Radio Urbana, a new space online
By Isabel Juárez, Otra Guatemala Ya, Radio Urbana
The social mobilizations of 2015 caused a wide range of people to converge in different political spheres, the majority taking the name of groups where the unity of ideas and proposals, without forgetting political analysis, assumed they had passed from activism to longer processes.
Guatemala has experienced a political transformation that was carried within the groups that make up Otra Guatemala Ya and Resistencia Ciudadana, to drive a digital radio project called Radio Urbana –Radicalmente Democrática- (Radio Urbana –Radically Democratic-), which seeks to be an alternative medium of communication that is the voice of those who make up this new historical period.
On Saturday, December 19th, transmission tests began for Radio Urbana, alternative, “Radio Urbana”, a project born of the need to have new visions of political analysis, opportunity, artists, and emerging and urban cultural proposals, as well as spaces for alternative music and spaces with social content.
Today Radio Urbana counts on an initial group of collaborators, men and women, who act within the different groups, who based on their experiences and work create a fresh proposal from this digital radio space. In this initiative, they come together from experiences with community and social work, scientific and social research, feminism, teaching in universities, popular education, artists, writers, poets, human rights advocates, representatives of sexual diversity, and which have remained out of range of the mass media.
Above all, the initiative joins together personalities that have been and continue to be eternally nonconformist souls, who seek the sustainability of a diverse environment, multiculturalism in all of its forms, multilingualism as the essence of a people with profound history, who seek structural changes that will weaken an economic and political system that forgets the most important element of a society: the people.
Radio Urbana aims to be a community radio space by having an open stance, through volunteer work and making a proposal to construct civic responsibility. Its nature is based on radical democracy, in the same way, to understand and to reclaim Freedom of Expression as a fundamental Human Right.
Another element is added to its slogan: to be the space for the citizen revolution, tied to terms that meet the need to seek sociopolitical changes through critiques, democracy, the desire for change, and most of all, to be prevailingly antisystemic.
This space, therefore, wants that utopia of being part of the tools for the fight, for social action. A community radio that from the urbanity of the Guatemalan capital will be the platform for the diverse voices of the city, for the rebel voices whether through slogans or music. It will try to take the initiative to create the union, the interaction, the journey to demand processes and changes that will bring us to define political subjects, empowered people, strong groups, and strong collective interactions.
That is Radio Urbana, Radically democratic, because life is a battle and it is always being fought.
