Community Radio Faces Roadblocks for Broadcasting Perspectives Against the Government Natalie Schachar - Columbia Journalism Review
go to original October 20, 2017

In 1999, a group of radio hosts at Neza Radio, a small community station in the Mexican city of Nezahualcoyotl, began transmitting content for about 1 million people living just past Benito Juarez International airport and over the Mexico City line.

With little radio experience and virtually no budget, the hosts used transmitters and antennas built by local engineering students and broadcast on Saturdays and Sundays for listeners up to 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) away. At times, they caught an intermittent signal and went off-air, or they found themselves dancing around the radio dial to prevent interference with other transmissions and guarantee their physical safety. (Legal proceedings have been carried out against a number of community radio stations, while others have been subject to violence or forced off air.) The station’s raison d’etre, says Rocio Roman, the station’s operating director, was “to communicate the good things about Neza.”



Like other community radio stations - independent outlets often known for broadcasting perspectives against the government, or content different from those of state-influenced commercial stations - that was not enough to convince Mexican authorities to grant it legal permission to operate. Mexico’s Communications and Transport Ministry, former telecommunications regulator Cofetel, and then successor IFT, all denied permit and concession requests made by Radio Neza, citing a saturated radio spectrum, inter-frequency separation requirements of 800 KHz, and a wave of stations already migrating from AM to FM, as some of the reasons the station could not be officially recognized.

But about 15 years after the radio began requesting permission to operate, in July 2017, the station won a legal challenge against IFT’s 2015 permit rejection, and finally received a 50-watt signal to operate on 97.3 FM. “They look for a way not to give concessions,” says Luis Fernando Garcia, a lawyer at Mexican digital rights group R3D, who handled Radio Neza’s case. “In a personal sense, I was exhausted, very tired,” adds Roman, who began working with the station as a single 24-year-old, but is now 45 and married with one daughter.

For decades, hundreds of community radio stations like Neza Radio were denied recognition under Mexican law. But in 2013, Mexico’s constitutional and legislative reform of the telecommunications and broadcast sectors authorized radio licenses for commercial, public, private, and social use - opening a path to legality for such stations.

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