Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

Latitudes of Rebellion • 25
Salvador, and it has served as an important tool in the arsenal of the
guerrilla forces fighting against the occupation of East Timor by Indonesia.
It has become the voice of the favelas in Brazil where some 2000
free radio stations exist without government sanction or approval.
When threatened with closure by government agencies, communities
arise to defend their voices. Mass strike actions by taxi drivers forced
the Taiwanese government to abandon its effort to shut down underground
radio stations in the mid-1990s. On numerous occasions indigenous
communities have put their bodies between their radio station
and government forces attempting to shut them down. Following the
Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994, a subsequent call was made by
Subcomandante Marcos in 1996 for the creation of an international
network of grassroots media. In response, independent community
media then entered a new period of revitalization and regrowth in
step with a burgeoning anti-globalization movement. Many community
voices had been silenced not at the barrel of a gun, but by neoliberal
polices which privatized the broadcast airwaves and mandated
their sale to the highest bidder. A single FM frequency or channel for
the entire country of El Salvador had a price tag of $100,000. Onerous
regulatory policies combined with civil and monetary sanctions were
brought to bear against any community believing that they had the
right of free speech and expression.
For those who resist, the steel fist of state-sanctioned police or
military violence rests within the velvet glove of neo-liberalism and
is enforced by a global corporate mafia. A handsome profit has been
made in selling crowd suppression technology and weapons to both
developing and first world countries as mass protests against corporate
globalization and neo-liberal policies have broken out on an
international scale. Close on the heels of the arms merchants came the
lawyers and consultants representing private security firms and mercenaries.
To avoid an embarrassing repetition of the shutdown of the
World Trade Organization’s (WTO) meetings in Seattle, steel cordons
were raised in Genoa, Prague, Cancun, and dozens of other cities to
protect the elite gatherings of the Group of Eight (G8) or WTO from
the masses who were insisting that another world was possible. But,
unlike people, radio waves cannot be easily fenced out. This is a primary
reason why free radio is considered an ominous threat by those
who wish to maintain their reign of domination and control. After all,
the first paragraph in the Dictatorship for Dummies book states: “Seize