Abstract
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.
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Notes
Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production vs. Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 164.
Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press) 1990. 16–17.
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.
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.
I filed from Chiapas daily from January 3 to January 14, 1994, with most of those articles appearing on page Al 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.
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.
Tod Robberson, “Mexican Rebels Using a High-Tech Weapon; Internet Helps Rally Support,” Washington Post, February 20, 1995, A1.
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 235. His exact phrase is, “A page in history has been turned.”
Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971), 13–14.
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.
Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2 (Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 71.
Some examples are Eduardo H. Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina, 36a corr. y aum. ed. (Mexico, 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); Richard 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).
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.
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.
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.
Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994).
Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 6.
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.
Jorge G. Castañeda, La Utopia Desarmada, 2a ed. (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1995), 234–235.
Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements, 37.
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.
Jesús Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations (London; Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1993), 208–209.
Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategías para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad (Barcelona: Editorial Paidós SAICF, 2001), 14.
John Holloway and Eloína Peláez, Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London; Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998), 4.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 120.
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).
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, “Where to Begin,” in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, ed. Victor Jerome (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1961), 20–21.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, What Is to Be Done? trans. Robert Service, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 143–168.
Alan O’Connor, “Radios Populares en America Latina,” in Los Radios Mineros de Bolivia, ed. Lupe Cajías Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (La Paz, Bolivia: CIMCA-UNESCO, 1989), 134–135.
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).
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 176.
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.
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.
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).
John Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), 33.
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.
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.’”
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.
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.
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.
Teófilo Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People: Testimonies of Faith from Nicaragua (Maryknoll, NY; London: Orbis Books; Zed Press, 1983), 19.
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.
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).
José Ignacio López Vigil, Las Mily 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.
Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932; Gregorio Selser, Sandino (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1970).
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.
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (London: Profile Books, 2003), 180–181.
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.
Juanita Darling, “Re-Imagining the Nation: Revolutionary Media and Historiography in Mesoamerica,” Journalism History 32 ( Winter 2007–2008): 239.
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.
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, 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.
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.
Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York, Toronto: Free Press; Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993), x.
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© 2008 Juanita Darling
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Darling, J. (2008). Media and Revolution. In: Latin America, Media, and Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612006_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612006_1
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