PL 022124

Download Polly Lauer's paper below: Disputing "Democratization": The Problems of Guatemala's Radio Spectrum Regulation Polly Lauer (History, Yale) AS GUATEMALA’S 1996 PEACE ACCORDS WERE BEING SIGNED after a 36-year genocidal armed conflict (1960-1996), economists and lobbyists recognized an opportunity to restructure Guatemala’s telecommunications market. Prior to 1996, titles for FM and AM frequencies had been free — save for small administrative fees and under-the-table bribes — for Guatemalan applicants. These economists, however, argued that using Ronald Coase’s auction-based model to allocate frequencies to the highest bidder, Guatemalan or not, would “democratize” and “liberate” Guatemalan media. This neoliberal move functionally privatized the spectrum. POLLY LAUER probes the political economy of Guatemalan radio frequency regulation to illustrate the fraught meanings of “democratization” in post-peace Guatemala. She explores the ways this process immediately limited local radio stations, especially Indigenous radio stations, from obtaining legal access to frequencies, as they could not financially compete against multi-national media conglomerates. The exclusion of local media creators in this “liberation” of the radio spectrum reflects that the policy in fact obstructed the democratic promises of radio by creating a frequency market that prevented makers and audiences from engaging the otherwise low-cost, wide-reach medium. This case illustrates the conflicting definitions and uses of “democratization” in Guatemala’s neoliberal context. Lauer shows how the language of “democratization” was deployed to legitimate a tense political project, revealing the ways that policy makers disguised their ultimate economic motivations in the popular language of democracy.