Brazil, Argentina and Chile
W hat kind of contact did you have w ith the media in Brazil, Argentina
and Chile?
I immediately had a lot of contact w ith the mass media. T hat
happens almost everyw here except in the U S.
State television and radio?
Commercial stations too. T he mass media are a lot more open
there.
W hat about independent media?
T here’s an independent left journal published in São Paulo. It’s in
Portuguese, so I have only a superficial sense of w hat’s in it, but the
material looks extremely interesting. T he journal is very w ell-
designed and w ell-printed, as professional as Harper’s or the
Atlantic. W e don’t have anything like it here.
T here are also more popular efforts. My w ife and I spent an
evening in one of the biggest of R io’s suburbs, Nova Iguaçu, w here
several million people—a mixture of poor, w orking-class,
unemployed and landless peasants—live. (U nlike here, the rich live
in the center of most Latin American cities, and the poor in the
suburbs.) We w ere w arned that w e shouldn’t go to Nova Iguaçu—
too dangerous—but the people there w ere perfectly friendly.
We w ent w ith people from an NGO [nongovernmental
(nonprofit) organization]—progressive artists, professionals and
intellectuals w ho w ant to provide the population w ith an alternative
to having their minds destroyed by commercial television. T heir idea
w as to drive a truck w ith a huge screen into some public area and
show documentaries dealing w ith real problems.
T hey spent a fair amount of time w ith the leaders of popular
organizations in the community, figuring out how to make their
points accessible, and how to put some humor in. I haven’t seen the
films, but apparently they w ere very w ell-done. But w hen they
show ed them in the poor neighborhoods, they completely bombed.
People came by to check them out, w atched for a w hile and left.
W hen the NGO did w rap-up sessions to try to figure out w hat