled territory throughout the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war.5 Listeners discovered that the battle sounds they were hearing were an attempt by the recently formed insurgent coalition to take control of the country before Ronald

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Reagan’s inauguration as president of the United States on January 20.6 “Violence is legitimate when it is in self-defense,” Father Rogelio Ponseele reassured the radio audience.7 The station also announced that eighty soldiers had set fire to one barrack and joined the revolution, forcing the flustered government to acknowledge the mutiny, although insisting that the soldiers, while not the officers, later rejoined their command.8 The offensive turned out to be only the beginning of an arduous, twelve-year civil conflict, rather than the decisive triumph the insurgents had predicted.9 In contrast with the failure of the offensive, the rebel radio inaugurated to support it was a resounding success. It became the principal medium for the guerrillas, a key weapon in the battle for public opinion. In a pamphlet published early in the war to promote the guerrilla-produced documentary, Letter from Morazán, Carmen Latona, who as Commander Luisa was the member of the rebel high command in charge of Radio Venceremos, stated: “Radio Venceremos is no longer just a radio station. It is the official voice of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the main source of information (about the insurgents), not only domestically, but also for the mass media of the entire world.”10 Significantly, the rebels called the news from the front Plomo Informativo (Information Lead).11 Radio Venceremos and its sister station, Radio Farabundo Martí, became weapons in the civil war’s second front: the fight to establish an alternative hegemony that would replace the system of beliefs and values that kept the Salvadoran rulers in power. Salvadoran guerrillas recognized the Gramscian concept that taking power is not sufficient. The population had to be prepared to accept a new order if the revolution were to succeed. Radio became a way to lay the groundwork for that new order by recruiting and cultivating civilians to believe in the rebel vision for society even if they did not carry arms in support of a military victory. The Democratic Revolutionary Front, the rebel political arm known by the initials FDR, carried out that mission on a diplomatic level. Radio carried out the mission of creating an alternative hegemony for both domestic listeners and the revolutionary movement’s international support network. In using radio to establish that alternative hegemony, rebel radio built a community of listeners, an “imagined community” that united urban professionals and entrepreneurs, students, bus and truckline owners, guerrilla fighters, exiles, and union leaders in listening to the same broadcast at the same time.12 Through the broadcasts, the insurgents asked the listening community to imagine a different kind of country. They presented an alternative history and an alternative

THE ANTENNA IN THE ARSENAL

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present, one that sometimes directly contradicted the government’s version of events. Based on that alternative view of the past and present, the stations presented a vision of a different future. Thus, while guerrilla fighters struggled to gain military control of the nation, the stations fought for a different kind of control, challenging the established meaning of being Salvadoran, presenting the rebels and their allies as the legitimate rulers of the nation.

Revolutionary Radio To anyone who heard the sign-on, “This is Radio Venceremos, the voice of the workers, peasants and guerrillas,” it was obvious that this was a revolutionary medium.13 Still, categorizing these radio stations is not enough to understand them and their role in the Salvadoran civil war. The stations, Radio Venceremos and Radio Farabundo Martí, were in the tradition of Cuba’s Radio Rebelde, but are remarkable for their longevity, enduring through a twelve-year civil war.14 Radio introduced the rebels’ arguments into the public sphere by creating a community of listeners across the country and around the world who had access to information and a point of view that the government had denied them.15 Radio linked the guerrilla-controlled zone in Morazán, the Northeast, to the area another rebel faction controlled in Chalatenango, the Northwest. Further, the stations transmitted the daily life of those zones to listeners in the capital, San Salvador, and in locations all over the globe, informing their audience about a nation in which the airwaves had until then transmitted only the government version of events.16 The effectiveness of the stations, particularly Radio Venceremos, in getting out the rebel message is widely accepted. Thomas O. Enders, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, recognized that local and international reporters quoted Radio Venceremos to report news of areas that were not readily accessible.17 The Salvadoran defense minister acknowledged the stations’ effectiveness in building support for their cause. “In psychological, social, and political terms, the FMLN used the radio very well,” Defense Minister Rene Emilio Ponce told a foreign reporter shortly after the peace agreement was signed. “They used it to convince many people to support them. For us, it was the strongest source of propaganda they had to build the morale of their combatants. They used it to win support.”18 The broadcasts were a way to attract people to the rebellion while constructing a vision of the future.19 The stations’ narrow escapes, for instance, packing up transmitters and microphones just ahead of the army,20 became

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part of the revolutionary mythology, making Radio Venceremos and Radio Farabundo Martí symbols of the rebellion they defended. When the civil war began in 1981, radio was the medium with the most penetration in El Salvador. A total of twenty-nine radio stations broadcast in San Salvador, the capital, and another twenty-two in other cities and towns. Only two of the stations were not part of the country’s six radio networks. They were on the air an average of sixteen hours a day and most Salvadorans could receive at least one station. The country of 4.5 million people had about 1.5 million radios. That compared to two national newspapers, La Prensa Gráfica and El Diario de Hoy, each with a circulation of about 100,000 copies, and three afternoon newspapers with circulations of 12,000 to 48,000 copies. La Crónica del Pueblo and El Independiente had recently closed for reasons generally attributed to repression. Three commercial television channels broadcast for eight to fifteen hours daily, seven days a week. The government also ran two educational channels. About 20,000 television sets were operating in the country.21 None of those media was available to the guerrillas. “Because we were an illegal movement, we did not have access to the traditional communications media,” Miguel Huezo Mixco, who coordinated communications for the guerrilla faction that controlled Radio Farabundo Marti, told an interviewer during the war.22 To tell their story, the rebels fought back with radio. In the late 1970s, they would take over radio stations, tie up the employees, and disappear, leaving tapes running, before the army arrived, as one group had done with Radio Femenina that January night in 1981 when the general offensive began.23 However, those transmissions were necessarily unscheduled and, thus, could not be used to build an audience. Once the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua, they allowed one guerrilla faction to transmit from their country. Joaquin Villalobos, the leader of another faction, became convinced that the rebels needed a transmitter inside El Salvador. “Radio will be the other half of the war,” he predicted. Thus, each of the two largest of the five rebel factions that comprised the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front had its own radio station. Until the final months of the war, only Radio Venceremos, controlled by the faction that Villalobos led, would be the official voice of the entire coalition, broadcasting twice a day for an hour. At times, a third broadcast was added and in exceptional circumstances, such as the 1989 offensive, the station might remain on the air continuously.24 Radio Venceremos began when the rebels smuggled in a modified Viking transmitter from Mexico in 1979 and tested it at university


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demonstrations in 1980.25 Late that year, the transmitter was moved to Morazán in preparation for the final offensive. The guerrillas also recruited a professional radio announcer, Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, a Venezuelan living in Nicaragua. For the next twelve years, he would be Santiago, the voice of Radio Venceremos.26 Photos of the period show him as thin, at least a head taller than the rest of the crew, with unwieldy dark curls, graying slightly where they faded into an equally unwieldy beard. “We started out with one tape recorder, a single cassette, and a microphone,” he recalled. The staff would remain small. At different points in the war, one or two other announcers would join Santiago. Marvin Galeas, who had been a reporter for La Crónica del Pueblo arrived in 1982. Later the same year, Hector Angel Ibarra Chavez came from Mexico as a technician and took the nom de guerre Genaro, honoring the late Mexican guerrilla leader Genaro Vázquez. Because of the difficulty of smuggling foreigners across borders and into the combat zones, he made a commitment to stay in El Salvador for five years. Ultimately, he remained part of the radio crew until the war ended.27 Sometimes an announcer or reporter would accompany combat units and sometimes combatants would use military radios to call in for on-air interviews. A technician, sometimes two, kept the equipment running and a security team was assigned to protect the staff and equipment. Radio Venceremos sometimes operated from a hidden cave and sometimes from a field, depending on weather and combat conditions.28 Through most of the war, Radio Venceremos reported to Paolo Leurs, a European journalist who coordinated the rebel faction’s communication policy, and to Carmen Mercedes Latona, a high-ranking commander.29 Once the “final offensive” failed and the guerrillas settled in for a long fight, the transmitter in Nicaragua was dismantled. “It had been a disaster,” recalled Miguel Huezo Mixco, who was in charge of media for the guerrilla faction that would operate Radio Farabundo Marti. “We had no access to combat. We were using the wire services.” Then, the guerrilla responsible for the radio was captured, and Huezo Mixco found himself in charge of smuggling the equipment into El Salvador piece by piece, over gun-smuggling routes, to the capital. From the capital, peasants hid the components under loads of tomatoes and coffee bound for the northwestern province of Chalatenango, recalled a former technician who asked to be identified by the nom de guerre Wilfredo. Huezo Mixco hid transmission equipment in the back of his car. He was never stopped at any army roadblock on his trip to guerrilla-controlled territory. The transmitter

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was reassembled in a camouflaged cave and inaugurated on January 22, 1982, as Radio Farabundo Martí. The transmitter, also mobile, operated from underground trenches to buffer noise from the generator. The crew changed locations at least monthly to keep the Salvadoran Army from finding the transmitter.30 Like Radio Venceremos, Radio Farabundo Martí was kept on the air by a remarkably small crew, which included technician Wilfredo and announcers Marinela (her nom de guerre) and María Teresa Escalona, a Mexican internacionalista. Radio Farabundo Martí also was known for its network of war correspondents, including Fidel Campos, who were often assigned to combat units for weeks or months.31 The team represented a mixture of traditional intellectuals such as Escalona, who is now an administrator at the University of El Salvador, and organic intellectuals such as Marinela and Campos, who were pulled from the ranks of the fighting forces and, in Campos’ case, returned to them. Both stations reported combat news, issued warnings of strikes, and covered protests and other civilian activities that the mainstream media ignored. They interspersed their news with large doses of comedy, parody, alternative history, and protest music that other stations did not play. The rebel stations offered what commercial radio stations did not, because airing programs with such content, as well as listening to them, was risky. “Even listening to protest music was dangerous in those days,” recalled Astúl Ibarra, the director of the Roman Catholic Church charity Fe y Alegria and a rebel supporter, in the eastern town of Usulután. “At that time, it was very dangerous to listen,” recalled another Usulután resident who was a student during the war. “I listened in the intimacy of my home, because I thought I had the situation under control.” Similarly, professional soccer player Eoberto López Ponce said, “You had to be careful. It was a clandestine radio and listening to it was not permitted. You had to see how you managed it. . . . Sometimes we got a portable radio and listened to it softly in the room.” The owner of a rural bus line said, “I would listen with earphones or at a very low volume.” Because of the danger and clandestine nature of the broadcasts, estimating an audience size is virtually impossible. Still, the rebels were confident that they could convince potential listeners to run the risk of tuning in by mixing credible information with entertainment, creating an alternative hegemony in which Salvadorans could reimagine their nation, challenging the history, the present, and the future that the rulers presented.32


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Imagining a Radio Community Winning support required bringing together a diverse audience that was listening to the radio for many different reasons. In contrast with the “imagined communities” of the Creoles, accidentally created by newspapers in colonial Latin America, the community of rebel radio listeners was deliberately constructed by the insurgents.33 The main audience was urban listeners far from the war, in the capital San Salvador. Reaching the urban audience was crucial because most of the fighting after January 1981 took place in the countryside. Despite the proximity of a guerrilla stronghold in Guazapa, north of the capital, there was little evidence of rebel activity in San Salvador. Leurs explained, “Radio became a bridge between two national realities that had become completely divided: San Salvador and the liberated zones” of Morazán and Chalatenango in the country’s northern corners. Radio became part of what Paul Adams has called “the conflict over whether news of the conflict should be bounded in space as powerful interests generally desire, or publicized and spread through space.”34 In Mark Poster’s terms, radio created its own context, moving listeners from the urban areas that were relatively unaffected by the war into guerrilla-held territory and the combat zones. The words of war became the media language of rebel radio. Radio also brought in listeners from beyond the Salvadoran borders, taking the war to the foreign solidarity movements, which provided crucial support for the guerrilla movement in general and the stations in particular, as well as organized opposition to the Reagan administration’s military aid to the Salvadoran Armed Force.35 “We knew that if we were going to win the war, it would be in good part because of international public opinion,” said Leurs. Radio became a factor in the guerrillas’ ability “to mobilize information strategically to persuade, pressure, and gain leverage over much more powerful organizations and governments,” in the words of Keck and Sikkink. As the scholars have noted, “For the less powerful third world actors, networks provide access, leverage, and information (and often money) they could not expect to have on their own.”36 The importance of the international audience for the rebel radio stations is evident in the posters in German and French on the wall of the Perquín War Museum. One featured a seal with two guns in the center under the words “Solidarität mit El Salvador” in large letters and the names of the radio stations below. Another featured a portrait of Farabundo Martí beneath the words “Una voz para vencer” and the names of the radio stations at the bottom. The posters, along with

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pamphlets in European languages, promoted the two radio stations abroad, encouraging listeners to tune in and contribute funds to buy transmission equipment and radio receivers for distribution to promoters and potential listeners. The stations relied heavily on foreign contributions and conducted campaigns, such as the listeners’ circles (explained later), to attract foreign donors.37 San Salvador print shop owner Américo Aldana, who spent part of the war in Texas, said that reception there was clearer than in El Salvador, a difference that he attributed to lack of interference from the government’s jamming equipment. Even after the FM signal made the programs available to any household with a standard retail radio receiver and, thus, more accessible to the urban audience, Radio Venceremos continued to broadcast on shortwave, remaining a part of what Hachtens have called “international political communication.”38 As they noted using other examples, Parisians sipping coffee in a Latin Quarter café had the same listening experience as union members and college students in San Salvador. That shared media experience, as Anderson has pointed out, creates a sense of community. As the Hachtens also have noted about international radio, “[N]owhere is the truism that one person’s news is another’s propaganda more apparent.”39 International listeners provided the funding for projects, such as the distribution of transistor radios that helped the stations reach another target audience: Salvadoran peasants and other people close to the war zones, including small business owners. Once the FM signal was activated in 1986, the rebels increased their efforts to win audiences, turning political officers into community promoters for the radio stations. Every promoter was issued a transistor radio with a cord to hang the radio around his neck. The promoter would begin to chat with a neighbor just before the time for transmission, slowly turning the conversation to the subject of the rebel radio shows. About the time the broadcast began, he would turn the radio on, listen to that day’s show with the neighbor, and stay there afterward to talk about what they had heard.40 Particularly before the addition of the FM signal made Radio Venceremos more accessible, the station encouraged listeners to meet secretly to hear the broadcasts and then to discuss them.41 That form of listening would have made the experience of the radio audience similar to that of the Nicaraguan study circles or the collective listening to readings that Martín-Barbero has mentioned as characteristic of popular culture in societies with high rates of illiteracy. He has noted that such collective reading evolved into radio listening in


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Cuban cigar factories.42 Thus, encouraging collective listening was a way to link the radio broadcasts to popular culture. However, Sebastian Alejo, a militant who served as a liaison with supporters of the insurgency in the cities, said that those “listeners’ circles,” although widely promoted for fund-raising abroad, were usually student or union organizations that were meeting for other reasons. The broadcasts served to orient such existing groups, “giving them the party line” on the most recent news events until they could meet with their designated liaison. They also were a way to provide daily reinforcement for potential urban recruits. As they informed listeners in San Salvador, Los Angeles, Usulután, and Amsterdam about the insurgent version of the war, the stations also reached the combatants actually fighting the war, both guerrillas and soldiers. They had to keep up morale on the rebel side while demoralizing the government troops.43 As a practical matter, the stations were also occasionally used to send coded messages to operatives.44 Besides encouraging soldiers to desert, the radio stations fed them false or misleading information, such as emphasizing battles in one part of the country when a major offensive was planned for another region.45 The militants who ran the communications strategy realized that false announcements were dangerous because they undermined the stations’ credibility, as did filling the airtime with propaganda. “We had to be careful not to contaminate the information with too much propaganda because we knew that it nourished our own political bases, but still, there had to be an element of propaganda,” said Leurs. “Sometimes we told big lies. . . . It was difficult to have so many audiences. You had to confuse the soldiers, but not the students in San Salvador.” Yet, building that diverse radio audience was crucial because it was the first step in constructing that imagined community of supporters who would provide the basis for a new nation. If the guerrillas were to be more than a military movement, they had to create a constituency among the same groups that the radio stations targeted as listeners.

Programming the Revolution To reach and retain those listeners, the stations offered programming that they could not get anywhere else: the insurgent version of combat news, corroborated with live interviews and the names of civilians, soldiers, and guerrillas killed and captured, and warnings of strikes and boycotts declared as part of the insurgent war effort. What interested the potential audience most was also what the revolutionaries

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most wanted to publicize. War reporting became a crucial link with listeners and a test of the stations’ credibility. “It let us keep track of the victories,” Ibarra recalled. “You wanted to be able to comment on these things with your friends.” Listeners named broadcasts about blowing up the Golden Bridge, an expansion bridge that spanned the Rio Lempa and linked the eastern and western regions of the country, as among the most memorable ones.46 Following the precedent that Radio Venceremos set in its first broadcast, the rebel stations set out to fill in the information vacuum left by the mainstream Salvadoran media. “The government and the domestic media did not keep us informed,” said San Salvador print shop owner Aldana. Rumors circulated about casualties, but the government denied them, he said, recalling that the government constantly claimed to have finished off the guerrillas. Similarly, an Usulután man who was a student during the war named war news as his main motive for listening. “I wanted to compare what Radio Venceremos said with the government’s news, to really know who was lying,” he explained. A schoolteacher recalled, “When there was an offensive here in Usulután—I live in an area where there were many confrontations—I would hide in a type of shelter I had and listen to the radio.” One evening in 1984, he recalled, his three-year-old son who had been playing outdoors came in at about 8 p.m. and said, “‘Daddy, turn off the television. They said the fighting is going to start in about fifteen minutes.’ We didn’t much believe him, but right at 8, we started hearing bullets and we went down to the shelter. . . . I grabbed the radio and we were listening to a concert by the Guaragüau and suddenly the music stopped and they started talking to the townspeople. It calmed the family. The next day, I realized that they were transmitting from the social security office about eight hundred yards from my house. What they had said was the truth.” Thus, the stations’ combat news succeeded in exacerbating doubts about the reliability of the mainstream domestic media and government information, challenging the ruling class’ control of information. As Melucci has pointed out, “Emerging power is based not solely on material strength but on the production and circulation of information” and “[t]he control of ideology, more generally, the flow of information is an important leadership resource.”47 Through radio, the guerrillas broke the government’s control over the nation’s most important issue: news of the civil war. They provided information for discussion of war news, bringing the war into the public sphere. It was an important step toward breaking down the hegemony that kept the rulers in power.


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The rebel radio stations realized the draw of the combat news and would tell listeners, “Stay tuned for battle news.”48 Each broadcast featured a section for war reporting. “Attention, may I have your attention,” Santiago would begin. “Now, the latest news of the guerrilla victory in the province of San Vicente . . . .”49 Announcements of such victories were important because no one else was reporting them. Without radio, rebel victories were like a tree falling in the woods where no one heard it. Did it make a sound? Unless the public knew about the victories, they did not matter. “Our victories would not have their maximum effect if we did not have a way to quickly inform our people and the people of the world,” Carmen Latona, the guerrilla commander directly responsible for Radio Venceremos said in a 1982 interview. “Radio Venceremos fulfills that role.”50 Conversely, when a broadcast did not offer any combat news, a professional woman in San Salvador said, she became disgusted. “It was so hard to get the signal and then sometimes they would just have pure filler.”

The Battle for Credibility For other listeners, rebel radio was a vital link to loved ones on the battlefield. “My sisters were part of the revolutionary movement,” recalled Karla Majano, a San Salvador university student. When she was a child, she and her mother listened to the Radio Venceremos broadcast every evening hoping not to hear a familiar name among the lists of captured or wounded. “It was the only way to find out,” she said. Only journalists aligned with the movement were allowed to circulate freely in the guerrilla-controlled zones and gather firsthand information. “We cared about the war news because people we loved were involved,” she said.51 Throughout the war, the rebel stations reported the names of those captured and killed on both sides, in part to prove that their battle reports were accurate and in part to inform listeners who had no other way to learn the fate of individual combatants.52 Other factors in building the radio stations’ credibility, according to a schoolteacher in Usulután, were live reports and interviews. He particularly recalled interviews with the only known survivor of the 1981 El Mozote massacre and with the deputy minister of defense when he was captured by the insurgents. Reporting the massacre at El Mozote was an early coup for rebel radio.53 In the midst of the 1981 year-end holidays, Radio Venceremos announced the shocking news of a scorched earth campaign in the station’s own home province of Morazán, which became known as

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the El Mozote massacre. The station interviewed a woman identified as Rufina Tamayo of the village of Meanguera. “On Friday, December 12, they began pulling people out of their houses at five in the morning, to line them up in the plaza,” she began in a soft, wavering voice. “They had us there, the children, nude, shivering in the cold. . . . At noon, they killed the men. At 2, they took the girls up to the hills. They had them there until 6 in the morning the next day. . . . After they raped them, they killed them. . . . They thought that they were killing guerrillas, but they were killing children and women.” Tamayo hid behind a tree and saw the soldiers, mindful of wasting bullets, strangle the children. In a January 3, 1982, broadcast, two captured soldiers, Nelson Ernesto Orellala Hernández and José Alberto Martínez, confirmed the story of the massacre. “We went into the houses saw what they had done,” said Orellala Hernández. “We saw a lot of women, among them a pregnant woman, dead in the beds with their children.”54 Such live interviews bolstered the credibility of rebel radio, a factor that was particularly important because both the Salvadoran and U.S. governments denied that the massacre had taken place and criticized the international media that had reported the story.55 It would be more than a decade before forensics experts excavated the bones of massacre victims and nineteen years before a second survivor was found.56 Radio Venceremos conducted similar interviews with survivors of massacres at El Junquillo and El Rosario. Radio Farabundo Martí reported the Palo Blanco massacre in 1982.57 In June 1982, Radio Venceremos reported a different kind of scoop, one that was not contested. Rebels shot down a helicopter carrying Colonel Adolfo Castillo, deputy minister of defense, and took him prisoner. This occurred at a time when the rebels were trying to turn over 335 captured soldiers to the government through the International Red Cross as prisoners of war, part of their attempt to receive international recognition as a belligerent force. The government was refusing to acknowledge the prisoners.58 In an interview with Radio Venceremos, Castillo explained that he was flying over guerrilla territory to review troop conditions when his helicopter was shot down and said that he was being treated well, “[l]ike any other prisoner.” Then came the crux of the interview: Radio Venceremos: How do you expect that you will be treated? Castillo: Like any other person who is captured. Radio Venceremos: Do you know about the other prisoners? Castillo: In reality, no.


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Radio Venceremos: Do you know that the high command has refused to acknowledge their status? Castillo: Normally, the term prisoner of war is [used] in international law for prisoners of a conventional war. Radio Venceremos: Don’t you think that there is a war going on? Castillo: No, in my opinion, no. Radio Venceremos: What do you consider yourself then? Castillo: A captive. Radio Venceremos: You don’t recognize that you have international rights? Castillo: Well, rights, yes, all human beings have rights.59

Santiago conducted similar interviews with Corporal Margarito Santa Cruz, Francisco Alberto Navarro, Alberto García, and Samuel Antonio Rivera. Captured in combat the day before, they demanded that the Red Cross be allowed to rescue them. “They treat us well,” said Rivera, “but the climate here is freezing.”60 Such live reports and interviews used radio’s capacity to transmit sound to bolster the station’s credibility while providing more lively, interesting reports for listeners. However, as Huezo Mixco noted, to use that capacity to the fullest, the radio stations had to be close to where the action was taking place. For that reason, radio as used by revolutionaries is a challenge to Poster’s contention that electronic media are not associated with time or place.61 Immediacy and location were essential to the use of radio by Salvadoran rebels. Interviews and eyewitness reports simulated the impact of direct communication. In that way, they were more like the example Poster used of audiophiles who attempt to recreate the exact conditions of a concert.62 Sound fidelity is not the issue. Authenticity is. War reports were essential for the guerrillas’ own morale as well. “For those of us who were fighting, it was a way to stimulate enthusiasm, combat morale,” said Ulises, who commanded a unit in one of the smaller guerrilla factions. “It helped counter-balance the propaganda from the [government] radio, which was, shall we say, false. There would be combat when one guerrilla and ten or fourteen soldiers died and they would give the number backwards. So it became important for morale. Missing Radio Venceremos was like missing Mass.”

Radio Recruitment Ulises also recalled the portion of guerrilla programming most associated with traditional war propaganda: “The radio also asked soldiers to leave that institution in order to join the guerrilla,” he remembered.

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“It showed them that they were wrong to believe that they were defending their country, that they were poor, marginalized people who were defending the interests of big capital.” Such calls to desert were common in guerrilla broadcasts, but one instance of an uncommon version of such calls was broadcast early in the war, when Radio Venceremos interviewed Esperanza Sánchez about an alleged attack on her village, El Rosario in Morazán. The radio reported that she told the guerrilla reporter that she had a son in the Salvadoran Army and asked the station to read a letter to him over the air: “Various cars came to El Rosario and they killed women and children. I don’t want you to stain your soul killing innocent people. I want you to leave the army.”63 Later that year, in the same broadcast that reported the massacre at El Mozote, Radio Venceremos announced the names of five soldiers who had joined the guerrilla forces.64 Other early broadcasts included messages such as “Brother soldier, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front invites you to participate with dignity in this crucial moment in our country’s history. Join the ranks of the legitimate revolutionary army. Do not continue in the ranks of the murderous exploiters.”65 Similar exhortations continued throughout the war.66 In late 1986, Radio Venceremos advised army recruits, “Soldier, your family is in San Salvador, homeless, hungry, and jobless, or you have your family in the country, suffering from a bad harvest, bombings, attacks, and murders. Brother soldier, figure out a way to get some information. Desert, brother soldier.”67 A broadcast five days later announced that twenty-six youths from the western city of Santa Ana had had recently fled to neighboring Guatemala to escape the draft. “We call on the young men of Santa Ana and the rest of the West who do not want to be drafted to seek out our units operating in the area. You will find your place there.”68 Some calls to desert became elaborate, such as this litany broadcast toward the end of the war: Female voice: They killed Monsignor Romero, for that reason Chorus: End the army, end the army Male voice: They killed the Jesuit priests, for that reason Chorus: End the army, end the army Santiago: They killed the union leaders, for that reason Chorus: End the army, end the army Female voice: Thousands of peasants were killed at El Mozote Santiago: El Zumpul Female voice: El Junquillo Santiago: El Calaboso


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Female voice: For all those reasons Chorus: End the army, end the army Santiago: Soldier, aren’t you ashamed of this Armed Force? The last bullets of the war are being fired, soldier. The moment to decide for life and peace is now. Take advantage of a leave. Your family waits for you at home.69

As the war continued, the stations supplemented their eyewitness interviews with reports live from the battlefield.70 By 1985, half of Radio Farabundo Marti’s staff of six had traveled with guerrilla columns, sending information to the crew handling the transmitter in Chalatenango province.71 Besides being close enough to the battles to report them, by broadcasting from within El Salvador, the stations became a daily reminder that the army did not control all of the national territory. “Simply coming on at 6 in the morning, noon, and 6 at night every day was a permanent victory,” said Santiago. The live interviews brought listeners the sounds of the combat zones, providing a form of dialogue and creating a context, an attribute of broadcast as a mode of information. The context created by rebel radio was the imagined nation of resistance.

News for Survival Closely related to war news were announcements of rebel-ordered strikes and the rebel position on participation in upcoming elections, information that was necessary to survival. Whether civilians actually wanted to support a strike or boycott an election, acting against the guerrillas could have serious consequences, such as having an automobile or bus burned.72 For Salvadorans living in disputed areas, knowing where combat was taking place was essential for avoiding it. “My wife’s brother died that way,” said a school teacher. “There was a confrontation on the road to Santa Elena and all the cars were waiting. Suddenly, he decided to take a chance and he was killed.” The radio stations provided a reliable source of information about the insurgent position, allowing people to make informed decisions about the risk of voting or going to work.73 For example, during the 1982 elections, Radio Venceremos announced that the guerrillas were not enforcing a boycott, thus telling voters not to expect attacks at the polling places.74 Similarly, long-haul bus and truck entrepreneurs listened to the rebel stations to know whether combat or strikes were likely to interrupt their routes. “Attention, your attention please, national and

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international transport companies,” began a typical announcement. “The FMLN announces that starting at midnight this Monday, January 12, the national transport strike decreed by the high command as part of the current military campaign and as an expression of repudiation of the draft, will end and all of the nation’s highways will be open.”75 The rebels also used the radio to provide defenses of their decisions to call transportation strikes: “Associations of bus and truck line owners complain that they are between a rock and a hard place,” began one such report. “On one hand, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front has decided to sabotage any vehicles that do not respect the strike. On the other, there are government pressures to circulate. Let us take this occasion to reflect deeply on the situation. . . . Instead of asking, ‘Why the strike?’ let’s ask, ‘Why the war?’ The war is the result of the constant denials of freedoms and rights through electoral fraud and criminal repression.” 76 Rebel broadcasters recognized that small business owners listening to such announcements were not natural rebel sympathizers. Their hope was that as the entrepreneurs came to rely on the guerrillas for information about matters of immediate, crucial interest for their businesses, they were implicitly accepting the credibility of the rebel information and learning about the rebel position on issues such as the draft.77 However, the lone bus line owner who agreed to participate in this study said that although he listened to the radio daily, his political views remained unchanged: “I just listened for the news about strikes and combat. I didn’t know anything about the other part.” That challenges Poster’s assertion that, beyond selecting a channel or station, the audience is a passive listener or viewer. The bus line owner perceived that he was listening selectively, indicating that, as Martín-Barbero has asserted, there are different ways of listening, just as there are different ways of reading. The rebels could not rely on the mode of information alone to create the context for the audience. They had to make the context credible even for skeptical listeners. The guerrilla stations tried to build their credibility by pointing out instances when the international media mentioned them, even briefly. “We have found out that the British radio and television chain BBC said on the twenty-fifth of this month in a program heard in El Salvador at 7:30 at night that the station Radio Farabundo Martí would be transmitting on a new schedule,” one such broadcast noted. “The report was part of a program for short wave radio buffs all over the world.”78 The comparison with international media was also a crucial test of credibility for some listeners. “The government radios were completely controlled and said only what was convenient for


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them,” said a former student from Usulután. “Radio Venceremos said what had happened and that was what appeared in the international newspapers, so one knew that was true.”

Reconstructing National Identity As they built their credibility and their audience, the rebels used radio to create a context, portraying a different nation from the one reported in the mainstream domestic media. War coverage was part of building that alternative reality, along with rapid response to government information about the political and economic realities. Radio also played an important part in portraying the guerrillas as the fighting arm of a broader alliance that included moderate politicians, the Roman Catholic Church, unions, peasant organizations, and students. As Jorge Castañeda has noted, “With the exception of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Salvadoran politico-military organizations had the most success in the policy created after the defeats of the previous decade: the unity of ‘Cubans’ and communists, the alliance with other forces, particularly the Church, and a combination of armed struggle with traditional forms of mobilization.”79 Radio played a role in that success, using humor and music, to claim the legitimate representation of the nation, to question what El Salvador was as a country, and to explain why the civil war was being fought. As a basis for that vision of an alternative reality, the rebel radio stations began with an alternative history. Two weeks after Radio Venceremos first came on the air, the station claimed the mantle of a nearly forgotten figure in Salvadoran history. “On a day like this, in a January of hope such as this, the Izalco volcano shook. Thousands of peasants, machetes in hand, and with a few rusty rifles, rose up against the oppressor class. The popular uprising of 1932 was the prologue of the Salvadoran popular struggles of the twentieth century. Fifty years later in another January of hope, we Salvadorans have risen up against oppression.”80 Radio Farabundo Martí, like the guerrilla movement itself, was named for the leader of that movement. Farabundo Martí, the founder of El Salvador’s most prominent socialist organization,81 organized an uprising of urban laborers and indigenous farm workers midway through the 1932 coffee harvest. The worldwide depression had collapsed the price of coffee, an export crop that had squeezed out food crops, not to mention subsistence farming, leaving the country dependent on imported goods. With prices so low, coffee growers let the crop rot in the fields. Unemployed farm workers had no source of income to buy imported

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food. Workers protested in spontaneous demonstrations that Martí organized into a revolt. Peasants armed with machetes met military dictator General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s troops in the plaza of Izalco, a village at the foot of a volcano in western El Salvador. The soldiers mowed down the farm workers gathered there.82 A structuralist explanation for the failure of the rebellion would be that while conditions existed to provoke a revolt, the government was strong enough to regain control and prevent the revolution from seizing power. From a structuralist perspective, that should have been the end of the revolt and its suppression. But it was not. The government did not stop at arresting and executing the leaders, including Martí. In the days that followed, the government hunted down anyone suspected of a connection to the revolt. Speaking Nahuatl, an indigenous language, or wearing traditional clothing was interpreted as a sign of rebellion and a capital offense.83 To crush the uprising, Hernández Martínez and his troops killed up to 30,000 people.84 The massacre also wiped out El Salvador’s indigenous culture and quelled the possibility of protest as property was concentrated in the hands of fewer families. The government was not satisfied with demonstrating sufficient coercive power to crush the revolt. The dictator also insisted on establishing undisputed hegemony by eliminating those sectors he determined had spawned the uprising, particularly the indigenous subculture that spoke and dressed differently, outward manifestations of people that probably also thought differently, who might not subscribe to the hegemony that oppressed them and kept Hernández Martínez in power. For the next thirty-seven years, Salvadorans struggling to survive in an increasingly overpopulated country channeled their desperation into emigration rather than revolution. First, they moved into the dry, rocky northern provinces of Morazán and Chalatenango, then over the border into Honduras. The Salvadorans’ silent invasion of their less-populated neighbor erupted into the 1969 “Soccer War,” sparked by a disputed call in a close game between the two national soccer teams. It ended in a treaty that turned off the Salvadoran escape valve. With emigration no longer as ready an option during the 1970s, Salvadorans began to reconsider the possibility of rebellion against the alliance of an oligarchy and a succession of military dictators. In 1970, the first armed rebels appeared.85 The public Universidad Nacional de El Salvador and the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana became centers of protest. A decade of repression, including firing on protest marches and murdering union leaders, culminated in the 1980


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assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, six opposition political leaders, and four U.S. religious workers. The same year, the fractured revolutionary groups joined together to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.86 The civil war had begun.

The Unofficial Story The history recounted on the rebel radio stations reflected what Castañeda has called “the nationalism of the left.” As he has explained the concept, “there is no true nation that is not the people.” The poor and dark-skinned form the real nation, the elite is another country that is not part of the true nation.87 Guillermo Bonfil Batalla first developed that concept, which he called the “deep” nation, for Mexico, but acknowledged that it applies to all of Mesoamerica. “Within Mexican society, a minority nation has been created that is organized according to the norms, aspirations, and purposes of Western civilization not shared . . . by the rest of the national population; this sector incarnates and pushes the dominant project in the country.”88 In Mexico, the “deep” country resisted domination.89 Rebel radio encouraged “deep” El Salvador to do the same, assuring the poor and dark-skinned Salvadorans that they, not the lightskinned rulers, were the true nation. Through the stations, the rebels made manifest the contest for the nation that Martín-Barbero has claimed is always being fought. Historical memory is an important element in that struggle because people filter and reorganize what they receive from the dominant culture, then integrate and fuse the result “with what comes from their own historical memory.” 90 The rebel stations’ version of history contrasted sharply with the government’s representation of the civil war as the most recent episode of international communist aggression.91 The Salvadoran and U.S. governments saw a much more recent beginning to the conflict than the radio stations recounted. A year and a half before El Salvador’s January 1981 offensive, in neighboring Nicaragua, a broad-based coalition had overthrown staunch U.S. ally, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The unabashedly Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front emerged as the leader of the new government, setting off alarms in the United States. Central America became the latest front of the cold war. The new Nicaraguan leaders also allowed one of the Salvadoran guerrilla factions to set up a radio transmitter to broadcast across the northern border.92 In one of his last acts as president of the United States, Jimmy Carter cut off aid to Nicaragua on January 19, 1981, after investigators uncovered evidence that the Sandinistas were

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sending more than radio signals to El Salvador. They were serving as a transit point for arms.93 The next day, Ronald Reagan took office. Three weeks later, his administration released a “White Paper” stating that documents captured in November proved that Cuba, supported by the Soviet Union, was supplying arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas as part of a strategy for spreading Communism.94 Although subsequent investigations by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on the government’s analysis of the underlying documents backing up the report, that argument would frame the terms of the U.S. government wartime communication.95 As the Reagan administration promoted the Salvadoran conflict as a war of communist aggression, the rebels insisted that theirs was a civil war over issues left unresolved for half a century. By naming their coalition for Farabundo Martí, the rebels assured that their position would be implicitly restated every time their name was mentioned. Having their own radio stations let them make sure that the message was heard. The alternative version of history led to a view of an alternative present and a vision for the future. Usually, the link between the two was implied, but was clearly stated in a broadcast early in the war: This government was born behind the backs of the people. The oligarchs have bled the country for fifty years, sowing pain and trying to kill our culture, our national values. They have reaffirmed their power with the legalization of death. . . . For fifty years, the oligarchy built an army to serve its interests. The dictator Hernández Martínez murdered thirty thousand Salvadorans, 30,000 guanacos 96 so that the rich oligarchy could get richer and the poor, more painfully poor. For years, the misery continued for the majority, marginalized, forgotten, suffering. The peasant without land, but with hunger. The small and mid-size entrepreneur asphyxiated by the sharks of the oligarchy. The professional, made into their tool with no chance to use his knowledge to develop a country without misery, without illness, without the suffering that all Salvadorans suffer. The priest, without the chance to exercise his Christianity in the manner that Christ dictated: ministering to the poor. The student, with no chance to study to improve the Fatherland. The military, with no chance to defend the country against foreign intervention or to defend the interests of the people. . . . But today, June 1982, our people now have a powerful army that controls a great part of the country, which permits that in extensive zones of El Salvador free territory exists, which there are no death squads or vices, or injustice. There is an army that has constructed a truly luminous nation inside a nation full of injustice, corruption, and abuses; territories where there is space for the new man,


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brotherly, human, free, the new man that we wish could inhabit all of El Salvador.97

While some listeners may have considered this part of the broadcast the kind of filler that so disgusted the professional woman in San Salvador, it was also a carefully constructed argument. It not only used an alternative view of history to construct an alternative present and future, but also included a broad group of the society among the citizens oppressed by the existing regime: priests, soldiers, and owners of small businesses along with peasants and students. It demonstrated the inclusivity that Castañeda mentioned as one of the strengths of the Salvadoran movement. The only question is whether listeners eager for combat news were actually hearing the argument. One of the few listeners interviewed who said that he recalled the commentary and history was Aldana, the print shop owner: “People listened to it . . . and it helped form a consciousness among the people.” As the war continued, the rebel radio stations expanded their claims on Salvadoran history and sought to add their own heroes to the nation’s pantheon of distinguished citizens. Reaching back to one of the founding myths in what Stuart Hall has called the national narrative, the guerrillas claimed Anastasio Aquino, who led an indigenous revolt against the light-skinned founding fathers shortly after independence. A guerrilla front was named for him and his name was invoked in reports of their triumphs. Radio Venceremos broadcast his biography.98 Ending a report of fifty enemy casualties and three rebel losses in a 1986 attack by the Anastasio Aquino brigade, Radio Venceremos offered, “Revolutionary greetings to you, comrades, who have achieved this military feat in the state of San Vicente, occupying the military base Las Delicias in San Esteban Catarina. From these territories, a revolutionary embrace, worthy children of Anastasio Aquino. . . . Today the people’s arms and the heroism of the Salvadorans have smashed the counter-insurgency plans of the invaders who have never understood our people, who thought they could conduct a counter-insurgency war against our people as if they were playing chess, without taking into account the heroism, the creativity, the audacity, and the bravery that our indigenous forefathers bequeathed us. That’s why they are losing the war, that’s why they will lose the war.” 99 The stations also refuted the claims of the government and army to the nation’s legacy. On Salvadoran independence day in 1983, Radio Venceremos broadcast: “The 15th of September 1825: The glorious gesture of our founding fathers. The struggle of a people for its

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dreams of independence and liberty. But our country was betrayed. The current traitors, the oligarchs, the corrupt military officers, the Yankees now run our country.”100 Similarly, the stations challenged the army’s heritage. “The generals have made the army that José Manuel Arce founded to fight against the aggressor troops of Agustín de Iturbide an army of occupation in our own county,” the same independence day broadcast charged.101 Later in the war, the station referred to a Special Forces battalion named for a pre-Columbian ruler as “the badly named Atonal Batallion.”102 To an extent, Santiago acknowledged, the historical material reflected his own interests. However, he also saw filling in the historical record as part of the mission of Radio Venceremos and necessary for raising the consciousness of listeners. “We wanted to make the connection with the past, the struggle of 1932, the land, the indigenous culture,” he said. Besides reinterpreting history, the rebels sought to create a testimony of contemporary history, linking their heroes to the heroes of the past and their struggle to the struggles of the past. The effort could be as simple as a phrase before the combat report: “The heroes of the Fatherland, Farabundo Martí, Anastasio Aquino, Francisco Sánchez, and Feliciano Ama, all of the revolutionary heroes, are celebrating a new revolutionary victory.”103 More lengthy tributes to fallen guerrilla heroes were also broadcast. “This is a program of Radio Farabundo Martí for Radio Venceremos, recalling the life of Melinda Anaya Montes, Commander Ana María, on the third anniversary of her death,” began one such excerpt. “On April 6, 1983, the Salvadoran people lost one of their most distinguished and beloved [citizens], a revolutionary teacher, a leader of thousands of working men and women, and at the end of her life, a guerrilla fighter.”104 Radio Farabundo Martí broadcast a similar eulogy to a fallen commander who was being singled out for special honor: “Hundreds of fighters, workers, peasants and students today rendered homage to the example of Commander Felipe Peña Mendoza. His practice and conviction in the victory of the Salvadoran people is worthy of the decisive and victorious action of our revolutionary battalions. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, vanguard of the Salvadoran people, now has a powerful vanguard of battalions that with honor and historic responsibility will bear the name of the heroic commander of the battalion group, Felipe Peña Mendoza, Comrade Ignacio.”105 Even before this acknowledgment, Peña Mendoza had been listed when the stations read the roll of heroes, beginning with the pre-Columbian rulers, Atonal and Atcatal, and stretching through the founding fathers to Martí.106


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As the war dragged on, the rebel radios also sought to promote their own history of the conflict. A teacher recalled those episodes, although he acknowledged that he has also read an oral history of Radio Venceremos and is not certain how much he recalls from the book and how much from the broadcasts.107 One particularly lengthy recounting was broadcast during the guerrillas’ 1989 offensive on San Salvador, when they occupied the mansions of Escalon and San Benito, the capital’s most exclusive neighborhoods. While waiting for battle updates, Santiago began to recount the story of the war from the rebel perspective, naming major battles, such as the 1983 battle of Berlin, a coffee-growing town. “One of the comrades from Radio Venceremos who covered the combat told us the story of the battle of Berlin by the light of a guerrilla campfire,” he said. “It was like World War II when the helicopters or airplanes launched rockets or bombs into the town, setting blocks of Berlin on fire.” He recalled the guerrilla attack on the San Miguel barracks the same year, when “it was winter, and it rained constantly. The Torola River was swollen, and equipment had to be moved across it by cables.” The story he told was of a brutal army that attacked civilian targets and fought a far cleverer guerrilla force. The war had lasted this long only because of an outside factor: “If the North Americans and their millions in aid had not appeared with their advisors and aid, surely under military pressure, the army would have collapsed between 1982 and 1983.” Instead, the introduction of fast moving small units with air support forced the guerrillas to change strategy and to disperse throughout the country. “Combatants were no longer solely combatants with guns but also organizers of the people, in close contact with the people. . . . It was a tremendous political task, while in the territories we had conquered we confronted the enemy with land mines.” Radio also would prove a crucial part of that change in strategy by providing a point of contact between the armed rebels and civilian dissidents. By 1988, he recounted, “In the cities, the popular movements, the unions, the small business groups . . . overcame the terror that had been instilled by massacres and once again protested in the streets.” During that period, he said, the Salvadoran Armed Force, with U.S. advice, struggled to limit the war to the countryside and keep it out of the cities. The 1989 offensive proved that they could not. “The Salvadoran peasants converted into warrior-like military leaders outsmarted the West Point boys.”108 Aldana recalled those broadcasts from guerrillas who occupied the capital’s mansions and a luxury hotel as an embarrassment that convinced the government

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that the Salvadoran Armed Force could not win the war. “This was the beginning of the peace process,” he said. That version of events differed sharply from the official story of a guerrilla force supported not by the Salvadoran people, but by the Soviet Union through Cuba and Nicaragua. It also showed the emphasis that the Salvadoran guerrilla movement placed on the struggle not just for territory, but for the soul of the nation, the hegemony that legitimized rulers. Radio played a role not only in reinterpreting history, but also in appropriating national symbols, and demonstrating that the struggle extended beyond the armed guerrilla groups, encompassing important sectors of Salvadoran society. The rebels employed what Poster has called media language to create a context for listeners, a different reality with a different history in which symbols had different meanings.

Rallying ’Round the Flag In one independence day broadcast, Santiago told listeners: “Never has our blue and white banner looked more beautiful than it does flying over the guerrilla camps that stretch across the country. The dignified place for our blue and white banner is a guerrilla camp.”109 The rebel radio also questioned the sincerity of the government leaders as they sang the national anthem. “In these moments, surely those who have given over our sovereignty are hypocritically intoning the words ‘you have our beloved homes’ when they have filled so many Salvadoran homes with pain. They are saying ‘fertile fields and majestic rivers,’ when they have killed Salvadoran peasants and thrown their bodies into the majestic rivers. They are saying ‘the religion that consoles us’ when they still have not dried their hands from the blood of Monsignor Romero and other murdered priests and catechists. They are saying ‘you are the air we breathe,’ when they have filled that air with Yankee airplanes that bomb the Fatherland.”110 The appropriation of a national symbol that provoked controversy within the guerrilla ranks was the use of the national anthem to open the Radio Venceremos broadcast. Several members of the high command were adamantly opposed to playing the national anthem of the official medium of the FMLN because they associated the song with petit bourgeois nationalism. “The oligarchy had made it their patrimony,” said Santiago, recalling the argument he used to insist that they had stolen the national anthem and that Radio Venceremos should reclaim it. That argument prevailed. After September 1982, every Radio Venceremos broadcast opened with the “1812 Overture,”


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the music plagiarized by the composer of the Salvadoran national anthem, using the auditory capability of radio to associate the radio station and the insurgency it represented with the legitimate nation. Radio Farabundo Martí, operated by the guerrilla faction most closely aligned with the Communist Party, did not add the national anthem to its programming until 1985. The station pressed the guerrilla claim to the national anthem with less subtlety in one independence day broadcast. “No place is the national anthem sung with more patriotic fervor than in the early hours of the morning in a camp of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front,” the announcer insisted.111 Two years later, another independence day broadcast called attention to the lyrics: “The second stanza of our national anthem affirms the history of struggle of our people throughout the years. Struggles for independence. Struggles against aggressors. Struggles for social justice. . . . The final part of the second stanza refers to the spirit of struggle that has characterized Salvadorans. It refers to heroes who throughout five hundred years of history have formed a history of struggle and rebellion against any enemy. . . . The second stanza of our national anthem is little known. It calls on the people to struggle against tyrants, to struggle for liberty.”112 By reciting and explaining those relatively unknown lyrics, as when the stations rescued the little-known history of Farabundo Martí and the 1932 massacre or Anastasio Aquino’s revolt a century earlier, the insurgents were calling attention to a part of their heritage that listeners did not know, or had only heard about in vague references. They were presenting the idea that their nation was a nation based on struggle, not just for work, but for freedom and equality.

Popular Culture as National Culture Besides appropriating national symbols to lend legitimacy to their place in Salvadoran history and their fight, the rebels used the audio capacity of radio to incorporate popular culture into legitimate national culture and identity. Martín-Barbero has remarked on the affinity between radio and popular culture.113 Music, humor, and storytelling, especially parodies, were all part of the alternative identity and alternative context that the stations created. However, they did not stop with folklore: Incorporating popular culture into the national culture was a first step in incorporating the masses into the nation as political actors. On the rebel radio stations, dissident labor unions, student movements, and peasant organizations were newsmakers who were as valued as the country’s political and military rulers.

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For the first year of the war, Radio Venceremos began its broadcasts with the song “Venceremos,” which ends with the chant, “The people united shall not be defeated.” That song continued to close the broadcasts throughout most of the war. Another song played regularly on the broadcasts was Nicaraguan singer-writer Carlos Mejia Godoy’s “El Salvador,” which began, “From the waist of this continent, crushed by profiteering and enclosure, like a spring of shining water El Salvador surges forth pure and strong.”114 The stations also developed native Salvadoran groups. Los Torogoces, named for a songbird, was a traditional Salvadoran village band that sang repetitious rhythms slightly off-key. They became the musical stars of Radio Venceremos, singing tributes to slain Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and other leftist heroes. Radio Farabundo Martí even sponsored a battle of the bands, featuring groups from each guerrilla front. Listeners mentioned the music in their recollections of the stations. “There was lots of South American music: drums and flutes and things like that;” recalled Aldana. “One always felt excited to hear that music because it meant that one had tuned in to the station.” Such music, known as Nueva Trova, or the new troubadours, was not played on mainstream Salvadoran radio.115 Besides the music, listeners recalled the comedy on the radio stations. “They made fun of the government,” recalled one teacher. “They even had their own cast, La Guacamaya Subversiva,” literally the Subversive Macaw, but also a play on words for the Perquín neighborhood where the station was located throughout much of the war. At their best, the radio stations reflected the guidelines for propaganda outlined by Eduardo Sancho, one of the five members of the FMLN high command. “Popular debate has its own forms, its language, its slang. We should construct our propaganda with that language. . . . People are tired of hearing ‘class struggle and the levels of polarization we have reached’ or ‘imperialism is the enemy of the people.’ . . . The truth is more true when one laughs.”116 Radio proved a particularly effective medium for carrying out that mandate. “Radio is a medium that lets you practically touch the listener,” said Santiago, in a more poetic expression of Poster’s point that broadcast media create their own context. The humor could be as simple as a poem, such as a parody of Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario’s famous “Sonatina” that put Defense Minister General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova in the role of a strawberry-mouthed princess: “Vides Casanova is sad. / What is wrong with Vides Casanova? / From his blabbering mouth / He has not again expressed more pronouncements / Like the one when he


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said / The puppet government had re-taken the initiative.”117 On other occasions, the Radio Venceremos crew would write and perform a multipart radio soap opera. Marvin Galeas recalled that the soap operas began with a script that he wrote as a spoof to circulate within the guerrilla ranks. While some members of the high command thought the spoof was undignified, those who controlled Radio Venceremos liked it so much that they put it on the air. One of the most elaborate radio soap operas began with a Valentine’s Day skit that was aired shortly after balding U.S. Ambassador Dean Hinton married a member of the Salvadoran oligarchy in a civil ceremony conducted by the mayor of San Salvador: Mayor: Dean Hinton, do you accept as your lawfully wedded wife, or your woman, Mrs. Patricia Salaverria? Hinton: Oh my God, by Kirkpartrick’s118 hair I do! Mayor: Patricia Salaverria, do you accept . . . (bursting into laughter) this guy as your lawfully wedded husband? Salaverria: I do. Mayor: By the power invested in the Military High Command, the employers’ federation, the Department of State and the National Government, which, by the way won’t be around much longer, I now declare you father and daughter, pardon me, husband and wife.119

The wedding skit was followed by several days of earthy, soap opera style skits about the couple’s romance and honeymoon, which became a multipart feature. The voices that the cast members used to create soap opera characters also were adapted to brief, humorous announcements that mimicked the distinctive accent of peasants in eastern El Salvador, an accent comparable to an Appalachian accent in the United States.120 Using skits, the rebels were able to exploit a form of popular culture that had grown into its own on the radio: melodrama. In a well-received novel, Mario Vargas Llosa has recalled nostalgically the importance of radio soap operas in the Peru of the 1950s.121 Martín-Barbero has written that melodrama “mediates between the folkloric culture of country fairs and the urban-popular culture of the spectacle, the emerging mass culture” and “dare[s] to violate the rationalistic division between serious and frivolous themes, to treat political events as dramatic events, and break with ‘objectivity’ by observing the situation from the perspective that appeals to the subjectivity of readers.”122 To this appealingly familiar form, the guerrillas added a form of humor favored in El Salvador, parody and burlesque.

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At other times, the stations simply poked fun at powerful military officers, politicians, and diplomats by calling them names or casting doubt on their intelligence or sexual orientation. One favorite play on words was to call the army gorillas, in contrast with guerrillas. U.S.-trained elite troops were dubbed “The Coca Cola Battalion.”123 Radio Venceremos once flouted authorities by conducting interviews in an open-air market in San Salvador.124 The station invited listeners to join the jokes at the government’s expense. When the government announced special telephone numbers that tipsters could use to turn in traitors and subversives, Radio Venceremos encouraged listeners to call in and give the addresses of members of the high command and informants.125 Poking fun at the powerful made them seem less formidable, creating for at least two hours a day an alternative reality in which the oppressed could laugh at their oppressors. The broadcasts created a context that James C. Scott has called “a world upside down” and provided evidence for his contention that when media portray the world upside down, they exercise a form of resistance. In his words, they “create an imaginative breathing space in which the normal categories of order and hierarchy are less than completely inevitable.” Radio listeners could laugh and imagine a country in which they were in charge or at least no longer had to fear those who were powerful in the here and now. As Martín-Barbero has written, “While solemnity is related to fear, prolonging and projecting it, laughter connects with freedom.”126 While listeners and producers fondly remember the humor, they admit that the stations did not always live up to Sancho’s standards for painless propaganda. Noted leftist philosopher and sociologist Ignacio Ellacuria was among their severest critics.127 Santiago recalled with a laugh, “He used to say that the guerrilla radio should have more analysis and less agitation.”

The New Nation The guerrillas built a radio-listening community and encouraged that community to imagine a country with a history of struggle in which the oppressed were the protagonists and a present in which those struggles continued. Through the radio, they could imagine the possibility of laughing at the rulers who decided the fate of the country and its citizens and envision swaths of countryside where those rulers were no longer in charge. Rebel radio also allowed them access to a country of militant labor unions, protesting students, organized peasants, and priests troubled by injustice. The radio stations opened their


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microphones to allied groups, providing them with an opportunity to broadcast their message, and listeners, access to information. This made the stations a central part of the guerrilla strategy for shifting hegemony in El Salvador. As Castañeda noted: “Both the armed left, since the death of Che Guevara, and the pacifist, reformist left, since Allende, had been defeated . . . perhaps a new left that grew out of the proliferating pluralistic and popular movements could triumph where others had failed.”128 The stations were implementing a strategic decision announced early in the war by Joaquin Villalobos, a member of the guerrilla high command: “What we are pursuing in El Salvador is a revolution in civil society.”129 The first ally incorporated into rebel radio, from the premier broadcast of Radio Venceremos, was the Roman Catholic Church. Rogelio Ponseele, a Belgian priest who had arrived in San Salvador as a missionary in the 1970s and moved to Morazán in 1980 as the January offensive was being organized, spoke during that first broadcast, reassuring listeners that violence could sometimes be justified.130 He would become a regular speaker on the broadcasts, offering Sunday Mass and a special Mass for the dead following the massacre at El Mozote.131 “Speaking over the radio was a great opportunity that we have to evangelize,” Ponseele stated in a testimonial work published during the war. “People take note that a priest speaks on the FMLN radio. And they listen to what we say. They are interested.”132 Although none of the Radio Venceremos team was particularly religious, said Santiago, they all recognized the importance of the Church in the movement in general and particularly in the guerrilla faction that ran Radio Venceremos. Many of the members of that faction had been catechists or members of Christian base communities such as the one Ernesto Cardenal had established at Solentiname. Slain Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero had battled for human rights and freedom of expression. He and his successor, Arturo Rivera y Damas, as well as other religious figures, were frequently quoted on the rebel stations.133 In 1986, Radio Venceremos read a letter that the Christian base community in Arcatao, Chalatenango, had written to Rivera y Damas three months after he visited them as part of a tour he made of guerrilla-occupied zones. “Beloved brothers, we want you to know the Calvary, like that of Christ, that the Christians of this zone have endured this Lent,” the letter began. It went on to recount that their village had been bombed and strafed on April 8, when five citizens were beheaded and survivors were told to evacuate in forty-eight hours. The letter did not specify who had attacked the village, but the fact that the archbishop sent the letter to Radio

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Venceremos indicates that he did not suspect the guerrillas.134 It also indicates that he had a channel of communication with the medium and confidence in its ability to get the message heard. When six Jesuit priests were murdered in the house they shared with a housekeeper and her daughter, who also were killed, Radio Venceremos used the airwaves to demand accountability.135 Referring to the philosopher-priest who had been the rector of the Universidad Centroamericana, one broadcast blamed his death on the military radio station, Radio Cuscatlán: “Ignacio Ellacuria of the critical consciousness that valiantly arose in the Fatherland in a tenacious struggle, a sometimes stubborn struggle, always for peace, always for understanding among Salvadorans. Ignacio Ellacuria never carried a gun, never participated in formulating military tactics, as Radio Cuscatlán said Saturday night. We accuse Radio Cuscatlán, the radio of the armed force, and we accuse the military high command of being the masterminds behind the murder of Ignacio Ellacuria.”136 That is not to say that Radio Venceremos and church leaders always agreed with each other. Besides Ellacuria’s call for the radio to be more analytical, Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez received a less-thanflattering portrayal in one of the radio station’s infamous soap operas when he criticized a guerrilla sabotage campaign for shooting cattle. The incident so distressed catechists in Morazán that they considered writing a letter to the station to complain.137 Besides the Church, other allied organizations that the rebels viewed as the founders of the emerging nation also received ample coverage on guerrilla radio. After less than three months on the air, Radio Venceremos issued the following invitation: “We call on unions and professional organizations to use your radio station, Radio Venceremos, to send us your interviews and communiqués, the words of our people.”138 Over the next dozen years, the stations broadcast messages as diverse as these: “Miners in San Sebastian have been fired without severance pay.” “Public employees ask that salary freeze be lifted.” “Radio Farabundo Martí presents the platform of the National Peasant Association.” “Rector of the National University denied U.S. visa.” “School teachers’ strike to begin Thursday the twenty-ninth.” “Demonstration in front of U.S. embassy the 28th.”139 The stations also covered the news of the alternate nation, such as the 1985 protests on independence day, a day that traditionally features a military parade: “This morning the humble Fatherland rose early to keep a date with the founding fathers,” the broadcast noted. Santiago told listeners: “This September 15, the streets belong to the people. The streets of San Salvador have been courageously conquered by our


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people in the struggle against exploitation and for the defense of the interests of the people.”140 Similarly, Radio Venceremos covered the 1986 Labor Day protests: “Despite the campaign of terror by the military operatives of the regime, the working class turned out this May 1. Some eighty thousand workers marched through the streets of San Salvador, despite the blockade and the thousands of peasants who were detained at road blocks as they traveled to San Salvador to participate in the march.”141 By giving a forum to other dissident organizations, the rebel radio stations widened the range of what could be discussed and debated in El Salvador. As historian Jeremy Popkin noted, “one characteristic of revolutionary crises is that they force into the public sphere—and therefore into the media of mass communication—a great deal of discourse that would normally be conducted behind closed doors.”142 Still, the radio stations were introducing more than topics into the public sphere. They were introducing people, the masses who traditionally had been excluded from public discussions. The stations were broadening the base of the movement from people who were willing to abandon their families and risk their lives in combat to include those who were willing to march in a protest and even those who were willing to quietly tune their radio to a difficult-to-reach frequency at a specific time. Radio became an instrument for establishing an alternative hegemony to challenge the prevailing notion of what, and who, the nation was.

Revolution in the Air As a mode of information, radio offered advantages in the effort to challenge the dominant hegemony, but also placed demands on the guerrilla organization and suffered from limitations. Radio offered a solution to the reluctance of Salvadorans to possess written guerrilla propaganda because of the danger being caught with such material posed. It also allowed the guerrillas to easily incorporate illiterate Salvadorans into the audience. Further, the medium fit well with the ideal of more accessible, humorous propaganda, outlined by Sancho.143 As one young Mexican scholar noted, “Radio is a flexible medium, ubiquitous, cheap, easy to operate, and, it should be noted, not requiring much training and receiving the message is relatively easy. . . . The power of radio is in its effect of intimacy, as it offers a world of communication between the writer-announcer and the listener. The immediacy of radio converts it into a personal and particular experience for the listener.”144 Though Poster never directly considers radio,

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instead comparing television to newspapers or direct personal communication, like television, radio also creates its own context, in a sense giving listeners the chance to live for an hour a day in the alternative nation that rebels envision. As Martín-Barbero has noted, both the technology and how it is used work together to bring radio close to popular culture: “[A]ll you have to do is listen, its limitation to voice and music allowing it to develop a particular form of colloquial expression; and its non-exclusive form of use making it compatible with simultaneous activities and time frames.”145 Radio approximates personal communication in its sense of intimacy, but it has marked limitations. For example, the radio stations’ attempts to train combatants over the air were a total failure.146 In addition to those limitations, radio (while certainly cheaper to produce and distribute than newspapers) required tremendous resources from guerrilla organizations with limited funds. Automobile batteries powered the equipment, and the engines that kept them running required huge amounts of gasoline, which had to be smuggled into the area. “The logistics were diabolical,” recalled Huezo Mixco. The engines also made a tremendous amount of noise in a rural area. That meant counting on the cooperation and discretion of the peasants who lived in the area around the production and transmission equipment.147 Because two Salvadoran guerrilla factions operated radio stations, the differences in the ways they coped with those demands provide some insights into how much the medium can influence a rebel organization and what the consequences of the different options might be. Having two stations in different parts of the country allowed the rebels to continue broadcasting even when one region was under heavy attack or a transmitter suffered technical difficulties. The two stations shared information and reports, thus broadening the coverage of both.148 While the stations presented a united front to the world, just as the FMLN did, in reality they were run quite differently.149 Despite camaraderie among the veterans of the two stations, a slight rivalry persisted, as manifested by a continuing dispute over whether Radio Venceremos can be considered to have broadcast from El Salvador throughout the war. From 1984 to 1989, several announcers moved to Nicaragua leaving a skeleton crew in El Salvador. All Radio Farabundo Martí personnel remained in El Salvador throughout the war.150 Radio Venceremos was central to the strategy of the guerrilla faction that controlled it.151 At first, the faction adopted a strategy of defending territory, a position almost antithetical to the concept of guerrilla warfare, in part because of the need to defend the station.


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Early in the war, the top commander of the faction explained: “The radio obliged us to fix a territory, to try to wear down the enemy, to try to keep them from invading or at least to make sure that when they did they were so tired that they had to retreat or that we could easily drive them back. It seemed crazy from a military standpoint that a guerrilla movement would defend territory, but what we were doing was protecting this political instrument.”152 That was a bold move so early in the war. “During at least 1981, a good part of the ERP’s capacity was dedicated to assuring that the radio functioned,” Leurs recalled. “By 1985, when Radio Venceremos had become what it was, defending it was logical. But in 1981, it was not logical. . . . It was a burden on a small force.” The decision to defend territory also changed the guerrillas’ relationship with the communities under their control, and brought them in closer, more frequent contact with the civilian population there.153 In addition, because the territory under rebel control included parts of the two main highways into neighboring Honduras, the guerrillas controlled access to that border.154 Even after the guerrilla leaders determined that they could not seize control of all national territory, they continued to defend a rearguard where the transmitters were located.155 Radio requires a rearguard. Newspapers can be produced outside a country and smuggled in, but radio, especially FM, requires a signal transmitted from a nearby area. Further, the immediacy that radio offers is only an asset for those close enough to cover the events and transmit them firsthand.156 Besides changing strategy to protect the station, rebels invested heavily in equipment. Significantly, only the two largest factions in the guerrilla coalition could afford radio stations.157 Replacement parts, including a transmitter, were smuggled into the country and hidden, in case they were needed.158 Thus, even when the Salvadoran Army captured the transmitter in December, 1981, Radio Venceremos was back on the air in less than three weeks.159 Early in the war, the radio station had to compete with the military units for access to communications equipment to report on battles. By the mid-1980s, Radio Venceremos had its own equipment, including early laptop computers.160 Installations and equipment never became luxurious, but they were modern in the sense of being suited to the needs of a rebel radio station. In 1988, when a Canadian journalist visited rebel-held territory to observe how Radio Venceremos operated, “[a] mobile unit of three men and two women produced the evening program from a family’s backyard in the mountain village of Perquín, in northeastern Morazán department. . . . Before the show began, a bearded man with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder

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tied an old television antenna to a bamboo pole, then anchored the contraption to the roof of the family’s adobe house. Meanwhile, a young woman in fatigues selected music cassettes, the announcer checked his handwritten news script, and the engineer wired up the equipment. The gear was small and light enough to fit into a backpack.”161 In contrast, although the rebel faction that controlled Radio Farabundo Martí began the war with more resources and stronger international contacts, especially in the key allies of Cuba and Nicaragua, its leaders never devoted many of those resources to the radio.162 “We had a weak signal and it was easy to interfere,” said Huezo Mixco. “Radio Venceremos had a more powerful radio.” As a result, Salvadorans outside the zone that the faction controlled were less aware of its three successful attacks on the El Paraiso military base than they were of less significant victories publicized by Radio Venceremos.163 The decision of the guerrilla faction that controlled Radio Farabundo Martí to turn over sixty captured soldiers to the Red Cross was a minor public relations victory compared to the Radio Venceremos campaign demanding that the government negotiate for the release of a single colonel.164 “It’s all a question of how you sell your product and how much importance you give it,” said Juan José Dalton, who was involved in other aspects of media policy for the guerrilla faction that controlled Radio Farabundo Martí. “Almost nobody listened to Farabundo. Weeks could go by and it would not be heard [on the air]. In contrast, if Venceremos missed one broadcast, it was a cause of concern.” A decade after the war ended, Salvadorans vividly recalled listening to Radio Venceremos.165 Among the listeners who participated in this study, three said that they had heard Radio Farabundo Martí and all of them had listened more regularly to Radio Venceremos.166 The differing influence of the two stations became a factor in the balance between the two major guerrilla factions.167 Until late 1991, only Radio Venceremos was the official voice of the FMLN. Huezo Mixco argued in an early 1991 interview on Mexican television that not being an official voice gave Radio Farabundo Martí more flexibility. Despite such differences, just as Lenin had recommended for newspapers in Where to Begin, the radio stations became a point of organization as well as information.168 Backyards became radio studios and the guerrillas became part of the communities in which they operated. The rebel stations went far beyond the role that Lenin had imagined for revolutionary media, however, and became the focal point of an imagined community that made the rebels more than a fighting force. Via radio, union leaders,


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priests, small business entrepreneurs, students, peasants, and international supporters were drawn together in a vision of a new Salvadoran nation. The rebels turned to that emerging nation for support in the negotiations that eventually ended the war, thus radically changing the nation although the guerrillas never took power. By 1986, the rebel stations began preparing listeners for the possibility of a negotiated settlement. “The Salvadoran people need to construct a political project born from the consensus of all national, democratic, patriotic, and revolutionary sectors,” one broadcast advised. “Where all of the sectors have participated, we have come to the conclusion that the only solution is a negotiated settlement.”169 Later that year, Joaquín Villalobos read listeners, “The Negotiated Settlement: The Best Solution to the Conflict,” a communiqué so lengthy that it was read in chapters over seven days.170 “By then we knew that our victory would not mean rolling into the capital in tanks,” recalled Santiago. It would be another five years before an agreement was negotiated. By December 1991, guerrilla commander Jorge Melendez was assuring listeners, “There has been a democratic revolution here and its conclusion is near.”171 Still, a month later, just as the cease-fire was about to take effect, the rebel radio stations were defending the negotiations against mainstream national media that advocated continuing the war. “The Diario de Hoy has taken an editorial line against the peace negotiations,” the announcer warned, preparing listeners for the Radio Venceremos response: The entire nation has responded with joy to the democratic victory reached in the [peace] agreement that finally marks the end of sixty years of militarism. . . . Only one solitary voice howls in the desert. This solitary voice came from an editorial in the Diario de Hoy where it argued that the lion could not lie down with the lamb. In this way, it manifested its rejection of democracy, its rejection of pluralism, its rejection of the incorporation of the FMLN into the political life of the nation. . . . Too much blood has already been spilled protecting feudal privileges. It is time for peace. It is time to construct a new social model where everyone plays a leading role. Neither lions nor lambs. Let us think that we are all Salvadorans, Salvadorans in a new phase of our history.172

The question remains: How much of a role did the rebel radio stations play in the war that led to that new phase and did the characteristics or mode of radio as a medium make a difference in that role? Although the former student in Usulután was an avid listener, he saw

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the radio’s role as minimal. In contrast, Ulises, a guerrilla leader, said, “If we hadn’t had the radio we would have had to have political workers in among the troops because that work had to be done. . . . Written pamphlets would have been more difficult, but we would have had to come up with something. . . . It would have been a lot more effort, but we would have had to let people know the truth about the war.” The Salvadoran rebels had other media at their disposal. Radio Venceremos was the centerpiece of a guerrilla media conglomerate that produced videos and pamphlets in several languages mainly for international distribution.173 Attempts to produce mimeographed newspapers in the guerrilla-controlled zones foundered because production supplies were erratic.174 That the rebels continued to privilege radio as a mode of information is the strongest indication that it worked. Both radio stations survived the war and Radio Venceremos remained the official voice of the guerrillas, sending the same message in Spanish simultaneously to listeners throughout El Salvador and the world. In Santiago’s words, radio “touched” listeners with the same accents, the same music, and the same words at the same time. Radio listeners became part of an imagined community that envisioned a new nation and worked to bring that nation about, either by fighting, by protesting, or, when it became possible, by voting. Twice daily rebel radio brought them a taste of that new nation, removing them from their lives and placing them into a context supplied over the airwaves. Thus, the radio helped nourish and maintain the link between the armed rebel forces and a dissident civil society. With the founding of the Comité Permanente del Debate Nacional por la Paz, or Permanent Committee of the National Debate for Peace, in 1988, representatives of civil society had a mechanism for commenting on peace negotiations that would lay the foundations for postwar El Salvador, even though they were denied a seat at the negotiating table. Initially organized by the Roman Catholic Church, the committee included a broad spectrum of Salvadoran society, from groups closely identified with the guerrilla movement to conservative business organizations. The committee was able to exert pressure for ending the armed struggle, reform of the armed force, and a democratic political structure, although it did not effectively take on the issue of the country’s socioeconomic structure.175 Thus, radio helped the insurgency maintain its connection with civilian supporters, who in turn created additional pressure for sustaining the peace talks and for issues that were important to the rebels in the negotiations. The producers of Salvadoran rebel radio see themselves as pioneers in effectively incorporating media into a revolution. “The Zapatista


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thing is an appropriate conclusion, creatively applied, of the Central American experience,” said Leurs. “El Salvador is the country where a revolutionary movement . . . has known how to incorporate media into its general strategy.” Part of the example set in El Salvador was that the rebel faction that is best remembered for using radio to undermine the government was willing to adapt its overall strategy to suit the needs of its mode of information.


CH A P T ER

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On New Year’s Eve, 1993, rebels in ski masks took control of four county seats in southern Mexico. Before fading back into the jungle, barely ahead of the Mexican Army, the rebels distributed the first and only edition of their newspaper, the Mexican Alarm Clock, briefly captured a radio station, and sent faxes to the news media, giving their reasons for the uprising as quickly as the government could offer its explanation of events.1 The manifesto of the Zapatista National Liberation Front, or EZLN, as the rebels called themselves, was not only quoted by the domestic and international reporters who poured into Chiapas in those first days of January 1994, but also was published in full in the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada.2 Then, Zapatista communiqués began to circulate in a new medium that the rebels had not even anticipated. Their words were translated into English and posted on the Internet in both English and Spanish.3 The Zapatistas obtained not only the anticipated international attention from the mass media—newspapers, news magazines, radio, and television—they also had gained access to a medium without a gatekeeper.4 They could communicate directly with Internet users in the United States and Europe and those users could react to what they read. As quickly as manifestos could be typed into computers, they were available on the Internet, not just for reading, but also for commentary. In contrast, communication with Zapatista supporters in remote jungle villages could take days. Diffusion of information about the New Year’s Eve uprising linked two strikingly different communities: a network of technology leaders in urban Mexico, the United States, and Europe and isolated, indigenous peasants in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. Communications on the Web sites indicate that Internet users were not merely passive consumers of the

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information they read about Chiapas. They identified with the Zapatistas’ concerns, particularly those related to globalization.5 They imagined themselves as participants in the same struggle, in a sense, different neighborhoods of the same community of resistance, one spread through the hills and jungles of Chiapas, the other spread through cyberspace in the sort of diffused presence that Mark Poster anticipated for users of listserv and e-mail. The diffused presence allowed members of the cyberspace neighborhood to feel they were a part of a united community. One group of supporters would eventually adopt a sort of motto: “Today it is a no longer ‘all of you’ and ‘we.’ We are the same. We are.”6 Just as Marx credited the mode of production with bringing workers together and providing them the opportunity to develop class consciousness, the Internet, as a mode of information, brought together these two communities and deepened their global consciousness. This chapter examines the beginning of the relationship between those two neighborhoods of struggle and the new mode of information that joined them, then analyzes whether that relationship brought changes to the situated community. The leaders of the situated community used the Internet to challenge a vision of their nation that disenfranchised them and to demand change. However, using the new mode of information most effectively brought about both emergency changes in the decision-making structure and unexpected long-term changes that shaped the daily lives of rank-and-file members of the situated community. Understanding what the Internet meant for that relationship between a situated, revolutionary community and the cyberspace community that supported it, is another step in determining whether the mode of information matters in revolutionary media. It was a struggle that Mexican Foreign Minister José Angel Gurría scornfully dismissed as “an Internet war,” a struggle in which the rebels’ medium became their primary weapon.7

Background The Zapatista uprising resulted from the convergence of three historic trends: the land reform led by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the closely linked issue of indigenous rights, and globalization. “Land and Liberty” was the slogan of the revolutionaries who overthrew the landowners at the beginning of the twentieth century and Zapata was the incarnation of that slogan. Austere and dark skinned, from the central Mexican state of Morelos, he was in many ways carrying on a fight for land that his

ZAPATISMO IN MEXICO AND CYBERSPACE

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ancestors had waged since colonial times.8 Unlike his contemporaries, Venustiano Carranza and Francisco Villa, he did not actively use media or press agents to court the support of foreign and domestic public opinion. As I write this, I am looking up intermittently at a copy of a famous photograph of Zapata and Villa that hangs over the desk in my study. It was taken in the National Palace the day their troops converged on Mexico City. Villa sits in the presidential chair smiling and looking, well, presidential. Beside him, Zapata hunches back into his chair and gazes uncomfortably at the camera. They had seized power briefly, but could not muster enough support to end the fighting and lead Mexico. Carranza soon replaced them. Violence continued into a second decade as no group or ruler was able to establish hegemony until Plutarco Elías Calles formed the coalition of peasants, workers, and military leaders that provided a base for ruling Mexico for the next seventy years. Years before that, Zapata was betrayed and killed, but the land redistribution he advocated became part of the myth of the revolution and a source of legitimacy for successive Mexican administrations long after all the arable land had been distributed.9 Chiapas participated only marginally in the 1910 Revolution. Significantly, the best-known accounts of the state’s role are told not by historians, but by novelists.10 Nevertheless, the revolutionary value of land distribution extended to Chiapas. However, the government did not break up the fertile ranches of the traditional landowners as it did in other parts of the country.11 Instead, in the 1960s, indigenous settlers from the Chiapas highlands were given land in the lowland jungle, which they proceeded to deforest over the next three decades. The Mexican government declared an end to deforestation by establishing the Lacandon Rain Forest Reserve. The settlers protested by forming an antienvironmental movement to insist on the need for them to continue opening farmland in the jungle. The government made some accommodations in response to the protests, but actually expanded the reserve. Anger over the reserve was added to a long list of grievances that the indigenous people of Chiapas had suffered since colonial times.12 While Mexico reveres its indigenous past, the situation of contemporary indigenous people is more ambiguous. The version of Mexican nationalism that was supported since the 1910 Revolution by philosophers such as José Vasconcelos has emphasized mestizaje, the mixture of races, principally European and indigenous, to create La Raza Cósmica, the contemporary Mexican. That vision relegates indigenous people to the past. In Chiapas, significant, if unsuccessful, indigenous

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rebellions occurred in 1712 and 1869. Race was only one element in these uprisings that intertwined economic, political, and religious issues that were expressed as race.13 To be indigenous in Chiapas was the outward manifestation of a condition of social and economic exploitation that did not change substantially with the 1910 Revolution. In fact, well into the 1970s, indigenous people lived in rural areas, maintaining separate societies from the mestizos of the region. During the 1970s, the indigenous people of Chiapas began to organize around the issue of ethnicity. However, the names of their organizations showed that their concerns were twentieth-century versions of the issues that had led to those earlier rebellions: the Organization for Indigenous Health in the Chiapas Highlands; the Union of Peasants, Students, and Teachers in Chalchihuitan, and; the Committee in Defense of the Threatened, Persecuted, and Expelled of Chamula (an organization based on religion).14 To be indigenous was to receive poor health care, inferior education, unarable land, and even religious persecution. In Chiapas, as Jesús Martín-Barbero has noted in other parts of Latin America, ethnicity has survived “not only in objects and rituals, but also in the protests, the political movements within parties, or entry into . . . armed struggles.”15 On the eve of the Zapatista revolt, Chiapas was the poorest state in Mexico and the people living in the area of the rebellion were the poorest residents of Chiapas. With 60 percent of its population living in the countryside, Chiapas was three times as rural as the rest of Mexico. Nearly one-third of Chiapas’ adults could not read, compared to a national illiteracy rate of 13 percent. In Altamirano, Ocosingo, and Las Margaritas, three of the county seats that the Zapatistas took, nearly half the adults were illiterate. Chiapas produced three-fifths of Mexico’s electricity, but one-third of the state’s households did not have electric power. In Altamirano, three-fourths of the houses lacked electricity. During the 1980s, the population grew 4.5 percent annually, nearly double the rate for Mexico as a whole.16 By 1993, the indigenous people of Chiapas feared that their situation was about to become worse. The Mexican government had signed a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada that would, among other provisions, end subsidies of basic goods, including agricultural products, and price supports for crops. Complementary legislation threatened the semicommunal land tenure system that assured peasants access to land. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect on January 1, 1994. The night before, the Zapatistas carried out their first military operation, taking over four county seats, including the colonial tourist attraction of San Cristóbal de las Casas.17


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This was the world debut of a revolutionary movement that, like the leader whose name it took, was explicitly not trying to seize power.18 Instead, two U.S. military analysts have stated, “[T]he organization is more a politico-military body than a purely military one.”19 It was believed to have only 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained fighters, and the carved wooden toy guns that the Zapatistas dropped as they slipped back into the jungle were a testament to how poorly armed those fighters were.20 Rather than a military victory, the movement offered an invitation to develop an alternative hegemony. It is significant that the Zapatistas named the newspaper they distributed on the first day of their rebellion El Despertador Mexicano, the Mexican Alarm Clock. The name was taken from the newspaper that revolutionaries published from 1810 to 1811, the beginning of the prolonged struggle for independence from Spain. Using that name linked the Zapatistas to the original struggle for sovereignty while expressing their confidence that Mexicans merely needed to be awakened and they would take action to build an alternative hegemony, the sort of political and economic democracy that the Zapatistas envisioned. The role of the situated community was to sound the alarm, and the rest of the community would respond. Indeed, John Holloway and Eloína Peláez contend that the Zapatistas have reinvented revolution as “the struggle, not of a past to be defended, but of a world to be constructed. This understanding of their struggle means that, unlike almost all previous revolutions, the Zapatista revolution does not aim to take power. . . . The project of humanity cannot be achieved through the winning of power. This marks a radical break with the traditions of the revolutionary and the non-revolutionary left.”21 As an instrument in their struggle, like the Sandinistas and the FMLN, the Zapatistas put into practice Alberto Melucci’s concept that power can come from producing and circulating information.22 They have used their control over information to assert control over symbolic representation and to make a cultural offering, providing an alternative cultural model that challenges the dominant discourse. Through their own media, the Zapatistas actively participated in redefining the public debate both nationally and internationally. The same way that the collective identity developed among readers of the same newspapers or listeners to a clandestine radio broadcast, readers of Internet messages unabridged by gatekeepers formed an imagined community that challenged the dominant view of the revolution and the government, redefining the nation contested in the rebellion. Having such an effective means of communicating their message allowed them to take on the mainstream media that supported the

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existing hegemony. The contacts also provoked changes in the previously isolated situated community.

Building Community, Reconsidering History Events in the early days of the rebellion made the insurgents aware of the consequences of losing access to their national and international supporters. By January 6, less than a week after the Zapatistas struck, the Mexican Army had sealed off access to the combat zone. Local residents, journalists, and human rights activists were all barred from the region for six days, until local human rights groups were able to exert pressure to remove the roadblocks. A joint report by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas found that the most egregious violations the organizations documented were committed during that week, including five summary executions, the murder of eleven hospital patients, and the interrogation under torture of the residents of the village of Morelia, culminating in three murders.23 That was a lesson that would have repercussions a year later. Even as those abuses were occurring, the Zapatistas were intent on creating community. The first packet of rebel communiqués, released eleven days after the insurgents occupied the city halls, was accompanied by a letter addressed “To the national newspaper La Jornada:/To the national newspaper El Financiero:/To the local San Cristóbal newspaper, El Tiempo:” that specifically asked them “to put these documents into the public domain.” Beginning with that first set of communiqués, the messages of the Zapatistas were addressed “To the people of Mexico:/To the peoples and governments of the world:/ Brothers and Sisters:” The communiqué began: “As of January 1 of this year, our Zapatista troops began a series of politico-military actions with the principal objective of letting the Mexican people and the world know the miserable conditions that millions of Mexicans, especially we, the indigenous people, live and die in.”24 The rebels clearly were reaching out, attempting to create the kinds of external pressures for change that Paul Adams has researched. Specifically, they addressed one communiqué in the packet “To Mr. Bill Clinton, President of the United States of North America:/To the North American Congress:/To the people of the United States of North America:”25 That communiqué is a direct appeal for international support: We direct this letter to you to tell you that the Mexican federal government is using the economic and military support that it receives


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from the United States of North America to massacre Chiapaneco Indians. We would like to know whether the U.S. Congress and the citizens of the United States of America approved this military and economic support to combat drug trafficking or to assassinate indigenous people in the Mexican Southeast. . . . We’re making a special call to the North American people and government. To the first, we call upon them to initiate actions in solidarity with our fellow citizens. We call upon the North American government to suspend all military and economic aid to the dictatorial government which doesn’t respect human rights, because said aid will be used to massacre the Mexican people.26

This is a clear application of Paul Adams’ point about reaching beyond boundaries to create national and transnational advocacy networks. In doing so, the rebels were challenging the legitimacy of the government as a representative of the Mexican people, Bonfil Batalla’s “deep” Mexico. They were claiming their rights as citizens of the “real” nation, portraying government officials as those who would massacre “the Mexican people,” “the indigenous people of the Mexican Southeast.” Subcommander Marcos outlined that position more fully later in an interview, posted on the Chiapas listserv, with three representatives of organizations that supported the Zapatistas. “We believe that today’s Mexico, the Mexico we are fighting against, is not a Mexico in the abstract, but rather a project of a certain class, of a certain social group. This project was born of the disorder or of the internal agreement provoked by the revolution at the beginning of the century. . . . We believe it is possible to have the same Mexico with a different project, a project that recognizes not only that it is a multi-ethnic state—in fact, multinational—but also that new concepts are needed to reform the Constitution.”27 Besides adopting the name of the best-known indigenous leader of the 1910 Revolution, the rebels reached further back into Mexican history to identify themselves with the leader of the fight for independence from Spain who most clearly represented non-European participation in that struggle. In an April communiqué, containing mocking quotations from government statements about the Zapatistas, Subcommander Marcos wrote: We have resolved to follow in the footsteps of the “lords of the Central American guerrilla” and follow the example of a “foreigner,” “transgressor of the law,” and a “professional in violence” from the days of yore called José María Morelos y Pavón. About this man and his troops, the “legal” General Félix María Calleja del Rey wrote: “If the constancy and activity of the defenders of Cuautla had morality, and

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were led by a just cause, they would deserve a distinguished place in our history some day. Stretched by our troops and afflicted by necessity, they express happiness in all of the events. They bury their cadavers with peals of celebration in their glorious deaths.”28

The rebels identified themselves with the Mexican founding fathers and the government with the Spanish colonial administrators. They claimed to be the legitimate heirs of Morales y Pavón as well as Zapata. They were the real Mexicans, not the usurpers who ran the government. The Zapatistas’ interest in building and rebuilding a support network was evident within a month of the uprising as they began to respond to letters sent to them from individuals and organizations. A set of February dispatches contain letters to such diverse groups as the University Student Council of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (the federal university), the mayor of a town in rural Michoacan in central Mexico, the Supreme Council of Indian Peoples (a land reform advocacy group), the Regional Liberation Association for Human, Economic, Social, and Political Rights, and a class of school children in the central Mexican state of Jalisco. The point of distribution for those letters remained the trusted national media outlets, and this assured that their readers also were aware of the support community that the rebels were building across Mexico.29

How the Zapatistas Saw Their Role Just as the Zapatistas started out with the clear intention of building a national and transnational advocacy network, they also had a clear notion of their place within that network. They would be the symbol and catalyst of an alternative hegemony of democracy and resistance to globalization on neoliberal terms, neither the vanguard nor foot soldiers to be led. A February 1994 communiqué to the students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico proposed: If it would be possible for you to organize, and once things calm down a bit, for you to come to our mountains to visit us and chat with us and to help us with what you know of technology and writing and all that comes in books that never come our way. We do not want you to come to politicize us or to pull us into one or another political current. In this I think that you would be more likely to learn from us what a truly democratic and participatory organization is. But you can help us cut the coffee, prepare the corn field, and in the community work of our villages. You can help us learn to read and write, to improve our health and nutrition, to use techniques that get more from the land. You can


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come to teach us and to learn. You can come even for only a few days so you get to know this part of Mexico that already existed before January 1 and in spite of it.30 (Emphasis in the original.)

They acknowledged what they saw as their weaknesses, but also pointed out their strengths and insisted on defining the terms of their relationship with the support network. This was true not only in their contact with the students, but also in later communications with other groups. In a May 1994 interview with four Mexican and international reporters, Subcommander Marcos defined their skepticism of leftist political parties: The left is very closed-minded. The traditional left is very closedminded. They say, “Well, these people don’t draw from any of the known ideologies, so they must not have one. I will lend them one.” Or they say, “They are good people but they don’t know what they want. I’m going to tell them what they want.” Or “They’re good people but they need a leader. I’ll be their leader.” This is the reality not just in the case of PROCUP [an urban guerrilla group] but with groups of Trotskyites and Maoists who say, “What the EZLN needs is . . . ME!”31

The Zapatistas insisted on their independence while at the same time refusing to take on the role of a traditional vanguard party. They shunned both accepting outside leadership and becoming leaders. The latter point became clear after the failure of the peace talks with the government in June 1994. In rejecting the government’s peace proposal, the governing council of the Zapatistas stated that “[i]t considers the Dialogue of San Cristóbal to have ended. It calls on the Mexican people to attend a new national dialogue to be attended by all of the progressive forces in the country. The central themes of this dialogue will be democracy, freedom, and justice for all Mexicans.”32 The Zapatistas were turning over leadership of the movement for change to the advocacy network that they had brought together to build an alternative hegemony for their nation. In that communiqué, the Zapatista leaders specifically called nongovernmental organizations “the vanguard of civil society” and thanked them for their support. They also acknowledged the existence of a support network, thanking “all those men, women and children, people without faces, throughout the country and outside of Mexico, who have given us their solidarity and who have joined our just cause. Our struggle and death is for you, brothers and sisters. We will not take off our masks until every Mexican—the indigenous peoples,

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campesinos, workers, students, teachers, housewives, squatters, artists, intellectuals, retirees, the unemployed—men and women without voices or faces—have everything they need for a dignified and true life. Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves.”33 The message named the people, “indigenous peoples, campesinos, workers, students, teachers, housewives, squatters, artists, intellectuals, retirees, the unemployed,” whom they considered the legitimate nation. The words proposed an emerging hegemony of people who were “without voices or faces” in the existing order. By the time they sent that message, the Zapatistas were clearly aware that their words were being distributed through a medium substantially different from the modes of information familiar to them at the start of their rebellion. The difference was evident in the letter that accompanied an early packet of Zapatista communiqués. “These documents contain our position on the events that occurred during January 7–13, 1994. I clarify this because, to reach you, the documents packet must travel for days, crossing mountains and valleys and by-passing tanks, military vehicles, thousands of men dressed in olivegreen uniforms, and all of the war arsenal with which they try to intimidate us.”34 The letter also emphasized the limited communication available to the rebels, noting, “We also are not affected by the lies presented by television and in the press. Do they forget the illiteracy rate in the state of Chiapas? How many houses have no electricity and thus no televisions in these lands? If the nation falls for these lies again, there will always be at least one of us who is prepared to awaken them again.”35 The communiqués indicated that the Zapatistas in Chiapas may not yet have been aware of the 50,000 or more demonstrators who marched on the Zócalo, Mexico City’s ancient central plaza, on January 12, 1994, demanding peace in Chiapas. The day of the march, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari ordered that the army observe a unilateral ceasefire.36 That day’s events indicated the level of national support for the Zapatistas, as well as the influence of that support network on events in Chiapas. However, the Chiapas Zapatistas were still relying on the written communications through trusted couriers, which could be delayed by a week or more. Those couriers simply arrived at the office of El Tiempo, left a few sheaves of paper and disappeared, recalled Concepción Villafuerte, editor of the San Cristóbal de las Casas newspaper.37 The first round of peace talks in February 1994 provided indications that the Zapatistas had become aware of just how far away their message was being heard. In preparation for the talks, the rebels communicated


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with the nongovernmental organizations that offered to provide security for the talks.38 The full extent of international support for the rebels became graphically clear as volunteers from seventy-three organizations held hands to form a security cordon around the San Cristóbal de las Casas cathedral where the talks were held.39 The Zapatistas had revived and built on the international solidarity networks that had been created during the Central American civil wars.40 The communiqués sent after the Zapatista delegates returned to the jungle to consult with the rank and file showed that they had taken note of the wide base of support. In a report on the progress of consultations to decide on the government offer, the rebels included “non-governmental organizations” in the list of recipients. The body of the message stated that the purpose of the message was “to inform the Mexican people about the details of the internal and external consultations that we have carried out regarding the peace accords that the federal government presented to us during the dialogue in San Cristóbal de las Casas . . .” and ended “We will continue to inform the Mexican people about the results.”41 By detailing the consultation process, the communiqué provided an explanation for why it was taking weeks, while at the same time keeping the Zapatistas in touch with their long-distance supporters even when the rebels had no news to report. While they were not adapting their internal processes to the mode of information their supporters used, they were acknowledging the need to explain their internal functioning to supporters accustomed to faster communication. The wisdom of having laid that groundwork would become evident in February 1995, when the Zapatistas again faced a threat reminiscent of the one they confronted the second week in January. Meanwhile, starting in March 1994, the rebellion and prolonged negotiation process were overtaken by events. The ruling party’s presidential candidate was assassinated, which refocused national and international attention on the upcoming presidential election. The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, took office and immediately faced a financial crisis. Throughout that period, the Zapatistas occasionally regained international headlines and time on news broadcasts, as for instance when presidential contender Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas visited in a futile quest for their endorsement. However, they had to compete with other dramatic events for attention. While the mainstream media might have ignored the movement for weeks at a time, the Zapatistas remained a current topic for their most ardent supporters through a new medium: Nongovernment organizations and academics set up listservs to distribute

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Subcommander Marcos’ communiqués, which El Tiempo and La Jornada continued to publish in full.42 The Zapatistas, who had so carefully timed their rebellion to coincide with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, had unwittingly made themselves part of a change that would have significant repercussions for their movement: the development of Internet communication. The Zapatista discourse of struggle fit in well with the promise of the Internet. The same year the Zapatista rebellion began, legal scholar Daniel Waggoner called the Internet “an ‘information superhighway’ where virtually everyone can instantly become publisher, source, recipient, and target.”43 Posting communiqués in which the Zapatistas complained of their isolation and oppression helped fulfill the promise of a mode of information that could give everyone a voice. As a result of Internet communication, the rebels’ international advocacy network was primed and ready when Zedillo accused the Zapatistas of stalling their response to government proposals and issued arrest warrants for alleged rebel leaders. Army tanks gathered at the edge of guerrilla-held territory to execute the warrants.44 “The delay in replying to the government communications is the result of the consultations that must be carried out among the [Zapatistas] and the great distances and communications problems that exist in the mountains of southeastern Mexico,” a February 9, 1995, communiqué stated. “Evidently, the supreme government is unaware of the grave conditions of isolation in which the government itself has kept indigenous communities and which make communication difficult.”45 The mocking term “supreme government” undermines the legitimacy of the rulers, and the rest of the message questions either their knowledge of their own national territory or their sincerity. The message returns to the concept of two nations, one isolated and the other, either ignorantly or cynically criticizing the former for its difficulties in communication. Further, on the eve of the army’s invasion of rebel territory, the Zapatista communication showed a notable difference from those of a year earlier. It indicated that the insurgents knew they were reaching a national and international supporter network that they could count on for quick action on their behalf. “Since 16:00 hours, hundreds of federal army troops have taken positions in the county seats of San Andrés Sacamach, Simojovel and Sabanilla, and have reinforced with thousands of soldiers the military bases of Ocosingo, Altamirano and Las Margaritas. Minutes later, the evil government announced via a radio transmission in the voice of Mr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon as series of statements and threats against us and our just cause,” the communiqué began.


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Their faith was not misplaced, either in the government’s intentions or their supporters’ response. No sooner did the tanks begin rolling on February 10, with military roadblocks denying civilians—including reporters and the Red Cross—any access to the disputed area, than the members of the Internet support work began informing (and sometimes misinforming) each other about events.46 One message, which stated that it was based on a telephone call from Mexico, erroneously reported that tanks were surrounding San Cristóbal de las Casas and that a hospital in Comitán was treating numerous wounded patients.47 On February 12, both the Chiapas-L and Mexico94 listservs posted a communiqué, issued just a day earlier, in which the Zapatistas “ma[d]e a call to all of our Mexican brothers to stop this genocidal war that the evil government has launched against us.” It ended with the plea, “We beg you brothers, do not abandon us.”48 The rapidity of the communication contrasts with the slowness of letters sent a year earlier, which had taken weeks to reach their recipients. To get the communiqués out quickly because of both the urgency and the danger created by the army’s offensive, the Zapatistas had trusted a relatively low-level operative, Major Ana Maria. In a communiqué nearly two weeks later, they explained: In view of the difficult military conditions, the [Zapatista leadership] has been forced to look for diverse channels and means to let its words be known. By this means, we communicate to the people of Mexico, to the peoples and governments of the world, to the National Commission of Mediation, to the national and international press, that the [leadership] ratifies and honors the diverse communiqués emitted by [it] and signed by the Comandantes David and Javier, and by Major Ana Maria. All of the communiqués signed by these compañeros and all of their statements are honored by the supreme command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army: Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee-General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Their word is ours.49

Remembering the atrocities that had occurred the second week of the previous January and recognizing the importance of contact with their advocacy network at that critical moment, the Zapatistas were forced to change the way they operated to make that contact.50 The same communiqué accused the army of torturing civilians, specifically in the hamlet of Rosario Ibarra, a settlement in a remote part of the jungle accessible only by bush plane and a rutted dirt road that is passable only part of the year. When journalists were later allowed into the community, the accusations turned out to be exaggerated.51

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Even when it became clear that the situated community had used hyperbole to attract attention to the threat it felt, the “deceived” cyberspace members of the community did not publicly rebuke the situated community. That episode did not appear to damage the relationship between the neighborhoods, indicating how closely the advocacy network identified itself with the situated community. As Poster has predicted, the listservs both provided users with the opportunity to take on a new identity, that of a Zapatista, and dispersed all users, relocating them, in a sense, in the canyons of Chiapas.52 Meanwhile, the cyberspace Zapatista community was taking action. On February 10, a user of the soc.culture.mexican newsgroup posted the e-mail addresses of major news organizations that accepted e-mail. The organizer of the Chiapas-L list copied and posted it to his list on February 13 with the suggestion, “You can use it to express your opinion regarding current events in Mexico.”53 The following day, a member of the Chiapas-L listserv posted a “Chiapas Internet Press Kit” with a source for obtaining the email addresses of large media organizations, another source for congressional e-mail addresses, and the U.S. president’s e-mail address.54 As Mimi Keck and Katherine Sikkink’s research would have predicted, the Zapatistas used their cyber network to pressure the Mexican government. They succeeded, to an extent. The army removed its roadblocks on February 14, allowing the Red Cross, human rights organizations, and reporters chafing in San Cristóbal de las Casas, access to the disputed region.55 International pressure had opened access in just four days, two days sooner than local pressure had produced results a year earlier. The government did take back control of the region, but it did so under the supervision of international observers of a sort, who could bear witness to how the army treated the Zapatista communities. To effectively and rapidly gain access to the Zapatista network for creating pressure at a crucial moment, the situated community was forced to modify its procedures and messengers. However, thanks to the new medium of the Internet and the emergence of alternative media, such as the newspapers La Jornada and El Tiempo and the news magazine Proceso, the Zapatistas were able to circumvent the mainstream domestic media. Just as Televisa had ignored the Guerrero guerrillas and the 1968 student protesters, the Zapatistas ignored Televisa, announcing their own boycott of the medium closely associated with the government and the ruling party. The network was banned from Zapatista press conferences and denied interviews.56 The Zapatistas threatened to extend the boycott to any


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news organization that sold Televisa footage. The nation’s premier network was frozen out of the nation’s biggest story in years. Years later, in a video recorded for viewing at the “Free Media” teach-in in New York, Subcommander Marcos spoke about the importance of taking control of the media message, rather than being controlled: We have a choice. We can have a cynical attitude in the face of the media and say nothing can be done about the dollar power that creates itself in images, words, digital communication, and computer systems that invade not just with an invasion of power but with a way of seeing that world, of how they think the world should look. We could say, “Well, that is the way it is,” and do nothing. Or we can simply assume incredulity. We can say that any communication by the media monopolies is a total lie. We can ignore it and go about our lives. But there is a third option that is neither conformity, nor skepticism, nor distrust. It’s the option to construct a different way: to show the world what is really happening, to have a critical worldview, to become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this world. The work of independent media is to tell the history of social struggle in the world. Here in North America—The United States, Canada, and Mexico—independent media has, on occasion, been able to open spaces even within the mass media monopolies, to force them to acknowledge news of social movements.57

Two U.S. military analysts have given the Zapatistas credit for setting an example of how to do exactly what the subcommander advocated.58 Meanwhile, the editors of El Tiempo found their commitment to independence shaken: they were accused of being Zapatistas. They were shunned in their community and subscriptions dropped. As pressure against them grew, the journalists began to identify more closely with the rebels. “We were independent,” said Villafuerte, “We were forced into the Zapatista camp.”59 Like Carlos María Bustamante nearly two centuries earlier, the two Chiapas journalists found that government persecution pushed them out of mainstream media and into the revolutionary movement. The separation between independent media and social movements that Sol has noted as one of the characteristics of Latin American media broke down in this case. The independent medium that had been a link to the Internet became part of the social movement, providing organic intellectuals to challenge the dominant hegemony. The cyberspace community was an extension of the advocacy network that the Zapatistas had nurtured in letters and communiqués,

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and the advocacy network had become essential to the situated community. Along the way, the Zapatista leadership became “cultural brokers” between the situated community and the cyberspace community.60 They took on a role similar to that of gatekeepers and it is largely that role that has been studied in relation to the Internet. During the first year of the conflict, the Zapatista leaders continued to write their communiqués for transcription onto the Internet. In Poster’s scheme, they were involved in the traditional writing process of making symbols that would be deciphered in reading. They remained situated although their messages were read throughout cyberspace. In contrast, the advocacy network members reading the messages and corresponding with each other were dispersed in cyberspace, in Poster’s terminology. Thus, the communication experiences differed, allowing the situated neighborhood to remain isolated while the cyberspace neighborhood was dislocated, or relocated, into a fused community.

The Fallout The events of February 1995 brought the situated community into direct contact with some residents of the cyberspace neighborhoods in ways that minimized the role of the cultural brokers or gatekeepers. Members of the cyberspace neighborhood relocated physically into the situated community with which they had so strongly identified. One part of the cyberspace neighborhood brought the situated community the capacity to produce its own media. The other tried to ensure that the situated community would never again be exposed to the danger of army contact without the presence of international observers. Both efforts would be coordinated largely via the Internet and would change the Zapatista situated communities in ways that provide an intriguing variation on Poster’s point that new modes of information do not replace old modes, but rather enhance and change their use.61 Poster was referring more to changes such as the way the advent of television affected radio. As drama and variety shows moved from radio to the new medium, radio developed new functions, such as playing recorded music and, later, talk radio. In the case of the Zapatistas, the cyberspace neighborhood created through the Internet encouraged development of other “older” modes of information, particularly the use of video, and even face-to-face communication between members of the situated and cyberspace neighborhoods of the imagined Zapatista community. As Poster has noted, a new mode


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of information does not necessarily make a previous mode obsolete, but rather modes of information come to exist contemporaneously. Modes of information have been added to the situated community even though members of the situated community have, at most, sporadic access to the Internet. The only time during our meeting that the members of the Oventic Reception Committee laughed was when I asked whether they had Internet access. The reception committee greets visitors to the area, answers questions, and receives petitions for further interviews or interaction with the community, such as a tour of the nearby shoe factory or a prolonged visit. On my first visit, I met with a five-member committee, including one woman and two men in traditional Tzotzil dress. Only three of the men spoke. The woman took notes, indicating that she understands Spanish. We met in a high-ceilinged, wooden building about the size of a basketball court, furnished with a dozen benches. We sat facing each other on two benches. “Internet is a way to transmit our message,” one committee member explained when the giggling stopped. “It is a way to make ourselves known to the whole world.” The Internet is a way to refute government misinformation, he said. “We need to globalize ourselves as our enemies have globalized,” he said. “We must be united.” Even before 1994, Zapatista communities had studied about homelessness in the United States and understood that globalization was affecting people all over the world, he said. Even so, he added, they were surprised by how rapidly their message had been received throughout the world.62 In the more remote jungle community of Ibarra, when residents are asked about communication, they talk about roads.63 They blow an old cow horn to call community meetings. Nevertheless, the effects of those translated Internet messages are felt across the highlands and jungle where the situated Zapatista community lives.

Peace Campers As a result of the 1995 military offensive, the then Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who has since retired, put out a call, nationally and internationally, for “a civil presence to accompany the communities to confront the civil conflict.” According to the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, “this call has been fundamental because many communities have benefited from the presence of national and international observers, which has favored a situation not only of prevention but also of prevention and action by the human rights center.”64 The people who respond to the call have become known as

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“peace campers” or simply “campers.” Further, the center has a constant presence on the Internet, which is not subject to the vagaries of news that make television and newspapers such inconstant messengers, said Antonia Álvarez, who is in charge of public relations at the center.65 The actions and role of the peace campers are in stark contrast with traditional tourism as described by Néstor García Canclini. He views tourism and craft production as turning indigenous culture into a show that stereotypes ceremonies and costumes, and ultimately demonstrates the superiority of modern forms to traditional ones.66 This traditional form of tourism is evident in the cars and air-conditioned tourism buses that arrived daily and in greater numbers during the Holy Week festivities at the indigenous community of San Juan Chamula, located a twenty-minute drive from San Cristóbal de las Casas. Residents wear traditional clothing: brightly embroidered huipiles for the women and white cotton for the men. Officials can be distinguished by the colorful ribbons on their straw hats. For a fee, tourists may enter the local church, fragrant from the cedar strewn across the pewless floor and the copal incense the worshippers burn to honor saints laden with layers of silk brocade costumes that make them look like the bloated figures of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Worshippers converse with the saints in soft Tzotzil and toast them with Pepsi-Cola and posh, the local moonshine, in syncretic ceremonies not sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. Outside the church, posh drinkers lie wherever they fell, in the courtyard or on sidewalks. A complex power structure lies behind these ceremonies, but that is not what tourists see. They observe only a colorful, debauched culture. That is not the Chiapas presented to peace campers. One community that has consistently welcomed campers is Rosario Ibarra, once again called Ibarra, the euphoria having passed ten years after one of Mexico’s leading human rights advocates visited Chiapas, causing the hamlet to modify its name in her honor. Ibarra’s women wear kneelength dresses with ruffled bib collars and ribbons trimming the skirt and sleeves. The sewing cooperative meets a few hours a week to fill the week’s orders, in contrast to the weeks of intricate weaving and embroidery that the huipiles of San Juan Chamula require. The men wear khaki pants and cotton shirts. The community’s wooden church has a single altar and rows of backless wooden pews. Alcohol is forbidden here as in other Zapatista communities. There is no colorful primitivism to photograph here, no pots or wall hangings to sell. Ibarra was the community mentioned in the communiqué the Zapatistas so urgently sent out in 1995. At that time, bush planes


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flew into an airstrip about a kilometer from Ibarra and visitors walked through the jungle to the community, often sinking knee-deep in mud. About half the cabins standing in the community had been deserted by non-Zapatistas who poured into the county seat of Ocosingo in the early days of 1994. Now, the non-Zapatistas have built new houses, a church, and a school along the airstrip near a new Mexican Army outpost.67 Such divisions and militarization have become the norm in the Chiapas canyons since 1995.68 The outpost is what most worries the Zapatistas living in the old community. With the campers, they said, they feel safer. “The campers have worked out well,” said one member of the old community. “Sometimes the army comes in dressed as civilians and if the observers are not here, they bother us.” When the soldiers see foreigners in the hamlet, they leave immediately, he said.69 Instead of buying artwork made by the residents of Ibarra, over the years, the campers have left their art in the cabin where they hang their hammocks and in its separate kitchen, a typical Chiapas jungle home. A mural of a jungle scene with animals is painted across one wall of the sleeping area. On another wall, someone named Juan has painted a vase of flowers and dated it March 14, 2003. A list of Zapatista demands is on a third wall. The kitchen has a caricature of Marcos, a quotation credited to Gandhi (“Non-violence is love”), and a map of the world. When I told the villagers that I was now living in North Carolina, they asked me to show them where it was on that map. The latest residents of the camper cabin were Marcus, a Heidelberg anthropology student, and Brady, a student of peace and conflict resolution from California. They learned about the program through the Internet, read required pamphlets or attended seminars in their respective countries, and came to Chiapas with letters from sponsoring organizations. They met in Chiapas. Already Zapatista sympathizers, they have become more concerned about conditions in the community, particularly the lack of teachers for the children.70 What they have seen in Ibarra contrasts with the picture of Zapatista community education portrayed in the videos that other communities have produced through the Chiapas Media Project and that the Zapatista leadership has approved for international distribution. The Internet thus has brought members of the cyberspace community into face-to-face communication with the situated community in a striking example of Poster’s contention that modes of information overlap and complement each other, rather than displacing each other in a progressive model. What the campers learn through that direct contact is sometimes different from the information made

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available through controlled modes of information, such as the videos. In another unintended consequence of the campers’ presence, “They bring us information about what is happening,” said one man. “They bring newspapers and they tell us.” Thus, the campers, brought to the community via Internet, are conveying information face-to-face. This face-to-face communication is particularly crucial because the only alternative source of information is “The Voice of the South,” XEVFS, Radio Margaritas. The station is part of a network of stations run by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the National Indigenous Institute, to promote rural development. In a study conducted from 1989 to 1991, Lucila Vargas found that the station broadcasts in four indigenous languages as well as Spanish, covering 20,000 square kilometers of the jungle and highlands of southern Mexico. Its programming consists mainly of indigenous music and interviews with local people, as well as personal messages that substitute for the telephone service that most of the jungle lacks.71 She also determined that news programming is tightly controlled and that because the network “has undergone unprecedented expansion during the early 1990s, it is fair to assume that the federal government has been getting something (probably securing indigenous consent to its rule) from this participatory institution.”72 The day I arrived in Ibarra, the station played rancheras on the kitchen radio of one family as we ate tortillas and scrambled eggs. The adults hushed the children and nodded approvingly when the station interrupted the music, explaining to me that they were listening to an announcement of plans for the Zapatista anniversary celebration a week away. Nevertheless, in a community interview later that afternoon, the father of the family said, “We listen to the radio for music, not for information, because it belongs to the government. We listen to it, but we do not pay attention, because it is not true.” Another man added, “The radio does not benefit us, only the government.”73

Internet as a Vehicle for Other Media While Ibarra has found a source of information in the campers brought by the Internet, other communities have found different communication solutions. The Chicago-based Chiapas Media Project has distributed video cameras to four Zapatista communities in the jungles and highlands of Chiapas. Originally, the project also planned to provide the communities with Internet access, but that idea proved unfeasible because of lack of electricity and telephone lines.74 Since


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1998, the Chiapas Media Project has provided the communities with training, cameras, and tape, and distributed their videos largely via Internet. At first, the communities looked upon the cameras as defense mechanisms. “Video can bear witness to what happens, the way the soldiers enter the communities,” said Israel, whom his community chose to attend the video workshops. “The camera can provide documentation, to publicize the truth and to denounce (wrongdoing).”75 Indeed, one early documentary features soldiers patrolling the edge of the community in takes that were several minutes long.76 The communities’ ideas about the cameras soon evolved to encompass other uses. “The government communication media do not clearly show what is happening in the communities,” said Moisés, a video producer from another community. “As indigenous videographers, we witness what is happening in the communities, whether it is mistreatment by the Mexican Army, government efforts to take land from indigenous people, the peasant comrades. . . . What happens is that the government media never tells the truth about what is happening. So, we, as indigenous people, do not have access to government media. We are totally marginalized.”77 The communities that participate in the Chiapas Media Project have the opportunity to break out of that marginalization, to make a cultural offering. “I have learned that communication is very important in the indigenous communities,” said Moisés. For him, he added, videography “is like saving history that we are never going to make again.”78 However, the indigenous video producers hasten to add that camera work comes after their work in the fields. Much like Villafuerte and Avendaño with their newspaper, the video producers see their media work as an added activity. However, for them it is not quite a hobby: It is part of their obligation to their community and the Zapatista movement. They do not consider themselves independent. “If a video is going to be sent outside [the community] it has to be authorized,” said Moisés. “Nor can I, as a videographer, send material outside that has not been authorized.”79 Thus, the Chiapas Media Project video about education contrasted sharply with what I observed in Ibarra. In the video, children were learning in indigenous languages from members of the community who have attended secondary school.80 In Ibarra, the school was empty, schoolbooks were stored away in the small library adjoining the campers’ sleeping area, and worried mothers told me privately that the residents designated as community teachers have never attended the training sessions. Children there are growing up illiterate.

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Residents of Ibarra told me that they have never seen any of the videos.81 Even communities that see the videos must share projection equipment. Israel’s community found that it needed an additional medium: We have only one projector for seven communities, so we have to wait a long time for our turn. We needed to find a way to be in touch—I’m not saying every two weeks, but at least once a month—with what is happening at the international, national, state, and local level. For example, the military harassment that is going on in Roberto Barrios. If I hadn’t found out and taken the information to my zone, the comrades would not have found out. . . . Four months ago, we thought of making a wall newspaper. So, for the past three months, I’ve been getting the comrades together and, besides the video, we work on the wall newspaper. Every month, every two weeks, we have a wall newspaper in every town, where the comrades can come and see what’s happening. This is important because, nobody gets the paper there. The government radio station doesn’t tell the truth, so people are bored with the government radio. They don’t pay attention to it. It’s not the same as if a comrade arrives and says, “This is what’s happening.” The wall newspaper has worked well for us. We change it every month and it has become another means of communication, another tool in the struggle.82

Thus, Internet did not displace other media. On the contrary, it made possible the addition of video, and video spurred the interest in being informed that led to a wall newspaper, another example of Poster’s assertion that modes of information are contemporaneous. Throughout the process, face-to-face communication remained the most reliable source of information. Israel did not consider any of these modes of information as independent. All were tools in the struggle. While he and his fellow indigenous video producers criticized the government radio as unreliable, they unhesitatingly submitted their own work for censorship by the Zapatista leadership. The difference was not independent versus censored media. It was simply whose version of reality was being portrayed, and whose hegemony was being promoted. The Zapatistas also have experimented with varying degrees of success with other media. They produce cassette tapes and CDs of both original and pirated music for sale at the dry goods store in Oventic. A prominent Zapatista known by the nom de guerre David is featured on a two-volume recording, singing “Corrido Chiapaneco,” “Zapata y Villa,” and “Himno Zapatista” among other songs.83


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Los Dos Vientos de Voz y Fuego, a recording that I was told was made by a trio from the jungle, contains songs about the struggle, such as the battle of Ocosingo, the bloodiest combat in the twelve days of fighting in 1994, as well as “La Burla de Bush,” a song poking fun at the first president Bush.84 “People form their groups and write revolutionary songs, not what you hear in the cantinas,” a member of the Oventic Reception Committee explained. Besides the revolutionary music groups, other musicians perform and preserve the traditional religious songs in indigenous languages, the first man to speak explained. Since the rebellion, the committee member said, the number of groups has increased. “We want everyone to know what has happened;” he said. “It is a way to make ourselves heard. . . . It is a form of awakening, to not keep silent in front of the enemy. . . . This way, we aren’t just listening to Vicente Fernández and Los Tigres del Norte, which have a counterrevolutionary mentality. We are not going to find ideas there because those are written for the rich. We need to compose songs about the life that we want in order not to be dominated by other ideas. We can help our people with our simple compositions.” Another committee member added, “Our struggle can be carried out in many ways. One can also strike with music. . . . It’s another form of fighting. . . . From the many people who come to visit us, we know that suffering is not just in Mexico. There is exploitation all over the world.” The CDs on sale also include a recording of a broadcast of Radio Insurgente, complete with listings of shortwave, FM, and AM frequencies displayed on the case. The same frequencies are listed on several Web sites devoted to the Zapatistas and allied organizations. The reception committee told me that for the past two years, Zapatista communities in the highlands have owned three low-power FM transmitters, but two of them were broken at the time I visited. They broadcast in both Spanish and Tzotzil, and are used mainly for transmitting communiqués, but they also occasionally play music, broadcast greetings, and read newspaper stories on the air. “The problem is that they do not have much range,” said one committee member. Indeed, except for the reception committee members, no one I spoke with in Oventic, Ibarra, or San Cristóbal de las Casas had actually ever heard the station on the air. My request to meet with the radio team was politely refused with the explanation, “The comrades are busy in other tasks right now.”85 Radio clearly has not been as successful as other modes of information for the Zapatistas. As the FMLN learned, radio requires resources

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and commitment. The equipment must be maintained and the station must broadcast at regular times. Unlike video, radio cannot be left until after farm chores. It cannot be handed over to a newspaper or magazine for publication and distribution on the Internet as the early Zapatista communiqués were. For an organization without enough resources to support a radio station, access to the Internet proved an effective way to build an international movement to challenge the dominant hegemony. However, utilizing that mode of information has required that the situated community adapt. While direct communication via Internet has largely been a dialogue between the leadership of the situated community and the cyberspace neighborhood of the Zapatista movement, the rest of the situated community also has been changed by that contact. The result is similar to the way that Marx envisioned industrial production: bringing workers together, allowing them to see that their exploitation was not individual, and developing class consciousness. The Internet mode of information has brought residents of remote hamlets into regular face-to-face communication with supporters from various industrialized countries and Mexico’s urban centers. Through the Internet, several communities have the opportunity to make videos and to distribute them internationally. These experiences have stimulated a desire to obtain more information on a regular basis, even through a wall newspaper, and a desire to communicate through music or by radio. These changes go beyond the organizational and structural modifications that the leadership opted to implement in a moment of grave danger in February 1995. They demonstrate shifts in everyday life that Internet as a mode of information has brought about in the situated community.

CH A P T ER

6

Refuting the Revolution

Colonel Diego Monterrosa, commander of the Salvadoran Army’s elite Atlacatl Battalion arrived by helicopter at the scene of his soldiers’ rout of the guerrilla movement that had plagued his army for more than three years. That morning in October 1984, he had come to take home a particular battle trophy: a Viking transmitter that the rebels had left behind in their panic and that had been the source of irritating, daily insurgent radio broadcasts. With the transmitter safely loaded, Monterrosa’s helicopter rose above the site of the recent fighting. A few minutes later, it exploded.1 The capture of the transmitter was an elaborate trap made possible because the insurgents had created a war on two fronts: the battlefield and the field of public opinion waged largely in the communication media. The rebel radio had become a key weapon in the second front, an important enough threat that it had become a military target, and the transmitter, a war prize. The perception that the radio was a point of vulnerability for the rebels allowed the insurgents to create a twentieth-century Trojan horse. While in this particular case the rebels were able to turn that perception of vulnerability to their advantage, during most of the war the need to defend the transmitter was a burden. Vulnerability to attack, both physical and ideological, is part of the strain that revolutionary media place on an insurgent movement, one of the factors in how a mode of information may shape a movement. How adroit the movement is in minimizing or overcoming that vulnerability is one of the factors in the mode of information’s effectiveness. Other factors in the ways the mode of information shapes the movement, such as the nature of the mode of information and how the audience receives its message, are analyzed in the final chapter.

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Forms of Attack In El Salvador and Chiapas, opponents of the revolutionary movements tried to physically prevent the rebels from getting out their messages. In both those cases and in Nicaragua, opponents attempted to undermine the credibility of the message. The mode of information made a difference in vulnerability to both forms of attack. Monterrosa had reason to believe his soldiers’ reports that they had captured the Radio Venceremos transmitter. After all, they had done it before. Further, Monterrosa had high expectations of his elite, U.S. trained Atlacatl Battalion. “He wasn’t like the other army officers who conducted conventional warfare from behind a desk,” one guerrilla later recalled. “Monterrosa was a man who constantly revised his long-term plan and he knew how to lead troops.”2 Over the years, he had developed a special interest in capturing Radio Venceremos. Barely three months into the war, on the morning of April 2, 1981, Radio Venceremos announced that it would not broadcast that evening. Nor did the station transmit the following day.3 In its April 4 broadcast, the rebel radio station refuted a government announcement, reported by international wire services, that the army had dismantled the station. “The newspapers and radio stations that do not support foreign intervention have been dynamited, persecuted, and closed,” Santiago told listeners. “Radio Venceremos is the voice of our people in combat. For that reason, in its aggression against the people of Morazán, the dictatorship has made destroying Radio Venceremos one of its objectives. To that end, it mobilized hundreds of men, airplanes, helicopters, and sophisticated electronic devices operated by North American advisors to detect our position. For twenty-two days, the dictatorship launched bombs and mortars without pause, day and night, but could not silence Radio Venceremos.” The announcer also recognized the efforts of the security forces that protected the station and reinforcements sent in for support during the attacks.4 Thus, the radio station was protected at the cost of assigning a significant number of troops to that task during a major confrontation. In that case, the radio continued broadcasting, but at a high cost in manpower for the guerrilla force. Eight months later, the Salvadoran Armed Force launched Anvil and Hammer, a major attack on the guerrilla stronghold in northeastern El Salvador, with the Atlacatl Battalion led by Monterrosa providing the ground troops. As the fighting moved closer to the radio crew’s camp, the rebel broadcasters packed up their transmitter and fled. On the third day, they had to abandon the transmitter after

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three crew members were killed in strafing. The station was off the air for two weeks. During that time, Monterrosa mounted his own station, Radio Verdad, Truth Radio, and taunted the Radio Venceremos crew on the airwaves as he chased them across eastern El Salvador. When the fighting ended, the surviving crew members returned to their base camp.5 On Christmas Eve, using a backup transmitter, Radio Venceremos resumed its broadcasts. Three days later, it reported a horrifying story: During Anvil and Hammer, the Atlacatl Battalion had massacred more than 1,000 peasants in El Mozote and surrounding villages. Wire services reported the story, attributing it to Radio Venceremos. The guerrillas separately invited Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post to see the massacre site and to interview the lone known survivor. Their stories appeared on January 27, 1982, a day before President Reagan certified that the Salvadoran government’s human rights record was improving.6 Four days later, Thomas O. Enders, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, told a United States Senate subcommittee, “We sent two Embassy officers to investigate last week’s reports of a massacre in the Morazán village of El Mozote. While it is clear that an armed confrontation between guerrillas occupying El Mozote and attacking government forces occurred last December, no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone.”7 Based largely on Enders’ comments, the Wall Street Journal wrote a scathing attack on U.S. press coverage of El Salvador, mentioning Bonner by name. The New York Times reassigned Bonner shortly afterward in what appeared to be a victory for the Reagan administration. Reports of the massacre were confirmed in 1992 by a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists, who estimated the number of victims at more than 200, but ran out of funds before all the skeletons could be exhumed. The dead were mainly women, children, and old men, they found. The report on El Mozote that Enders mentioned, declassified after the war ended, indicates that the two embassy officials never actually arrived at El Mozote and that their interviews with residents of nearby villages tended to confirm the massacre reports.8 The station’s reports that Monterrosa had led the El Mozote massacre were followed over the next three years by on-air taunting of the colonel and the rest of the high command. Radio Venceremos called the colonel “stupid” and “useless” and in 1984 gleefully reported the story of how the rebels destroyed a military transport plane. “We

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would like to see Monterrosa’s face in this moment, now that we blew up a super-million [dollar] plane, right underneath his nose, a few miles from his barracks,” the announcer taunted.9 In the autumn of 1984, the Salvadoran Army broke a guerrilla radio code. After a brief confrontation with the rebels in late October, an army unit overheard a guerrilla transmission advising, “We have a problem. We lost the thing. What should we do?” Then, the voice added, “We have wounded.” The reply came: “Forget the thing and get out of there.” Within an hour, the soldiers were jubilantly advising Monterrosa that they had recovered the Radio Venceremos transmitter. Two days later, the colonel arrived by helicopter to take home his trophy. However the Viking transmitter, only a slightly more modern version of the one destroyed nearly two years earlier, turned out to be a booby trap. The guerrillas knew the army had broken the radio code and had turned that knowledge to their advantage.10 In that instance, the perception of the transmitter’s vulnerability worked in favor of the insurgents. However, throughout most of the twelve-year civil war, the radio stations’ vulnerability to physical attack required the guerrillas to devise elaborate security measures to protect them. As the April 1981 broadcast indicated, each station was assigned a security force. Radio programs were produced in “tattoos,” caves or holes in the ground with disguised openings. Even with such precautions, the guerrilla radios had to be able to count on the discretion, and at times the support, of civilians living in the area.11 Besides their vulnerability to attack, the stations also were vulnerable to interference. Whether the interference was due to the precarious transmission conditions of improvised equipment or intentional intervention from the Salvadoran government, as listeners and producers suspected, it prevented the rebels from getting their message out. Interference in the form of distorted voices interrupted an early Radio Venceremos broadcast.12 A 1982 broadcast had barely begun when distorted voices and high-pitched sounds, like those from microphone feedback, made it inaudible.13 The day that Radio Venceremos reported the downing of a plane over Nicaragua piloted by U.S. citizen Eugene Hasenfus, interference made the report inaudible.14 The downing of Hasenfus’ airplane was widely taken as proof of United States involvement in the counterrevolutionary movement against the Sandinistas. As previously noted, listener Aldana said that he noticed less interference when he was listening to the station in Texas than he had in El Salvador.15 Before the war started, the Roman Catholic Church radio station YSAX had complained about interference that announcers blamed on the government or its supporters.16


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If the interference were intentional in both cases, it would indicate that the forces opposed to change had applied what they learned about jamming the signal of YSAX to the rebel radio stations. While radio appears to be a relatively simple, cheap medium, its vulnerability to capture of the transmitter and interference, whether from intentional jamming of signals or poor transmission, make it a demanding medium for a poor rebel force to operate, as the Zapatista attempt to operate a radio station more than a decade after the Salvadoran experience would demonstrate. While the Salvadoran rebels continued to occasionally occupy radio stations and broadcast recorded messages early in the war, they felt the need for their own equipment to be able to control broadcast times and frequencies to build an audience.17 Using their own equipment also gave them the opportunity to transmit live broadcasts from the combat zones. In contrast, the Zapatistas were able to enter cyberspace without their own equipment, which provided them significant cost savings and decreased their medium’s vulnerability to physical attacks because their equipment was actually scattered all over universities and offices mainly outside Chiapas. When the Mexican Army attempted to cut off contact between the Zapatistas and the rest of the world in February 1995, the rebels simply sneaked a lesser-known militant through the lines to deliver their urgent communiqué. Two days after the tanks rolled into their communities and a day after their communiqué was issued, it appeared on both the Chiapas-L and Mexico94 listservs. In the communiqué, the Zapatistas “ma[d]e a call to all of our Mexican brothers to stop this genocidal war that the evil government has launched against us.”18 The Internet, as it was used by the Zapatistas, could survive the government’s physical attack. However, to respond to the threat they perceived when the government attempted to cut off contact, the Zapatistas were forced to change the messenger they used and modify their communication structure.

Attacking Credibility Though Barricada did not have to endure attempts to physically cut off its contact with readers, it was subject to an intense ideological battle waged through opposition media. One afternoon in the last years of Nicaragua’s revolution, a truck backed into the loading dock of La Prensa, the country’s last opposition newspaper, owned by the branch of the Chamorro publishing dynasty that also strongly backed the Conservative Party. The truck was there to deliver 300-kilogram

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rolls of newsprint stamped “Made in the USSR.” Throughout the afternoon, more truckloads of Soviet newsprint arrived, until they had delivered 700 tons of paper that over the next three months were transformed into daily attacks on the Soviet-backed Sandinista government. “Thus did Soviet generosity help keep the flame of press freedom alive in Nicaragua,” wrote Michael Massing, the veteran journalist who observed the deliveries.19 Those deliveries of Soviet newsprint to a newspaper openly seeking the overthrow of a government that the Soviet Union supported were part of the price for ending the U.S. backed counterrevolution. They demonstrated what an experienced, formidable challenge the Sandinistas and Barricada confronted in La Prensa. Just as the newspaper had done under the Somozas, it attacked the government in news columns and editorials. The Sandinistas predictably responded by tightening controls on the media. From 1980 to 1981, penalties for disseminating false information escalated from temporary closure of the guilty medium to jail terms. A state of emergency declared in 1982 suspended all radio newscasts and subjected the print media to prior censorship. La Prensa closed seven times in five years and suspended publication more than twenty times because of censorship or delays caused by censorship.20 In the eyes of the world, the newspaper was a victim of Sandinista repression. As Nichols has noted, “The Sandinistas seemed to be caught in the same dilemma regarding La Prensa as was the Somoza regime.21 La Prensa played the part of martyr so skillfully that in 1986, the year the Sandinistas closed the newspaper indefinitely, its publisher, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, received the Louis Lyon Award from Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. The award recognized “conscience and integrity in journalism.” Even with her own newspaper closed, Barrios de Chamorro continued to publish, making her case in Foreign Affairs’ winter 1986 issue and, later, in an opinion piece in the Times of the Americas. In 1987, La Prensa printed and distributed a notice the size of a poster calling for support against the newspaper’s closure to delegates to the World Interparliamentary Conference meeting in Managua.22 Thus, La Prensa effectively used the freedom of press discourse as understood in the Anglo-American tradition to make a case against Barricada, which responded with its new and unfamiliar revolutionary discourse. The pressure produced results: As part of the negotiations for a cease-fire in the counterrevolution that would lead to elections, La Prensa was allowed to resume publishing on its own terms. Censorship was lifted both for the newspaper and other media and the


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government agreed to supply the newspaper with Soviet newsprint, brought by the trucks that Massing saw outside the plant that afternoon. The banner headline in the first issue after publication resumed on October 1, 1987, was “The People Triumphed.”23 La Prensa was clearly challenging Barricada for the position of voice of the people. Each newspaper was trying to impose its idea of who the people of Nicaragua were, to promote the hegemony that it represented. The struggle among competing views for hegemony, expressed through the mode of information, is evident in all three cases. Monterrosa did not merely capture the Radio Venceremos transmitter in 1981; he put Radio Verdad on the air on the same frequency. Throughout the war, the Salvadoran Armed Force broadcast Radio Cuscatlán. Archives of those broadcasts were not preserved and most of the information about the station is in references in the rebel stations, which clearly saw Radio Cuscatlán as the enemy. During the 1989 offensive, when Radio Venceremos was broadcasting continuously, Santiago mentioned that Radio Cuscatlán had stated that the rebels had been repelled at the outskirts of the capital. He challenged that assertion, broadcasting the voice of a commander who said he was in the northeastern San Salvador neighborhood of Cuidad Delgado. Later in the same broadcast, Santiago accused Radio Cuscatlán of having called for the murders of the Jesuits assassinated during the offensive.24 Although I could unfortunately hear only one side of the discussion, the two stations were clearly arguing for their conflicting visions of the truth. In addition, Radio Venceremos was attempting to undermine the credibility of the other station by linking it to priest killers. This is significant because radio listeners said that they tuned into the rebel stations to hear both sides, indicating that they also were exposed to other media with other viewpoints. Thus, credibility became an important point of vulnerability for the rebel stations and for their attempt to promote the insurgent vision of the nation and the civil war. The Salvadoran Armed Force and its U.S. allies were waging an aggressive battle of their own for public opinion from the day the guerrillas launched their first offensive in 1981. Part of that effort included undermining the credibility of the rebel radio stations, such as Enders’ attacks on the credibility of the Radio Venceremos’ coverage of El Mozote, and part was by providing their own information and vision of the war through Radio Cuscatlán. In Mexico, the government relied on its old methods to confront a new mode of information. Six years after the Chiapas uprising began, an article on a now defunct online news service called To2.com

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accused the government of having bribed journalists who covered the Chiapas conflict for favorable coverage.25 The government relied on the co-optation of the press that had worked well for seventy years, including during a similar episode: the successful effort to isolate the Guerrero guerrillas two decades earlier. However, the Zapatistas did not depend on the entire press corps to take their message to the world. Instead, they relied on a few trustworthy messengers, among them sympathetic media, to transmit their unedited message to international listservs. The old methods of control did not work. Thus, rebel use of a newer mode of information appears to put opponents at a disadvantage. The publishers of La Prensa were able to draw on experience gained during four decades under Somoza to outmaneuver the Sandinistas. There are indications that opponents of change in El Salvador applied what they had learned about interfering with the signal of a controversial church radio station to interrupting the rebel radio signals. In contrast, to try to control Zapatista access to public opinion, the Mexican government relied on old methods predicated on the existence of gatekeepers who controlled the flow of news. Officials still thought they could control news by controlling reporters. Besides the fact that some reporters could not be bribed in Mexico’s new media scheme, the Zapatistas now had access to a mode of information without gatekeepers. Notably, six years later, Colombians opposed to Internet access for the guerrillas there were able to pressure officials at the University of California, San Diego, to remove from its server the site used for their communication.26 The site was temporarily restored and removed again two years later.27 In the years between the beginning of the Chiapas uprising and the removal of the site for Colombian guerrillas, opponents had learned more effective means for cutting off access to rebel news.

Defining Success Counterrevolutionaries succeeded when they either cut off access to the rebel message or undermined those messages, making them ineffective. Success for revolutionary media as part of a specific mode of information is less clear-cut. I found three levels of success, progressively more difficult to measure. The most basic level, which Santiago called a “permanent victory,” is simply getting the message out: printing and distributing a newspaper, broadcasting a radio program, or posting a message on the Internet.28 The second level is attracting an audience. The most crucial level, and most difficult to measure, is Gramsci’s mandate to be “permanently persuasive.”


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All three rebel groups at times struggled to meet even the first level of success. As Montenegro recalled, the Barricada newsroom and back shop sometimes relied on light from the headlights of the delivery trucks for illumination.29 Newsprint and ink shortages dictated the size of the newspaper as much as did the coverage. Similarly, bombardments and even shortages of gasoline to fuel the transmitter sometimes forced the Salvadoran rebel radio stations off the air.30 While the Zapatistas could rely on transmission networks that were not vulnerable to battle conditions, their messengers had to reach those networks with communiqués and the messengers were often delayed. Nevertheless, all three rebel groups succeeded in getting out their messages. Success in transmission, however, was only a partial victory. As Huezo Mixco noted, the first effort at a Salvadoran rebel radio station was a failure because it was located far from the battle zone and, thus, could not report news as it happened.31 No one bothered to listen. In contrast, Radio Farabundo Martí and Radio Venceremos could claim listeners, although the clandestine nature of the stations prevents anyone from knowing exactly how many. My interviews indicated that the rebels were reaching at least some representatives of their target audience. I also interviewed one man who said he never listened to either rebel station, although he was living outside El Salvador and could have listened on a shortwave receiver with no danger, in addition to two people who listened infrequently.32 Participation on the listservs indicates that people read the Zapatista messages. However, the people receiving those early Internet messages were by definition a select group of technology leaders, mainly academics. By making Barricada a mandatory text for study groups, the Sandinistas helped create an audience for the newspaper. All of the media, then, had an audience that participated in the mode of information, the linguistic experience. The question, then, is whether the mode of information was “permanently persuasive” in Gramsci’s terms, whether it helped the organic intellectuals who served as reporters, editors, correspondents, and announcers to communicate to an audience with the potential of sympathizing with or even joining the movement. Evidence of persuasive effect can take various forms. The Hachtens have written, “Military struggles during a coup attempt frequently occur outside the broadcast station, because if rebels can announce over the nation’s only radio station that a coup has been accomplished (even while the issue is still in doubt), it helps accomplish the desired end.”33 Another example of proof would be that audience members joined the insurgency. Less definitive, but still indicative, evidence

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would be that information made available through rebel modes of information opened the public debate to issues that previously were not part of the public sphere, in the way that Habermas has written about the newspapers read in Paris cafés opening the French public sphere. None of the three modes of information can claim more than isolated incidents of recruiting armed supporters via media. Salvadorans did not take to the streets during the 1989 guerrilla assault on the cities. Weapons-training via radio was ineffective, participants recognized.34 There were limits to the immediate persuasive powers of the revolutionary media studied. However, the Zapatista Internet messages drew nongovernmental organizations from around the world to provide security for the initial rebel peace talks with the government and it still draws peace campers to Chiapas a decade after the military action has ceased. The listserv messages proved an effective way to build and sustain an international advocacy network. All three modes of information showed some success in opening the public debate to issues that had not previously been discussed. Barricada invited its readers to consider new forms of social and economic organization. Readers responded in the newspaper’s own columns, indicating that they were indeed engaged in the public debate. Readers said that they missed Barricada, indicating that the newspaper and the mode of information that developed around it had provided them with information and a forum that they used in their lives and that shaped their views.35 Salvadoran radio listeners consistently told me that they tuned into the rebel stations to hear both sides.36 This indicates that the radio stations did offer information through a linguistic experience not available elsewhere and that some listeners did give that information weight in forming their opinions. Therefore, the stations did succeed in expanding the public debate. (That success was not universal. The bus line owner indicated that although he believed rebel reports of battle activities and strikes, he was not persuaded by their political arguments.37) My research indicates that in some instances, such as the desertion of soldiers during the offensive that began the civil war, information from the rebel stations forced the government to respond. However, in other situations, such as the massacre at El Mozote, the government simply denied the rebel reports. The international media quoted rebel radio reports, indicating that radio provided information that expanded international debate about the war.38 Further investigation is needed to know whether the radio reports expanded the offering of information in mainstream domestic media.


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The Chiapas uprising drew attention to a movement that timed its revolt to coincide with implementation of an international agreement. The Zapatistas stated in communiqués that their viewpoint was ignored in negotiations leading up to the agreement. Through the attention surrounding their rebellion, they included themselves in the public debate about that particular agreement and global trade in general. Further, via the Internet, they kept their side of the debate alive long after the mainstream media lost interest in their revolt. The Zapatistas did not immediately succeed in changing the agreement that angered them. However, if hegemony is a process, the Internet has provided them with a means for creating a mode of information that allows them to continue to contest existing power structures while proposing alternatives.


CH A P T ER

7


This book began by examining the media legacy that shaped the late twentieth-century revolutionary media in Mesoamerica. It ends by considering the legacy of those media. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, did the medium change the movement? Did the mode of information chosen by each rebel group shape its rebellion? One part of the answer lies in examining how the characteristics of each mode of information enhanced or limited its effectiveness in conveying the rebels’ message. That will lead to understanding whether those characteristics and the demands they made ultimately altered the nature of the movement. All three revolutionary movements assigned a strikingly similar role to their primary mode of information. All three modes of information were attempting to go a step beyond Benedict Anderson’s imagined community by deliberately creating an alternative idea of the nation and proposing an alternative hegemony that would allow what rebels considered the legitimate nation to govern. All three revolutionary movements used their media to create modes of information that became both means of recruitment and points of contact for their national and international advocacy networks. The media reinterpreted the histories of their respective countries, reexamined national symbols, and ultimately redefined the nation. All blurred the lines between news and propaganda, while trying to create modes of information that incorporated elements of popular and oral communication to appeal to their audiences and reinforce the feeling of community. Each of the three modes of information was more or less conducive to those purposes. Considering the advantages and limitations of each, compared with the other two, provides a comparison that will yield a better understanding of all three modes of information. As Mark Poster has noted, “The current configuration [of media] constitutes a necessary totalization of earlier developments: that is, one cannot but see earlier developments from the situation of the present. The anatomy of

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the mode of electronic information . . . necessarily sheds new light on the anatomy of oral and print modes of information. The danger that must be avoided in Marx’s formulation is progressivism.”1 Bearing that concept, and its accompanying admonition, in mind, Poster’s outline of the differences in the way people receive media messages, depending on the mode of information, provides a way to compare the three media and the way the revolutionaries used them. His base is face-to-face communication, because he has noted, “Speech constitutes subjects as members of a community by solidifying the ties between individuals.”2 If speech is the mode of information that promotes community creation, then it seems reasonable that other modes of information are more likely to be successful in creating imagined communities that will provide the basis for a new hegemony if they can find ways to imitate speech. Context and dialogue are two of the salient characteristics of speech that are missing in other media, Poster has determined. To create community, therefore, other modes of information could be expected to try to provide context and dialogue. However much each mode of information sought the same goals, they would be likely to have different outcomes.

Revolutionary Print Print is different from speech, according to Poster, because readers are independent receptors who rely on themselves to make sense of the message, both in its most basic, cognitive form by giving meaning to arrangements of letters and in the more abstract sense of understanding the deeper meaning of the text. Poster’s emphasis on the autonomous nature of print appears to contrast with Benedict Anderson’s assertion that reading the same newspapers creates an imagined sense of community among people who have never met and are unlikely to ever meet. This difference in perception can be partially explained by Poster’s conception of newspapers as mainstream newspapers. “In Paris as elsewhere newspapers changed from being organs of particular points of view to purveyors of ‘all the truth that’s fit to print’ in the second half of the nineteenth century when circulation soared to mass proportions,” he explained.3 While that may have been true of the mainstream press, that description is antithetical to revolutionary media, which are by definition organs of a “particular point of view,” to use Poster’s term. In that way, a late twentieth-century newspaper such as Barricada resembles the colonial newspapers of Anderson’s reference or the partisan sheets of Jürgen Habermas’ revolutionary Paris cafes more than it does today’s New York Times. In

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addition, Anderson has acknowledged the paradox of the mass ceremony of newspaper reading. He agrees with Poster that newspapers are read “in silent privacy in the lair of the skull.” However, Anderson argues that because newspaper readers know that other newspaper readers perform the same ceremony every day, they feel linked although they are strangers.4 Further, Barricada, like Habermas’ French newspapers, was read in a context. The newspaper was not presenting isolated facts. Rather, it was making an argument for a new Nicaragua in which workers and peasants were the protagonists. That argument ran through news stories as diverse as recruits marching off to war and mosquito infestations in fishing villages as well as through editorials and even the reproduction of lengthy speeches and decrees. Whatever the guise, the argument, the context, was always present. In addition, both in content and the way Barricada was read, the newspaper attempted to incorporate dialogue into the reading process. First, workers and students read Barricada to prepare for their study circles, where discussions allowed them to reinforce and elaborate on what they had read through face-to-face communication. As union leader Barbosa noted, the study circles “helped us maintain brotherhood, friendship, and contact and get to know each other better,” characteristics of community formation that Poster has attributed to speech. This experience also reminded me of an anecdote told by a friend whose pastor was disturbed by questions she asked him based on her reading of the Bible. “You really should not read the Bible alone,” he advised, encouraging her to join a study group. Like MartínBarbero’s Italian miller, who faced the Inquisition because of his heretical reading of approved texts, my friend was making her own meaning from what she read, on the basis of her own life experience, just as Poster’s understanding of the reading process would have predicted.5 The Bible study group was an antidote to such independent thinking. Similarly, the Sandinista study circles mitigated the possibility of “erroneous” readings of the newspaper brought about by autonomous interpretations of its articles. Speech was an even more important factor in how the troops received the news secondhand from Barricada, through their political officers. For them, the doubly censored information was channeled through a comrade-in-arms. Second, the Buzón Popular feature simulated dialogue that allowed readers a voice, breaking down what Poster has termed “monologic” conversation in which “one communications pole transmits virtually all of the messages; the other simply receives.”6 Even readers who did not participate in study circles could become part of the dialogue

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through Buzón Popular. Thus, Barricada attempted to simulate the community-forming attributes of another mode of information, direct oral communication. Despite those efforts, the official Sandinista newspaper continued to be bound by the traditions of Mesoamerica by which print expressed the ideas of the elite. Pages were devoted to full texts of long speeches, and stories that undermined the movement’s line were suppressed. That limited the newspaper’s scope and circumscribed the public sphere it presented. Readers of Barricada Internacional, who read the newspaper alone and with a less stimulating “International Mailbag” section, had less experience of dialogue and more experience of the autonomous reading that Poster has described. Nevertheless, the Sandinistas believed that the multiple-language weekly editions provided an important link to their international advocacy network. “The newspaper was published in that context,” said Sergio De Castro, editor of the international weeklies. “It was not supposed to be a summary of the news, but rather a newspaper that served a strategic point.” That strategy was to provide information from a Sandinista perspective to politically active foreigners. He explained, “International politics was like a retaining wall, both politically and economically.” Barricada Internacional was created in the context of strengthening that wall.7 Like the daily newspaper, then, it was not without context. The use of print allowed the Sandinistas to create a slightly different context and product for the newspaper’s domestic and foreign audiences, a form of audience-targeting that would not have been possible with radio. Thus, the most traditional of the three rebellions studied chose as its official voice the most traditional mode of information. The Nicaraguan revolution included a moment of seizing power and, as Castañeda noted, the Sandinistas built a mythology that emphasized the military aspects of their victory over the organizational contribution.8 The newspaper drew on Nicaraguan tradition to bolster the legitimacy of the revolutionary regime, but also left that regime vulnerable to an enemy practiced in conducting a newspaper war. The Sandinistas attempted to run Barricada as a new type of newspaper with an expanded forum for reader participation and study circles to encourage group reading. The newspaper was able to expand the public sphere, initiating discussions on topics such as new social structures and family politics that previously were not part of the public debate. However, as Poster has noted, the characteristics of the newspaper as a mode of information do encourage independent thought. Nicaraguan readers drew their own conclusions from the information they read. Once opponents defeated the revolution,


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Barricada flourished briefly and then was torn apart by internal conflicts.9 The Nicaraguan case would indicate that newspapers produce a mode of information tied to traditional forms of revolution. While the Sandinistas continued to contest hegemony in postrevolutionary Nicaragua, even regaining the presidency in 2007, they did so without their own newspaper, relying instead on the pages of El Nuevo Diario, a sympathetic, but independently owned publication and on other media, such as billboards and Internet sites. A blog with the address Barricada.com.ni. denies any affiliation with either the defunct newspaper or any political party. The public sphere once contested by conservatives and liberals now has a Sandinista voice. However, former Barricada readers indicated that they are not satisfied with the dimensions of the public debate.10 Although expanded from the prerevolutionary era, the public sphere is still circumscribed. The process former readers describe is reminiscent of Habermas’ chronology of the fate of the bourgeois public sphere in postrevolutionary France. The issues that touch the lives of readers receive a low priority compared to reports of political bickering, scandal, and personality politics. The continuing nostalgia for the newspaper indicates that Barricada helped consolidate a constituency for a new hegemony during the revolution and that constituency still believes in the vision of society they saw in the newspaper’s pages. Perhaps the nostalgia also indicates that Barricada with its study circles and an active section for letters to the editor created a new mode of information that surviving newspapers do not duplicate.

Revolutionary Radio Electronic communication, Poster has written, creates its own world where outside references do not exist and identity is not defined.11 For Salvadoran rebel radio, that created the opportunity to define Salvadoran identity as an identity of struggle for independence and social justice, an identity shared by rebellious slaves, the founding fathers, indigenous coffee workers led by Farabundo Martí, slain archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and, finally, the FMLN. The stations used what Poster has called “media language” to create their own context: a country in which the rebels, who represented the people, were winning a just war for control. They used their audio ability to incorporate the popular culture of songs, humor, and storytelling as well as the attributes of speech: live interviews in which participants were invited to “talk” to the government, to relatives, to other Salvadorans: “She has a son in the barracks

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and she wants to send a message to her son through the radio.”12 “What would you like to say to the defense minister?”13 In addition, in every broadcast, listeners were invited to write to the station’s post office box in Mexico.14 Letters were read on the air, breaking down what Poster called the “monologic” attributes of mass media.15 As Poster noted, the features of media language apply differently to different media and even to different broadcasts by the same medium. Thus, the characteristics of electronic media can be manipulated.16 By using radio, the Salvadoran rebels were able to take advantage of both the properties of electronic media that served them well as a revolutionary medium and to seek to mitigate the properties that could have undermined their efforts to mold their radio audience into an imagined community. The radio simulated context. However, it also created a type of dialogue, similar to speech, through live interviews and by inviting listeners to write to the stations. Its audio capabilities allowed radio to draw on oral traditions. The parodies of radio soap operas played on the Mesoamerican fondness for melodrama and the trickster image of the Güegüence, who might be weaker, but still wins by outsmarting the authorities. Listeners heard a familiar form of protest and a clear identification with the traditions of the oppressed. Radio appears to be a cheap medium, but is actually quite demanding, as the Salvadorans learned. It requires a safe rearguard for dependable, daily transmission to build an audience and proximity to the battlefield to keep that audience interested. Further, radio is vulnerable to interference. If rebels can overcome those obstacles, radio allows revolutionaries an instantaneous mode of information that can speak to people in their own language, effectively drawing on oral traditions. However, as the producers of Radio Farabundo Martí learned, if a guerrilla movement is not willing to make the commitment to overcome the logistical obstacles, radio’s effectiveness is limited. Unless listeners can reach the signal every day, or nearly every day, they will not tune in. Once the immediacy of fighting ended, the Salvadoran guerrilla leaders, now turned politicians, were no longer willing to make the commitment to keep the radio stations running as alternative media and they became commercial radio stations. The political party of the former guerrillas is now part of the debate in the mainstream media, indicating a significant opening in the public sphere in El Salvador. In contrast with Nicaraguan newspapers, which returned to the prerevolutionary model of privately owned media, El Salvador has a war legacy of community radio stations that developed independently of rebel radio and continue to


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operate on precarious budgets. Those stations provide an opportunity to carry on the mode of information created by the rebel radio stations. Further investigation is needed to determine whether they actually do so.

Revolutionary Internet Contesting hegemony when there is virtually no hope of a military victory requires desperation and a mode of information that is virtually invulnerable to attack. This study indicates that the newer a mode of information, the less likely are the opponents to find a way to attack it. Involving an advocacy network in transmission both diminishes vulnerability and gives the network members meaningful, frequent involvement with the situated community that is actually fighting. Accommodating the network’s demands for instant communication can place a strain on the situated community, but the Zapatistas have found that this inconvenience is outweighed by the advantages the Internet offered them. Cyber communication through the Internet absorbs users, spreading them across space, replacing their autonomy with a sense of community.17 This characteristic of Internet communication could help explain the absolute identification with the Zapatista movement that would inspire a Web site on a server at a U.S. university to post the motto: “Today it is a no longer ‘all of you’ and ‘we.’ We are the same. We are.”18 While Leyva has identified the international support network of the indigenous movement as “Neo-Zapatistas,” the members of the network consider themselves full-fledged Zapatistas.19 The Zapatista leadership has encouraged that sense of identification and community. Listserv archives record a dialogue that simulates speech. Early in the movement, Zapatista leaders encouraged that dialogic aspect by answering correspondence as well as emitting communiqués. In the first year, the leadership retained control of communication between the situated community and the international support network. However, as members of the international support network became more directly involved with the situated community, that control has become more difficult to enforce. The leadership is still able to censor the video productions of the Chiapas Media Project. Control over the peace campers has proven to be more elusive. Peace campers are required to undergo multilevel vetting, from their own home organizations, Chiapas organizations friendly to the Zapatista movement, and the Zapatista leadership.20 However, the peace camper system has

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meant that residents of remote hamlets are exposed to a large number of foreigners in short increments. That contrasts with the experiences of internacionalistas in the two other cases. Santiago, Genaro, and other foreigners assigned to the rebel radio stations stayed in El Salvador for the duration of the war.21 The number of members of the international support networks who could make such time-commitments was limited. In contrast, the nature of the Zapatista conflict combined with Internet access has meant that their international supporters, recruited via the Internet, can become peace campers for a few weeks. They can physically become part of the situated community with which they so strongly identify in cyberspace. Zapatistas in remote hamlets across the highlands and canyons of Chiapas have become accustomed to visitors from Europe and North America and have come to see them as sources of news from the outside world. They have become used to seeing a map of the world and referring to unknown places by reference to that map. Even though they do not use the Internet directly, this more diffused method of communication has brought them into face-to-face communication with people who imagine the same sort of nation that they do and have transposed that vision to a global scale. In contrast with Benedict Anderson’s vision, members of the imagined community of Zapatistas actually meet, thanks in part to the mode of information that brings them together.22

Conclusions The late twentieth-century Mesoamerican revolutions emerged in countries where uncontrolled media were identified with periods of disorder, and press freedom was considered an individual right of publishers, rather than a societal right for open discussion of issues. Media prided themselves on their independence from social movements. The revolutionary media that had existed in the past were created to promote the cause of one elite group trying to wrest power from another or to obtain a quota of power. Under those circumstances, the media that the rebels chose to carry their respective messages were not the ephemeral, tactical creations that the Hachtens describe as revolutionary media. Rather, they were part of a strategy to create an imagined community that would redefine the nation along with an international advocacy network to support that vision. They were part of an effort to create a consensus in favor of an alternative hegemony. Other parts of that effort, including


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armed struggle, interacted with the modes of information to produce the ultimate outcome of the rebellions. The reasons that each movement chose the primary mode of information it did was the result of a combination of history, ideology, and availability. Once that choice was made, it resulted in different outcomes. First, the movements found themselves facing various demands to support their respective media. Further, each medium showed different levels of vulnerability to physical and ideological attacks, which placed further demands on the rebel movement. In addition, the characteristics of a mode of information can affect the audience’s listening practices and, thus, the communication experience, including the way the audience receives the message. To create consensus, each movement sought to maximize the characteristics that would promote community formation and to mitigate those that worked against creating community. As the Salvadoran case shows, the extent to which a movement responds to the demands of its mode of information can influence the effectiveness of that mode. Radio Farabundo Martí did not receive the same level of resources or attention as Radio Venceremos and, as a result, was less effective, producers from both stations agreed.23 For several years, Radio Venceremos also benefited from a secure rear guard, both inside and outside El Salvador. As the movements attempted to respond to the demands of their respective media, the mode of information that they had chosen shaped their movements, sometimes in unexpected ways. Barricada reinforced the literacy crusade that was already a Sandinista priority. The very act of reading is empowering, allowing the readers of newspapers to participate in the public sphere and form their own views. Radio, as it was used by the Salvadoran rebels, requires everyone to listen at the same time. Combatants, students, business people, and union leaders, all tried to be in a private place near a radio at exactly the time of the broadcast. The radio transmission created a context that the imagined community of listeners shared for an hour or two a day. To bring that imagined community together twice a day, a real transmitter had to be defended twenty-four hours a day. A guerrilla army had to secure a piece of territory with a permanent presence. While Internet users can log on anytime and read the messages that have been posted since the last time they checked, they expect to see frequent updates. The mode of information permits rapid organization but demands immediate attention. Further, its far reach and the close identification that it provoked in widely dispersed users, fomenting a sense of being “there” in the movement, meant that some audience members responded not only online to the Zapatistas,

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but also by physically appearing in the situated community. Their presence, whether as peace campers or video instructors, has given the rank-and-file members in isolated communities continuing contact with the rest of the world, an alternative way to receive information and to express themselves. Because of the Internet, they suddenly became less isolated, even if they personally never had touched a computer. The Zapatista movement also has come to rely on its international support network in times of crisis, as during February 1995. It has evolved from a secret, isolated conspiracy into a highly public symbol. In choosing their principal mode of information, the three revolutionary movements studied were influenced by a mixture of history, tradition, and availability. Once that choice was made, it became a factor in the way the movement developed. Nicaraguan history and tradition meant that the choice of a newspaper conferred legitimacy on the Sandinista message but left the revolutionaries vulnerable to a practiced enemy in the form of La Prensa. As a mode of information, the newspaper is conducive to independent thinking, despite mitigating effects in the way Barricada was used, such as the study circles or a political attaché in a military unit passing on censored information. It also presented a dichotomy between leaders who wanted to limit the public sphere and readers eager to participate in public life through the pages of the newspaper. Radio allowed Salvadoran guerrillas and their audience to avoid the fingerprints of subversive activities that pamphlets or a newspaper would have exposed. Once the rebels began using radio, the mode of information presented them with the opportunity to capture the elements of popular culture, including music and humor. However, to be most effective, radio demanded both a rearguard and close contact with the front lines. That forced the Salvadoran guerrillas to defend territory and reinforced the need for strong relations with the communities where the radio operated, assuring that residents would keep the secret of the radio. The Zapatistas chose the beginning of their revolt to coincide with the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement and unintentionally caught the first big wave of the Internet. The opportunity to use that emerging media allowed them to create a mode of information that put an isolated, situated community into instant contact with technology leaders in the postindustrial world. To fully take advantage of that relationship in an emergency, members of the situated community were forced to compress their decision-making process and to enlarge the number of members authorized to speak for the movement. Longer-term changes became evident as the cyberspace community


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identified with the movement so strongly that members of the cyberspace community appeared physically in the situated community on a regular basis, bringing media equipment and information about the outside world. Bearing in mind Poster’s admonition against progressivism, it is still worthwhile to note that in each of the three cases the balance between military achievements and media use was different. As Manuel Castells has noted: “The Zapatistas’ ability to communicate with the world, and with Mexican society, and to capture the imagination of people and of intellectuals, propelled a local, weak insurgent group to the forefront of world politics.” As he pointed out, “The success of the Zapatistas was largely due to their communication strategy.” However, my research leads me to disagree with his assessment that “they can be called the first informational guerrilla movement.”24 Although less dependent on their modes of information than the Zapatistas, both the Sandinistas and the FMLN in El Salvador effectively incorporated information into their overall strategy and relied on support from advocacy networks held together in part by their modes of information. In Gramscian terms, this represented a tilt toward more reliance on consensus and less on coercion. As the balance tipped more toward media use, the result was a progression of outcomes. The Sandinistas had the military prowess to seize power, although they ultimately lost it because they could not consolidate consensus into a dominant hegemony. They used the international editions of their newspaper to muster world opinion against U.S. sponsorship of a counterrevolutionary army. In the months before their electoral defeat, they used the pages of their domestic edition to present their victory as inevitable. As a primary mode of information, the newspaper could draw on Nicaraguan tradition that lent it authority. However, that choice pitted Barricada against a rival with international prestige and decades of experience in turning efforts at coercion to its own advantage in undermining the legitimacy of leaders. It is also a mode of information more likely to produce independent thought than to persuade. While Barricada published photos of Daniel Ortega on horseback and stories praising his athletic skill, readers were evaluating what they read in light of their own experience. “An election in the middle of the calamities of war was practically a plebiscite for or against the war,” Ernesto Cardenal wrote in his autobiography. Part of the population, “resigned itself to electing another government, giving up because they were tired and hungry.” As a result, he wrote, “The principal achievement of the revolution

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was democracy, although that was not precisely the highest priority of the socialist tendency within the revolution.”25 The Salvadoran guerrillas fought the army to a stalemate. Through radio, they could let people outside the combat zone know that their fight was still continuing. At the same time, they maintained and built links with civilian dissidents and international supporters, forming a support network that shared their vision of a different nation, an alternative hegemony. That network became a factor in pressuring the government to negotiate a peace settlement and the armed forces to accept terms that were important to the rebels. Neither Barricada nor the rebel radio stations survived the decade after their respective revolutions ended. In the case of the Zapatistas, combat lasted twelve days, and the final purely military action took place in February 1995, when the Mexican Army established the outposts in Zapatista territory that soldiers still occupied at the time of this writing. A movement with a relatively weak military force has survived for more than a decade utilizing its mode of information to challenge the dominant hegemony and to stay in contact with a domestic and international support network that remains interested enough to provide media equipment, buy videos, and travel to remote canyons to live for weeks without electricity or running water to assure that the uneasy peace cannot be broken unobserved by the international community. These are not the massive demonstrations in the Zócalo—in the tradition of the march on the Bastille or the demonstrations in Red Square—that pressured the government to announce a cease-fire in 1994. These are the efforts of one person at a time, drawn to Chiapas by the Internet. A stream of campers living in the jungle for a few weeks each are an entirely different kind of internacionalistas from Sergio De Castro, who still lives in Nicaragua, or Santiago and María Teresa Escalona, who remain residents of El Salvador more than a decade after the civil war ended.26 Theirs is a different kind of revolution. While the Internet certainly has not made the new revolutionary form inevitable, the emerging mode of information did make it possible.

No tes

1

Media and Revolution

1. “¡Vencimos y Adelante!,” Barricada, July 25, 1979, 1. 2. Radio Venceremos. January 10, 1981. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Recordings of broadcasts are archived chronologically, by date. 3. See “Zapatistas on Line.” http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ (last accessed March 16, 2004). 4. Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production vs. Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 164. 5. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press) 1990. 16–17. 6. Jeremy D. Popkin and Jack R. Censer, “Lessons from a Symposium,” in Media and Revolution, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995), 2. 7. The common definition is: “Illegal and subversive mass communication utilizing the press and broadcasting to overthrow a government or wrest control from alien rulers.” William A. Hachten and Harva Hachten, The World News Prism: Changing Media of International Communication, 3rd ed. (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1992), 27. 8. I filed from Chiapas daily from January 3 to January 14, 1994, with most of those articles appearing on page A1 of the Los Angeles Times. Later articles included “Chiapas Revolt Puts Mexico’s Economic Future on Hold,” January 25, 1994, A1; “Mexico Accused of Human Rights Abuses During Revolt,” January 25, 1994, A5; “Poverty, Fear Abide in Area of Recent Mexican Uprising,” February 16, 1994, A1; “Rebel or Pacifist—Mexican Uprising Divides Villagers,” February 27, 1994, A1; “Mexico Reaches Pact With Rebels,” March 3, 1994, A1; “Mexican Rebels Prove Masters at Public Relations,” March 5, 1994, A3; “Zedillo Confronts Chiapas Rebels Today,” December 18, 1994, A6; “Mexican Troops Deployed in Bid to Crush Rebels,” February 11, 1995, A1. 9. Dudley Althaus, “Zedillo Orders the Arrest of Rebel Leaders,” Houston Chronicle, February 10, 1995, A1; Anthony DePalma, “Mexican Army Restricting Access to Rebel Zone,” New York Times, February 14, 1995, A1.

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NOTES

10. Tod Robberson, “Mexican Rebels Using a High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support,” Washington Post, February 20, 1995, A1. 11. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 235. His exact phrase is, “A page in history has been turned.” 12. Hobsbawm, On History, 235. 13. Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971), 13–14. 14. Michael Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence: The Press, the Ruling Party, and Democratization in Mexico,” in The Mission: Journalism, Ethics, and the World, ed. Joseph B. Atkins, International Topics in Media (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 2002), 55. 15. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2 (Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 71. 16. Some examples are Eduardo H. Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, 36a corr. y aum. ed. (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1983); Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Leonardo Ferreira, Centuries of Silence: The Story of Latin American Journalism (London: Praeger, 2006); Rick J. Rockwell and Noreene Janus. Media Power in Central America, History of Communication (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003); R ichard R. Cole, Communication in Latin America: Journalism, Mass Media, and Society, Jaguar Books on Latin America, no. 14 (Wilmington, DE.: Scholarly Resources, 1996); Michael Brian Salwen and Bruce Garrison, Latin American Journalism, Communication Textbook Series (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991). 17. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 33; Jeffrey Gould, “La Nación Indohispana,” in Identidades Nacionales y Estado Moderno en Centroamérica, ed. Arturo Taracena Arriola and Jean Piel (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1995), 253; Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 79–82. 18. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 16–17, 19, 23–25, 29–30, 33–35, 38. 19. Castells, Identity, 69–70. Emphasis in original. 20. Theda Skocpol, “Emerging Agendas and Recurrent Strategies in Historical Sociology,” in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 375–376.

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21. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 22. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 23. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994). 24. Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 6. 25. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Gramsci and Marxist Political Theory,” in Approaches to Gramsci, ed. Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982), 31; Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory, vol. 4) (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 10. 26. Hobsbawm, “Gramsci and Marxist Political Theory,” 30. 27. Jorge G. Castañeda, La Utopia Desarmada, 2a ed. (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1995), 234–235. 28. Hobsbawm, “Gramsci and Marxist Political Theory,” 26. 29. Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements, 37. 30. Susan Eckstein, “Power and Popular Protest in Latin America,” in Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 3. 31. Jesús Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations (London; Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1993), 208–209. 32. Castañeda, La Utopia Desarmada, 117. 33. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 20. 34. Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategías para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad (Barcelona: Editorial Paidós SAICF, 2001), 14. 35. John Holloway and Eloína Peláez, Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London; Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998), 4. 36. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 120. 37. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 122. 38. Hachten and Hachten, The World News Prism, 27. 39. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956).

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40. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, “Where to Begin,” in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, ed. Victor Jerome (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1961), 20–21. 41. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, What Is to Be Done? trans. Robert Service, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 143–168. 42. Alan O’Connor, “Radios Populares en América Latina,” in Los Radios Mineros de Bolivia, ed. Lupe Cajías Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (La Paz, Bolivia: CIMCA-UNESCO, 1989), 134–135. 43. Thomas Randolph Adams, The American Controversy: A Bibliographical Study of the British Pamphlets about the American Disputes, 1764–1783 (Providence; New York: Brown Univ. Press; Bibliographical Society of America, 1980); G. Jack Gravlee and James R. Irvine, eds., Pamphlets and the American Revolution: Rhetoric, Politics, Literature, and the Popular Press: Facsimile Reproductions, Commemorative, 1776–1976 (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976); Graham Goulden Hough, Reflections on a Literary Revolution (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1960); Jeremy D. Popkin, “Media and Revolutionary Crisis,” in Media and Revolution, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995); Pierre Rétat, “The Revolutionary Word in the Newspaper in 1789,” in Media and Revolution, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995). 44. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 45. Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 176. 46. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 353, 358–359. 47. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 177. 48. Marta Harnecker, “De la Insurrección a la Guerra,” Punto Final, Noviembre–Diciembre 1982, 20–21. This is a pamphlet archived at El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 49. Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity and its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 296–299. 50. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, x. 51. García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategías para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad, 266. 52. Eckstein, “Power and Popular Protest in Latin America,” 35. 53. Castañeda, La Utopia Desarmada, 104. 54. Paul C Adams, “Protest and the Scale Politics of Telecommunications,” Political Geography 15, no. 5 (1996); Mimi Keck and Katherine Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998). 55. John Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), 33.

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56. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 1, 3. 57. Adams, “Protest and the Scale Politics of Telecommunications,” 420–421. 58. Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture: The Culture of the Women’s Movement,” in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995), 172. 59. David Manning White, “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News,” Journalism Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1950): 383. “The traveling of a news item through certain communication channels [is] dependent on the fact that certain areas within the channels function as ‘gates’ . . . gate sections are governed by either impartial rules or by ‘gate keepers.’ ” 60. Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extended ed. (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 34. 61. Daniel H. Levine and Scott Mainwaring, “Religion and Popular Protest,” in Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 211–213; Blase Bonpane, Guerrillas of Peace: Liberation Theology and the Central American Revolution, 2nd ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 2–4. 62. Levine and Mainwaring, “Religion and Popular Protest,” 211; Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 4–12. 63. Teófilo Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People: Testimonies of Faith from Nicaragua (Maryknoll, NY; London: Orbis Books; Zed Press, 1983), 19. 64. Paolo Leurs, interview by author, July 2, 2002, San Salvador; Santiago, interview by author, September 23, 2003, San Salvador; Rogelio Ponseele and María López Vigíl, Muerte y Vida en Morazán: Testimonio de un Sacerdote (San Salvador: UCA editores, 1987), 64. 65. Xochitl Leyva Solano, “Catequistas, Misioneros y Tradiciones,” in Chiapas: Los Rumbos de Otra Historia, ed. Mario Humberto Ruz Juan Pedro Viqueira (México, D.F.: UNAM, CIESAS, CEMCA, Universidad de Guadalajara, 1998). 66. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 122. 67. Levine and Mainwaring, “Religion and Popular Protest,” 210. 68. José Ignacio López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 10th ed., Colección Testigos de la Historia, vol. 4 (San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991), 24–25; Ricardo A. Mayorga Duran, “Radio Venceremos: Medio Alternativo de Comunicación de Masas,” (Licenciatura, Universidad Tecnológica, 1992), 6. 69. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932; Gregorio Selser, Sandino (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1970).

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70. Poster, The Mode of Information, 154. 71. Poster, The Mode of Information, 8, 15. Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2000), 3, has developed one of the clearest explanations of “subject” and “subjectivity” in relation to their meaning to identity and self. “‘Subjectivity’ refers . . . to an abstract or general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that, or simply helps us to understand why, our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire, and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience. In this way, the subject is always linked to something outside of it—an idea or principle or the society of other subjects. It is this linkage that the word subject insists upon. Etymologically, to be subject means to be ‘placed (or even thrown) under.’ One is always subject to or of something. The word subject, therefore, proposes that the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles.” Emphasis in original. 72. Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History, 167. 73. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6. 74. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. 75. Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History, 165. 76. Poster, The Mode of Information, 15–16, 46. 77. Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (London: Profile Books, 2003), 180–181. 78. Chuck Hays, “Writing in the Wind: Recreating Oral Culture in an Online Community” (paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Kansas City, Missouri, July 30–August 2, 2003), 3. 79. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ix. 80. Downing, Radical Media, 181. 81. Poster, The Mode of Information, 116, 128. 82. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 18, 25, 28, 31, 69, 78, 104, 214. 83. Poster, The Mode of Information, 154. 84. Juanita Darling, “Re-Imagining the Nation: Revolutionary Media and Historiography in Mesoamerica,” Journalism History 32 (Winter 2007–2008): 239. 85. William Hamilton Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 9–11. 86. I transcribed 50 of the 200 tapes archived in the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen and read 100 contemporaneous transcripts of broadcasts of Radio Venceremos and Radio Farabundo Martí from late 1986 and early 1987, the two rebel radio stations that operated during the 1980–1992 civil war in El Salvador, to analyze what music they played, what information they reported, and how they reported it,

NOTES

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including what words and expressions they used. I looked for both continuing themes and points that mark significant change in the radio broadcasts. I also looked for differences in the two stations that could be indicative of how the same medium could be used in different ways. I transcribed at least one broadcast from each station for each year of the war, if a broadcast was available. (For some years, no broadcast was available, or only one broadcast was available. The “choice” was based on what was available.) In three cases in which both a transcript and a tape were available, I compared them, finding that while the transcripts were sometimes incomplete, they were accurate. I also transcribed sixteen tapes of coverage of key events, such as the offensives of 1981 and 1989, the massacre at El Mozote, the deaths of the Dutch journalists, one of the three attacks on the El Paraiso military base, release of prisoners, the capture of the vice minister of defense, and the murders of the Jesuits, as well as Christmas and independence day coverage for several years. Unfortunately, tapes do not exist for some key events, such as the Zona Rosa massacre in which guerrillas killed civilians and off-duty U.S. Marines in what is considered one of the worst atrocities committed by the rebels. Another disappointment is that I could not find any remnants of the broadcasts from the military station, Radio Cuscatlán. Besides coverage of significant events, I also transcribed four broadcasts from slow news days, to give an idea of how the stations filled the airtime in such situations. The museum archives also contained a logbook for several months of 1981 broadcasts, which covers dates for which no tapes exist. 87. As I sought out a wider range of producers and audience members, references from participants proved crucial, particularly in El Salvador, where the level of postwar reconciliation has meant that some former rebels now hold jobs in private industry and the government bureaucracy. They prefer to remain discreet about their leftist past. Several participants insisted on confidentiality and are referred to either by a nom de guerre or their profession during the civil war. A bus line owner granted me a crucial interview only because of a family connection. Ironically, because Nicaragua remains more polarized, participants were more open about their politics and freer about participating. These interviews were in no way random, although I did try to cover the different categories of listeners or readers that the producers told me they were trying to reach. In the case of Salvadoran radio, those were urban dwellers, students, families of combatants, labor union members, international support networks, their own fighters, and soldiers. Those categories sometimes overlapped, as in the case of one urban female student who had sisters fighting with the guerrillas. I interviewed three residents of the capital, San Salvador, and eight residents of Usulután, a provincial town in a contested region. Two of the participants were small

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business owners, including the owner of a transportation line, one was a professional, three were union activists before or during the war, one was a guerrilla fighter, two were students, and another was an athlete. I also spoke with an exile who chose not to listen to the shortwave broadcasts. I was not able to interview former soldiers, but I did find contemporaneous interviews with high-ranking officers who commented on their evaluation of the importance of the guerrilla radio stations. I also was able to document other indications of the importance that the armed force placed on the broadcasts, such as Colonel Diego Monterrosa’s repeated attempts to capture the Radio Venceremos transmitter. Similarly, I was unable to contact non-Salvadorans who listened to the broadcasts. One of the small business owners I spoke with had listened to the radio when he was in exile. Among the producers, I spoke with announcers, correspondents who reported directly from the battlefield, technicians who kept the transmitters operating, and the liaisons between the stations and the guerrilla high command. 88. I did not receive official Zapatista sanction for my visit to the canyons. After failing to negotiate the Zapatista bureaucracy, I relied on the goodwill that I had established nine years earlier through repeated visits to the hamlet of Ibarra. I first visited Ibarra in early 1994, following the first round of peace talks between the Zapatistas and the government. The day after the Zapatistas agreed to take the negotiated proposal to their militants, I bought a copy of La Jornada, which published the agreement in full, and headed to the canyons to find out what people there thought. I chose Ibarra because I struck a deal to share a bush plane ride with two men from the neighboring hamlet of Santa Elena, who assured me that Ibarra was a Zapatista community. Thus, I took the community the news of the peace offer before they heard it from their leaders. After that, the hamlet became my touchstone, the place where I checked in to hear the views of ordinary Zapatistas. Immediately following the Mexican Army’s 1995 advance into Zapatista territory, the Zapatistas reported atrocities in Ibarra. I was on a plane back to the community a day after the government lifted roadblocks, under pressure from Zapatista supporters who rallied via the Internet. The reports, fortunately, were exaggerated, although the residents of Ibarra were hiding in the jungle, terrified. I once again played the traditional role of the foreign correspondent and took their story, as I observed it, to the world, playing the gatekeeper in contradicting the gatekeeperless version of the incident. I counted on that relationship to override their understandable distrust of outsiders. From the beginning of the visit, I could see the profound change that had occurred in the community in the aftermath of the army’s 1995 entry into the canyons and its continuing presence there. When the plane touched down, I questioned the pilot about whether he actually had taken

NOTES

89.

90. 91. 92.

2

177

me to Ibarra. The last time I was there, the airstrip was about a mile from the community. Now there were houses all along the airstrip. I insisted that he wait while I confirmed with one of the people who came to greet the plane that this was indeed Ibarra. During a conversation with the schoolmaster, the mystery was solved: this community was Nuevo Ibarra. It comprised non-Zapatista refugees, who had fled the canyons when the rebellion began, and an army outpost, placed there, ostensibly to protect them from the nearby Zapatista community that I remembered. This was an example of the divided communities and military outposts that had become characteristic of the canyons during the nine years since the army had arrived. Now less sure of my bearings, I hired a guide to take me through the jungle to Ibarra. Most residents of the community remembered me and agreed to let me stay two days to conduct interviews and observation. They asked whether I had spoken with caracol authorities and appeared concerned about welcoming a visitor who had not been vetted. However, observation also made me doubt some of their comments, particularly their insistence that they did not have any form of radio transmitter. Because two-way radio transmissions were not what I was studying, I chose not to press the point. Hobsbawm, On History, 206. Paolo Leurs, interview by author, June 26, 2002, San Salvador, El Salvador. Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York, Toronto: Free Press; Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993), x.

A Mesoamerican Media Backgrounder

1. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, Four Theories of the Press, 33. 2. This is in no way an exhaustive history of Mesoamerican media. Rather, it is a selective account that focuses on events that illustrate the background against which the revolutionary media under study developed. 3. John Milton, Of Education; Areopagitica: The Commonwealth, ed. Laura Emma Lockwood (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 239. 4. Carlos Francisco de Croix, “Hago saber a todos los habitantes de este Imperio . . .” Mexico City, June 25, 1767, Mexico Collection, Yale University, Box 16, Folder 170; Carlos Francisco de Croix, “Por hallerme bien informado . . .” Mexico City, November 26, 1767, Mexico Collection, Yale University, Box 16, Folder 174. 5. “El Lic. Juan Wenceslao Sanchez de la Barquera,” Revista de Mexico, February 8, 1891, 90, Mexico Collection, Yale University, Box 76, Fólder 89; Ferreira, Centuries of Silence, 60–62.

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6. Daniel Cosío Villegas and Gabriel Zaid, Daniel Cosío Villegas: Imprenta y Vida Pública, Vida y Pensamiento de México (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985), 1. 7. Victoria Goff, “Print Journalism in Mexico: From Printing Press to Revolutionary Press, 1536–1821” (paper presented at the American Journalism Historians’ Association Conference, Roanoke, VA, October 7, 1994), 2. 8. Ferreira, Centuries of Silence, 10, 19. 9. El Güegüence: Comedia-Bailete de la Época Colonial, trans. Emilio Álvarez Lejarza and Jorge Eduardo Arellano (Managua: Ediciones Distribuidora Cultural, 1977), 14, 54. 10. El Güegüence: Teatro Callejero Nicaragüense: El Güegüence o Machoratón, trans. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, vol. I (Granada: Cuaderno del Taller San Lucas, 1942). A mestizo has both Spanish and indigenous ancestors. 11. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 67. 12. El Güegüence, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29. 13. El Güegüence, 24–25. 14. El Güegüence, 33. 15. El Güegüence, 34–35. 16. El Güegüence, 17, 22, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38. 17. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven; London: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 162. 18. Frank Tannenbaum, Ten Keys to Latin America (New York: Knopf, 1962), 148. 19. Alexander Taylor Edelmann, Latin American Government and Politics: The Dynamics of a Revolutionary Society, rev. ed. (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969), 120. 20. Edelmann, Latin American Government and Politics: The Dynamics of a Revolutionary Society, 466. 21. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47–66. 22. Constitucion política de la Monarquia española promulgada en Cadiz a 19 de marzo de 1812, Titulo XI, Art. 371. The Cortes had granted a limited freedom of expression shortly after it convened. Colección de los Decretos y Ordenes que han Expedido las Cortes Generales y Extraordinarias desde su Instalacion el 24 de Septiembre de 1810 hasta igual fechas de 1811, decreto IX, November 10, 1810, Libertad Politica de la Imprenta. 23. “Efectos patrioticos del ‘Diario literario de Mexico’ en sus escritos pretendiendo la libertad de la Nacion,” Mexico Collection, Yale University, Box 69, Folder 16. 24. “Carta del benemerito Americano Lic D. Carlos Maria de Bustamante, elector constitucional nombrado por la Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel en la metrópoli del reino, al Excmo. Sr D Jose Maria Morelos capitan general de los exercitos americanos,” El Correo Americano del Sur, March 25, 1813, 38.

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179

25. “A Todos los Habitantes de America,” El Despertador Americano, December 20, 1810, 4. 26. Goff, “Print Journalism in Mexico,” 15. 27. “Hoy a las doce y media ha llegado Expreso de Zacatecas,” El Despertador Americano, December 27, 1810, 18; “Expreso del Real del Rosario que Llego Ayer por la Tarde,” El Despertador Americano, December 29, 1810, 22; “Gazeta Extraodinaria del Gobierno de México del miércoles 5 de diciembre de 1810,” El Despertador Americano, January 10, 1811, 31, 38; “Expedición de Oaxaca,” El Correo Americano del Sur, February 25, 1813, 1–8; E. Rosalba Cruz Soto, “El Movimiento de la Independencia y la Prensa Novohispana,” Bicentenario Mexico: Uno y Diverso (last accessed March 1, 2007). 28. “A los Americanos que Militan Baxo las Banderas de los Europeos Flon y Callejas,” El Despertador Americano, January 3, 1811, 23. 29. Other insurgent publications were El Sud, Ilustrador Nacional, Ilustrador Americano, Seminario Patriotica, and the improbably named Gaceta del Gobierno Americano en el Departamento del Norte. 30. “A los Americanos que Militan Baxo las Banderas de los Europeos Flon y Callejas,” El Despertador Americano, January 3, 1811, 6. 31. Senate Journal, 18th Cong.s 1st session, December 2, 1823, 11. 32. While the U.S. government did not aid the Mexican revolutionaries, the January 11, 1811 issue of El Despertador Americano reported that 1,200 “Anglo-Americans, our Allies” were gathered at Nacogdoches, Texas (then a sort of demilitarized zone between the United States’ recently acquired Louisiana Territory and Spain’s American colonies) to support the independence movement. Dr. John Sibley, the U.S. Indian agent based in Nacogdoches, confirmed in a July 17, 1811, letter that the privately recruited troops were gathering in the town, possibly to aid the revolutionaries. Julia Kathryn Garrett, “Dr. John Sibley and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1803–1814,” Volume 49, Number 1, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, http://www. tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v049/n1/contrib_ DIVL1434.html (last accessed June 25, 2007). 33. Edelmann, Latin American Government and Politics: The Dynamics of a Revolutionary Society, 399, 431. For a discussion of international insult laws see Ruth C. Walden, Insult Laws: An Insult to Press Freedom (Reston, VA: World Press Freedom Committee, 2000). 34. Tannenbaum, Ten Keys to Latin America, 154. 35. V.J., “REMITIDO,” El Sol, December 6, 1824, 735. 36. El Mexicano Despreocupado, “REMITIDO,” Aguila Mejicana, December 12, 1824, 3. 37. “Prospecto,” La Miscelánea, December 28, 1839, 1. Its successor, El Correo Seminario, was published in 1840 in the government printing office in San Salvador.

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38. “Prospecto,” El Noticioso, June 17, 1844. 39. “Prospecto,” La Unión, June 15, 1849, 1. 40. “Defectos en la legislación y administración de justicia,” La Unión, June 15, 1849, 3. 41. “Contestación del Presidente de la Asamblea Legislativa,” La Union, October 15, 1849, 2; “Crónica Oficial,” La Regeneración, March 15, 1877, 2; “Discurso Pronunciado Por el Señor Presidente de la Republica,” La Regeneración, March 8, 1877, 3; “Discurso Pronunciado Por el Señor Presidente de la Asamblea Nacional,” La Regeneración, March 8, 1877, 1; “El Presidente de la República,” La República, May 21, 1885, 1; “Francisco Menéndez, General de División y Presidente Provisional de El Salvador,” La Libertad, November 23, 1886; “Presupuesto de la Instrucción Pública,” La República, December 28, 1882, 5. 42. Manuel de la Peña y Peña, “Comunicado,” El Defensor de Tamaulipas, April 9, 1848, 1. 43. “Rasgo Necrologico,” El Defensor de Tamaulipas, November 7, 1847, 2; “Editorial” El Defensor de Tamaulipas, November 7, 1847, 3. 44. Alfred Emile Cornebise, Ranks and Columns: Armed Forces Newspapers in American Wars (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993) 10–21. 45. Julio Cerventes M., “La Libertad de Imprenta en Mexico” (Master’s thesis, Universidad de Puebla, 1940), 124. 46. Mexico. Constitucion de 1824, Titulo I, Secc. I, Art. 7. 47. Constitución Política de la República (Mexico, 1857), Art. 7. 48. A. de Saligny, “Parte Oficial,” Periodico del Imperio Mexicano, August 4, 1863, 1. 49. “Prospecto,” El Mentor Nicaragüense, October 26, 1841. 50. “Instrucción Publica,” El Mentor Nicaragüense, November 6, 1841; “Instrucción Publica,” El Mentor Nicaragüense, January 1, 1842. 51. “Industria,” El Mentor Nicaragüense, November 6, 1841. 52. “Variedades,” El Mentor Nicaragüense, November 6, 1841. 53. El Eco Popular, July 15, 1854, 4. 54. El Defensor del Orden, September 7, 1854, 3; El Defensor del Orden, August 28, 1854, 2; El Defensor del Orden, August 9, 1854, 1; El Defensor del Orden, July 25, 1854, 2; El Defensor del Orden, August 3, 1854, 1; El Defensor del Orden, July 20, 1854, 4; El Defensor del Orden, July 18, 1854, 2; El Defensor del Orden, July 7, 1854, 1; El Defensor del Orden, December 15, 1854, 3; El Defensor del Orden, November 10, 1854, 4; El Defensor del Orden, September 15, 1854, 1; El Defensor del Orden, May 8, 1855, 3; El Defensor del Orden, March 1, 1855, 2; El Defensor del Orden, January 23, 1855, 1. 55. “Prospecto,” Boletín Oficial, May 12, 1855. 56. The meaning of the word filibuster has evolved over the centuries to include those who hijack ships, countries, and debates. For discussions of both the nineteenth-century meanings of the term and,

NOTES

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

181

more generally, the Cuban filibuster press, see Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and the Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005). Alejandro Bolaños Geyer, William Walker, the Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny (Lake St. Louis: A. Bolaños Geyer, 1988), vol. 2, The Californias, 56–57, 200, 244–256, 310, 320–324. “Los Americanos,” Boletín Oficial, April 9, 1856, 4. “No Oficial,” Boletín Oficial, August 16, 1856, 1. “When a despotism,” El Nicaraguense, October 20, 1855, 2. James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 7, 50, 79. Cosío Villegas and Zaid, Daniel Cosío Villegas, 124–128, 30–35, 58; Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 10–11. Mark Cronlund Anderson, Pancho Villa’s Revolution by Headlines (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 80–116. Eduardo Guerrero, Corridos of the Mexican Revolution and Other Songs (México, D.F.: E. Guerrero, 1931). Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence,” 57. “La Asamblea del 95,” El Unionista, May 25, 1895, 4. Ricardo Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, Colección Minuto (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Porvenir: ILET, 1984), 72–74. Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, 20. Mary A. Gardner, The Inter American Press Association: Its Fight for Freedom of the Press, 1926–1960 (Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by the Univ. of Texas Press, 1967), 124–125. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 26. John Spicer Nichols, “The News Media in the Revolution,” in Nicaragua in Revolution, ed. Thomas W. Walker (New York: Praeger, 1982). In addition, Kris Kodrich, Tradition and Change in the Nicaraguan Press, 14, has noted, “The number of daily newspapers declined from nine in 1950 to four in 1972, just before a devastating earthquake destroyed much of Managua. . . . After the 1972 earthquake, only Novedades and La Prensa began publishing again.” Nichols, “The News Media,” 184. Nichols, “The News Media,” 188. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 104. L’Artisan, September 22, 1830, quoted in Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 197. Nichols, “The News Media,” 185. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 3.

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78. Silvio Vega, interview by Vilma Ortiz, June 1, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.12, CNA.13A-165, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. 79. Cassette 153, interview by Vilma Ortiz, May 23, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.12, CNA.13A-164, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. 80. Francisca Pérez Miranda, interview by Juana María García, July 10, 1980, Mueble no. 1 lado B, CNA.1A-357, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. Similar comments appeared in the following interviews: 153; Alfredo, interview by Danny Pérez, May 26, 1980, mueble no.6 gaveta 6.12, CNA.7A-1, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua; Natividad González Gaitan, interview by Rene Herrera, June 2, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.2, CAN.10A–276, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. 81. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 7; Nichols, “The News Media,” 184; “Shotguns Silence a Critic,” Time, January 23, 1978, 55–56. 82. Santiago, interview by author, June 20, 2002, San Salvador. A columnist for La Prensa in the months after Chamorro’s assassination, Santiago later became the announcer for the guerrilla radio station in neighboring El Salvador. 83. Rodolfo R. Campos, El Salvador Entre el Terror y la Esperanza: Los Sucesos de 1979 y su Impacto en el Drama Salvadoreño de los Años Siguientes, vol. 1, Colección Debate (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1982), 6. 84. Campos, Terror y Esperanza, 7; YSAX, April 9, 1979. YSAX was the Roman Catholic Church radio station. Transcripts of the prewar broadcasts of its daily editorial are available at the library of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador. 85. Carlos Rodolfo Paniagua Serrano, “El Bloque Empresarial Hegemónico Salvadoreño,” Estudios Centroamericanos 57 (2002): 616–617; YSAX, December 17, 1979; Miguel Huezo Mixco, interview by María-Luísa Morales-Martínez, June 1991, México, D.F. Huezo Mixco represented Radio Farabundo Martí in Mexico. 86. Américo Aldana, interview by author, October 23, 2003, San Salvador. His brother has since died and his recollection could not be corroborated. 87. Marvin Galeas, interview by author, September 24, 2003, San Salvador. 88. YSAX, July 16, 1979; Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books, 1984); Galeas, interview. 89. Galeas, interview; Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, 72.

NOTES

183

90. La Voix de L’oiseau De La Liberte: Historique de Radio Venceremos, Voix Officielle de FMLN, trans. Correspondance de Radio Venceremos en France (Paris: Sisteme Radio Venceremos, 1983), 6. This was an interview with Carmen Latona, who as Commander Luísa was the member of the rebel high command in charge of Radio Venceremos. It is located on the bookshelves of El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 13; Lawrence C. Soley and John S. Nichols, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting : A Study of Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Electronic Communication, (New York: Praeger, 1987), 248. 91. Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, 193, 97; Aldana, interview. 92. Santiago, interview. 93. Cosío Villegas and Zaid, Daniel Cosío Villegas, 162. 94. Cosío Villegas and Zaid, Daniel Cosío Villegas, 53–60; Chappell H. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 55, 62. 95. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Mexico: The Perfect Dictatorship,” New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1991): 123–124. 96. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 7. 97. Barbara Belejack, “How Mexican Television Reported the 1994 Presidential Elections,” in A Culture of Collusion: An inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed.William Orme Jr. (Miami: North-South Center Press/Univ. of Miami, 1996), 52–53; Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate, 48–56. 98. Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence,” 58. 99. Lucy Conger, “From Intimidation to Assassination: Silencing the Press,” in A Culture of Collusion: An inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William Orme, Jr. (Miami: North-South Center Press/ Univ. of Miami, 1996), 100; Raimundo Riva Palacio, “A Culture of Collusion: The Ties That Bind the Press and the PRI,” in A Culture of Collusion: An inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William Orme, Jr. (Miami: North-South Center Press/Univ. of Miami, 1996), 21–25; Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence,” 59. 100. Marjorie Miller and Juanita Darling, “The Eye of the Tiger: Emilio Azcárraga and the Televisa Empire,” in A Culture of Collusion: An inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William A. Orme (Miami: North-South Center Press/Univ. of Miami, 1997), 59–70. 101. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate, 3–4; Sallie Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) 5–10.

184

NOTES

102. Committee to Protect Journalists, Attacks on the Press (1996); available at (last accessed March 24, 2004). 103. Elena Poniatowska, La Noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de Historia Oral (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1971); Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence,” 60. 104. José Antonio Reyes Matamoros, “Una Aproximación a los Cívicos,” Para Romper el Silencio, Expediente Abierto 1, no. 2 (1992): 8. 105. René Avilés Fabila, “El Accidente,” Para Romper el Silencio, Expediente Abierto 1, no. 2 (1992): 36. 106. El Corrido de Genaro Vázquez, Oscar Chávez. This is a song sung in coffee houses and not a recorded version or published score. 107. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate, 67. 108. Jorge G. Castañeda, “Limits to Apertura: Prospects for Press Freedom in the New Free-Market Mexico,” in A Culture of Collusion: An inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William Orme, Jr. (Miami: North-South Center Press/ Univ. of Miami, 1996), 134–135. 109. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate, 76–77. 110. Belejack, “How Mexican Television Reported the 1994 Presidential Elections,” 53. 111. Snodgrass, “From Collusion to Independence,” 62. 112. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate, 73–78. 113. Concepción Villafuerte, interview by author, San Cristóbal de las Casas, October 17, 2003. 114. Villafuerte, interview. 115. Stephen J. Wager and Donald E. Schulz, “The Awakening: The Zapatista Revolt and its Implications for Civil-Military Relations and the Future of Mexico,” (Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1994), 8. 116. Villafuerte, interview. 117. Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 6–7. 118. Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, 21.

3

Newspapers and Citizenship in Revolutionary Nicaragua

1. Steven Strasser et al., “Life without Somoza,” Newsweek, July 30, 1979, 44; Ernesto Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida (Managua, Nicaragua: Anama Ediciones Centroamericanas, 2003), 297. This is a memoir. 2. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, interview by author, July 9, 2002, Managua, Nicaragua. Chamorro was the editor of Barricada from shortly after its founding until 1994. 3. “¡Vencimos y Adelante!,” Barricada, July 25, 1979, 1. Headline styles, particularly capitalization, varied among and within the

NOTES

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

185

various editions of Barricada and Barricada Internacional that I examined. I have opted to be faithful to the original documents by using the capitalization and other style elements as published. “Próximo Miércoles Inicia Labores La Voz de Nicaragua,” Barricada, August 2, 1979, 5. Valerie Miller, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade,” in Nicaragua in Revolution, ed. Thomas W. Walker (New York: Praeger, 1982), 243. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 200. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. Poster, The Mode of Information, 154. Downing, Radical Media, 181. Ángel Rama, La Ciudad Letrada (Montevideo: Comisión Uruguaya pro Fundación Internacional Ángel Rama, 1984), 125. Bayardo Arce, interview by author, December 12, 2003, Managua, Nicaragua. Poster, The Mode of Information, 16. “‘Ideas’ or ‘beliefs’ are not limited to certain classes of activities or to certain classes of people. They are woven into the fabric of everyday life of ordinary people.” Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 10. Oscar René Vargas, interview by author, June 6, 1999, Managua, Nicaragua. Vargas, a Nicaraguan sociologist, explained, “We are divided over Sandino.” Rubén Darío, “A Roosevelt,” Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1905). Pablo Antonio Cuadra, interview by author, June 8, 1999, Managua, Nicaragua; Ernesto Cardenal, interview by author, June 10, 1999, Managua, Nicaragua; Ariel Montoya, interview by author, June 6, 1999, Managua, Nicaragua. Montoya is a literary critic. Nearly every Nicaraguan newspaper published in the past thirty years, at least, contains a Sunday literary supplement. Selser, Sandino, 43. U.S. troops occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, except for a few months in late 1925 and early 1926. Anastasio Somoza, El Verdadero Sandino; O, El Calvario de las Segovias (Managua: Tip. Robelo, 1936). Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 26; Selser, Sandino, 347. Chamorro, interview; Arce, interview. Alfredo, interview by Danny Pérez, May 26, 1980, mueble no.6 gaveta 6.12, CNA.7A-1, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. Cassette 153, interview by Vilma Ortiz, May 23, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.12, CNA.13A-164, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua; Francisca Pérez Miranda, interview by Juana María García, July 10, 1980, Mueble no. 1 lado B, CNA.1A-357, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua; Alfredo, interview by Danny Pérez, May 26, 1980, mueble no.6 gaveta 6.12, CNA.7A-1, Instituto de Historia de

186

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

NOTES

Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua; Natividad González Gaitan, interview by René Herrera, June 2, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.2, CAN.10A–276, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua; Silvio Vega, interview by Vilma Ortiz, June 1, 1980, mueble no. 5 gaveta 5.12, CNA.13A-165, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro América, Managua, Nicaragua. Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 299. Castañeda, La Utopía Desarmada, 124, 127, 129. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 13–14. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 184. Steven Palmer, “Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua,” Latin American Research Review 23, no. 1 (1988): 99. Palmer, “Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua,” 96. Hugo Cancino Troncoso, Las Raíces Históricas e Ideológicas del Movimiento Sandinista: Antecedentes de la Revolución Nacional y Popular Nicaragüense, 1927–1979 (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1984). Palmer, “Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua,” 96–97. Arce, interview. Nichols, “The News Media,” 194–195. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 13. Kris Kodrich, Tradition and Change in the Nicaraguan Press, 17; Michael Massing, “Nicaragua’s Free-Fire Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, July–August 1988, 33. Adam Jones, “The Death of Barricada: Politics and Professionalism in the Post-Sandinista Press,” Journalism Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 24. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 27. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 249. El Pueblo did not resume publication until the Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections. Guillermo Cortés, interview by author, July 18, 2002, Managua, Nicaragua. “Esa Prensa no deja de mentir,” Barricada, February 18, 1981, 11; “Lección a ‘La Prensa,’ ” Barricada, February 20, 1981, 7; “Una mentira más de ‘La Prensa,’” Barricada, March 8, 1981, 7. Nichols, “The News Media,” 187. The government chose to officially close La Prensa rather than simply cut off its supply of newsprint, a tactic which the Mexican government had used to stifle opposition. When La Prensa was not officially proscribed from publishing, it continued to receive its allotment of imported newsprint, a luxury in a country such as revolutionary Nicaragua with its mounting trade deficit. Nichols, “The News Media,” 196. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 22.

NOTES

187

43. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 22. 44. Cortés, interview. 45. Sofía Montenegro, interview by author, Managua, Nicaragua, July 10, 2002. Chamorro, interview; Cortés, interview; Arce, interview. 46. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 66–67. 47. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 176. 48. Chamorro, interview; Montenegro, interview; Cortés, interview; José Luís Lara, interview by author, Managua, Nicaragua, December 11, 2003; Luis Barbosa, interview by author, 1 Managua, Nicaragua, July 8, 2002. Barbosa headed the printers’ union during the revolution and was head of Nicaragua’s largest labor federation at the time of the interview. 49. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 177. 50. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 178. 51. Cortés, interview; Montenegro, interview; Juan Ramón Huerta Chavarría, interview by author, Managua, Nicaragua, July 16, 2002. 52. Barbosa, interview; Antonio Aguilar, interview by author, Managua, Nicaragua, December 4, 2003; Lara, interview. 53. Arce, interview; Montenegro, interview. 54. Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 332. 55. Thomas Hughes, Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 88. 56. Hughes, Loyola and the Educatinal System of the Jesuits, 91–92. 57. Teófilo Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People, 54. 58. Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People, 26. 59. Elvis Chavarría, translated by David Gullette, “Nicaraguan Peasant Poetry from Solentiname,” (Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1988), 58. 60. Ernesto Cardenal, El Evangelio en Solentiname (Caracas: Editorial Signo Contemporáneo, 1978). 61. Cardenal, Evangelio, 437. 62. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 359. 63. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. 64. Nubia Arcía, translated by Peter Wright. The Peasant Poets of Solentiname (London: Katabasis, 1991), 88. 65. Cardenal, Evangelio, vi. 66. Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People, 19. 67. Miller, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade,” 246. 68. Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People, 18. 69. “Estudiantes en campaña contra analfabetismo,” Barricada, July 31, 1979, 3. 70. “Inician Campaña Para Alfabetizar 650 Mil Nicaragüenses,” Barricada, August 10, 1979, 1. 71. “La alegría regresó a Villa Carlos Fonseca,” Barricada. March 24, 1981, 18; Miller, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade,” 241. 72. Miller, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade,” 244.

188

NOTES

73. Miller, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade,” 242. 74. UNESCO. “Premio Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Premio Asociación Internacional de Lectura y Premio NOMA 1980—Proclamación,” Paris, UNESCO, September, 1980, 1–2. Later studies found that the numbers may have been exaggerated or that some participants may have lapsed back into illiteracy. Nevertheless, the campaign is still considered a model for other countries. Ulrike Hanemann, “Nicaragua’s Literacy Campaign,” paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2006, Literacy for Life, 9. 75. Sergio De Castro, interview by author, Managua, Nicaragua, July 16, 2002. 76. Taylor and Whittier. “Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture,” 164. 77. “Barricada requiere tu colaboración.” Barricada, August 18, 1979, 3. Journalists from La Prensa, which was published in the same press, the only one in the country immediately after Somoza fell, helped out with early editions, but the rest of the staff was inexperienced. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 3. 78. “Hagamos de Barricada un periódico mural para que todo el pueblo pueda leerlo.” Barricada. August 1, 1979, 4. Emphasis in original. 79. Aguilar, interview. 80. Lara, interview. 81. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 4. 82. Montenegro, interview. 83. “No es hora de descanso,” Barricada, July 25, 1979, 1. 84. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 194; Montenegro, interview. 85. Taylor and Whittier, “Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture,” 183. 86. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 176. 87. Barbosa, interview. 88. Aguilar, interview; Lara, interview; Barbosa, interview. 89. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. 90. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 104. 91. Lara, interview. 92. “Habla el combatiente sandinista,” Barricada, August 30, 1979, 4. 93. “Una vida de lucha sandinista,” Barricada, February 20, 1981, 5. 94. “Barrio de pescadores no es un nido de amores,” Barricada, February 23, 1981, 1; “Dificultades en Zelaya Norte,” Barricada, March 10, 1981, 7. 95. Barbosa, interview. 96. “No Me Rendiré y Aquí los Espero,” Barricada, May 2, 1985, 1. 97. Tomás Borge, “La Ventaja Es que Cabalgamos Sobre la Historia” (paper presented at the V Aniversario de Fundación del Sistema Sandinista de Televisión, Managua, August 11, 1984) 24. 98. Borge, “La Ventaja Es que Cabalgamos Sobre la Historia,” 24.

NOTES

189

99. “Referente a los cortes de luz y el agua,” Barricada, March 13, 1981, 6. Emphasis in original. 100. “Explican porque fueron dados de baja,” Barricada, March 13, 1981, 6. 101. Chamorro, interview; Guillermo Cortés Domínguez and Juan Ramón Huerta Chavarría, “La Crítica Periodística en el Diario Barricada” (Licenciatura thesis, Universidad Centroamericana, 1988), 5. 102. This is a term not found in journalism textbooks but rather based on the author’s twenty years of newsroom experience. 103. Lara, interview; Cortés, interview; Huerta, interview. 104. Cortés, interview; Lara, interview. 105. Cortés, interview. 106. “Que tiemblan los enemigos! Los milicianos por todos lados,” Barricada, January 30, 1981; “Que se desalienten los intervencionistas! Pueblo se desbordo en centros de instrucción,” Barricada, February 3, 1981; “Emotiva despedida al Batallón 5013,” Barricada, March 30, 1981; “Parte otro Batallón,” Barricada, March 31, 1981, 9; “Larry, tu mama te dará el permiso,” Barricada, March 29, 1981, 12. 107. Cortés, interview; Huerta, interview. 108. “54 Desertores a los Juzgados,” Barricada, March 22, 1985, 1. 109. “Si Nosotros No Defendemos a la Patria, Entonces Quién?,” Barricada, March 22, 1985, 1. 110. Víctor Tirado López. Paper presented at the Día del Periodista y del Centenario del Diarismo en Nicaragua, acto central de la Unión de Periodistas, Managua, March 1, 1984. 111. Cortés, interview. 112. “‘Construiremos una sociedad de hombres libres:’ H. Ortega,” Barricada, July 27, 1979, 6; “Cuba rinde tributo a la Revolución nicaragüense,” Barricada, July 27, 1979, 3; “Estamos en pie de lucha y confiamos en la solidaridad internacional,” Barricada, January 28, 1981, 3; “Logros y perspectivas de la economía sandinista,” Barricada, January 30, 1981, 8; “Combatientes de la solidaridad y defensa de la Revolución,” Barricada, February 2, 1981, 3; “Todo nuestro esfuerzo para la defensa nacional,” Barricada, February 2, 1981, 4; “Los militantes son conductores del pueblo consiente,” Barricada, February 22, 1981, 3; “La política exterior de EE.UU. hacia Centro América y particularmente a Nicaragua,” Barricada, March 22, 1981, B1–18. 113. Cortés Domínguez and Huerta Chavarría, “La Crítica Periodística en el Diario Barricada,” 12. 114. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 130–131. 115. Chamorro, interview. 116. Aguilar, interview, Lara, interview, Barbosa, interview. 117. Aguilar, interview.

190

NOTES

118. Those events are ably recounted in Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998. 119. Chamorro, interview; Cortés, interview; Montenegro, interview. 120. De Castro, interview. 121. Cortés, interview. 122. Karl Berman, Under the Big Stick (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 127–128. 123. “Dificultades en Zelaya Norte,” Barricada, March 10, 1981, 7. 124. Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 643. 125. Cortés, interview; Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 644. 126. “Los Mískitos y las Mentiras de Kirkpatrick,” Barricada Internacional, February 20, 1982, 15. 127. “La Agresión en la Costa Atlántica,” Barricada Internacional, February 20, 1982, 2. 128. “Un Testimonio Sobre Los Mískitos,” Barricada Internacional, April 30, 1982, 4. 129. “Legislators Approve Amnesty,” Barricada Internacional, May 9, 1985, 5. 130. “Miskitos Will Return to Rio Coco,” Barricada Internacional, June 6, 1985, 1. 131. “Wawa: Del Infierno a la Tranquilidad,” Barricada, March 14, 1985, 4. 132. “Bienvenida de Brazos Abiertos a los Desplazados de Guerra,” Barricada, March 15, 1985, 4; “Desplazados de Guerra en las Nuevas Tierras,” Barricada, March 16, 1985, 4. 133. “I Feel Safe Here,” Barricada Internacional, March 28, 1985, 7; “A New Life for Displaced Families,” Barricada Internacional, March 28, 1985, 6–7. 134. “Creole English Oral Tradition,”Barricada Internacional, March 28, 1985, 12. 135. “Spain Suspends Credits,” Barricada Internacional, June 6, 1985, 7. 136. Some examples are “FSLN con Amigos de la Revolución en Europa,” Barricada Internacional, November 4, 1981, 1; “Libia y Nicaragua Firman Convenio de Conversión,” Barricada Internacional, February 20, 1982, 1; “Venimos Para Servir,” Barricada Internacional, February 20, 1982, 15. 137. Some examples are “Nicaragua Señala Camino Para la Paz en Centroamérica,” Barricada Internacional, February 20, 1982, 2; “Por la Paz, Todos Contra la Agresión,” Barricada Internacional, February 28, 1985, 5. 138. “A Day’s Salary for Nicaragua,” Barricada Internacional, May 23, 1985, 4. 139. “An Embrace of Solidarity,” Barricada Internacional, June 6, 1985, 9. 140. “The Battle for Public Opinion: Part of the Global Struggle,” Barricada Internacional, May 30, 1985, 6–8.

NOTES

191

141. “Obando Invested as Cardinal,” Barricada Internacional, May 30, 1985, 1; “Papa Unge Cardenal al Arzobispo Obando,” Barricada, May 26, 1985, 1. 142. “Buzón Internacional,” Barricada Internacional, April 30, 1982, 2. 143. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 1, 8, 18. 144. Carlos Mejía Godoy, “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita.” This refers to a song sung in coffee houses and not a recorded version or a published score. 145. Carlos Mejía Godoy, “La Hacienda de Don Nelo.” This refers to a song sung in coffee houses and not a recorded version or a published score. 146. Carlos Mejía Godoy, “El Divieso”; “El Pocoyito”; “Que se Redamen las Copas.”This refers to a song sung in coffee houses and not a recorded version or a published score. 147. Jones, Beyond the Barricades, 1979–1998, 46–47. 148. “Hoy todo será major en Masatepe,” Barricada, January 3, 1990, 7; “FSLN arranca el 90 directo al trinufo,” Barricada, January 4, 1990, 1; “Nandaime fue . . . y todos con Daniel,” Barricada, January 7, 1990, 1; “Hoy Daniel en La Libertad,” January 4, 1990, 12; “Daniel al frente de caballería de la Paz,” Barricada, January 5, 1990; “Ocho mil reciben a Daniel en Altagracia,” Barricada, January 25, 1990, 1. 149. “Daniel y el deporte,” Barricada, February 25, 1990, 10. 150. “¿Aceptará la oposición el triunfo del FSLN?” Barricada, January 2, 1990, 3; “¿Cúal política social?” January 7, 1990, 3. 151. “Derecha se quedó sin fuerza en Chontales,” Barricada, January 9, 1990, 11; “Derecha marcha desolada en barrios de la capital,” Barricada, January 9, 1990, 11; “FSLN aumenta ventaja; UNO se cae,” January 25, 1990, 1. 152. “El desarrollo agropecuario,” Barricada January 15, 1990, 10; “La mujer,” Barricada, January 25, 1990, 8. 153. Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 651–652. 154. “Daniel: confió en la victoria,” Barricada, February 25, 1990, 1. 155. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 67–68.

4


1. Michael W. Drudge, United Press International, January 11, 1981; Joe Frazier, Associated Press, January 10, 1981. Wire services dispatches represent the news that was available to more than 1,000 U.S. media outlets. Dispatches are available on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. 2. We Shall Win. Translation of “venceremos.” 3. FMLN, the coalition of five Salvadoran guerrilla groups named after the leader of a 1932 peasant revolt. 4. Radio Venceremos, January 10, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, San Salvador, El Salvador.

192

NOTES

5. A third, short-lived station, Radio Guazapa, lasted for about a year in the early 1980s. 6. Salvadorans on both sides of the conflict correctly anticipated that the Reagan administration would supply military aid to the Salvadoran Armed Force, decreasing the likelihood of a successful rebellion. Brian J. Bosch, The Salvadoran Officer Corps and the Final Offensive of 1981 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1999), xii; Demetrio Olaciregui, United Press International, November 28, 1980. 7. Radio Venceremos, January 10, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 8. Drudge, UPI, January 11, 1981; López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 56; Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad Del Izote: El Salvador, Crónica de una Victoria: La Historia de Radio Venceremos, (México: Editorial Diana, 1992). 32. Mil y Una Historias is an oral history that compiles interviews by guerrillas who helped create, maintain, and operate Radio Venceremos during the first six years of civil war. La Terquedad is a published diary kept from 1981 to 1984 by the station’s announcer. Recordings of the first broadcast are only partially audible. 9. The Salvadoran civil war is usually considered to have begun when five guerrilla factions formed a united front, the FMLN, in the autumn of 1980 and to have ended with the implementation of a cease-fire in February, 1992. 10. “La Carta de Morazan,” (El Salvador: Sistema Radio Venceremos, 1982), 5. 11. The program was mentioned in virtually every broadcast during the first year of the war. Specific examples of broadcasts are mentioned in “Indices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril/81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” (Morazán, El Salvador: Radio Venceremos, 1981). 12. Paolo Leurs, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, July 2, 2002; Santiago, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, June 13, 2002. 13. Hachten and Hachten, The World News Prism, 27. That sign-on was part of virtually every broadcast throughout the war. A few specific broadcasts where it was used are Radio Venceremos, January 24, 1981; Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982; Radio Venceremos, November 15, 1983; Radio Venceremos, March 18, 1984; Radio Venceremos, August 18, 1986; Radio Venceremos, November 21, 1986; Radio Venceremos, September 22, 1988; Radio Venceremos, November 21, 1990; Radio Venceremos, November 22, 1989; Radio Venceremos, November 19, 1990; Radio Venceremos, August 17, 1981. 14. The story of Cuba’s Radio Rebelde is told in Ricardo Martinez Victores, 7RR, La Historia de Radio Rebelde (Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978).

NOTES

193

15. Americo Aldana, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, September 27, 2003; Astúl Ibarra, interview by author, Usulutan, El Salvador, April 28, 2002; Karla Majano, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, June 28, 2002; Bus line owner[pseud.], interview by author, Usulutan, El Salvador, September 13, 2003; Urban professional [pseud.], interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, September 20, 2003; Student [pseud.], interview by author, Usulutan, San Salvador, September 13, 2003; Teacher [pseud.], interview by author, Usulutan, El Salvador, September 13, 2003; Ulises [pseud.], interview by author, Usulutan, El Salvador, September 13, 2003; Sebastian Alejo, interview by author San Salvador, El Salvador, July 2, 2002; Juan Jose Dalton, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, July 2, 2002; Marvin Galeas, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salvador, September 24, 2003; Leurs, interview; Eoberto López Ponce, interview by author, September 13, 2003, Usulutan, El Salvador; Santiago, interview; Joaquin Villalobos, interview by IMEVISION, May 1989, San Salvador, El Salvador. Alejo was an urban organizer for the FMLN, whose duties included liaison with the foreign press, labor unions, and student groups that supported the guerrillas and urban militia units. Villalobos, who headed the rebel faction that produced Radio Venceremos, granted an interview to IMEVISION, the Mexican government television station, late in the war. A transcript of the interview is available at El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 16. Galeas, interview; Americas Watch Committee (U.S.), El Salvador’s Decade of Terror: Human Rights since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, Human Rights Watch Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 39; YSAX. April 9, 1979 San Salvador. UCA Editores; YSAX. July 16, 1979, San Salvador. UCA Editores. YSAX was the Roman Catholic Church radio station. Transcripts of the prewar broadcasts of its daily editorial are available at the library of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador. Ibarra, interview; Leurs, interview; Lopez Ponce, interview; Majano, interview; Bus owner, interview; Urban professional, interview; Teacher, interview; Ulises, interview; Student, interview. 17. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democracy and Security in the Caribbean Basin, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., February 2, 1982, 3. 18. Marjorie Miller, “Salvador Rebel Radio Comes in from the Heat,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1992, D6. 19. Eduardo Sancho, El Salvador: Democracia y Desmilitarizacion, Colección Pensamiento Politico (Mexico City: Ediciones Roque Dalton, 1990), 70. Sancho headed one of the guerrilla factions. 20. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos; Santiago, interview.

194

NOTES

21. Ricardo Sol and Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios “Transnacionales, El Salvador, Medios Masivos y Comunicación Popular, 155–168. 22. Miguel Huezo Mixco, interview by Maria Luisa Morales Martinez, June 1991, Mexico City, transcript. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 23. La Voix De L’oiseau de la Liberte: Historique de Radio Venceremos, Voix Officielle de FMLN, trans. Correspondance de Radio Venceremos en France (Paris: Sisteme Radio Venceremos, 1983), 6. 24. Leurs, interview; Santiago, interview. 25. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 24–25; Ricardo A. Mayorga Duran, “Radio Venceremos: Medio Alternativo de Comunicación de Masas” (licenciatura, Universidad Tecnologica, 1992). The Viking was a 700-watt World War II-era apparatus for high-seas radio communication. Guerrilla supporters in Mexico adapted it for use in broadcasting signals in the shortwave radio band. 26. Santiago, interview; Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad del Izote, 13–19. The diary is the announcer’s contemporaneous recollection of events, which he confirmed and elaborated on in a recent interview. 27. Hector Angel Ibarra Chavez, Historias de Barro y Otros Cuentos de la Guerra en El Salvador (Memorias de un Interncationalista) (Mexico City: Publicaciones Expediente Abierto, 2003), I, 75–76. 28. Santiago, interview; Ibarra Chavez, Historias de Barro, 101–103. 29. Leurs, interview; Santiago, interview. 30. Jonathan Steele, “The Media: A Voice of Defiance They’d Like to Silence/Radio Farabundo Marti, Rebel Voice of El Salvador,” Guardian, April 8, 1985; Wilfredo, interview by author, October 3, 2003; “Secret Radio and Doctors Keep Moving,” New York Times, December 26, 1985, A12. 31. Marinela [pseud.], interview by author, October 1, 2003, San Salvador, El Salvador; Fidel Campos, interview by author, October 2, 2003, San Salvador, El Salvador; Maria Teresa Escalona, interview by author, October 2, 2003, San Salvador, El Salvador; Wilfredo, interview. 32. Santiago, interview; Leurs, interview. 33. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47–66. 34. Adams, “Protest and the Scale Politics of Telecommunications,” 423. 35. El Salvador’s military structure is a single, united command, known by the singular armed force. 36. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 2, 12–13. 37. Alejo, interview; Leurs, interview; Dalton, interview. Santiago alone disagreed with this assessment, insisting that the foreign audience was a minor consideration. 38. Hachten and Hachten, The World News Prism, 110. They have defined the term as “The political effects that newspapers,

NOTES

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

195

broadcasting, film, exchanges of persons, cultural exchanges, and other means of communication can achieve.” Hachten and Hachten, The World News Prism, 114. López Vigil, Las Mil y una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 346–348. Radio Venceremos, November 8, 1981 El Museo de la Palabra; Morales Martinez, “Radio Venceremos, un Medio de Comunicación Alternativa en Latinoamerica,” 86. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 169. Leurs, interview. Urban listeners became even more important for Radio Venceremos after the shortwave signal was complemented by an FM signal in 1986. Radio Venceremos, December 17, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. The importance of foreign support for the stations is evident in posters of the era, now on display in the War Museum in Perquin, where Radio Venceremos was located through much of the war. It also was mentioned by Alejo and Dalton, who were involved in marshaling foreign support for the insurgency. Radio Venceremos, May 28, 1981; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 24, 1988, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Santiago, interview by author, San Salvador, El Salador, September 23, 2003. Santiago, interview; Leurs, interview. López Ponce, interview; Aldana, interview. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 176, 353. Radio Venceremos, March 17, 1984, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, December 30, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Virtually every broadcast contained similar reports. A few examples are Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983; Radio Venceremos, November 19, 1990; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 24, 1988; Radio Farabundo Marti, May 17, 1985; Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989; Radio Venceremos, March 17, 1984, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. “La Carta de Morazan,” 5. When one of her sisters actually was captured, the family was notified by a telephone call rather than through a news broadcast on the radio. Radio Farabundo Martí, March 18, 1982; Radio Farabundo Martí, February 21, 1983; Radio Venceremos, December 31, 1981; Radio Venceremos, May 11, 1986; Harnecker, “De la Insurreccion a la Guerra,” 21; Radio Venceremos, April 12, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, April 20, 1986; Radio Venceremos, November 8, 1981; Radio Venceremos, September 14, 1986; Radio Venceremos, October 29, 1986; Radio Venceremos, October 17, 1986; Radio Venceremos, September 2, 1986; Radio Farabundo Martí, May 31, 1989; Radio Venceremos, May 2, 1986; Radio Venceremos, December 13, 1991; Radio Venceremos, November 11, 1986;

196

54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

NOTES

Radio Venceremos, June 10, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, December 31, 1981; Radio Venceremos, January 3, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democracy and Security in the Caribbean Basin, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., February 2, 1982, 3. United Nations Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, “From Madness to Hope: The 12-year War in El Salvador,” (New York: United Nations, 1993), 114–120; Juanita Darling, “Salvation Born of Slaughter; Raised by the Family of the Salvadoran Soldier Who Spared Him, a Young Man Today Confronts His Own Guerrilla Heritage,” The Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2000, A1. “Indices de Programas Transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril/81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” 391; Radio Farabundo Martí, March 18, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, June 22, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Poster, The Mode of Information, 44. Poster, The Mode of Information, 10. Radio Venceremos, February 13, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. No corroboration of the letter exists. Radio Venceremos, December 31, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, January 24, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, November 21, 1990; Radio Farabundo Martí, October 16, 1986; Radio Farabundo Martí, November 3, 1984; Radio Venceremos, May 17, 1985; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 24, 1988; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 25, 1988; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 26, 1988; Radio Farabundo Martí, March 18, 1982; Radio Venceremos January 15, 1983. Radio Venceremos, September 16, 1988, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, December 10, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, December 15, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, August 17, 1991, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, August 18, 1986; Radio Venceremos, January 15, 1983; Radio Farabundo Martí, March 18, 1982; Radio Venceremos, November 19, 1990; Radio Farabundo Martí, December

NOTES

71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

197

23, 1988; Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Steele, “The Media: A Voice of Defiance They’d Like to Silence/ Radio Farabundo Marti, Rebel Voice of El Salvador.” Teacher, interview; Bus line owner, interview; Ibarra, interview. Ibarra, interview; López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 351. Jack Spence, “The Great Salvador Election Blitz,” The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Report on the Americas 17, no. 4 (1983): 13. Conversely, in 1986, Radio Venceremos warned mayors in eastern El Salvador not to form the civil defense brigades that the national government was requiring of them. Radio Venceremos, April 15, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra. Radio Venceremos, January 13, 1987, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, November 22, 1988, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Alejo, interview. Radio Farabundo Martí, December 26, 1988, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Castañeda, La Utopía Desarmada, 117. Radio Venceremos, January 24, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Socorro Rojo Internacional, International Red Aid, a more important force than the Salvadoran Communist Party, which actually was founded by Guatemalans in 1930. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 21–26. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 170–175, 186, 191–192. Estimates vary from 8,000 to 30,000. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 186–187. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 175–176. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 245, 251; United Press International, December 6, 1980; United Press International, December 4, 1980; United Press International, December 3, 1980; “Angry Leftists Set Bombs, Burn Buses,” United Press International, December 1, 1980. Castañeda, La Utopía Desarmada, 324. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Una Civilización Negada (México, D.F.: Secretaria de Educación Pública: CIESAS, 1987), 10. Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, 187–206. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, x, 74. U.S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Cuban Support for Terrorism and Insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, 97th Cong., 2nd sess.,

198

NOTES

92.

93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

99.

100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

March 12, 1982; Department of State, Communist Interference in El Salvador (February 23, 1981). Huezo Mixco, interview; El Salvador: Clandestine Radio, Media Network; available from http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/clandestine/ (last accessed March 23, 2003). Robert A. Pastor, “The War between the Branches: Explaining U.S. Policy toward Nicaragua, 1979–1989,” in Public Opinion in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Controversy over Contra Aid, ed. Richard Sobel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 227. Department of State, 1981 White Paper. Robert G. Kaiser, “White Paper on El Salvador Is Faulty; Flaws in El Salvador White Paper Raise Questions About Its Analysis,” Washington Post, June 9, 1981, A1; Jonathan Kwitney, “Tarnished Report? Apparent Errors Cloud U.S. ‘White Paper’ on Reds in El Salvador,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1981, A1. The national nickname used by Salvadorans, the name of a South American herd animal that is smaller than a llama. Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, February 13, 1982; Radio Farabundo Martí, May 17, 1985, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; “Indices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril/81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” 197. Radio Venceremos, December 30, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra. Aquino led a nineteenth-century indigenous uprising. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932, 31. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Itubide was emperor of Mexico immediately after independence from Spain and unsuccessfully attempted to claim Central America as part of Mexico. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist revolt of 1932, 16. Radio Venceremos, August 4, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, March 17, 1984, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, El Salvador, April 6, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Farabundo Martí, October 16, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. López Vigíl, Las Mil y una Historias de Radio Venceremos. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.

NOTES

199

109. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 110. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 111. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 112. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1985, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 113. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 181. 114. Carlos Mejia Godoy, “El Salvador.” This is a song sung in coffee houses and not a recorded version or a published score. 115. “Indices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril /81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” 247; Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad del Izote (caption in photo section between 192, 193); Radio Farabundo Martí, February 11, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Teacher, interview; Aldana, interview; Ibarra, interview. 116. Sancho, El Salvador: Democracia y Desmilitarizacion, 71–72. 117. Radio Venceremos, October 18, 1983, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 118. Apparently a reference to Jean Kirkpatrick, the U.S. representative to the United Nations. 119. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 228. No tape or transcript of the broadcast is available. 120. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989. 121. Mario Vargas Llosa, La Tía Julia y el Escribidor (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988), 5th ed. 122. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 119, 178. 123. Radio Farabundo Martí, December 25, 1988; Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1986; March 18, 1984; Radio Venceremos, March 22, 1984; Radio Venceremos, October 18, 1983; Radio Farabundo Martí, December 24, 1988; Radio Venceremos, September 22, 1988; Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1986; Radio Venceremos, March 18, 1984, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 124. Radio Venceremos, April 8, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 125. Radio Venceremos, April 8, 1981; Radio Venceremos, April 9, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. There is no record that any such calls were actually ever made. 126. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 168; MartínBarbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 66. 127. Ellacuria, rector of the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana, was murdered along with five other priests, who also were professors, in 1989. Soldiers were convicted of the murders. United Nations Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, “From Madness to Hope,” 45–53.

200

NOTES

128. Castañeda, La Utopía Desarmada, 236. 129. Harnecker, “De la Insurreccion a la Guerra,” 20. 130. Rogelio Ponseele and María López Vigíl, Muerte y Vida en Morazán 24, 34, 49–53. Testimonial literature is similar to “as told to” biographies that are written as if the subject were speaking directly, but is actually a close collaboration between the subject and the writer. Juanita Darling, “Church Seeks Way Amid Shifts in El Salvador,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1995, 1, 10; Radio Venceremos, January 10, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 131. Radio Venceremos, December 31, 1981; Radio Venceremos, January 24, 1981; Radio Venceremos, March 21, 1981; Radio Venceremos, February 18, 1987; Radio Venceremos, November 19, 1990, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; “Indices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril /81 al 27 de Junio del 1981” 172, 206, 212, 223, 252, 265; Santiago, interview. 132. Ponseele and López Vigíl, Muerte y Vida en Morazán, 104. 133. Santiago, interview; Ponseele and López Vigíl, Muerte y Vida en Morazán, 64; Radio Venceremos, November 22, 1989, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; “Indices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril/81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” 123, 176, 226, 241. 134. Radio Venceremos, April 12, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 135. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989, Radio Vencermos, November 22, 1989; Radio Venceremos, August 17, 1991; Radio Vencermos, November 19, 1990; Radio Venceremos, November 21, 1990, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 136. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 137. Radio Venceremos, December 9, 1987, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Ponseele and López Vigíl, Muerte y Vida en Morazán, 64. 138. Radio Venceremos, April 8, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 139. Radio Venceremos, May 28, 1981; Radio Venceremos, June 22, 1982; Radio Farabundo Martí, February 3, 1984; Radio Venceremos, September 16, 1988; Radio Venceremos, September 22, 1988; Radio Venceremos, September 22, 1988, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 140. Radio Venceremos, September 15, 1985, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 141. Radio Venceremos, May 2, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 142. Popkin, “Media and Revolutionary Crisis,” 16. 143. Sancho, El Salvador: Democracia y Desmilitarizacion, 66. 144. Morales Martinez, “Radio Venceremos, un Medio de Comunicación Alternativa en Latinoamerica,” 40–41.

NOTES

201

145. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 182. 146. Radio Venceremos, February 12, 1987; Radio Venceremos, January 25, 1982; Radio Venceremos, February 27, 1981, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Santaigo, interview; Leurs, interview. 147. Huezo Mixco, interview. 148. Huezo Mixco, interview; Santiago, interview by author, May 6, 2002; One clear example of information sharing is a hookup between the two stations for a joint broadcast to deny government reports that the Radio Farabundo Martí transmitter had been captured. Radio Venceremos, May 3, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 149. Leurs, interview; Soley and Nichols, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting, 252–253; Dalton, interview; Santiago, interview. 150. Santiago, interview by author, September 29, 2003, San Salvador; Huezo Mixco, interview. 151. Radio Venceremos was broadcast by the Revolutionary Army of the People, known by the initials ERP. 152. Harnecker, “De La Insurrección a la Guerra,” 20. 153. Harnecker, “De la Insurrección a la Guerra,” 20; Santiago, interview. 154. Harnecker, “De la Insurrección a la Guerra,” 20. 155. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 156. Huezo Mixco, interview. 157. Ulises, interview. 158. Harnecker, “De la Insurrección a la Guerra,” 20. 159. Harnecker, “De La Insurreccion a La Guerra,” 20; “Clandestine Radio Venceremos Returns to Air,” Associated Press, December 25, 1981. 160. Santiago, interview; War Museum at Perquin. 161. Susan Leffler, “Ragtag Salvadoran Rebel Radio Reports on War from Battlezone,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1988, E3. 162. Dalton, interview. 163. Dalton, interview. 164. Radio Venceremos, December 24, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 165. Radio Venceremos, December 24, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen; Ibarra, interview; Alejo, interview; Dalton, interview; Majano, interview. 166. Aldana, interview; Urban professional, interview; Teacher, interview. 167. Dalton, interview; Huezo Mixco, interview; Ulises, interview; Soley and Nichols, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting, 252–253. 168. Lenin, “Where to Begin,” 22. 169. Radio Venceremos, August 18, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 170. Radio Venceremos, November 11, 1986, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.

202

NOTES

171. Radio Venceremos, December 13, 1991, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 172. Radio Venceremos, January 4, 1992, El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 173. Leurs, interview; Most of those videos and the footage used to produce them are archived at El Museo de la Palabra. 174. Santiago, interview. 175. Ponciano Castellanos, “El Rol de la Sociedad Civil en los Procesos de Paz ee Guatemala y El Salvador: Procesos De Negociación Comparados,” Panorama Centroamericano: Temas y Documentos de Debate No. 64 (1996): 51–60, 146–202.

5


1. Tim Golden, “Mexican Troops Battling Rebels; Toll at Least 57,” The New York Times, January 3, 1994, A1; Houston Chronicle News Services, “Six Killed in Attacks in Mexico; Indian Rebels Storm Four Towns, Declare War on Military,” The Houston Chronicle, January 2, 1994, A1. 2. David Adams, “Fierce Fighting Leaves 55 Dead in Mexico Rebellion,” The Times, January 3, 1994, 1; Oscar Camacho Guzman, “Emitió un Mensaje Por Radio: Definó el Ejercito Zapatista sus Motivos y Acción Política,” La Jornada, January 2, 1994, 6; David Clark Scott, “Mexican Indians Seize Towns and Demand Land in Challenge to Salinas,” Christian Science Monitor, January 1, 1994, 1; Phil Davidson, “Mexico Rebels Invoke the Name of Zapata,” The Independent, January 3, 1994, 9; Reuter-AP-CP, “Death Toll Rises in Mexico Battle Armed Rebels Cite NAFTA among Grievances,” Toronto Star, January 3, 1994, A1; Tod Robberson, “55 Killed in Fighting in Southern Mexico; Army Surprised by Indian Force’s Attack,” The Washington Post, 3 January 1994, A1; Oscar Camacho Guzman, “‘Declaracion de Guerra’ del Ejercito Zapatista en Chiapas,” La Jornada, January 2, 1994, 8. 3. Harry Cleaver, “Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle,” in Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. John Holloway and Eloína Peláez (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 86; Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 10–11. 4. “The traveling of a news item through certain communications channels [depends] on the fact that certain areas within the channels function . . . as ‘gates’ . . . gate sections are governed by either impartial rules or ‘gate keepers,’ and in the latter case an individual or group is ‘in power’ for making the decision between ‘in’ and ‘out.’” David Manning White, “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News,” Journalism Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1950): 383. 5. Cleaver, “Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle,” 87.

NOTES

203

6. One example of inviting reader contributions to Web site discussions is Zapatista Net of Autonomy and Liberation. Zapatista Autonomous Zone via (last accessed February 13, 2003). 7. José Ángel Gurría, Mexico City speech, April 25, 1995. 8. Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 5–7. 9. Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 326. 10. Rosario Castellanos, Ciudad Real, (México, D.F.: Organización Editorial Novaro, 1974); B. Traven, General from the Jungle (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); B. Traven, La Rebelión de los Colgados, trans. Pedro Geoffroy Rivas (México, D.F.: Ediciones Insignia, 1938); B. Traven, Puente en la Selva (México, D.F.: A.P. Marquez, 1941). 11. Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas, “Waiting for Justice in Chiapas” (Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas: Boston, 1994), 11; Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 3. 12. Juanita Darling, “Aircraft Strafe, Bomb Fleeing Mexican Rebels,” The Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1994, A1; Juanita Darling, “With Chiapas Cease-Fire, Political Fallout Begins Mexico,” The Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1994, A1; John Womack, Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New York: New Press, 1999), 61–189. 13. Jan Rus, “¿Guerra de Castas Según Quién? Indios y Ladinos en los Sucesos de 1869,” in Rebeliones Indígenas en Chiapas (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México: Ediciones Piratas, 2002); Juan Pedro Viqueira, “Las Causas de un Rebelión India: Chiapas, 1712,” in Rebeliones Indígenas en Chiapas (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México: Ediciones Piratas, 2002). 14. Villafuerte, interview; Xóchitl Leyva Solano, “¡Chiapas Es México! Autonomías Indígenas: Luchas Políticas con una Gramática Moral,” Iconos, no. 11 (2001): 111; Gaspar Morquecho Escamilla, “Los Indios en un Proceso de Organización: La Organización Indígena en Los Altos de Chiapas, ORIACH” (Licenciatura, Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, 1992). 15. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 193. 16. Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas, “Waiting for Justice in Chiapas,” 10; Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 7. 17. Juanita Darling, “Mexican Revolt in 2d Day,” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1994, A1. 18. Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” v. 19. Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 9. 20. Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas, “Waiting for Justice in Chiapas,” 8; Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 8. 21. Holloway and Peláez, Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, 4. 22. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 176.

204

NOTES

23. Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch/Americas, “Waiting for Justice in Chiapas,” 15, 67–96. 24. “Versión de la Propuesta del EZLN para que se Inicie el Diálogo,” La Jornada, January 11, 1994, 10. Emphasis added. 25. General Command of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, January 13, 1994, (President of the United States of North America Mr. Bill Clinton, the North American Congress, the people of the United States of North America) via (last accessed March 15, 2003). 26. General Command of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, January 13, 1994, (President of the United States of North America Mr. Bill Clinton, the North American Congress, the people of the United States of North America) via (last accessed March 15, 2003). 27. Subcommander Marcos, interview by Ana Laura Hernández (Amor y Rabia/Mexico), Eugenio Aguilera (Nightcrawlers Anarchist Black Cross), and Pablo Salazar Devereaux (Haitian Information Bureau), May 11, 1994, Somewhere in the Lacandon Jungle, via (last accessed February 11, 2004). 28. Subcommander Marcos, “We are Surrounded” April 21, 1994, via (last accessed February 11, 2004). 29. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 169–175. 30. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 170. Emphasis added. 31. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 292. 32. General Command of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Segunda Declaración de la Selva Lacandona” June 10, 1994, via (last accessedMarch 15, 2003). 33. General Command of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Segunda Declaración de la Selva Lacandona,” June 10, 1994 via (last accessed March 15, 2003). 34. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 76. 35. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 79. This apparently refers to reports that newscasters at three broadcast stations had been told not to use the term Zapatista and to refer to the insurgents as “armed groups” and “delinquents.” “El Termino Ejercito Zapatista. Prohibido en Radio y Television,” La Jornada, January 12, 1994, 16. 36. “Cese Unilateral del Fuego en Chiapas,” La Jornada, January 13, 1994, 1; Anthony DePalma, “Mexico Orders Cease-Fire and Offers

NOTES

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

205

Rebels Amnesty,” New York Times, January 13, 1994, A3; Alonso Urrutia and Victor Ballinas, “Un ‘Alto a la Masacre’ Encabezó la Marcha por la Paz en Chiapas,” La Jornada, January 13, 1994, 10. Villafuerte, interview. !Zapatistas!: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution, 125. Tallie Naumann, “Independent Groups Prepare for Security at Mexican Peace Talks,” United Press International, February 19, 1994. Xóchitl Leyva Solano, “De las Cañadas a Europa: Niveles, Actores y Discursos del Nuevo Movimiento Zapatista (Nmz) 1994–1997,” Thule, no. 8/9 (2000): 309. “First Communiqué on the Results of the Consultations” June 3, 1994, via (last accessed July 15, 2004). Cleaver. “Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle”; Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 11. Daniel Waggoner. “Potholes on the ‘Information Superhighway,’” Practicing Law Institute, March–April 1994, 297. Dudley Althaus, “Zedillo Orders the Arrest of Rebel Leaders,” Houston Chronicle, February 10, 1995, A1; Leslie Crawford, “Crackdown Ordered on Mexican Rebels,” Financial Times, February 10, 1995, 6. Hugo Perales, “Comunicado EZLN 09-02-95” February 13, 1995, via (last accessed March 13, 2003). Juanita Darling, “Mexican Troops Deployed in Bid to Crush Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1995, A1; Juanita Darling, “Mexico Takes Control of Rebel Strongholds,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1995, A8. Chuck Goodwin, <[email protected]> “Massacre in Chiapas” February 11, 1995 via (last accessed March 12, 2003). AFSC/Immigration Law Enforcement, “Ultimo Comunicado del EZLN” February 12, 1995 <[email protected]; Cc:[email protected]> via (last accessed March 13, 2003). “Ni Samuel Ruiz García Ni Jorge Santiago Están Ligados con el EZLN,” La Jornada, February 25, 1995, 17. The listservs also adapted to the emergency by posting the communiqué in Spanish first, then supplying a translated version when it became available. Previous communiqués had not been posted until translated. Hugo Perales, “La Jornada, Entrevista Ana

206

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

NOTES

María” February 4, 1995 via (last accessed March 13, 2003). Tod Robberson, “Mexican Rebels Using a High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support,” Washington Post, February 20, 1995, A1; Juanita Darling, “Chiapas Villagers Say They Fled Army Brutality,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1995, A1; Hugo Perales, “La Jornada, Entrevista Ana María” February 4, 1995, via (last accessed March 13, 2003). Poster, The Mode of Information, 116. Jose A. Briones, “Internet Newspapers/ Media E-Mail List” February 13, 1995, via (last accessed March 12, 2003). Jose A. Briones, “Chiapas Internet Press Kit” February 14, 1995 via (last accessed March 12, 2003). Anthony DePalma, “Mexican Army Restricting Access to Rebel Zone,” New York Times, February 14, 1995, A8; Tod Robberson, “Mexican Rebels Using a High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support,” Washington Post, February 20, 1995, A1; Russell Watson et al., “When Words Are the Best Weapon,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995, 36. Leyva Solano, “De las Cañadas a Europa: Niveles, Actores y Discursos del Nuevo Movimiento Zapatista,” 302; Bruno López, “Balancing Act: Surviving as a Television Reporter in Mexico,” in A Culture of Collusion: An Inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William A. Orme Jr. (Miami: North-South Center Press, Univ. of Miami, 1997), 90–92. López covered the Zapatista uprising as a correspondent for Univisión, Televisa’s U.S. subsidiary. Subcommander Marcos, On Independent Media January 31, 1997 via (last accessed September 13, 2003). Wager and Schulz, “The Awakening,” 11. Villafuerte, interview. Leyva Solano, “De las Cañadas a Europa: Niveles, Actores y Discursos del Nuevo Movimiento Zapatista,” 302. Poster, The Mode of Information, 6, 16, 67. Oventic reception committee, interview by author, October 24, 2003. Ibarra community, interview by author, November 8, 2003. Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, “Brigadas Civiles de Observacion por la Paz y los Derechos Humanos,” via

NOTES

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

207

(last accessed March 30, 2004). Antonia Álvarez, interview by author, San Cristóbal de las Casas, October 17, 2003. Néstor García Canclini, Arte Popular y Sociedad en América Latina (México: Grijalbo, 1977), 69. Nuevo Ibarra school teacher, interview by author, November 8, 2003; Ibarra community, interview. Xóchitl Leyva Solano, “Regional, Communal and Organizational Transformations in Las Cañadas,” Latin American Perspectives 2, no. 117 (2001): 27–29. Ibarra community, interview. Brady and Marcus, interview by author, November 9, 2003. Lucila Vargas, Social Uses and Radio Practices: The Use of Participatory Radio by Ethnic Minorities in Mexico, International Communication and Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 15, 66. Vargas, Social Uses and Radio Practices, 242–243. Ibarra community, interview. Daniel, interview by author, October 30, 2003. He coordinates the San Cristóbal de las Casas office of the Chiapas Media Project. Israel, interview by Chiapas Media Project, date uncertain, early 2003. Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria, El Esfuerzo de los Indígenas de Mut Vitz (San Juan de la Libertad, Chiapas, Mexico: 2000), video; Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria, Tour ‘99 (Ejido Morelia, Chiapas, Mexico: 1999), video. Moisés, interview by Chiapas Media Project, date uncertain, early 2003. Moisés, interview. Moisés, interview. Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria, Educación en Resistencia (Francisco Gómez, Chiapas, México: 2000), video. Ibarra community, interview. Israel, interview. David, Canta David del EZLN y su Guitarra, vols. 1 and 2. Compact disk. Homemade rccordings, not professional, commercial works. Los Dos Vientos de Voz y Fuego, vol. 2, EZLN, Chiapas, Mexico. Compact disk. Oventic reception committee, interview.

6

Refuting the Revolution

1. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 316–335; Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad del Izote, 248–253. A less detailed version of the explosion was confirmed by the Salvadoran military in United Press International, “Bomb Concealed in a Radio Is Blamed

208

NOTES

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

in Salvador Crash,” New York Times, March 7, 1985, A10; News Services and Staff Reports, “Bomb Reported Cause of Salvadoran Crash,” The Washington Post, December 11, 1984, A24; and by guerrillas in Dan Williams, “Foreign Visitors Greeted by Clowns, String Band; Salvador Rebels Stage ‘Fiesta’,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1985, A14. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 143. Monterrosa routinely referred to Radio Venceremos as “scorpion on our ass.” “Índices de Programas Transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril /81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” (Morazán, El Salvador: Radio Venceremos, 1981), 116. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, April 4, 1981. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad del Izote, 96, 104. “Clandestine Radio Venceremos Returns to Air,” Associated Press, December 25, 1981; John E. Newhagen, United Press International, December 27, 1981; Raymond Bonner, “Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village,” The New York Times, January 27, 1982, A1; Alma Guillermoprieto, “Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing,” Washington Post, January 27, 1982, A1. For U.S. aid to El Salvador to continue, the Reagan administration was required to certify to Congress every six months that the government there was making progress in assuring respect for human rights. Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democracy and Security in the Caribbean Basin, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., February 2, 1982. Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1982, 26; United Nations Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, “From Madness to Hope,” 114–121. Radio Venceremos, March 22, 1984; Radio Venceremos, March 18, 1984. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. López Vigil, Las Mil y Una Historias de Radio Venceremos, 316–335; Henríquez Consalvi, La Terquedad del Izote, 248–253; United Press International, “Bomb Concealed in a Radio Is Blamed in Salvador Crash,” A10; News Service and Staff Reports, “Bomb Reported Cause of Salvadoran Crash,” A24; Williams, “Foreign Visitors Greeted by Clowns, String Band; Salvador Rebels Stage ‘Fiesta’,” A14. Marinela, interview; Escalona, interview; Mayorga, interview. Radio Venceremos, January 24, 1981. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, July 5, 1982. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1986. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Aldana, interview.

NOTES

209

16. YSAX, April 9, 1975; YSAX, April 16, 1979; YSAX, May 11, 1979. Universidad Centroamericana, San Salvador; June Carolyn Erlick, “Right Wing Bombs El Salvador Catholic Radio Center, Library,” National Catholic Reporter, February 29, 1980, 1. 17. Radio Venceremos, February 14, 1981. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. 18. AFSC/Immigration Law Enforcement, “Ultimo Comunicado del EZLN” February 12, 1995 <[email protected]. mx;Cc: [email protected]> via ( last accessed March 13, 2003). 19. Massing, “Nicaragua’s Free-Fire Journalism,” 33. 20. Nichols, “The News Media,” 185–86. 21. Nichols, “The News Media,” 188. 22. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 94–95; Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, “The Death of La Prensa,” Foreign Affairs 5 (Winter 1986–1987): 383. 23. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 97–98. 24. Radio Venceremos, November 17, 1989. El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen. Joseph Mulligan, a U.S. Jesuit who lived in Nicaragua and arrived in San Salvador shortly after the murders, also reported to readers of a U.S. Roman Catholic newspaper that witnesses told him the military radio broadcast threats against the priests. Joseph E. Mulligan, “The Blood of Martyrs: The Seed of Hope and Commitment,” America, February 2, 1990, 145. 25. Because the site now belongs to a dating service, the only reference available is a third-hand account. Commandante Null “Mexico Paid off Reporters Covering Chiapas” Mar 19, 2000 via http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ mexico/reports/journal_paid_mar00.html (last accessed April 4, 2004). The Mexican Army also compiled files on about eighty reporters who were graded as positive, negative, or neutral. I was among the reporters listed. 26. “Burn!” June 20, 2000 (last accessed April 4, 2004). 27. “Burn!” April 2002 (last accessed April 4, 2004). This example is meant only to demonstrate the advantage that using a new mode of information offers rebels, not to suggest that there are no significant differences between the Colombian guerrillas and the Zapatistas. 28. Santiago, interview. 29. Montenegro, interview. 30. “Índices de programas transmisión Radio Venceremos del 2 de Abril/81 al 27 de Junio del 1981,” (Morazán, El Salvador: Radio Venceremos, 1981), 116, 277. 31. Huezo Mixco, interview.

210

NOTES

32. Expatriate [pseud.], interview by author, Usulatán, El Salvador, September 13, 2003; López Ponce, interview; Student [pseud.], interview. 33. Hachten and Hachten, The World News Prism, 30. 34. Santiago, interview; Leurs, interview; Alejo, interview. 35. Aguilar, interview; Barbosa, interview; Lara, interview. 36. López Ponce, interview; Student [pseud.], interview; Urban professional [pseud.], interview; Teacher [pseud.], interview. 37. Bus line owner [pseud.], interview. 38. “Clandestine Radio Venceremos Returns to Air,” Associated Press, December 25, 1981; John E. Newhagen, United Press International, December 27, 1981; Steele, “The Media: A Voice of Defiance They’d Like to Silence/Radio Farabundo Martí, Rebel Voice of El Salvador.”

7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.


Poster, The Mode of Information, 6. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. Poster, The Mode of Information, 62. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 34. Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 67–68. Poster, The Mode of Information, 45. De Castro, interview. Castañeda, La Utopia Desarmada, 127. Jones, “Death of Barricada.” Aguilar, interview; Lara, interview; Barbosa, interview. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. Radio Venceremos, February 13, 1981. Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982. This invitation was extended in virtually every broadcast. Some examples are Radio Venceremos, January 15, 1983; Radio Venceremos, March 18, 1984; Radio Venceremos, August 18, 1986; Radio Venceremos, September 21, 1986; Radio Venceremos, June 21, 1982. Radio Venceremos, April 14, 1986. Poster, The Mode of Information, 46. Poster, The Mode of Information, 15–16. Zapatista Net of Autonomy and Liberation. Zapatista Autonomous Zone. Web page inviting reader contributions to Web site discussions. (last accessed February 13, 2003). Leyva Solano, “De las Cañadas a Europa: Niveles, Actores y Discursos del Nuevo Movimiento Zapatista.” Marcus, interview; Brady, interview. Escalona, interview; Santiago, interview; Ibarra Chavez, Historias de Barro, I.

NOTES

211

22. I witnessed the beginning of a similar contact between Colombian guerrillas and potential international supporters during the first years of the aborted 1998–2002 peace process in Colombia. A comparison of the Colombia and Chiapas cases requires further investigation. 23. Huezo Mixco, interview; Santiago, interview; Dalton, interview; Alejo, interview. 24. Castells, Identity, 79. Emphasis in original. 25. Cardenal, La Revolución Perdida, 650, 652, 657. 26. De Castro, interview; Santiago, interview; Escalona, interview.


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Inde x

audience, 1, 2, 13, 24, 44, 84, 86, 88, 99, 149, 152 composition, 22–3, 25, 38, 68, 69, 76, 78–9, 89–91, 113, 153, 160 reaction, 17, 19, 20, 22, 76, 82, 98, 154, 157, 162, 165 recollections, 4, 72–3, 76, 88, 92–3, 96–8, 108, 110, 154 Azcarraga Milmo, Emilio, 49

Despertador Americano, El, 32–3, 38, 125

Barricada, 4, 14, 16, 21, 24, 25, 55–8, 61–4, 66–75, 80–2, 149–51, 154, 158–61, 165, 168 Barricada Internacional, 14, 68, 69, 76–9, 160 Bustamante, Carlos María, 32, 54, 135 Buzón Popular, 72–3, 78, 159–60

Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), 21, 83–6, 98, 101, 104, 106, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117, 125, 161, 167 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, 15, 137

Cardenal, Ernesto, 15, 59, 64–6, 111, 167 Cardenal, Fernando, 55, 64, 66 Chamorro family (publishers), 54, 61, 149 Carlos Fernando, 25, 68, 75 Fruto, 38–9, 43 Perdro Joaquín, 44–5, 59, 61 Violeta Barrios de, 80, 150 Chiapas, 3, 4, 5, 9, 15, 21, 23, 25, 29, 35, 52, 121–4, 127, 130, 135–44, 146, 149, 151, 152, 154–5, 163, 164, 168 Chiapas Media Project, 24, 26, 139, 140–1, 163 Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, 44

El Salvador, 1, 4–6, 9, 11, 15–16, 21–4, 25, 29, 35–6, 42–3, 45–7, 54, 57–8, 60, 62, 83–120, 145–9, 151, 152, 154, 162, 165, 168 See also massacres Ellacuria, Ignacio, 46, 110, 112

Galeas, Marvin, 46, 54, 87, 109 Gardner, Ava, 44–5 Gardner, Mary, 43, 52 gatekeeper, 14, 121, 125, 136, 152 Gramsci, Antonio, 7–10, 16, 17, 46, 48, 53–4, 56, 84, 152, 167 Güegüence, 30–1, 32, 60, 79, 162 hegemony, 7–9, 10, 17, 34, 35, 41, 46, 48, 53, 58, 82, 92, 100, 106, 123, 142, 151 alternative, 12–13, 22, 54–7, 59, 68, 81, 84, 88, 111, 113, 125, 128–30, 135, 144, 155, 157, 158 Henríquez Consalves, Carlos, see Santiago

224

INDEX

Hernández Martínez, Maximiliano, 43, 100 historiography, 2, 7, 14, 22, 48, 58–9, 60, 71–2, 84, 99–101, 102–4 “deep” nation, 101, 127–8 pre-Columbian, 30 Hobsbawm, Eric, 4, 8, 26 humor, uses in revolutionary media, 22, 107–10, 161 Ibarra, Chiapas, Mexico, 26, 133–4, 137–42, 143, 176–7 identity, 6, 9, 12, 14, 22, 30, 68, 99–101, 107, 125, 134, 161 imagined community, 14, 18, 23, 56, 79, 118, 122, 125, 136, 164 deliberately creating, 13–15, 19, 22, 84, 89, 91, 97, 157–8, 162, 165 independence in media, 27, 49, 54, 135, 164 information, 79, 81, 97, 98 as a source of power, 11–12, 59, 70, 84, 89, 125, 132, 152, 155, 167 control of, 10–11, 41, 43, 63, 73–4, 85, 92, 99, 111, 140 See also mode of information international advocacy network, 13, 22–4, 79, 89–90, 127, 128–9, 132–4, 135, 136, 154, 157, 160, 163, 164, 167 internacionalistas, 16, 22, 23, 76, 87, 88, 164, 168 See also peace campers Jesuits (Company of Jesus), 29, 64 murders of, 96, 112, 151, 175 Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), 46, 100, 112 Jornada, La, 51, 54, 121, 126, 132, 134, 176 Latona, Carmen, 84, 87, 93 liberation theology, 15–16, 65

catechists, 16, 106, 111, 112 Christian base communities, 16 See also Solentiname literacy, 57, 62, 124 campaign, 64, 66–7, 69, 165 and democratic participation, 57, 65–7, 71, 80–2 Manifest Destiny, 36–7, 40 Martí, Farabundo, 60, 83, 89, 99–100, 102, 104, 107, 161 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 8, 12, 21, 30, 63, 67, 70, 75, 81, 90, 98, 101, 107, 109, 110, 114, 124, 159 massacres El Juquillo, 94 El Mozote, 93–4, 96, 111, 147, 151, 154 La Matanza, 4, 99–100, 107 Palo Blanco, 94 El Rosario, 94 Tlatelolco, 47, 49–50, 52 Melucci, Alberto, 11, 65, 70, 92, 125 Mentor Nicaragüense, El, 38–9 Miskitos, 76–8 mode(s) of information advantages of, 22–3, 46, 54, 56, 59, 76, 97, 113, 118, 122, 132 contemporaneous nature of, 136, 140–2, 144, 157–8 definition of, 2, 17–20 limitations of, 20, 24, 42, 46, 56, 81, 98, 113, 122, 144 compare mode of production mode of production, 2, 17, 122, 144 Monroe Doctrine, 8, 33, 36, 38 Monterrosa, Diego, 145–8, 151, 176 Morazán, El Salvador, 85, 87, 89, 93, 96, 100, 111, 112, 115, 146, 147 Morelos y Pavon, José María, 32, 127

INDEX

music, uses in revolution, 3, 88, 99, 107, 114, 118, 142–3, 166 compact disks (CD), 26, 142 corridos, 42, 50, 142 Mejia Godoy family, 79, 108 Nueva Trova, 108 and radio, 48, 49, 54, 88, 99, 107, 108, 116, 136, 140, 166, 174 national identity, contesting, 9, 12, 60, 69–70, 99–101, 106–7, 127–8, 151 Nicaragua, 4–6, 15, 22, 30–1, 35, 38–41, 43–5, 55–82, 87, 149–51, 160–1, 166, 167 Novedades (Nicaragua), 44, 55 Oventic, Chiapas, Mexico, 26, 137–40, 142–3 peace campers, 26, 137–9, 154, 163–4 Pinto family (publishers), 42–3, 46, 54 PIPSA, 48 Ponseele, Rogelio, 84, 111 Popkin, Jeremy, 2, 4, 113 Poster, Mark, 2, 20, 56–8, 65, 95, 98, 106, 122, 136, 159, 167 See also mode of information Prensa, La, 43–5, 54, 59, 61–3, 66, 70, 72, 73, 79–81, 149–51, 152, 166 Proceso, 50, 51, 54, 134 public sphere, 12, 20, 34, 44, 45–63, 74, 75, 81, 85, 92, 113, 154, 160–2, 165, 166 definition, 11 Radio Farabundo Martí, 21, 25, 84–5, 87–8, 94, 97, 98, 99, 104, 107, 108, 112, 114, 116, 153, 162, 165 Radio Venceremos, 12, 14–16, 21, 25, 46, 83–6, 88, 90, 92–9,

225

103–18, 146–8, 151, 153, 162, 165 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 73, 79, 84, 89, 102, 147, 192 revolutionary media definition, 2, 10 in recruitment, 9, 26, 40–1, 74, 84, 91, 95–6, 154, 157, 159, 164 in weapons training, 154 simulating dialogue, 72–3, 78–9, 95–7, 121, 158–60, 162, 163 see also alternative hegemony, imagined community, historiography, humor Romero, Oscar Arnulfo, 15, 46, 96, 101, 106, 108, 111, 161 Ruiz, Samuel, 15, 137 Sandinista Nacional Liberation Front (FSLN), 15, 16, 21, 22–3, 55–6, 59–61, 65, 75, 80, 99, 101, 150, 160–1, 167 Sandino, Augusto C., 45, 58, 60, 71–2 Santiago (Carlos Henríquez Consalvi), 25, 87, 93, 95–8, 104–6, 108, 110, 111, 117, 146, 151, 152, 164, 168 Scherer, Julio, 47, 51 Solentiname, 15, 64–6, 82, 111 Somoza dynasty, 4, 43–5, 55, 76 Anastasio Somoza Garcia, 44, 58, 60 Anastasio Somoza Debayle, 45, 66, 67 Luis Somoza Debayle, 59 study circles, 70, 82, 90, 160, 161, 166 dialogue in, 22, 27, 56, 68, 70–1, 81, 159 Televisa, 49–51, 134–5 Tiempo, El, 24, 53, 54, 126, 130, 132, 134, 135

226

INDEX

Vazquez, Genaro, 13, 16, 50, 87 Villafuerte, Concepción, 24, 52–4, 130, 135, 141 Walker, William, 36, 39–41, 71 YSAX, 15, 46, 148–9

Zapata, Emiliano, 3, 9, 122–3 Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), 3, 4, 9, 14, 16, 21, 23–4, 26, 49, 118, 121–44, 149, 152–5, 163–4, 165–7, 168 Zedillo, Ernesto, 3, 131–3

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