COMMUNICATION-PERU: Channel 45 – Alternative, Community-Based TV

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Abraham Lama

LIMA, Jun 22 2000 (IPS) - Channel 45, a television station run by residents of Villa El Salvador, one of the Peruvian capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, puts up a good fight against the area’s commercial broadcast giants in competing to attract millions of urban viewers.

The Villa El Salvador Municipal Council founded the project in 1992, which at the time was seen as a crazy idea of then-mayor Michel Azcueta, an educator of Spanish origin and resident of the neighbourhood.

The history of Channel 45 is similar to that of the community surrounding it – both are based on a self-management model of solidarity, a trait that earned Villa El Salvador international notoriety in 1987 when the community was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for being “a role model for all communities of the world.”

Villa El Salvador itself was created in 1971, during the military government of general Juan Velasco Alvarado, when a group of 200 families took over land in the capital’s outskirts and settled there, soon to be joined by thousands more.

For the first time in Lima’s history, the government did not attempt to forcibly remove illegal squatters, but urged the families to organise.

Also unlike other urban districts, the residents of Villa El Salvador refused assistance programmes, adopting a self-management model instead. It was one of the first places where community kitchens appeared in response to widespread unemployment and hunger.

It was here that the Federation of Women promoted the first brigades of housewives, who used a system of whistles to alert neighbours to detain abusive husbands or to nab local criminals.

One if the district’s major achievements is the Industrial Park, an area of Villa El Salvador devoted to small businesses, which currently employ some 40,000 local workers. The park is the Lima’s leading production centre for shoes and handcrafted carpentry.

Within this social scenario, mayor Azcueta sought out progressive- minded film director and producer Andrés Malatesta, challenging him to put together a community-based television station.

Malatesta trained some of the barrio’s unemployed young people in the technical aspects of the television business, teaching them through the production of short films about the problems surrounding them, and a mid-length movie on Villa El Salvador’s history.

Thanks to the support of foreign assistance groups, Channel 45 obtained the minimum equipment necessary to begin operations. And Malatesta began the battle to introduce the first alternative television channel onto the Peruvian airwaves.

The guerrilla organisation ‘Sendero Luminoso’ – or Shining Path – at one point attempted to interfere with the community project. The rebels were unsuccessful, but later targeted Channel 45 in two terrorist attacks.

“The basic idea behind Channel 45 was to promote community participation in social communications, and in this sense the project has been a total success,” says Azcueta, who is currently a member of the Greater Lima Metropolitan Council.

Because the Villa El Salvador Municipal Council is itself poor, it cannot dip into funds intended for social services for the population, meaning Channel 45 must finance itself.

Giving the lie to pessimistic predictions by the local television industry association, which did not believe a poor neighbourhood’s station could survive without financial backing, Channel 45 proves itself every day and continues to expand its audience – though it has yet to overcome its precarious status as a business.

The station’s viewing audience is primarily located in what is known as Lima’s Southern Cone, which extends from the Chorrillos district, where the urban area officially ends, to the poor neighbourhoods near the coastal town of Pucusana – all told, an area of two million people.

Channel 45 competes with Greater Lima’s major commercial stations in an unequal battle for this terrain. The relatively inexperienced people running the neighbourhood station, who maintain eight hours of programming Monday through Saturday and 14 hours on Sunday, do not have anywhere near the technical or financial resources of their competitors.

“We don’t have a mobile unit, our film, editing and reproduction equipment were donated several years ago and are outdated, and our staff is mostly students,” said Roger Vicente, station director.

“But we also have one important advantage – our viewers see us as their channel, not just because of the communal nature of the enterprise, but also because our programming is participatory and is involved in the issues that affect them,” he added.

The Channel 45 director stressed that the station is fighting the battle for audiences every day and every night, and that things are not going too badly, despite the fact that the competition has the soap operas and music stars as weapons to attract viewers.

“Some non-governmental organisations involved in social communications, such as Calandria, use our space to develop their campaigns. We have a one-hour news show and a debate programme, ‘Encuentro,’ which touches on social and political problems at the national and community levels,” said Vicente.

“But in the commercial field, we are not as successful. We do not have sufficient advertising income because the companies that measure television ratings refuse to measure our audience, meaning we do not exist as far as advertising agencies are concerned,” he concluded.