Ruiz hopes to see her work in low-power FM and setting up indigenous media channels as providing relief in the struggle between people who wish to live their lives with dignity and mutual respect vs huge corporate enterprises with their heartless agendas.
Sue Supriano's Steppin' Out of Babylon is a radio interview series covering a broad range of important issues in today's world: peace and war, human and civil rights, communication, the media, the environment, food security, racism, globalization, immigration and matters of the spirit.
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Luz Ruiz, independent media activist in Mexico and the US with COMPPA & Prometheus Radio
Luz Ruiz works with a group called COMPPA which, translated into English is "Coalition of Popular Communicators for Autonomy". She also works with the Prometheus Radio Project out of Philadelphia. This interview took place at the Barnraising with Prometheus assisting PCUN ( Treeplanters and Farmworkers United) to set up a low power FM radio station in Woodburn, Oregon where the union is based. Ruiz shares some of her experiences and goals with using community radio as a tool for bringing about peace and social justice. Most of COMPPA's work has involved facilitating the appropriation of media tools for indigenous organizations setting up media outlets in Mexico. Their work focuses there largely on farmworker and immigrant rights.
Ruiz hopes to see her work providing relief in the struggle between people who wish to live their lives with dignity and mutual respect versus huge corporate enterprises often notorious for their heartless agendas. Individuals controlling such enterprises have ruined entire communities for a profit by monopolizing the relay of information and promoting themselves as some kind of help to the national economy even thought the facts tend to reveal the opposite. Ruiz thinks that if the people of a community have the resources to voice their dissent when faced with the threat of corporate plunder dressed up as "development", they may have a much better chance to avoid ruin. She points that with radio as a communications tool, illiteracy does not present a barrier to getting information.
Although she does not discourage the use of licensed low-power community radio station, Ruiz makes the decision to refer to unlicensed radio broadcasting as "free radio" than "pirate" radio, indicating a conscious awareness that participation in the free flow of information constitutes a basic natural right for which we must show respect.
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