Can an online editor really amplify the voices of indigenous people while writing from a different country?

Eric French, co-editor of Revista Amauta, a Costa-Rican online alternative opinion magazine, spoke to me today about his life in Providence, Rhode Island, and how he tries to participate in Costa Rican politics by highlighting local Costa Rican voices online:

Eric: It's basically a leftist opinion magazine. I wouldn't call it news. It's mostly analysis. All of the editors have different views of what they want to do with the magazine, but at the beginning, my vision was to make a space for people's voices to be heard who couldn't be heard. In the magazine, we're trying to get as much participation from those sectors that don't participate as often.

This is hard to do because Amauta is an online publication in a country where most people get their news from the radio. Also, Eric is writing from Rhode Island, in the United States.

Eric: Of course, digital inequalities affect the outcome. We can end up in a filter bubble of leftists reading leftists, and no one challenging themselves. So one of the editors is planning to engage edgier, non-leftist opinions so people can challenge themselves.

[At the moment,] we mostly reach the same people who read leftist articles and access the Internet. We started on the Internet because we don't get paid for what we do, and the Internet is a free platform. Radio would be a great opportunity to expand. We have tried to incorporate audio conversations online. All of our editorials are recorded in audio. We record a weekly conversation about news. That's still online, but one day perhaps we can set up a small AM station.

Costa Ricans comprise Amauta's largest national audience, although the online magazine has more international readers than Costa Ricans. When Eric published an interview with Noam Chomsky in April 2011, readers translated it into several languages and reposted it elsewhere.

Although Eric wants Amauta to be a bridge for local voices, international celebrities like Chomsky have attracted the most readers. I asked Eric how he felt about that tension.

Eric: We knew we would get a lot of exposure because people want to hear Chomsky. I wish it didn't have to be that way. It would be better if people would care to hear what anyone says, but no-- people want to hear what famous people have to say.

Most of the time, Amauta publishes original opinion pieces or re-publishing opinion pieces from elsewhere. Media ownership in Costa Rica is highly concentrated, and according to Eric, tends to repeat government viewpoints. Amauta is part of a broader network of alternative media recently formed in Costa Rica, RedMica, which offer a different angle on events in the country. To help me understand how this could play out, Eric pointed me to a recent school protest in Térraba, near Buenos Aires.

Eric: Recently, the Térraba, an indigenous group, were resisting by occupying a high school on their land. They were protesting the bad conditions in the high school and the lack of representation on the staff. There weren't enough teachers from that community, even though they should have been hired.

The mainstream media in Costa Rica pushed that aside. They reported it very little and gave the governments' explanation instead of the perspectives of the indigenous people. That might partly be due to limited access to protesters, which sometimes happens for biger media companies.

Smaller media did try to give on-the-ground interviews with indigenous people, passing on their testimonies. It might have been very raw statements, not very well reported. But it was still the indigenous people.