Voices of Wallmapu, Media Caravan 2019

The Wallmapu Caravan is the journey of a collective of different autonomous communicators which is taking place during this southern summer of 2019, facilitating communication workshops and documenting the current context of the Mapuche people along the way.

This is the third collaboration of this kind, after the media coverage of Mutirao to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and the Mesoamerican Free Media Caravan which traveled from Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras in 2017.

Since 2015, members of different media collectives and/or projects dedicated to popular communication in Latin America have worked in a constant manner to generate spaces and instances dedicated to the exchange of our content and abilities. During 2015, 24 media collectives gathered in Mexico with the goal of sharing knowledge through discussions and workshops in order to further educate everyone working in popular communication.

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The first project took place in august of 2016 in the Mutirão, which covered the semi-urban territory of the Favelas in Brazil affected by evictions, raids, murders, criminalisation, militarisation and gentrification, as a result of a cleaning operation in preparation for the olympic games. The mission was to shoot a global counter-information alert; to expose the context of this mega event and its real impact on the inhabitants of the host city.

In 2017 took place the Mesoamerican Free Media Caravan. For the project, we proposed ourselves the goal of creating direct links with the different communities and media groups which accompany the struggles for the defense of the territory in Central America, showing ourselves as independent media sources with the possibility to share and spread knowledge through the territories in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. This is how in Chiapas, Mexico, we covered the campaign of the spokesperson for the Indigenous Government Council, Marichuy, an instance born out of the Zapatista movement. In Guatemala we visited the Community of People’s in Resistance (CPR in Spanish), the Ixcan Spring (Primavera de Ixcan). Finally,in Honduras we worked with the Lenca, Garifuna and Tolupan peoples.

For this third caravan it was decided to travel through the Mapuche territory, or Wallmapu, currently occupied by the Chilean and Argentinian states. With this new caravan project we wish to amplify the fight cries of the Mapuche people, dealing with its reality as it is lived today through open, alternative and counter media. On the other hand, we build on an urgent sense and need for solidarity and camaraderie, organising ourselves on the communicational trenches and building a world without borders.

Our goals and objectives as a caravan project at large go beyond generating a sort of resonance box for the struggles to which the caravan is witness. We want to not only create audiovisual material about the communities, but to teach and learn from each other, since many of us are self taught and autonomous communicators who learn as we do with minimum resources.

On our website you can find more detailed information about our goals and previous experiences, as well as audiovisual and written material from the communities we have been able to visit thus far. Here you can also find a contextualisation of the Mapuche struggle and their cosmovision.

For the moment, the website and most content is only in Spanish, but we are working on translating things into English, understanding that we work as we travel and sometimes time and access to internet is scarce. Similarly, we want to create quality material as quickly as possible but we also struggle with and discuss concepts of instant gratification and constant production, which are imposed to us by the capitalist system in which we live and struggle on a daily basis. This caravan is an exercise for us as communicators and individuals to learn to work together collaboratively but also to take care of each other, understanding that the same sense of urgency which drives us to create these projects should drive us to take care of one another so that we do not burn out constantly from or work. We understand these instances as beautiful and precious opportunities to create spaces of mutual aid and learning and, especially, to create and strengthen links and networks between us and our struggles.

Find more information here

Website:
http://vocesdelwallmapu.org/

Twitter:
Tweets by carav_wallmapu

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Caravana-de-Medios-Libres-en-Wallmapu-571464383290421/about/?ref=page_internal

Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0L2WgTSssh1ggY8O68XW9A