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Chronicle
LAND REFORM OF THE AIRWAVES
BRAZIL
Hinchberger, who lives in Sao Paulo, writes for a number of business and general interest publications.
Leo Tomax is the driving force behind Radio Reversao. That's 106.5 on your FM dial on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, where the homes of rural immigrants and their upwardly mobile children sprawl across what is called the East Zone.
It was 106.5 until April 9 anyway. That morning, federal police arrested Tomaz for operating a station without a license and confiscated Reversao's equipment. If convicted, Tomax faces six months to two years in prison.
Far from being treated like a criminal, however, Tomaz found himself being treated like something of a hero. Tomaz's lawyer is a former head of the Sao Paulo State Justice Department; the city councils of Sao Paulo and a handful of smaller municipalities passed supportive resolutions; and local labor groups -- including the Sao Paulo Journalists Union and the Sao Paulo Broadcasters Union -- defend Reversao. Mainstream media coverage made Tomaz's case a mini-cause celebre. And he was elected head of the newly formed Sao Paulo State Association of Free Radio Stations (ARLESP), a hodgepodge of stations -- twenty-five members so are, he says -- with a common goal: "Land reform of the airwaves."
The organizing hasn't relieved the pressure, however. Police shut down two more East Zone stations in August.
ARLESP's land-reform metaphor is more than poetic. The legacy of colonial land grants, distributed to the powerful and the connected, shaped Brazilian society, and the country's modern presidents are recreating this phenomenon in the distribution of electornic properties -- radio and TV licenses:
* According to the daily Hornal da Tarde, political criteria were a leading consideration for the country's first post-dictatorship civilian president, Jose Sarney, as he distributed 1,203 radio and television concessions between 1985 to 1990. The legacy: 130 of today's 584 members of congress own at least one radio or television station.
* The newsweekly Isto ElSenhor reports that the owners of the ninety-five cable television concessions awarded by Sarney and current President Fernando Collor de Mello "are, almost all, friends of the powerful." The magazine reports that Sarney awarded himself a cable concession three days before leaving Brasilia.
* By the end of August, the Collor administration was expected to award concessions for some 1,500 electronic media outlets, predominantly radio stations. According to the daily Folha de Sao Paulo, nearly 1,000 applications had been filed by the end of July, "most of them by members of congress."
With so many plums handed out to so many politicians, leftovers are slim pickings.
Meanwhile, after a decade of growth, Brazil's alternative, illegal electronic media have emerged from a student-activist ghetto to establish themselves as professionally operated -- if not profitable -- voices for everything from popular movements to heavy metal headbangers to evangelical Christians. "We are not pirates," rings their refrain.
Free radio, they say, is distinct from pirate broadcasting because it seeks to forge and cultivate links in the community it serves, eschews clandestinity, and maintains a regular broadcast schedule. Most of ARLESP's member stations are powered in the ten-to-fifteen watt range (sixty watts or less is the membership rule), giving them a broadcasting radius of five to ten kilometers.
The free-radio movement began to flower after the iron grip of Brazil's military dictatorship, imposed in 1964, began to loosen. The first station with regularly scheduled broadcasts, Radio Xilik, emerged with civilian rule in 1985, propelled by political activists and students and faculty at Sao Paulo's Catholic University. There is no telling how many free radio stations are broadcasting in the country these days. The most reliable estimates, by the television network Manchete and an ARLESP study, put the number in the 150 to 200 range.
Today's radio hotbed is in Sao Paulo's East Zone and nearby surburbs, where programming is a lively and diverse as a tag team match: Radio Esperanca keeps a strict evangelical format; Radio Objetiva is one of a handful of "mixed" stations, juxtaposing popular sertaneja music (Braziian country) and community service with evangelical programming; Reversao likes locally produced rock spiced with poetry readings, environmental and astronomy shows, and programming for and by women, blacks, and young people. The common thread is airwave access for the electronically dispossessed, what Radio Xilik founder Marcelo Masagao calls "marginalized groups." "This is not a station for bishops," says Esperanca founder Wilson Perez. "We are striving for equality."
The technical requirements of current law regulating radio effectively require a 300-watt transmitter, an expensive pipe dream for these self-sustaining nonprofit stations. Is there any alternative to electronic civil disobedience? Some ARLESP members maintain that it is best to remain illegal, in order to avoid being swallowed up by big commercial networks. But most disagree, and ARLESP plans to send Tomaz to Brasilia to lobby for legalization. Italy could be a model; that country's parliament recently approved legislation that distinguishes between commercial and community radio, reserving 25 percent of frequencies for the latter.
