25 years of democracy in Ecuador, digitized!

Founded in 1972 by the Centro de Educación Popular (CEDEP), Radio La Luna is now one of Ecuador’s most important radio stations. Soon after it was set up, it began playing a pivotal role on the political scene by providing citizens with a steady stream of information about political developments within the country and later giving them a ‘voice’ through its ‘open mike’ policy. This effectively allows ordinary people to publicly express their concerns about the government, over the airwaves, to a wide audience. However, as one of the former station owners, Mr Tobar, was quick to point out in an interview with the BBC in 2005, he and his colleagues are journalists first and foremost, not political agitators. They opened Radio La Luna’s microphones to the public simply to let people know what was really going on in the country because the official information channels could not be trusted: "Most forms of media in Ecuador don't do what we do; they keep the public uninformed.”

Radio La Luna’s impact is far-reaching: in 1997 and 2005 it played a key role in helping the people depose two Presidents, Abdalá Bucaram and Gutierrez, by keeping citizens continuously informed about key developments and giving them their own ‘voice’. Today, thousands of people regularly tune into the station’s broadcasts.

The ‘Digitizing 25 Years of Democracy’ project

Ecuador’s political and social turbulence stretches back many decades. Therefore, in order to preserve the nation’s collective memory of key moments from the last 25 years of democracy, Radio La Luna launched a project to ‘digitize 25 years of democracy’ in 2006. Along with CEDEP and a number of other organizations, it began collecting key radio broadcasts and documents from this period and digitizing them.

Aside from preserving the nation’s collective memory of this era, the project is also expected to stimulate broad discussions about important social processes. This will contribute towards educating younger generations about historical events over the past 25 years. The project will achieve all this by developing and producing a variety of multimedia products, including podcasts, CD ROMs and e-fora. The content of these products is being generated in close collaboration with people who witnessed the events first-hand so that their version of history can be placed alongside the ‘official’ version of history and compared. Meanwhile, a platform for communication and information is also being set up by strengthening the Radio la Luna website and an online radio service is being established for listeners outside Quito who currently have problems tuning into the programmes. Ultimately, all the information generated through this project will be shared with information agencies that have a similar approach to Radio La Luna, both in Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Initial results

Although the project has not been formally evaluated, the preliminary results look promising. For example, the latest figures from the new Radio la Luna website show that the podcasts of the radio broadcasts are immensely popular. The same can be said of the new e-forum, which is also housed on the website; this is providing a space for lively discussions on a wide range of themes, from ‘human rights and indigenous issues’ to ‘education’ and ‘politics’. But there is still a lot to do. High on the project’s agenda, for example, is the creation of an interactive CD-ROM with socially relevant content for educational purposes.

Building a strong network

Radio La Luna hopes that the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) it is using as a result of this project will help it to strengthen its ties with independent broadcasting organisations and news agencies, such as the Agencia de Prensa IPS and Prensa Latina, as well as other information networks all over Latin America. RSS feeds, for example, have turned out to be a very useful tool for this process.

Other ICT tools are being used to exchange content and lessons learned about conserving and strengthening the nation’s collective memory. In this respect, the popular Radio FM Mundo Real in Montevideo, Uruguay has extensive experience in online broadcasting via the Internet as well as other ICT applications and has been a great help with this.

1. For more information about Radio La Luna see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4477595.stm