Community Radio Stations (Brasil)

Brasil's community radio stations have their own special features, achievements—and a record of civil disobedience. They are public, with no money-making goals, and historically created and run, in most cases, collectively. They perform an important role in the process of informing and mobilizing around issues that concern the lives of impoverished and marginalized social sectors.

Their activities began after more than 2 decades of the military dictatorship imposed on the country beginning in 1964 in the context of social movement activism, of community associations, and of progressive sectors of Christian churches, which were seeking to find solutions to major social problems and mobilizing in struggles to reestablish democracy.

Their programming is alert to the public interest, is responsive to organized groups from subordinate classes and/or their localities, or contributes to their social development. Among other items, they broadcast cultural materials created from among the same groups their programs aim to serve. They function as informal “schools” for media practice. They struggle to acquire the right of freedom of expression by operating and the empowering technologies that help to make it feasible.

Brasil has four contrasting models: community licensed stations, unlicensed free stations (or free community stations), loudspeaker stations, and Internet community stations.

The licensed stations transmit on low power FM, are managed by local community organizations, and are meant to reach small urban and rural areas. They are governed by Law 9.612 (1998) and regulated by Decree 2.615 (1998), which permits them to function solely in the name of community associations or nongovernmental organizations. The same law requires a minimum of five local legally registered nonprofits to form a single association with the objective of running the frequency. The Federal Ministry of Communications authorizes community stations.

Free stations operate the same way, but without a license. Conservative writers call them “pirate” or “clandestine” stations, but the stations reject both terms, since they have no financial goals and publicize their locations and frequencies. It should be emphasized that Brasil's FM community stations came into being without legal protection in the 1970s and 1980s (the law is dated 1998). Hundreds of thousands continue in this mode. While illegal under the law, they are socially valid [Page 141]by reason of the emancipatory work they develop.

Loudspeaker stations are also known as radio mailboxes or radio trumpets. They are small grassroots sound systems that transmit their messages through loudspeakers or sound amplifiers. They are fixed to public lamp posts or other tall objects and on church towers. There is evidence of these dating back to the 1950s, but they blossomed in the 1980s. They are a particular type of “station” connected to social movements and community associations, such as churches (especially Catholic churches), and are used at times by media activists on behalf of citizens and communities for information, mobilization, and education, to challenge the blockages placed on legal use of the spectrum.

In other words, with no possibility of sharing the FM or AM spectrum, and at various moments in Brasil's political history when violent repression was launched against anyone daring to offend against the broadcasting laws, alternative communication channels were created, community radio being one. Its first emergence was as “people's radio” or “community radio” via loudspeakers, preceded by megaphones and then FM community radio on a specific frequency, and then by community FM proper, as specified in the 1998 law. Recently it has adopted Internet and web radio.

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