Journalism and community communication

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 came an epidemic of information and indigenous communities were no strangers to it. Day by day indigenous people received information on how to prevent this disease in a cab or on public transportation, information that when traveling by river is irrelevant. Thus we identified the need to build information and tell the stories from and for the territories. Taking into account local resources and knowledge, what began as the radio program El canto del tucán about the pandemic and health, was transformed into a training process in journalism and community communication in which around 50 indigenous people from Vaupés, Chocó, Putumayo and Caquetá have been able to explore communication as a tool for transformation and change.

Indigenous community communication has become, over time, a key tool for strengthening processes of self-government, leadership and local organization, initiatives that take on much more importance in contexts of historical social exclusion. In the Amazon we have worked in several departments with current emphasis in Vaupés, Caquetá and Putumayo. Specifically on community communication processes, where we exalt orality, a practice typical of Amazonian peoples as a central decision-making mechanism in intergenerational and cultural transmission. For this reason, the communicative pieces that have been produced prioritize the languages of the transmitting and receiving communities and the methodologies for their development are based on traditional knowledge and practices such as the spaces for dialogue and concertation in the malocas, bonfires, and thought banks.

This process has allowed us to identify the interests of the communities in telling their own story through different formats such as photography, text, video or audio, and to strengthen through communication other issues of local importance. In this process we have been able to accompany the communities in the creation of more than 100 communicative pieces around intercultural health, governance and women's leadership and in the formation of a collective of indigenous communicators of Vaupés.

Watch, listen and learn how the communication pieces were built in these 4 departments, here:

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