Hernán Dinamarca

Hernán Dinamarca is revolutionizing the field of alternative video and communications by creating the first cable television station to be entirely produced, directed, edited, and financed by members of a local community, including youth, women, and environmentalists. His community-controlled station will bring an unfiltered depiction of the lives of poor and disadvantaged Chileans to a wide audience, build support for community groups, and help reduce the country’s social divisions.

Hernán believes that community-controlled, produced, and edited television programs can profoundly improve the patterns of popular communication in Chile and beyond. Community television that, for the first time, places all aspects of production squarely in the hands of local community groups will result in programs depicting the actual conditions and opinions of the poor majority. It will enable local groups, including youth, women, and environmentalists, to share their ideas, experiences, and insights with others in the community. And it will thus expand the points of view and subject matter encountered by a large and geographically-dispersed viewership.

Hernán is persuaded that cable television offers the access to mass media technologies that will enable local citizen groups to disseminate their messages to a new and wider audience and to develop correspondingly stronger and broader support bases. He is also confident that, in turn, cable television will help nurture and strengthen civil society.

Local content control will be assured by a democratically-selected, community-based editorial board, which will be responsible for approving and, subsequently, evaluating the community’s programs. At every stage in the development of those programs, from content decisions to financial planning, local women, teenagers, and other traditionally ignored groups will actively participate in the decision-making processes.

Recognizing the importance of high-quality programming, Hernán will rely initially on professional technicians to train and supervise local camera operators, correspondents, and producers. But he is offering free professional training to local video makers to ease the transition from amateur video maker to master camera operator. Thus, even if the community cable station should fail, groups traditionally excluded from the television industry’s formal job markets will have gained marketable professional skills.

Television in Chile, as in many other Latin American settings, is an increasingly powerful industry, controlled by the state or by an oligopolistic privatized system. In Chile, all broadcast television is either state-owned or controlled by one or of two privately-owned networks. These groups control the television content that reaches virtually all Chileans, even those living in the country’s poorest slums. Because there are only a few television channels in operation, the range of voices that are heard, and of the viewpoints aired, is correspondingly limited, and so is the quality and texture of public debate. Even “local programs,” presented with the intention of depicting life and conditions at the community level, are filmed, produced and edited by non-local technicians and professional journalists, with corporate executives or state officials looking over their shoulders. In the usual case, neither the production staff nor the program managers have first hand living experience in the communities they cover, and the stories aired fail to address the issues and conditions of greatest concern to the local community.

The concentration of control in a few hands also enhances the likelihood that the programs offered will reinforce class divisions and do little or nothing to break down barriers of misunderstanding between neighbors. In Chilean society, the gaps between rich and poor, indigenous and European, and rural and urban are very wide. This leads to the tendency of the privileged minority to ignore the impoverished conditions of the vast majority of Chileans is rarely challenged. Therefore, the typical upper-class resident of Santiago feels more in common with New Yorkers or Berliners than with the poor Chileans living in slum communities only a few kilometers away.

The alternative video, community radio, and print media offer local groups in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America welcome airing issues, opinions, and concerns that they deem important. But none of those communication instruments has the mass distribution potential of cable television. In 1995, 80,000 families in Santiago had access to cable television. That number is expected to double in 1996 and to explode by 2000, as the consequence of an ambitious program for laying cable throughout Santiago.

Hernán’s strategy is based on his experience as a journalist, author, video producer, and radio station manager. In 1995, he convinced one of Chile’s private cable television companies to carry his community television station and began working in three cities with a combined population of about one million. He also persuaded his former employer, a nonprofit organization that manages a community radio station and a journal dedicated to disseminating local information, to fund the first year of the station’s operations.

In each of three pilot communities, Hernán has formed and trained a team of local programmers, producers, and correspondents from community-based organizations. Many of the individuals involved bring prior experience in alternative video production to their new assignments, and Hernán has organized skill-enhancing workshops to help refine and professionalize their creative, filming, and editing skills. Hernán is making a special effort to reach out to teenagers, who use self-taught video techniques to tell stories relating to their daily lives. By enlisting the cooperation and support of local corporations and municipal cultural organizations, he is also forging productive links between low-income youths and established local institutions.

Hernán has formed locally-controlled editorial boards. Each community-controlled board is developing editorial guidelines for the new cable station and is also charged with developing a long-range fund-raising plan.

By 1998, Hernán plans to spread his idea by introducing his community cable production initiative in each of the fifteen communities (with a combined population of more than five million) that surround Santiago.

Hernán Dinamarca has been actively involved in the alternative video and popular communications field for decades, in various capacities and in several Latin American countries. His experience includes years as a journalist, creating some thirty independent videos, authoring several internationally-published books on the alternative video movement in Latin America, and producing four television series covering such controversial, and seldom publicly discussed, topics as ethnic minorities, poverty, ecological problems, and children’s rights. He has also organized and participated in numerous regional conferences on alternative video and popular communications.

Prior to embarking on his current venture, Hernán served as communications director for the Chilean nonprofit organization, (Canelo de Nos) Our Channel, where he created and managed both a community radio station and Chile’s principal ecology magazine.