Latin America and the Caribbean

Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for development advocates and communities regarding advocacy for a policy environment supportive of community media. It reflects on the licensing process and financial sustainability of the projects.

Among processes towards democratisation, it has been asserted that alternative radio has a central role in the citizen making of the poor. However, it is important to analyse in detail what possibilities an alternative or citizens’ radio has to strengthen ideas of citizenship and transform the public space into a critical and deliberative public in urban sites. This paper focuses on one local Catholic radio station in Huaycan, a shantytown in the outskirts of Lima.

Social movements have generated interest in development circles since the mid-1990s as relatively independent expressions of civil society, mobilising people to set their own development priorities and agendas for issues as diverse as water privatisation, neo-liberal trade policies, the rights of women and indigenous peoples, and access to HIV anti-retroviral treatment. In the case of HIV and AIDS, independent civil-society initiative has been key to successful responses.

This paper surveys street publications that are members of the International Network of Street Papers. Street publications can empower the homeless though numerous endeavours that can lead to social change. Empowerment can be achieved by being employed, such as magazine vendors and/or as workers in socially oriented companies. It can also occur by recovering self-esteem and acquiring knowledge and abilities though training courses, rehabilitation therapy, and other endeavours such as the university of the homeless.

This study on the impact of fair trade relies on new field data from coffee and banana cooperatives in Peru and Costa Rica, including a detailed assessment of its welfare effects by comparing FT farmers with non-FT farmers as a benchmark.

This article discusses the ethical challenges posed to anthropologists working as experts in mining companies and in tourism and alternative solutions that are coherent with the ethical principles of their discipline.

Lack of working capital hinders collective commercialisation of recyclables. Social exclusion and bureaucratic constraints prevent recyclers from accessing official bank loans. As they continue to depend on intermediaries, the cycle of poverty, dependency, and exclusion is perpetuated. The article discusses collective commercialisation and the micro-credit fund created among 30 recycling groups in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. A committee of eight women recyclers manages this fund.

This article analyses the social change practices of Minga Perú, an NGO in the Peruvian Amazon that promotes gender equality and reproductive health through radio broadcasts and community-based interventions. This analysis, grounded in participatory research methods, reveals a feminist and gender-equitable approach, allowing participants to take the role of leader rather than of passive research subject.

This article examines the nature of social protest undertaken by an Amazonian indigenous organisation against international energy companies working in Peru. It analyses the response of Peruvian and international NGOs to the indigenous group’s activities and challenges certain stereotypes concerning the nature of indigenous collective action and perceptions of community. In particular, it focuses on the way in which NGO workers attempt to explain the failure of the indigenous organisation to mobilise and sustain collective protest.