331 lines
20 KiB
Markdown
331 lines
20 KiB
Markdown
# A seed sprouts when it is sown in fertile soil
|
|
|
|
***Loreto Bravo***
|
|
|
|
This is the story of the autonomous and community cell phone network of the
|
|
native peoples of Oaxaca, a techno-seed that inhabits a communal ecosystem; an
|
|
ethical-political bridge between the hacker community of the free-software
|
|
movement and the communities of indigenous peoples in Oaxaca, in the
|
|
South-East of Mexico. It is a dialogue between the concept of technological
|
|
sovereignty and the concepts of autonomy and self-determination, where the
|
|
commons and decolonisation meet; a version of the history of the autonomous
|
|
and community cell phone project driven by the Rhizomatica collective and
|
|
managed today by the organisation Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias
|
|
A.C. (Indigenous Community Telecommunications).
|
|
|
|
*It all started with a dream that was named and shared and became a
|
|
reality.*
|
|
|
|
I recall that only five years ago, when we talked about creating an autonomous
|
|
and community cell phone network, our circle of friends who lived in the city
|
|
looked at us in disbelief. However, when this idea was voiced in the
|
|
mountains of the Sierra Juárez, in Oaxaca, at the heart of a community radio
|
|
project, it took on a new meaning.
|
|
|
|
Every story is a voyage in time and space, and the start of this story is a
|
|
huge welcome sign that reads:
|
|
|
|
In this community private property does not exist.
|
|
|
|
The buying and selling of communal lands is PROHIBITED.
|
|
|
|
Signed the Comisariat of Common Goods of Ixtlan de Juárez
|
|
|
|
<!-- \[FOTO\] -->
|
|
|
|
## Historical background to Oaxaca [^1], the indigenous peoples and “communality”
|
|
|
|
Oaxaca is the fifth-largest state in the country, with a population of 3
|
|
million 800 thousand inhabitants, of which more than half live in rural
|
|
villages of less than 2,500 people. Of the 2,445 municipalities in Mexico,
|
|
570 are in Oaxacan territory, and 418 are governed by the system of usage and
|
|
traditions [^2]. That means that 58% of the total surface area of Oaxaca is
|
|
social property or commons. In these areas, the authorities are under the
|
|
community assembly, which represents the exercise of direct and participatory
|
|
democracy, and a form of self-government recognised by the Mexican political
|
|
constitution. Sixteen indigenous peoples live side-by-side in this region,
|
|
which is also the state with the greatest ethnic and linguistic diversity in
|
|
the country.
|
|
|
|
Oaxaca is also the state with the most biodiversity, due to the geological
|
|
complexity of the region, where three long and deep mountain ranges, the
|
|
Western Sierra Madre, the Sierra Sur and the Sierra Norte, better known as the
|
|
Sierra Juárez, cross. Because of this accident of geography, the European
|
|
conquerors never completely managed to subject these peoples who were able to
|
|
conserve their forms of self-government, which have been adapted and
|
|
reconfigured over time to fit the current context.
|
|
|
|
In the mid-1970s and early-1980s, a social movment emerged among the
|
|
indigenous peoples of Oaxaca and the South East of Mexico in response to the
|
|
development policies promoted by the government, and the need to defend
|
|
themselves against the pludering of lands, sacking of resources and forced
|
|
displacements. This movement demanded respect for their ways of life,
|
|
languages and spirituality. In this way they built and defended autonomy and
|
|
built the concept of “Comunality” as a way of explaining life in these areas
|
|
and villages. In those years they built their first communal companies for
|
|
forestry resources, spring water bottling, eco-tourism projects and the
|
|
commercialisation and export of consumable goods, as well as a myriad of
|
|
community radios. Today this social movement continues to struggle to defend
|
|
the territory against mining and extraction companies that want to come into
|
|
the region.
|
|
|
|
These struggles give life to what the anthropologist Elena Nava has called
|
|
“grassroots native analytical theories”, where indigenous thinkers such as
|
|
Jaime Martinez Luna (Zapoteco) and Floriberto Díaz Gómez (Mixe) sought to
|
|
understand life in community beyond western academic definitions. These
|
|
thinkers asked themselves: “What is a community for us, the indigenous
|
|
peoples?”. It is a space of common property, common oral history, common
|
|
language, its own form of organisation and a communal system for seeking
|
|
justice. They called this “Communality” as a way of being, living and
|
|
feeling, considering the mother earth and practising consensus in assemblies
|
|
as the highest decision-making body, creating a system of positions and
|
|
responsibilities based on free service, developing collective work as an act
|
|
of solidarity and reciprocity and the festival, the rites and the ceremonies
|
|
as expressions of the commons.
|
|
|
|
## Community radios as communal communication companies
|
|
|
|
In 2006, Oaxaca experienced an uprising detonated by government repression of
|
|
the education workers movement. This movement gave life to the Popular
|
|
Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca [^4] and one of its principal
|
|
characteristics was the creation of various community radio stations and the
|
|
taking over of state communications media [^5]. Some of these later became
|
|
Communal Communications Companies [^6] with the aim of reinforcing the
|
|
autonomy of the localities and contributing to achieving the indigenous
|
|
people's objectives and visions of life, in the form of self determination.
|
|
|
|
In 2012, more than 30 municipal authorities and indigenous communities
|
|
delivered a formal petition to the Communications and Transport Secretary (SCT
|
|
by its Spanish initials) to reclaim access to GSM band frequencies [^3].
|
|
However, that petition was refused. The current legal framework does not
|
|
oblige large telecommunications companies to provide communications services
|
|
in rural areas with populations of less than 5,000 people, although the state
|
|
regulatory body is obliged to guarantee universal service in rural areas.
|
|
|
|
## The techno-seed
|
|
|
|
The creation of an autonomous cell phone network is an idea that has been
|
|
cooking for several years within the hacker community and the free software
|
|
movement, and there have been a number of prior attempts to make it a reality.
|
|
For example, in 2008 the idea emerged to use cell phones to defend human and
|
|
environmental rights and to document the abuses faced by indigenous peoples in
|
|
the South of Nigeria. The challenge posed by the question of what to do with
|
|
the resulting documentation produced using cell phones, without using the
|
|
services offered by the telephone companies, led to experiments with a
|
|
software called Serval Mesh, which allowed communication between cellphones
|
|
without passing through any company's network. The technology proved
|
|
inadequate for the context. Nevertheless, these concerns led Peter Bloom,
|
|
founder of the organization Rhizomatica, to want to try a cell phone system
|
|
when he came to collaborate with the Palabra Radio organisation in Oaxaca
|
|
[^7].
|
|
|
|
At the beginning of 2011, Kino, a hacker with experience in technologies for
|
|
indigenous communities in resistance began to research the technological
|
|
requirements to be able to create these networks. At the same time, the
|
|
Mexican artist, Minerva Cuevas [^8], decided to buy a small kit for $3,000
|
|
dollars to create a political-concepual installation in Finland, with the help
|
|
of Kino, and later donate the equipment for making the initial tests. Later,
|
|
the lawyer Erick Huerta, specialist in telecommunications and indigenous
|
|
peoples, met Rhizomatica at a gathering of indigenous communicators, and he
|
|
began to research the legal implications. At that point, Palabra Radio was
|
|
providing technical support to community radios, and thus the idea reached
|
|
Keyla and Israel from radio Dizha Kieru (Our Word), located in the village of
|
|
Talea de Castro, where, in 2013, the first community cell phone network was
|
|
finally born.
|
|
|
|
Before launching the network, Erick Huerta began a dialogue with the state
|
|
regulatory body to review the spectrum allocation and found a range of GSM
|
|
frequencies that were not in use and had never been tendered nor granted to
|
|
the large companies. This enabled the creation of a legal framework in which
|
|
the communities could operate their own telecommunications networks. In 2014,
|
|
a 2-year experimental license was granted and in 2016 the organisation of all
|
|
the communities with telephone networks formed an association called
|
|
Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (TIC A.C.), which was granted a
|
|
social concession of 15 years to be the telecommunications operator in 5
|
|
states in Mexico [^9]. The TIC A.C. association is structured as an assembly
|
|
of communities. This created important precedents at a national and
|
|
international level to defy the hegemonic commercial model of doing
|
|
telecommunications, as it considers citizens not as client-consumers, but as
|
|
subjects with fundamental rights, which include the right to communication.
|
|
|
|
These telephone networks therefore do not commercially exploit the services
|
|
they offer and they create a quota based on recovering costs to make the
|
|
network sustainable. This quota is currently $40 Mexican pesos (around $2
|
|
dollars) to cover unlimited calls and text messages within the locality and
|
|
the interconnected micro-regions. Of this quota, $25 pesos remain with the
|
|
local economy to cover the community's investment costs and pay the internet
|
|
provider, and the other $15 go to TIC A.C. to cover maintainance of the
|
|
networks and legal processes.
|
|
|
|
## How do community cell phones work?
|
|
|
|
A community cell phone network is a hybrid network made up of an
|
|
infrastructure (software and hardware) and a service over internet that
|
|
enables the community to become a communications service provider. The
|
|
hardware consists of a GSM signal transceiver and a controller or computer
|
|
operating with free software connected to a local internet service provider
|
|
with a contract for a Voice over IP (VOIP) service. Thanks to the work of the
|
|
free software and hacker community, Ciaby and Tele, two Italian hackers,
|
|
created the software (RCCN + RAI) that makes this network work and give it a
|
|
simple administration interface.
|
|
|
|
A community interested in creating its own telephone network needs to have
|
|
undergone a process of collective decision making within the community
|
|
assembly. The authorisation of the project is minuted and a committee is
|
|
named for operating and administering the network. TIC A.C. provides training
|
|
and support in importing, installing, operating and managing their networks,
|
|
as well as accompaniment in legal matters. The community should provide the
|
|
location for the installation and invest around $7,500 dollars in equipment
|
|
and training. Some communities used municipal funds, others fund raised among
|
|
the people in the village or asked for a loan.
|
|
|
|
## Benefits and challenges
|
|
|
|
There are currently 15 networks [^10], covering around 50 villages, with
|
|
between 2,500 and 3,000 users. There are an average of 1300 calls per day, of
|
|
which 60% are within the village or the Sierra Juárez region. The principal
|
|
benefits of these networks are related to the facilitation of local
|
|
communication between residents and at a micro-regional level. It also
|
|
reduces the costs of communication at a national and international level,
|
|
thanks to a contract with a Voice over IP service provider, which reduces
|
|
costs by 60% compared to what companies charge. Due to regulations, there is
|
|
no public telephone number assigned to each device. Instead, a single number
|
|
receives all the calls from outside. Then the extension number of the network
|
|
user is dialled through a voice menu, which in some cases is in the local
|
|
language.
|
|
|
|
From the point of view of individuals and families, there is greater
|
|
interpersonal communication, facilitating the organisation of community life
|
|
and shared work, calling assemblies and ensuring the system of charges and
|
|
responsibilities works. It also facilitates issues of security and
|
|
surveillance within the territory. It is useful in medical emergencies or as
|
|
an emergency response system in case of natural disasters such as plagues and
|
|
storms. Finally, it also facilitates commercial relations and plays a role in
|
|
the processes of production, as it increases access to information and
|
|
communication with others.
|
|
|
|
In terms of challenges, we find new and existing gender violences that can be
|
|
reproduced through these technologies and which have led to the creation of a
|
|
new mechanism for attending to these violences. That is where
|
|
ethical-technical problems arise that include the storing and handing over of
|
|
information. Decision-making regarding these problems should be taken to be
|
|
debated within the community assembly and be accompanied by a participatory
|
|
process of reflection that takes into account technical, political and ethical
|
|
perspectives, so that these new means of communication can continue to exist
|
|
without prejudicing the communities. These concerns gave rise to the creation
|
|
of the “Community Diploma for Persons Promoting Radio and Telecommunications”
|
|
and the creation of a Manual [^11] and a wiki [^12] to document the production
|
|
of knowledge.
|
|
|
|
## Technological Sovereignty and Autonomy
|
|
|
|
Now that we have introduced the autonomous and community cell phone project, I
|
|
would like to go deeper into the ethical and political discussion that marks
|
|
the rhythm of the dialogue between the free software hacker community and the
|
|
indigenous peoples of Oaxaca. I would like to reflect on the significance of
|
|
the concept of technological sovereignty as a political focus for the analysis
|
|
of this kind of initiative. There is no doubt that the community telephone
|
|
project is the result of the bridge built between these two communities on
|
|
shared foundations: the commons and decolonisation. Nevertheless, the
|
|
encounter and the dialogue between the two is not easy. For the hacker
|
|
community, the starting point is the defence and decolonisation of knowledge
|
|
as a common good, while for the indigenous communities in Oaxaca, the common
|
|
good is the communally owned territory that also needs to be decolonised.
|
|
|
|
Decolonising communal territories implies understanding them as an inseparable
|
|
whole that includes the electromagnetic spectrum, that common good in the
|
|
public domain, socially constructed to allow the communities to strengthen
|
|
their autonomy. To decolonise the electromagnetic spectrum requires
|
|
technologies and knowledge. This is where the bridge is built between the two
|
|
communities. Once the dialogue began, we realised that the language also
|
|
needs to be decolonised.
|
|
|
|
As we build this dialogue we have observed that the hacker vision seeks common
|
|
goods from the point of view of the individual, while the vision of the
|
|
communities do it through the communal. This is the breaking point, which
|
|
makes it complex for some hackers who have arrived in the Oaxcan territories
|
|
to understand the lack of individual freedoms that exist in communal life,
|
|
where the people are not beings divorced from their relationship with the
|
|
whole. We have also learnt that the same words can have different meanings.
|
|
It is in this sense that I would like to explain what occurs with the concept
|
|
of technological sovereignty, which is what drew us to participate in this
|
|
book.
|
|
|
|
In order for this techno-seed to sprout it had to fall on fertile terrain,
|
|
with history, memory and a communal ecosystem such as that which exists in
|
|
South Eastern Mexico, a territory that has spend centuries fighting for its
|
|
autonomy and self-determination. For the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, the
|
|
concept of sovereignty is related to the construction of the Nation State
|
|
which, through its political constitution (1917), sought to absorb the
|
|
indigenous community's authority figures into the state structure, and as
|
|
such, repeat the colonial experience.
|
|
|
|
Until 1992, the Mexican state did not recognise the rights of indigenous
|
|
people to regulate themselves according to “uses and practices”. The
|
|
neo-Zapatista movement went public in 1994, subverting the Marxist idea of the
|
|
national revolution and turning it into a revolution for autonomy, demands for
|
|
self-government by the indigenous peoples of South East Mexico were
|
|
recognised. The creative use of communications technologies played a
|
|
significant role in the process. In order to better understand the idea of autonomy,
|
|
we return to the beginnings of this story, to our welcome sign:
|
|
|
|
In this community private property does not exist.
|
|
The buying and selling of communal lands is PROHIBITED.
|
|
Signed the Comisariat of Common Goods of Ixtlan de Juárez.
|
|
|
|
This is not a declaration of sovereignty, but of autonomy. Here the
|
|
construction of power is not based on the sovereignty of the people. Power
|
|
emanatesf from the territory, that common good, where there is no place for
|
|
private property and where technologies play a role in strengthening that
|
|
autonomy, which is the only mandate that the community assembly should respect
|
|
and defend.
|
|
|
|
Thus far it is clear that we are referring to the classical concept of
|
|
sovereignty and the meaning it has in this corner of the globe. We are far
|
|
from the concept of technological sovereignty that postulates the development
|
|
of self-powered initiatives, defined by community life, as a process of
|
|
empowerment for social transformation. To a large extent, this distance feeds
|
|
off the mistaken idea of wishing to strenthen the communities with current
|
|
commercial technologies in order to achieve social change. We need to
|
|
continue weaving knowledge among hackers and peoples in order to decolonise
|
|
the idea of technological sovereignty and exercise it from a position of
|
|
autonomy.
|
|
|
|
It is for that reason that, when the free software hacker community proposes
|
|
understanding these initiatives from a focus of technological sovereignty we
|
|
don't find the echo we expected, because the meaning is different. It appears
|
|
to be a conflict, although in reality it is common ground: we need to
|
|
decolonise the language and, as Alex Hache says: “Then, if the idea can be
|
|
told, it also means that it can filter into the social imagination, producing
|
|
a radical and transformative effect”. [^13]
|
|
|
|
We are in a good moment to open a dialogue between technological sovereignty
|
|
and autonomy, understood as it is lived in this corner of the world, among the
|
|
indigenous peoples of South East Mexico.
|
|
|
|
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca
|
|
|
|
[^2]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_de_usos_y_costumbres
|
|
|
|
[^3]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_global_para_las_comunicaciones_m%C3%B3viles
|
|
|
|
[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Assembly_of_the_Peoples_of_Oaxaca
|
|
|
|
[^5]: Un poquito de tanta verdad: http://www.corrugate.org/un-poquito-de-tanta-verdad.html
|
|
|
|
[^6]: Loreto Bravo. “Empresas Comunales de Comunicación: Un camino hacia la sostenibilidad”. *Media Development:* 4/2015 WACC. http://www.waccglobal.org/articles/empresas-comunales-de-comunicacion-un-camino-hacia-la-sostenibilidad
|
|
|
|
[^7]: https://palabraradio.org/nosotras
|
|
|
|
[^8]: http://contemporaryartarchipelago.fi/exhibition/artwork/15
|
|
|
|
[^9]: Puebla, Guerrero, Tlaxcala, Veracruz and Oaxaca.
|
|
|
|
[^10]: List of villages that have telephone networks: Villa Talea de Castro (Sierra Juárez) • Santa María Yaviche (Sierra Juárez) • San Juan Yaee (Sierra Juárez) • San Idelfonso Villa Alta (Sierra Juárez) • San Juan Tabaa (Sierra Juárez) • Secteur Cajonos: Santo Domingo Xagacia, San Pablo Yaganiza, San Pedro Cajonos, San Francisco Cajonos, San Miguel Cajonos, San Mateo Cajonos (Sierra Juárez) • San Bernardo Mixtepec (Valles Centrales) • Santa María Tlahuitoltepec (Mixe-Alto) • Santa María Alotepec (Mixe-Alto) • San Jerónimo Progreso (Mixteca) • Santiago Ayuquililla (Mixteca) • San Miguel Huautla (Mixteca) • Santa Inés de Zaragosa (Mixteca) • Santos Reyes Tepejillo (Mixteca).
|
|
|
|
[^11]: https://media.wix.com/ugd/68af39_c12ad319bb404b63bd9ab471824231b8.pdf
|
|
|
|
[^12]: http://wiki.rhizomatica.org/
|
|
|
|
[^13]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soberan%C3%ADa_Tecnol%C3%B3gica
|
|
|