Smith Journal – January 2019

059 SMITH JOURNAL

2016, the police turned up again. “It was

difficult to see a way forward after that,”

Martina cedes. Antena Negra now faced a

choice: fight the government in the courts,

or look for alternative ways to distribute its

content. Social media, perhaps inevitably,

won out, and today the group is most active

on Facebook – an interesting footnote to the

conversation that rages in English-speaking

countries about the social network’s corrosion

of civil society and democracy.

These days Argentina’s alternative media

collectives – both TV- and radio-based – face

a more prosaic factor in their fight for survival:

gentrification. While buildings with 20 years

of continuous occupation are usually given

over to their tenants, the current government

is so gung-ho for development that, in early

2018, it sold El Cid to private developers.

Antena Negra will need to be out by 2019

• and Martina says that it’s proving very
  difficult to find a new location.

Whether Antena Negra and DTL! are

equipped to withstand the effects of political

and urban renewal remains an open question.

If they don’t, it won’t be for a lack of need. The

Argentinian government has so far failed to

tame inflation, and the economy is tanking

once more. With inequality looking set to

continue apace, alternative community-based

media organisations are as important as ever.

But as experience would suggest, where

there’s a radio wave, there’s a way. •

In many countries, taking to the air to discuss
community issues would be seen as an example
of a healthily engaged citizenry. Not so in
Argentina, where a media monopoly law passed
by the country’s military dictatorship in 1980
bans community groups from broadcasting on
radio or TV frequencies. Unable to obtain a
licence to broadcast legally, Antena Negra
decided to work surreptitiously. They got their
hands on a transmitter, and began broadcasting
on unoccupied TV frequencies from the unused
second floor of the El Cid building. At the same
time, other operations across the country began
making use of an even older format: radio.

To date, DTL! Comunicacion Popular has
been the most influential of these pirate radio
groups. Its true strength isn’t in broadcasting
its own programming, but in empowering local
communities to take to the air for themselves.
In its near decade of operation, the group has
launched around 150 radio studios and 20
TV studios in provinces that span the country.
Using money raised from lotteries and parties,
the collective’s largely self-taught members
travel throughout Argentina, building studios
in remote towns and scrambling across barrio
rooftops to erect radio towers. Once up and
running, DTL! then runs a crash-course in
journalism, teaching ordinary citizens how
to report their own stories.

It takes at least a couple of days and a few
thousand dollars to build a simple studio
and tower capable of broadcasting. In cities,

the signal may only be limited to a few

blocks; in the countryside they can reach

as far as 50 kilometres. The results have

been wide-reaching. By dint of the efforts of

these operations, hundreds of communities

(many linguistically diverse and ethnically

marginalised) are now equipped to hear local

music, listen to poetry in their native tongues,

and discuss issues the mainstream media is

liable to gloss over: police brutality, political

corruption, and ‘disappearances’ all get the

airtime they deserve.

DTL! and Antena Negra may be well loved by

Argentina’s underclasses, but they have drawn

the ire of its leaders. In September 2015,

Buenos Aires police officers descended on the

Antena Negra headquarters, smashing their

equipment and confiscating their transmitter.

“What we were doing was illegal,” Martina

admits, “but this was a political act, since

the government wasn’t responding to and

observing the law [either]”. Needless to say,

the police weren’t partial to this point. The

raid was part of a wider crackdown on many

of the regional radio stations disseminating

contrary political opinions.

Not satisfied with destroying the outfit’s

equipment, the national communications

agency took Antena Negra to court, accusing

it of infringing on Argentina’s network of

TV licences. After a lengthy legal battle, the

television pirates won the action and were

able to get back on the air. But then, in early

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