Addressing the triad of communication, politics, and citizenship is a key issue for the Latin American and Caribbean region, as it constitutes an unavoidable territory for our democracies. Currently, media hyper-concentration, as well as the lack of regulations in communication and technology, call into question the exercise of citizenship and the democracies of our countries to the point of undermining the very idea of ​​the regulatory powers of nation-states and subjects of law. Of course, it is not only the media that can, on its own, condition the will of the people; rather, it does so in clear collusion with elites, the judiciary, and the national and transnational financial market. 

They constitute the pillars that have been operating in the region for decades, employing disinformation campaigns and the delegitimization of politics and popular leaders through the depoliticization of culture, the politicization of the judiciary, the criminalization of social protest, and general media stigmatization. From the so-called mainstream or hegemonic media, arguments are sown and judgments are handed down, blurring the roles of the judiciary and placing us at the limits of democracy. In this context, political campaigns, media-judicial operations, the proliferation of fake news, the control of big data, and the harassment of public and community media outlets and journalists, jeopardize the rights of citizens.

In this way, media hyperconcentration—which is simultaneously economic, ideological, and cognitive—anchored in the doctrine of citizen security and rooted in the pedagogy of cruelty (Segato, 2014), jeopardizes citizenship through mediated democracies that postulate new ways of being together based on the logic of financial capital. And at this point, the struggle for the meaning of the common good, the path to emancipation, is strongly linked to political action, mobilizations, economic management, and the cultural, ideological, and spiritual fabric of our peoples (García Linera, 2015). We understand, therefore, that communication is recognized as constitutive of citizenship as an interaction that makes possible the collectivization of interests, needs, and proposals; but also because it endows subjects with public and political existence, allowing them to see and represent themselves to themselves and others. This recognition of communication as a condition of possibility for citizenship is, at the same time, a condition of possibility for politics and for our democracies.

This suffocation of democracy intensifies with each assassinated popular leader and political prisoner, but also with each curtailed right (media concentration, unemployment and precarious work, the dismantling of public health, education, science and technology, and social security), with each government measure that enacts a regressive transfer of income. These actions are systematically presented in media agendas and in the public consciousness as having been agreed upon with the citizenry, constantly violating the right to communication. While all this is happening, or perhaps to make this scenario possible, the number of journalists, media workers, and owners of critical media outlets who are fired, persecuted, stigmatized, or murdered in our region is increasing, placing us in a state of communicational, political, and civic emergency.

All of this occurs within the context of a neoliberalism in crisis, where each community in the region knows and identifies its oppressors. However, these oppressors seem to revel in punishing those who refuse to submit to violence and injustice. From the positions of power they represent (authoritarian governments, the justice system, and concentrated media outlets), they treat popular struggles and the regulation of communication as a matter of state, portraying them as enemies. Therefore, it is crucial to continue warning that mass media, understood as corporations representing specific regional and global interests, employ a series of semiotic and political operations that reveal their objectives. They demonize the state and politics, claim to be the arbiters of history, and undermine collective memory and the struggles of the people (Saintout and Varela, 2015).

It is also necessary to reiterate that, as exponents of the so-called Latin American elites, the mass media establish a common sense that associates social inclusion policies with populism, fascism, and dictatorships; and they strongly contribute to the discrediting of progressive and left-wing governments, constructing agendas where the argument of public-state corruption becomes one of the main focuses—and excuses—of the neoliberal offensive. In doing so, they equate the State—and the expansion of rights—with corruption, in pursuit of a technocratic administration that ignores the political dimension of all state administration (Astarita, 2014).

Thus, we have been observing and stating how political processes that promote the democratization of communication, understood as a right, pose a clear threat to those who seek to monopolize the word, contributing to the establishment of a conservative order that undermines social rights while censoring, ignoring, or distorting the voices, demands, and expressions of the popular movement, as they reject the application of decrees that threaten the sovereignty and dignity of our peoples, manage fears and hatreds, and mount trials of dubious relevance against the region's rulers and social leaders. 

It is worth noting, then, that the history of mass media and elites in our region is intertwined, resulting in a prominent role in the most horrific events in our people's history, such as dictatorships, civil wars, and coups against democratic governments during the 20th century (like the emblematic case of El Mercurio in Chile, whose direct intervention led to the fall of the democratically elected Popular Unity government between 1970 and 1973), and also in the present day. Cases like those of Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), and Brazil (2016) are clear examples, to which we must add the operations aimed at discrediting and demanding trials of former presidents like Lula da Silva (still unjustly imprisoned), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Rafael Correa, all in support of the current right-wing governments of Jair Bolsonaro, Mauricio Macri, and Lenin Moreno. 

These regional right-wing groups—always in collaboration with global hegemonic powers—have been and continue to be complicit in—and even perpetrators of—the hunger, weapons, tanks, torture, disappearances, and stigmatization that weigh heavily on the history of our peoples. Today, their campaign of pressure no longer relies on bloodshed; instead, they instill their hatred and horror at the people, hiding behind the petty motives of institutions, as expressed in the neoliberal order.

However, in this scenario of confusing and difficult times for our peoples, the resistance of social and political movements is organized, ready to build democratic, open, and popular alternatives. Our America has been and continues to be a vital platform for emergence and potential transformation in the face of the advance of neoliberalism. Communication was and is one of the major arenas of conflict and power struggles. We have seen this in recent years as progressive and popular governments in the region have made it a matter of state, thus opening the possibility of recognition and empowerment for diverse social sectors that, prior to parliamentary discussions on communication regulation, were clearly disadvantaged by the monopolization of speech by concentrated media outlets, or even by those deprived of it altogether.

Today, one of the questions that brings us together concerns recognizing those spaces where dialogues and resistance are built, how we inhabit them when it seems the victors have already won. To this end, developing certain cartographies can be useful for exploring new categories with which to name and address the triad of communication, politics, and citizenship. Thus, we are presented with a series of urgent issues that permeate the current group's work agenda, such as: addressing processes of memory, peace, violence, and migration; the re-enchantment of the worst aspects of religion through the establishment of a fundamentalist worldview (Pentecostalism, Opus Dei, etc.); and the new populisms that, from both the left and the right, threaten to diminish the depth of politics or legitimize abuses of power, wherever that power may originate. 

We also need to re-understand the mediations, technicalities, socialities, and rituals in a time when the so-called digital revolution operates in all spheres of communication, politics, and citizenship. Analyzing the mutations, contradictions, and intersections within this triad is fundamental to understanding what kinds of citizenship are now being constructed from these other sensoriums. In turn, discussions about access to information, accountability, transparency, freedom of expression, and big data require mathematical language for precision, and we must delve deeper into this, since we live in a time when algorithms have acquired a decisive character, and it is essential to know how to decipher and intentionally intervene in them. Algorithms are not neutral. They are designed to grant favors and empower some while depriving others of their data.

Thus, the urgency of these issues is reflected in the brutal erosion of rights that deepens existing divisions, especially the inequality gap (including in communication) that threatens our democracies. Furthermore, addressing the triad of communication, politics, and citizenship in the current regional context aims to collectively develop strategies that will allow us to transform agendas of hatred and oppression into agendas of social justice that are sovereign and equitable, grounded in democratic, broad, pluralistic, and diverse communication.

This Working Group has had two periods of development (2013-2016 and 2016-2019) during which it has fostered the consolidation of an interdisciplinary and pluralistic academic and political space, problematizing the links between communication, politics, and citizenship in our region, in light of contemporary events, through a critical, creative, and historically situated approach. Thus, its meetings, productions, and exchanges contribute to understanding the role of communication in our democracies and in their political and cultural structures in each of our countries. Furthermore, during both periods, this Working Group has expanded its networks and debates, its articulation with other spaces within the network, in academic, scientific, public, and community spheres, always fostering dialogue among each of these spaces and traditions (and far from considering them as separate spheres). 

Given the importance of this space, its ongoing renewal promotes the updating of debates and perspectives, the expansion of the network and the diversity of its constituent actors, with the aim of extending commitments to the sovereignty of our region and the emancipation of our peoples through the production and exchange of knowledge from a geopolitical perspective centered on communication, politics, and citizenship. Thus, this Working Group's proposal entails a project and political struggles from which emancipatory knowledge is produced, attentive to social demands and the emergence of practices and discourses that challenge those imposed by hegemonic powers. These practices and discourses recover the particularities of each Latin American and Caribbean region, their richness linked to popular understandings capable of strengthening the struggles for access to the media spectrum and spaces of enunciation, ultimately leading to communication sovereignty.

The triad of communication, politics, and citizenship is one of the main spaces in the constitution of contemporary democratic societies. In this sense, adopting a Latin American perspective is key to understanding and addressing communication, media, social, cultural, and political practices and processes in our continent and the world. At the same time, it is essential to examine how the history of communication studies has been narrated by an academy "dependent on the metropolises and their conditions, in order to speak with legitimacy"—a revision capable of telling this story from a different perspective (Saintout, 2016). These are epistemologies of the South, of hope, of the grassroots, emerging from conflicts and imbued with the potential of popular struggles as tools capable of transforming the world into a more just and equitable one. 

The rise to power of right-wing parties and Latin American elites marks an alarming setback in human rights and the right to communication throughout our region. Regional right-wing forces, in collaboration with global economic powers, have established three structures that act as a hegemonic bloc: the financial system, the judiciary, and the media. In the past decade, the countries of the Southern Cone promoted the discussion surrounding communication as a human right of the people. With diverse tools and varying degrees of success, populist governments confronted the alliance between media, financial, and judicial powers, placing on the public agenda the need to democratize the spectrum of voices and media ownership through legislative tools and public policies that fostered pluralism and equity of perspectives. This led to the creation of regulations aimed at democratizing communication in our region, displacing those laws imposed by dictatorships and neoliberal governments that had given voice to a commercial logic, tending toward the concentration of media ownership.

In this regard, it is essential to continue denouncing the fact that the disadvantages arising from the unjust distribution of access to frequencies and technologies always perpetuate material and symbolic inequalities in one of the world's most unequal regions, our own. From this platform (among others, of course), we have demonstrated how one of the most evident forms of citizen exclusion today lies in the denial of the right to be seen and heard. Thus, following Jesús Martín Barbero—who points out that citizenship is based on politics, but is not exhausted by it, since citizenship also signifies the reinvention of politics (Martín Barbero, 2015)—we believe that unraveling and dismantling the mercantilist paradigm of communication and the media system remains a pressing need.

To address these challenges, we adopt an approach rooted in the political economy of media, as well as in culture within the framework of political culture, as an essential means of fighting for the transformation of communication landscapes in Latin America. In this adverse context of setbacks in human rights within our states, resistance through communication plays a key role. Even with difficulties (primarily political and economic), it manages to expand its reach by amplifying voices through community and grassroots media such as radio and television stations, but also, and above all, through the possibilities offered by the internet (social networks, digital platforms, etc.). Therefore, it is imperative to develop more complex communication maps or cartographies in Latin America and the Caribbean to analyze the formation of new forms of citizenship and the political organization of the region's peoples. 

The current geopolitical landscape challenges us to raise new questions and/or reframe existing ones, as well as to develop new assessments of the role of communication and media in daily and political life. Therefore, we are committed to deepening a space whose constitution entails the recognition of communication as a human right, the delegitimization of media monopolies, the promotion of public, alternative, and community media, and the fostering of national and local productions as essential elements for the democratization of communication.