ABSTRACT
According to Guatemala's community radio practitioners and international bodies including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), spectrum liberalization discriminates against those who lack the financial resources to purchase spectrum title, (re)criminalizes poverty, and effectively bars non-profit community radio stations from legal access to the airwaves. Research on property rights and neoliberalism reveals that disputes over rights and obligations often generate larger interpretive struggles that shift attention from rights and obligations as such to the rules and processes from which rights and obligations obtain. Scholars have mapped the correlation between massacre sites and Maya linguistic communities, and it is largely in these same ethno-linguistic areas that the bulk of Guatemala's unauthorized community radio stations are located. All frequencies in regulated bands Prior to the 1996 reform, spectrum zoning in Guatemala followed the spectrum zoning model of the United States Federal Communication Commission, wherein blocks of bandwidth are set aside for specific applications and license assignments are deployed from each block.
