Throughout the 1970s, journalists and leaders in the Global South organized around the concept of a New International Information Order (NIIO).Footnote 1 Though largely forgotten today, the NIIO was a key platform of the Third World solidarity movement, which united leaders of recently decolonized and so-called ‘developing’ nations against neocolonialism. International advocates in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) questioned a central tenet of liberal models of press freedom: that the free market of ideas would guarantee a truthful and civic-minded press. Political leaders, alongside left-leaning academics and journalists, argued instead that the widespread consumption of North Atlantic news, film, and television content perpetuated neocolonial mentalities, particularly consumerism, individualism, and the privileging of Western over indigenous cultures. Moreover, NIIO proponents argued that global mass media facilitated Soviet and US imperialist agendas, including economic extraction and military intervention. The movement envisioned an alternative information system premised upon South–South exchange of nationally produced information.
While influential in its time, the NIIO has received little scholarly attention.Footnote 2 International historians have recently turned to analysing the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and, in so doing, have revealed early opposition to an economic system rooted in unregulated capital. In May 1974, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly approved the NIEO, which asserted Global South sovereignty over natural resources and included proposals to improve developing countries’ international economic positions.Footnote 3 Yet, Third Worldist solidarity platforms did not focus solely on material concerns, and many NIEO advocates argued that economic independence would never be achieved without first gaining mental independence.Footnote 4 Global South leaders maintained that dependency persisted because former colonial powers possessed ‘both the word and the sword’.Footnote 5 Simply put, global inequities rested not only upon disadvantageous terms of trade and military power, but also upon the disproportionate control over mass media and its associated technologies.
Latin America experimented more with NIIO initiatives than any other region in the Global South, and this article focuses on reporters’ and academics’ efforts to bring about an alternative information order. Mexico City became the principle staging ground for NIIO advocacy, which enjoyed its heyday between 1973 and 1980. The city served as the regional headquarters for Third Worldist institutes, news publications, wire services, and journalist associations, and became home to hundreds of exiled reporters and intellectuals. Latin American NIIO advocates denounced the dominance of US news and culture, which they argued perpetuated regional dependency and undergirded coups against democratically elected leaders. In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin America witnessed a wave of right-wing dictatorships and violent counter-insurgencies that sought to eradicate leftism. For this reason, NIIO activists, who generally belonged to the political left, were not preoccupied with combating Soviet and Chinese propaganda, but instead attacked the North Atlantic value of the free flow of information.
Since the Second World War, the US government had made the free flow of information a central facet of it foreign policy-making. This principle prioritized freedom from state intervention and the uninhibited circulation of information across national borders. US leaders saw the NIIO as a threat to global democracy and spearheaded North Atlantic opposition against the project.Footnote 6 A stalemate eventually led the United States and the United Kingdom to withdraw from UNESCO in 1984 and 1985, respectively. By this point, however, the Third Worldist movement had dwindled and with it advocacy for new information and economic orders. The regional focus adopted in this article sheds new light on why this was the case. Scholars rightly emphasize that the NIEO failed for structural and diplomatic reasons, pointing to global debt crises and oil shocks, divisions within the NAM, and increased opposition by the United States.Footnote 7 This emphasis on international processes and state actors, however, has tended to obscure the domestic political factors that also attenuated enthusiasm for Third Wordlist initiatives like the NIEO and NIIO.Footnote 8 This article highlights three additional explanations for why ambitious Southern initiatives ultimately lost support, while also attenuating narratives of failure.
First, international delegates could not agree upon the right balance of market, state, and multilateral regulations to address the South’s information dependency. While Global South proponents generally rejected a strict commercial media model, they struggled to find an alternative that guaranteed both intellectual freedom and economic viability. Second, the problem of implementation became insurmountable, as schisms emerged within countries, not only between them.Footnote 9 For example, Latin America’s major media corporations opposed the NIIO, fearing it would mean the break-up of lucrative concessions, and select governments voiced their rhetorical commitment while seeking to undermine the project’s key goals. Finally, agendas formulated in the NAM and UNESCO did not evolve with developments on the ground. By the late 1970s, exiled journalists and academics became critical of the NIIO platform, arguing that repressive governments could not be trusted to safeguard socially responsible information. They re-envisioned a new information order that was rooted in local, rather than international, information sovereignty and spearheaded from below. The democratization of media production and voice demonstrates that the NIIO did not fail, but simply evolved.
Nils Gilman has recently argued that revisiting the NIEO ‘denaturalizes the inegalitarian global political economy’.Footnote 10 Likewise, revisiting the NIIO denaturalizes the free flow of information as the overriding ideology of international communications. The NIIO fundamentally challenged North Atlantic doctrine by asserting that open markets did not produce democratic or even truthful information. Proponents did not seek informational autarky, but rather to be equal participants in an alternative form of globalization rooted in national sovereignty. However, their prioritization of the nation-state ultimately raised too many contradictions, as repressive regimes and domestic media were arguably producing information that was just as compromised as that from foreign media. Neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the internet soon quieted global debates about private interests governing media. However, returning to NIIO debates reveals that the ideology of ‘free information’, like the ideology of ‘free trade’, was once fiercely contested and that the struggle over knowledge production was central to advocacy for an equitable, postcolonial international system. At the same time, returning to the NIIO illustrates the vulnerabilities of the movement, which assumed that South–South information would not reproduce the power hierarchies that predominated in each country.
This article begins by exploring early models and conceptual frameworks for South–South information exchange, which shaped the subsequent formulation of the NIIO agenda. The Cuban Revolution initially inspired leftists in Latin America and beyond to argue that media sovereignty would guard against US intervention. Enthusiasm waned as Cuban censorship became apparent, but influential scholars continued to argue that cultural imperialism, fuelled by the consumption of US news and culture, kept Latin Americans economically dependent. The second section examines how these ideas percolated into the international meetings that preceded and then followed the 1976 declaration of the NIIO. It highlights how advocates, most of whom straddled the worlds of academia, politics, and international activism, struggled to articulate the proper role that states, markets, and multilateral institutions should assume to guarantee fair media coverage of the Global South. The third and final section examines how Latin American exiles reformulated their agenda to account for state repression. Most were sent into exile between 1971 and 1974, driven by military takeovers in Bolivia (1971) and Chile (1973) and repression in Argentina, which foreshadowed the dirty war (1976–83). Reflecting shifts within the Latin American left, NIIO advocates soon argued that national democratization was necessary before international inequities could be addressed, and they soon lost enthusiasm for South–South initiatives.
Predecessors to the NIIO movement
Decades before the NIIO agenda emerged, Third World leaders identified media sovereignty as central to their anti-colonial struggle. They argued that colonialism had rested, in part, on the control over information. Indeed, North Atlantic wire services had long dominated international news production. In 1871, Reuters Telegram Company (Great Britain), Agence Havas (France), and Wolff Telegraphisches Bureau (Germany) wire services formed a cartel and carved the globe into areas of influence. In the early twentieth century, as the United States asserted itself militarily and economically in Central America and the Caribbean, the Associated Press (AP) negotiated the rights from Havas to operate throughout the western hemisphere. While the cartel dissolved during the Second World War, the spheres of news agency influence persisted long after.Footnote 11
Over the following decades, the so-called Big Four agencies – AP, United Press International (UPI), Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Reuters – sold wholesale news to subscribers around the world. Most newspapers and broadcasters could not afford the high operating costs of maintaining hundreds of full-time reporters and staff overseas. Wire service journalists were stationed in foreign cities, where they reported immediate news that could be available to subscribers within one hour of a story’s filing. With smaller operating budgets, Global South media typically used wire feeds to populate their international pages, and they would often print news about neighbouring countries that had been gathered by North Atlantic wire services. At its peak, North Atlantic wire feeds accounted for around 80% of the international news printed and broadcast.Footnote 12
Many Global South leaders saw information self-determination as a key step in decolonization. One notable early effort was spearheaded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70), who mobilized the state-funded Radio Cairo to promote pan-Africanism. In 1954, radio programmes such as Voice of the Arabs and Voice of Cairo broadcast anti-colonial programming in Arabic and Swahili. By the mid 1960s, Egypt had shifted to a pan-Islamist agenda, and its Voice of Islam programme bridged continental divides with qur’anic broadcasts to Latin America and the Middle East. Algerian revolutionary leaders also created a radio broadcasting network to connect Muslims across the Maghreb.Footnote 13 These programmes aimed to forge regional identities and counter French and British cultural influence.
Cuba similarly offered models for South–South communication. Just three weeks after the Cuban Revolution succeeded on 1 January 1959, Fidel Castro (1959–2011) announced that Latin America must produce its own news, and he founded the news service Prensa Latina. He believed that international representations of Cuba would determine the revolution’s ultimate success. Castro recognized the outsized influence of the US-based AP and UPI agencies, which produced the highest volume of international news on Latin America.Footnote 14 Castro argued that the revolution aimed to ‘decolonize’ the Cuban mind; in late 1959, revolutionary brigades staged dramatic newspaper burnings to literally and figuratively purge articles published from AP wires.Footnote 15
Castro wished not only to project a positive image of the island outwards, but also to guard the island against subversion. The Soviet Union, the United States, and China disseminated propaganda to win the allegiance of the ‘Third World’, and recent events in Guatemala offered a cautionary tale. In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had mobilized psychological warfare and armed a paramilitary force to unseat the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz.Footnote 16 By 1961, the United States was turning similar strategies against Cuba, funding opposition media and organizations and broadcasting Voice of America radio programmes that denounced the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 17
Cuban leaders explicitly linked economic and political liberation with South–South information exchange. In a few short years, Prensa Latina boasted over 200 subscriptions from newspapers throughout the Americas, and it transmitted sixteen hours of news each day to Asia, Africa, and Europe.Footnote 18 In 1961, the government founded an international shortwave radio service, Radio Havana Cuba, which broadcast English- and Spanish-language programming to Central America and the Caribbean.Footnote 19 Radio Havana also established information exchange agreements with Egypt’s Middle East News Agency and Yugoslavia’s Tanjung. Finally, the Cuban government broadcast English-language programmes that targeted US civil rights and anti-war protesters. For example, in 1962 Radio Havana aired a programme by the Hanoi radio service, Voice of Vietnam, to make the North Vietnamese perspective available to US opponents of the war.
Cuba inspired many countries concurrently fighting for liberation. For example, the Algerian revolutionary leader Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012) chose Cuba for his first diplomatic trip following independence in 1962. As the historian Jeffrey Byrne shows, Algerian leaders saw Cuba as a model to follow, and the delegation drafted reports of Cuban revolutionary programmes, such as the agrarian reform and literacy campaign. The delegation also returned home inspired to nationalize prominent French colonial landmarks, including the Radio Algiers broadcasting station.Footnote 20 The trip marked the beginning of a relationship of mutual aid between the two countries.
By contrast, many Latin American leaders viewed Cuba as a cautionary tale, rather than a model to emulate. Right-wing regimes came to power with promises to fight the revolutionary contagion. Blaming Cuba for the rise of leftist guerrilla groups, Latin American leaders tried to limit the Prensa Latina’s influence, and, by the mid 1960s, most had shuttered the agency’s local offices. Renata Keller observes that, as Cuba drew closer to the Soviet Union, there was ‘widespread confusion over what distinction existed – if any – between the Soviet Union’s interests and Cuba’s’.Footnote 21 But Prensa Latina nonetheless maintained its own distinct perspective.
While Mexico’s government allowed Prensa Latina to remain open, state spies closely monitored the news agency’s activities and accused Cuba of controlling radical Mexican news outlets.Footnote 22 Leftist publications, including Política and Sucesos para todos, did in fact receive funding from Cuban, Soviet, and Chinese sources, but socialist penetration paled in comparison to the influence of North Atlantic news and culture.Footnote 23 The UPI, AP, AFP, and EFE (Spain) accounted for 70% of all Mexican wire service subscriptions, while the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) and Prensa Latina accounted for only 10%.Footnote 24 Thus, the spectre of communist infiltration was greater than its actual media footprint.
Despite conservative opposition, Prensa Latina survived, and by the 1970s the Cuban news agency maintained offices in Europe, Asia, and Africa.Footnote 25 Meanwhile, Cuban media foreshadowed many of the vulnerabilities of the NIIO. Even as Prensa Latina promoted revolutionary struggles internationally, Castro progressively circumscribed the parameters of acceptable discourse at home. By the fall of 1961, all Cuban newspapers and radio had come under state control, and the media increasingly restricted the ability of citizens (particularly gays and Afro-Cubans) to question the revolution.Footnote 26 While recognizing these shortcomings, NIIO advocates would propose a similar form, a regional news agency, and, in so doing, modelled their ventures on Prensa Latina.
An American framework for the NIIO
The success of the Cuban Revolution and the ascendance of leftist governments in the 1970s led many Latin American scholars and journalists to believe that development was possible outside capitalism. This political context, alongside the popularization of dependency theory, shaped the conceptual framework for the NIIO. Leftist journalists such as Eleazar Díaz Rangel, novelists like Ariel Dorfman, and academics including Armand Mattelart and Herbert Schiller authored influential texts that shaped subsequent debates. Collectively, their work underscored the fact that national control over information was essential to economic, political, and cultural power. Moreover, they argued that the Global South needed to unite around its shared dependent position.
Many reporters were inspired by Castro’s denunciation of information imperialism. Among the commentaries that most shaped subsequent debates was the 1967 book Pueblos subinformados (Under-informed peoples), by the Venezuelan reporter Díaz Rangel. The thirty-three-year-old leftist journalist wrote the book in response to the 1965 US invasion of the Dominican Republic, which he saw as inextricably tied to US dominance of hemispheric news. Díaz Rangel argued that wire services served as ‘effective instruments’ of imperialism by supporting US efforts to overthrow popular leaders.Footnote 27 While the AP and UPI were cooperatively and privately owned respectively, they had collaborated with the US government since the Second World War to align their coverage with foreign policy objectives.Footnote 28 Díaz Rangel maintained that this symbiotic relationship allowed news agencies to serve as harbingers of imperialism: the more that US news services inflected hemispheric news, the more likely military interventions were to succeed. Like Castro, Díaz Rangel saw US news wire agencies as the worst offenders, even though western European news services enjoyed an absolute majority of Latin American subscriptions, with 52.2% compared to the US’s 32.2%.Footnote 29 He recognized that US cultural and commercial products, such as film, comics, magazines, and advertising, collectively had far more influence over Latin American consumers.
Díaz Rangel argued that regional solidarity was the only guard against imperialist intervention, and he saw information exchange as the first step towards this goal. He noted that Latin American newspapers did not circulate beyond national borders and, as a result, ‘every country … only sees its connections to its neighbours through the threads woven by AP and UPI’.Footnote 30 By focusing on print media in a region with low literacy, Díaz Rangel prioritized solidarity among political and economic elites. He maintained that commercial ties brought US ideologies, particularly anti-communism, into regional news. His experience of political repression no doubt shaped this conclusion. The Venezuelan government had cracked down on suspected communists as leftist guerrillas sought to arm a revolution. In 1963, Díaz Rangel was fired from El Nacional newspaper because of his communist sympathies, and he was arrested in 1964.Footnote 31 He wrote Pueblos subinformados while he was imprisoned, and he understood national repression to be shaped by US information dominance.
Developments on the ground soon coloured Latin Americans’ willingness simply to emulate the Cuban position. Many were disillusioned, for example, when Castro failed to denounce Russia’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Highly publicized cases of censorship, most notably the 1971 arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla, also tarnished the revolution’s image among left-leaning intellectuals and led prominent figures to withdraw their support. By the 1970s, many Latin American leftists were searching for a different alchemy of state, multinational, and private involvement to bring about information independence.
Dependency theory also inflected advocacy for information sovereignty. South American academics such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1931–) and Enzo Falleto (1935–2003) argued that underdevelopment was conditioned by an exploitative relationship between the periphery and the centre.Footnote 32 In their rendering, the Global North controlled the technology, machinery, and beneficial terms of trade that allowed it to profit at the expense of the periphery. By foregrounding global capitalism in explanations of underdevelopment, these writers departed from modernization theorists, who claimed that the Global South could develop if it simply followed the same steps as those taken by the Global North.Footnote 33
One of the most influential works to link dependency theory with information sovereignty appeared in 1971, when the Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian academic Armand Mattelart (working in Chile at the time) published their pioneering book, Para leer al pato Donald (How to read Donald Duck).Footnote 34 The authors developed a poignant critique of cultural imperialism, arguing that North American mass culture kept Latin Americans in a state of ‘mental dependency’ and prevented them from producing indigenous models of development. Dorfman and Mattelart analysed Disney comic books, which were wildly popular in Latin America, to argue that the whimsical characters inculcated children with the capitalist values of individualism and consumerism. The authors asserted that, by depicting a world without class conflict, the comics naturalized existing global inequalities. The authors thus pointed to the widespread consumption of US mass media to explain why Latin America remained dependent upon the United States after 150 years of formal political independence from Spain.
Para leer al pato Donald described the western hemisphere as divided along North–South lines, with divisions corresponding to a country’s autonomous or dependent economic position. The authors argued that Disney cartoons obscured the fact that Latin Americans ‘occupy the same dependent position’ by depicting individual nations only in terms of cultural stereotypes. For example, comics detailed adventures in ‘Aztecland’ (that is, Mexico), where locals donned sombreros and ponchos and took long naps against the backdrop of volcanoes and cacti. For the authors, fixating on shallow cultural differences prevented solidarity among nations that shared a common set of interests and challenges.Footnote 35
At the time of writing, Dorfman was serving as cultural adviser to the Chilean president Salvador Allende (1970–3), whose socialist government offered hope for the Latin American left. Leftist and populist governments also came to power in Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the early 1970s, and the Peruvian General Juan Velasco Alvarado even took steps to democratize media ownership by expropriating select periodicals and redistributing them to peasant organizations.Footnote 36 However, Chile’s case soon destabilized the notion that the Latin American left would prevail. On 11 September 1973, a military coup unseated Allende and sent Mattelart and Dorfman into exile. The US government welcomed the coup, but Allende’s overthrow was only possible because of considerable Chilean popular support and Brazilian collaboration.Footnote 37
While Dorfman, Mattelart, and Díaz Rangel suggested that US media universally welcomed right-wing dictatorships, many North American journalists denounced the Chilean coup. In 1972, the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson warned that US companies were trying to generate local opposition to Allende.Footnote 38 After the coup, North Atlantic reporters voiced antipathy towards General Augusto Pinochet, who headed the military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. Journalists routinely reported on human rights abuses in Chile and criticized the US government for supporting the new regime.Footnote 39 The neat dichotomy between North and South news also did not account for the flourishing of alternative media in the United States. In the 1960s, for example, activists and academics criticized mainstream media for naturalizing racial injustices and gender inequalities, and they produced news sheets to cover radical politics, including the Black Power Movement and anti-war protests.Footnote 40 The US invasion of the Dominican Republic further galvanized demands for alternative information among the left. The intervention led to the 1967 creation of the New York-based North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which aimed to support revolutionary struggles and counter mainstream coverage of the region.Footnote 41
Dependency theory and critiques of US cultural imperialism also emerged through inter-American exchange.Footnote 42 Indeed, Dorfman and Mattelart built upon Herbert Schiller’s influential 1969 work, Mass communications and American empire, which popularized the concept of cultural imperialism.Footnote 43 Schiller, a prominent North American communications scholar, argued that US media and cultural industries acted as vehicles of imperialism by monopolizing the world’s news, films, and advertising. This not only ensured an ever-expanding market for US products, which were advertised in news publications and films, but also provided an efficient means for the spread of Western values. Schiller claimed that the effects were particularly pronounced in Africa, where US broadcasters aggressively sold television and radio programming.Footnote 44 Challenging a central claim of Daniel Lerner, the major modernization theorist of communication, Schiller argued that the spread of mass media did not naturally lead to development and civic engagement, but instead could perpetuate dependency and generate political apathy.Footnote 45 In this way, he rejected modernization theorists’ notion that each nation would pass through stages, including the consumption of mass media, that culminated in development.
Schiller’s work further challenged classical liberal notions of press freedom, which emphasized the negative freedom from government interference. Instead, Schiller contended that privately owned broadcasters and news wires produced content that was just as biased as state-run media.Footnote 46 While governments manipulated information to perpetuate their own power, he argued that privately owned media used news to generate profit; in neither system was the press objective. Schiller made the case that Global South governments should regulate foreign news and cultural products, warning that the unrestricted international flow of information destroyed local cultures and stifled critical thought. This left local media consumers disempowered and prevented their effective engagement in the political life of their home countries.Footnote 47
Over the following decade, Díaz Rangel, Dorfman, Mattelart, and Schiller assumed leadership roles in NIIO institutions and conferences, allowing their ideas to further shape the movement’s agenda. In 1976, Díaz Rangel became the first president of the Latin American Federation of Journalists (Federación Latinoamericana de Periodistas, or FELAP), an organization founded to facilitate regional exchange among reporters. Dorfman and Mattelart’s book, meanwhile, attained a wide readership and by 1977 had been translated into English, French, and German.Footnote 48 Finally, Schiller and Mattelart regularly participated in UNESCO committees and conferences, where their working papers shaped the NIIO agenda.
The formulation of the agenda
Members of the NAM laid the groundwork for both the NIEO and the NIIO at their Fourth Summit Meeting of 5–9 September 1973 in Algiers.Footnote 49 Delegates envisioned these as interlocking projects and emphasized that economic liberation required control over knowledge production. To this end, they called for the ‘reorganization of existing communication channels which are the legacy of the colonial past’.Footnote 50 Participants clearly framed the agenda in response to North Atlantic, not Soviet, information imperialism. Indeed, the final document highlighted the legacies of European colonial rule and the continued US imperialism in Puerto Rico and Vietnam, with no mention of the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Latin American Summit attendees, this emphasis reflected the lived reality, as the United States was the dominant military and cultural presence in the region. Antipathy towards the United States also grew among other NAM leaders who resented coercive US policies towards non-aligned states.Footnote 51
Participants believed that media sovereignty would guard against US intervention. In the final report, delegates identified key strategies for strengthening national media systems and improving Southern information exchange. For example, they proposed ways to make news production less costly, including making cable services more affordable and collectivizing space satellites. The latter proposal was particularly radical. In 1964, the United States founded a global communication satellite system, which was managed by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat). While technically an intergovernmental consortium, Intelsat’s voting structure was based on share of satellite ownership, giving the United States a majority vote and thus effective control over the organization. Excluded from Intelsat, the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc formed their own international satellite communications organization, Intersputnik, in 1971. However, both Intelsat and Intersputnik limited Global South involvement by offering original members greater decision-making power.Footnote 52 NAM participants recognized this exclusion and argued that communication was a public good that should be redistributed on a global scale. Collectivizing satellites would not only limit the Global North’s media influence but also allow Global South media to project their views internationally.Footnote 53
Delegates also emphasized the need to improve intellectual collaboration among Global South universities and libraries. Their proposals led to the 1975 creation of the Non-Aligned News Agency, which served as a clearing house for news articles emanating from the Global South. Operating out of the Yugoslavian wire service, Tanjung, the agency collected articles submitted via teleprinter, telex, or airmail by its members and translated the news items into English, French, and Spanish before disseminating them to subscribers. In 1976, forty wire services participated in the pool, and by 1981 membership had more than doubled.Footnote 54 However, the volume of news was quite thin, and many readers complained that the articles merely promoted the interests of their governments.
The integration of regional news systems was already underway in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. At the 1975 Conference of Arab and African News Agencies in Tunis, attendees strategized how they might transmit news across their borders, and they asked UNESCO to underwrite a study of existing communications facilities.Footnote 55 UNESCO was already providing technical aid to help African countries such as Somalia and Libya develop their communication infrastructures. While this was a continuation of UNESCO’s development agenda in the 1950s and 1960s, Global South leaders now mobilized aid to advance their own ends of regional solidarity. In the English-speaking Caribbean, political leaders recognized the financial benefits of news cooperation. With UNESCO support, they formed the Caribbean News Agency (CANA), which focused on delivering financial and market-oriented news about the region. It was among the most successful and durable of such regional ventures, though it did not share NIIO goals of using media to achieve economic sovereignty.Footnote 56
NAM delegates formally called for a ‘new international order in information’ at the March 1976 Symposium on Information in Tunis.Footnote 57 After the declaration, Latin American academics and political leaders organized international meetings to solidify the NIIO movement. For example, in May 1976, thirty-six journalists, scholars, and public officials from Africa, Europe, and the Americas convened in Mexico City for a closed-door, five-day seminar. Organized by the Latin American Institute for Transnational Studies (Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, or ILET), a Mexico City-based organization affiliated with the UN, the conference elaborated on the NIIO agenda. At the event, Mexican public officials rubbed shoulders with Finnish academics, Senegalese newspaper editors, and Yugoslavian press agency directors. Schiller, whose Mass communications and American empire was translated into Spanish that year, and Mattelart also attended.Footnote 58
Rather than pursuing independence from global media, ILET delegates sought the means to insert themselves within it and sway international opinion. In the collectively authored final report, participants argued that North Atlantic wire services engaged in ‘the systematic deformation of the reality of Third World countries’.Footnote 59 Representatives were particularly concerned with how news agencies smeared liberation struggles in Palestine, Angola, and Cuba. ILET delegates suggested that multilateral governing bodies should pass and enforce regulations to prevent such coverage. For example, participants recommended that UNESCO should prohibit foreign direct radio broadcast by satellite, a proposal originally made by the Soviet Union in 1972.Footnote 60
Delegates also outlined a positive state role to ensure access to good information, and they took aim at the profit-driven model of media production. Participants stressed that ‘news should not be considered merchandise, but rather a social good that should be placed at the service of development’.Footnote 61 They envisioned varying degrees of state involvement, from subsidies and regulations to full media ownership. However, representatives identified common approaches that member states could take to strengthen national media systems, including the creation of news agencies and journalist training centres. While participants urged reporters to write socially conscious news, they did not specify how to do so. Instead, they suggested that emancipatory reportage would naturally emerge once national media structures were in place.Footnote 62
The final ILET report remained tellingly silent regarding the obstacles that national governments posed to the ‘emancipation of media’. To some extent, this was necessary to achieve consensus among representatives of nations as distinct as Peru and Tunisia. However, it was also an inherent weakness of the Global South designation, which suggested that a nation’s dependent international economic position was the starting point for transnational allegiances. Mobilizing as the Global South was a useful strategy, but it fell short of explaining how domestic politics and discrimination contributed to inequalities at home.
The spectre of state repression
Many South American proponents of the NIIO were living in Mexico City, exiled by the right-wing military dictatorships that took power in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976). The sheer concentration of exiled journalists and intellectuals in Mexico City provided critical social capital to denounce the human rights abuses of their home governments and organize initiatives around the NIIO declaration.Footnote 63 Wary of state repression, South American participants nonetheless struggled to imagine an NIIO, or indeed a UN, without the nation-state as the primary unit.
ILET’s founding director, Juan Somavia (1941–), was part of this recent wave of South American immigration to Mexico City. He had served as a trade adviser to Allende before fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup; members of the administration who remained behind were killed or detained in clandestine prisons. Though Somavia was all too aware of repressive military dictatorships, his working paper for the ILET conference did not explicitly address how government involvement might corrupt the NIIO.Footnote 64 Instead he urged Southern countries to ‘exercise their sovereignty’ and scrutinize the information that crossed their borders. Somavia proposed that multilateral institutions could create a normative framework for international news. This, he noted, would include a juridical and social outline of journalistic responsibility and a ‘right to reply’ that guaranteed Southern nations space to respond to inaccurate information printed about their countries. Somavia’s proposal presumed that international bodies such as the UN were omniscient and could easily adjudicate the accuracy of news about any given country. Moreover, these regulations would effectively grant nation-states, not journalists or citizens, the right to determine what counted as ‘information impunity’ and revise the public record as they saw fit.Footnote 65 However, Somavia did not propose a mechanism for sidelining repressive governments from NIIO efforts.
Another working paper at the Mexico City conference, written by Fernando Reyes Matta (1938–), advocated for the creation of a Latin American news agency, which he argued would allow the region to better shape global public opinion. Reyes Matta was an exiled Chilean academic and former diplomat who worked closely with Somavia at ILET. He presented the results of his study of Latin American periodicals, which revealed that the UPI, AP, and Reuters provided at least 77% of the international coverage published in major newspapers.Footnote 66 Reyes Matta argued that this reliance upon North Atlantic wire services had resulted in glaring silences about hemispheric developments, including news of Suriname’s recent independence. Reyes Matta believed that a Latin American wire service would more effectively cover regional events of significance.
His proposal raised the question of whose interests would be served by information sovereignty. In contrast with much of the Global South, most Latin American media was owned by a handful of private media conglomerates that had been granted favourable concessions by their governments. Monopolies like Mexico’s Televisa and Brazil’s O Globo historically defended the economic status quo, even if it meant supporting repressive regimes.Footnote 67 Moreover, a recent experiment with the regional news agency, Latin, did not give cause for optimism. In 1970, a consortium of Latin American newspapers, including, El Mercurio (Chile), O Globo (Brazil), Excélsior (Mexico), and El Comercial (Bolivia), opened a commercial news agency with managerial support from Reuters.Footnote 68 However, the venture suffered major losses, and leading Reuters to take over Latin in 1977.
Also conspicuously absent from Reyes Matta’s recommendation was Cuba, the only country in the western hemisphere to successfully expel US-based wire services. Reyes Matta did not address how a regional wire service would emulate or depart from Prensa Latina, which had considerably professionalized and expanded its operations by this point.Footnote 68 The island did not send a representative to the conference, likely because ILET delegates wished to avoid accusations of Soviet influence. However, Cuba continued to operationalize South–South ties between the Caribbean and Africa. In late 1975, Castro sent 36,000 Cuban soldiers to Angola to aid in the country’s independence movement, and he would send more troops to Ethiopia, the Congo, and Mozambique over the following years. In addition to military assistance, Cuba dispatched medical and education professionals to provide aid and training.
Most relevant to the NIIO project was Cuba’s creation of academic scholarships and a journalistic training centre. In response to South African apartheid, Castro invited 40,000 Africans to study free of charge in Cuba.Footnote 69 The Cuban Communist Party’s Nico López National Cadre School also offered training courses for journalists. In 1981, sixty-nine foreign students from seventeen African and Latin American countries graduated from the course.Footnote 70 Finally, Cuba supported the 1976 creation of an organization of Latin American journalists to counterbalance the US-dominated Inter-American Press Association (IAPA). Though it was forged with Cuban support and advised by the Prague-based International Organization of Journalists, FELAP members did not uncritically echo socialist positions at their annual meetings.Footnote 71 Nevertheless, Cuba’s efforts suggest that strong state support was essential to facilitate South–South exchange.
Both Reyes Matta and Somavia struggled to account for the realities of state repression and censorship that persisted even within countries supportive of the NIIO. Indeed, Mexico was a fraught setting for these debates to unfold. Paradoxically, the capital city offered safe haven for exiled South Americans even as the government deployed violence against its own dissidents. Policies towards the press also remained unpredictable. Just one month after the ILET conference ended, the Mexican government orchestrated the removal of the editorial staff from the most critical national broadsheet, Excélsior.Footnote 72 The intervention, masterminded by one of the world’s foremost Third Worldist advocates, President Luis Echeverría (1970–76), cast doubt upon the Mexican government’s willingness to support alternative information initiatives. Early formulations of the NIIO agenda took national sovereignty as their point of departure, and recommendations required that the state oversee foreign news content and subsidize domestic media outlets. However, this widely publicized incident of censorship highlighted a fundamental vulnerability of the NIIO: for the platform to succeed, the movement needed credible government allies.
Opposition to the NIIO
The NIIO declaration polarized global debates over the meaning of a free press. Many North American reporters and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) vehemently opposed the movement, charging that NIIO proponents advocated for state censorship and propaganda. Opposition to the project also cut across North–South boundaries, muddying one of the movement’s central goals: to amplify Global South voices internationally. Indeed, divisions were not just between countries but also within them, as Latin American media magnates and conservative government officials joined in opposition to NIIO organizing efforts.
US-based NGOs represented some of the most vocal opponents, and leading the charge was Freedom House, an advocacy organization dedicated to defeating communism and defending global democracy. Freedom House mobilized the free-flow-of-information model to discipline foreign governments. In the early 1970s, it began publishing the ‘Freedom in the World’ survey, which ranked countries on a seven-point scale that evaluated political rights and civil liberties. Freedom House used these numbers to then categorize countries as either ‘free’, ‘partly free’, or ‘not free’. Though the index became a widely cited resource for journalists and diplomats, it was unsystematically produced by a single academic, Raymond Gastil, who admitted years later that he had employed an ‘intuitive rating system’.Footnote 73 Neither the methodology nor the numerical breakdown was transparent, even to other Freedom House staff.Footnote 74 Invoking the presumed objectivity of a pseudo-quantitative indicator, the ‘Freedom in the World’ survey reproduced and reinforced US government views of how global freedoms were mapped geographically. Indeed, Gastil consulted the State Department’s annual reports to Congress to produce the survey, and US policy-makers, in turn, cited the survey in justifying their decisions.Footnote 75
On 30 June 1976, the Freedom House director, Leonard Sussman, convened a press conference in New York City that orchestrated hemispheric antipathy towards the NIIO. At the helm of Freedom House, his words carried political weight, as he had been called upon to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding foreign aid and human rights.Footnote 76 Sussman warned reporters that UNESCO was proposing ‘new government controls over news media in developing nations, starting in Latin America’.Footnote 77 This was evidenced, he claimed, by proposals to create a regional wire service and government-led efforts to regulate the imbalanced flow of information. The proximate cause for Sussman’s concerns were two recently leaked reports from UNESCO meetings held in Bogotá, Colombia (1974), and Quito, Ecuador (1975). There, Latin American public officials had strategized how national media systems could advance economic development goals, but they did not advocate state control.Footnote 78 However, Sussman suggested that the Soviet Union was prevailing in the global contest for influence over the developing world, and he cautioned that UNESCO meetings promoted ‘thought control’.Footnote 79
Mainstream US journalists and non-profit organizations joined in opposing government interference in the press. Their protests initially focused on undermining the upcoming UNESCO Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, which was to be held in San José, Costa Rica, two weeks later. With support from the US State Department, reporters created the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) to stage a counter-conference in San José. IAPA also mobilized to join the protest. The largest media association in the hemisphere, IAPA boasted a US-majority membership, with 284 Latin American and 337 US newspaper members in 1965.Footnote 80 With Ford Foundation funding, IAPA offered seminars, scholarships, and prizes that aimed to improve the quality of Latin American journalism. The annual IAPA meeting also addressed shared commercial goals, such as attracting US advertisers to Latin American publications and ensuring reliable newsprint supplies. However, IAPA was best known for its denunciations of press freedom violations. As the frequent targets of its allegations, leftist and populist Latin American leaders, especially Castro, frequently accused IAPA of imperialism, and rumours swirled that the organization was partially funded by the CIA.Footnote 81
Despite high-pitched opposition, the San José conference final report suggests that the NIIO movement was far less united than critics feared. During the proceedings, officials from governments as distinct as Chile and Cuba diverged significantly in their willingness to support development-oriented news and culture, which participants defined less by what it included than by what it excluded (foreign influence). The broad language of the final document accommodated wide-ranging visions of the relationship between the market, the state, and civil society. Moreover, recommendations underscored that all measures should comply with national laws.Footnote 82
Antipathy towards NIIO initiatives did not divide neatly along West–East or North–South lines. Though both Brazil and Uruguay sent delegations to the San José conference, their media proxies at home accused UNESCO of ‘surrendering freedom of information to the views of Marxist radicals and of advocating information monopolies and government control’.Footnote 83 Government-aligned news outlets, including Rio de Janeiro’s O Globo and Montevideo’s El Día, suggested that information was only ‘free’ when scrubbed of leftist ideology. The irony of this assertion would have been apparent to any critical reader, as right-wing military dictatorships had shuttered oppositional newspapers and imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared dissidents. Moreover, Brazil’s Globo corporation had gained a virtual monopoly over media, particularly television, by the 1970s.Footnote 84 This highlights how the language of press freedom at times signalled anti-communism rather than a positive vision for what media content should include.
The cross-cutting alliances made it difficult for contemporary observers to assess who stood to benefit from the NIIO project. This was apparent at ILET’s ‘International Communications and Third World Participation’ seminar held in September 1977 in Amsterdam. The seminar aimed to outline a concrete agenda for the NIIO, but Dutch reporters and liberal party representatives spearheaded a smear campaign against the conference five months before it convened. For example, K. M. Schreiner, editor-in-chief of one of Holland’s most reputable liberal newspapers, NRC/Handelsblad, reported that ‘ILET thinking is a danger for freedom of the press’. M. L. Snijders, editor-in-chief of the local periodical Utrechts Nieuwsblad, similarly attacked the Dutch government for supporting an organization that ‘rapes the freedom of the press’.Footnote 85 Many of these critics attended the meeting in September, intending to undermine its explicit goals. The conference site itself, the ornate neo-Renaissance building of the Royal Tropical Institute, set the stage for pitched battles over neocolonialism: previously known as the Colonial Museum, the building displayed antiquities taken by the Dutch East India Company from its former colonies.
The seminar’s primary conflict centred on who, exactly, was promoting the new information order, and debates revealed inconsistencies within the NIIO movement that would become more pronounced over the following years. During one of the sessions, a ‘Western media professional’ asserted that the NIIO was delegitimized by the fact that Third World autocratic governments promoted it. However, Latin American journalists in attendance insisted that advocacy for alternative information was emerging from below, and asserted that ‘private owners of mass media and authoritarian governments favour the exstinct [sic] situation and oppose a new information order’. These reporters highlighted multiple points of miscommunication: between Global South proposals and Global North perceptions; between local media workers and international organizations; and between their governments and NIIO proponents. Reporters suggested that international initiatives had not sufficiently consulted them and thus had failed to account for developments on the ground.Footnote 86
The NIIO was highly politicized by the late 1970s. International meetings and high-profile press conferences became venues for heated accusations of imperialism or communist infiltration. US-based NGOs and associations like Freedom House, IAPA and WPFC, and North Atlantic journalists weaponized evaluations of press freedom, and some Latin American governments echoed their assessments. Finally, reporters who attended ILET meetings complained that the international NIIO agenda did not reflect their lived realities. Over the follow years, many of these journalists instead looked to civil society to bring about a new information order.
The problem of internal dependency
By the late 1970s, Latin American journalists and academics questioned whether South–South cooperation could resolve the domestic challenges they faced. As they strategized on how they could achieve self-determination over information, exiled writers soon prioritized the problem of internal, rather than Global South, dependency. By ‘internal dependency’, academics referred to the domestic economic and political inequalities that were evident, for example, in the disparities between rural and urban areas and between indigenous and white populations in countries like Mexico. They stressed that national media, and not just North Atlantic news services, published misinformation, silenced opposition opinions, and served elite interests. As such, they emphasized the importance of democratizing media production to achieve alternative information. This revision reflected growing critiques within the dependency school and broader divisions within the Latin American left. For example, Aníbal Quijano underscored the need for a ‘second decolonization’ to address persistent racial and ethnic hierarchies.Footnote 87 Building on these ideas, many journalists and scholars rejected the idea that addressing international inequities would resolve national ones.
This shifting framework was reflected in smaller gatherings that discussed communications problems. In February 1978, for example, a seminar in the Political and Social Sciences Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, or UNAM) brought together Latin American journalists and communications scholars based in Mexico City. Among them was Mario Arrieta Abdalla, a Bolivian researcher at Mexico’s Third World Studies Center. He delivered lengthy comments on a paper given by Reyes Matta, who argued that ‘national liberation’ would naturally flow from the NIIO. Arrieta Abdalla contended, however, that this ignored the problem of internal dependency.Footnote 88 Building on the Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova’s idea of internal colonialism, Arrieta Abdalla argued that domestic media corporations reproduced inequality nationally, much as transnational media did internationally.Footnote 89 Like North Atlantic wire services, he argued, Latin American media produced bad or even ‘false’ information. In Mexico, for example, the broadcasting corporation Televisa owned seventy-eight of the country’s eighty-five stations, monopolizing television programming.Footnote 90 Famously loyal to the one-party regime, the broadcaster echoed official discourse and silenced social protest movements. Given this context, Arrieta Abdalla contended that national economic and political structures reinforced the inequalities wrought by global capitalism, and the latter could not be resolved without addressing the former.Footnote 91
Responding to Reyes Matta’s proposal for a Latin American news agency, Arrieta Abdalla argued that information integration would create more problems than solutions. He reasoned that such a venture required some ideological compatibility among participating countries, and he asserted that ‘it strikes us as unacceptable to have a [news] agency where representatives from the fascist governments of Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil can participate on the board of directors’.Footnote 92 Arrieta Abdalla maintained that, if dictatorships suffocated oppositional publications at home, a regional news agency would simply diffuse manipulated information. A 1976 coup had ushered in a military dictatorship in Argentina; over the following years, the regime had carried out a brutal dirty war against suspected dissidents, sending thousands into exile. Given this context, Latin American journalist organizations, including FELAP and the Andean Journalists Group, echoed Arrieta Abdalla’s concerns that domestic concerns must take priority.Footnote 93
Yet the incongruity between repressive regimes and NIIO advocacy evaded international architects. Even as Latin American journalists questioned the fundamental assumptions of the movement, many of the concepts undergirding the NIIO were being formalized within UNESCO. At the 1978 General Assembly in Paris, for instance, delegates approved the ‘Declaration of Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War’.Footnote 94 At base, the declaration articulated a universal code of ethics for journalists, insisting first that reporters give voice to marginalized peoples ‘who are unable to make their voices heard within their own territories’, and second, that they prioritize the values of human rights, peace, and liberation over profit. The statement, though non-binding, challenged the free flow of information ideology by underscoring that it was impossible for any reporter to write from a value-free position. The declaration also urged reporters to advance development, rather than merely pursue profit, but it did not offer a blueprint for what this content should include. Finally, it avoided the thorny issues of state repression that preoccupied many left-leaning Latin American reporters.
North Atlantic mainstream media and UNESCO delegates, meanwhile, read the mass media declaration as an endorsement of self-censorship and communist propaganda. They worried that it represented the first step towards international legislation to restrict correspondents reporting abroad.Footnote 95 In a cable to the Secretary of State, the US ambassador to the UN warned that ‘this complex of issues has explosive potential, depending on how the non-aligned decide to play it and how much influence the Soviets are able to exercise over their decisions’.Footnote 96 The ambassador proposed that the United States respond ‘positively’ by investing in communications infrastructure and providing training programmes for Global South journalists. This strategy was intended to address technological and infrastructural needs while avoiding the backlash that an overtly oppositional stance might elicit. The Mass Media Declaration marked a significant step towards UNESCO’s institutionalization of NIIO values, but exiled Latin American reporters and academics distanced themselves from international initiatives and outlined a distinct political agenda. Military dictatorships had endured far longer than exiles expected, and democratization increasingly became their main priority.
Democratization and the end of the NIIO
When twenty journalists met for an ILET-sponsored seminar in Mexico City in May 1979, they concluded that the NIIO would only bring about ‘partial changes’ without democratic transformations nationally. Latin American reporters prioritized grassroots media and a ‘participatory national communication policy’ to usher in a new national information order.Footnote 97 Participants argued that national media corporations had undergirded military dictatorships by silencing opposition and parroting the regimes’ narrative. These issues were a priority at the Mexico City seminar, where exiled activists enjoyed disproportionate representation. Among them was José Baldivia, a Bolivian journalist who had been kidnapped and tortured under Operation Condor, a Southern Cone intelligence-sharing initiative. The only woman in attendance, the Uruguay-born reporter Beatriz Bissio, had fled Brazil’s military dictatorship with her husband, Neiva Moreira, a Brazilian journalist who had been imprisoned for participating in the 1968 student movement. As many Southern Cone dictatorships came to power with the direct or indirect support of the United States, participants suggested that a challenge to national media structures was in fact a challenge to US imperialism.
Hoping for democratization, exiles believed that civil society might succeed where international organizations had failed. Reporters were particularly inspired by the rise of alternative media throughout the region, citing examples from Peru, Chile, and the Dominican Republic. The 1979 Nicaragua Revolution would provide another source of optimism. Upon taking power, the Sandinistas confiscated radio stations owned by the ousted dictator, and democratized news production by enlisting ‘popular correspondents’ to write for local stations.Footnote 98 ILET seminar attendees believed that they were witnessing the gradual reorientation of media to incorporate traditionally marginalized voices. To fortify civic engagement, seminar participants proposed the creation of reading circles and radio and film clubs; the strengthening of local journalism organizations; and the passage of national laws to protect reporters and their families. Their meetings indicated an increased concern with liberal democracy, rather than a pursuit of more radical political change.
These proposals moved decidedly away from South–South communication. Exiled participants were convinced that broad participation in the media was a prerequisite for forging emancipatory transnational allegiances. By the early 1980s, enthusiasm for the NIIO had also waned among Latin American reporters and academics because the movement appeared vulnerable to corruption. South American dictatorships had co-opted key agenda items, recognizing that information sharing could serve their own repressive aims. In June 1980, for example, nine major Latin American newspapers agreed to create an article exchange. Among the signatories were periodicals known to be loyal to military dictatorships, such as La Nación of Buenos Aires and El Mercurio of Santiago de Chile. The agreement represented an about-turn from four years earlier, when the same regimes had rejected information integration as a communist plot. Newspaper directors now borrowed NIIO language to express their stated goal to improve mutual understanding among Latin American nations.Footnote 99
These very regimes nonetheless showed signs of vulnerability, inspiring exiles to shift their attention to strengthening national democracies.Footnote 100 By late 1980, the ILET director Juan Somavia argued that democratization was the priority in pursuing a new information order. His experience on the MacBride Commission, which had failed to outline a coherent agenda for the NIIO, also diminished his confidence in internationalist solutions. In 1976, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow (1921–), the Director-General of UNESCO, had created the commission, named after its chairman, Sean MacBride, to conduct an in-depth examination of ‘Third World communication problems’. Though the commission of sixteen media experts convened eight times, disagreements foiled their efforts to solidify a common agenda. Soviet and US commissioners coincided in their scepticism towards the NIIO and allied themselves to block Global South requests that radio spectrums be reallocated.Footnote 101 Commissioners could not even agree on whether they should discuss the NIIO during their meetings, let alone arrive at international regulations.Footnote 102
Years of UNESCO-sponsored seminars and studies had failed to resolve ideological disagreements regarding the ethical responsibilities of media. The MacBride Commission’s 300-page final report reflected this lack of consensus and identified manifold problems in international communications while proposing few solutions.Footnote 103 Schisms among commissioners were also apparent in the final document. Footnotes accompanied many in-text assertions, allowing individual commissioners to dispute claims. For example, when the report described the negative influence that the market had on media content, a corresponding footnote from the US commissioner denied that any evidence existed to prove that assertion.Footnote 104 The commissioners fundamentally could not agree on an overseeing role for UNESCO in the field of information. In the end, M’Bow decided not to bring the report to the 1980 General Assembly for a vote, rightly anticipating opposition.Footnote 105 After nearly a decade of discussion, it appeared that institutional consensus was impossible.
Conclusion
Latin America’s democratic turn bookended nearly a decade of NIIO activism. Mounting protest movements and national plebiscites upended authoritarian regimes and inspired exiles to return home and play a part in the process of democratization. In 1983, widespread protests followed Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War and contributed to the collapse of the dictatorship; two years later, Brazil and Uruguay witnessed a similar end to military rule. The fall of these and other regimes definitively reoriented exiles’ agendas toward national politics, and remigration sapped the collaborative energies of an NIIO movement that had been formerly centred in Mexico City. Somavia, for example, resigned from his ILET duties to become president of the International Commission of the Democratic Coalition in Chile. Latin America’s debt crisis, meanwhile, pre-empted state investment in the types of regional communications infrastructure and exchanges advocated in the NIIO.
However, the NIIO was just one instantiation of a long-standing effort to democratize communication in Latin America, and reporters continued to pursue this goal after the movement’s heyday had passed. With few resources to underwrite large-scale projects, journalists focused instead on cultivating grassroots media, and indigenous and community radio projects flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These outlets achieved the NIIO goals of challenging the narratives of foreign and domestic media monopolies and integrating marginalized voices into the public sphere.
In the early 2000s, many Latin American governments embraced their role in regulating media, and their measures signalled the continued relevance of the NIIO project, while also highlighting the vulnerabilities of its solutions. To address staunch opposition from mainstream Venezuelan and US media, the polarizing leftist president Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) transferred many broadcasting concessions from private companies to community stations and spearheaded the creation of a Latin American news network, La Nueva Televisora del Sur (TeleSur) in 2005.Footnote 106 While diversifying media production, Chávez mobilized the state’s regulatory and redistributive powers to undergird his own hegemonic project and discourage criticism.Footnote 107 Like the NIIO, this project risked reproducing the problems of North Atlantic mass media.
It is easy to read the NIIO story as one of failure. The NAM, and later UNESCO, pursued a tremendously ambitious project: to revise international norms of media production. Recognizing that imperialist contests had limited access to news and cultural production, Global South delegates proposed redistributive measures that would shift the global balance of technological control. The project’s material and ideological goals were immense, and ultimately the Global North’s opposition ensured that they would not be achieved through multilateral bodies like UNESCO. Yet the Latin America case study illustrates that the NIIO did not fail, but simply evolved in tandem with realities on the ground. Latin American leftists came to view grassroots media as the most effective vehicles for a new information order. Eschewing proposals for international regulations and state-funded news agencies, they saw ordinary people’s access to news and cultural production as evidence that a new information order was underway.
Vanessa Freije is an Assistant Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington Seattle. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Scandalous democracy: journalists and the politics of corruption in Mexico.
