This Caravan is the newest iteration of an international cohort of media activists borne out of the Video For Change (V4C) network. In 2013 WITNESS co-organized the first pan-American regional V4C convening in Mexico City. It spurred lasting relationships and collaborations which led to the 2016 Mutirão media convening in Brazil to expose the injustices faced by favelas during the 2016 Summer Olympics held in Rio, and most recently the powerful video advocacy work and indigenous rights victories secured by the work of V4C trainee Tlachinollan and Mexico’s Júba Wajiín community.

In 2016, a convening was hosted in exchange with communities and organizations in Honduras. The organizers quickly recognized the increasingly alarming landscape of human rights violations in the country including evictions, criminalization of human rights defenders, and direct threats to land rights protectors. This year, The Latin American Coordination of Film and Communication of Indigenous Peoples (CLACPI) has provided a framework and activities for Voces de Mesoameríca to address those threats in Honduras, in addition to similar challenges in Mexico and Guatemala, with participants hailing from across the Americas including Red Tzikin, COPNIH, and Article 19.

The Caravan will offer various spaces for collaborative exchange, sharing of participatory methodology, and practical workshops on video techniques and media production. It will also work with community initiatives to bolster more independent media broadcasts and exchange of content on various platforms including community radio and social media, covering land rights and indigenous land protectors. Further training topics will include:

• Video editing  
• Community television
• Video as evidence                                                                                               
• Digital photography
• Journalism (genres, formats, reporting)

We look forward to sharing back stories, learnings, and experiences when our Program Manager and V4C organizer Laura Salas (below) returns from her Caravan travels. You can follow updates from the Voces Mesoamericana Caravan on their website (en Español). In the meantime, here’s a hello from the road.

The Mexican constitution guarantees that indigenous communities will be asked about how their land can be developed or used. As the community built a legal challenge to the mining contract, the government tried to argue that they weren’t, in fact, an indigenous community and therefore had no right to protest the arrangement.

For the past five years, WITNESS has been working with the Júba Wajiín community to tell their story and defend their land. We helped create videos including “Júba Wajiín: Resistance in the Mountain of Guerrero,” supporting their land rights case. One of the videos targeted the Supreme Court judge overseeing the case. It focused on proving that the Júba Wajiín were, in fact, indigenous people since that was being contested by the government. Scenes included in the video showed traditional lifestyle, farming, native languages, and customs. And we helped them show how mining would destroy their land and livelihoods.

The video was a crucial part of the Júba Wajiín’s biggest victory in July 2017, when the federal court ruled the Mexican state has a constitutional obligation to respect indigenous land rights, and that mining operations could not continue without the community’s input. An ally noted that the ruling is an “unprecedented achievement” for indigenous land rights activists working against open-pit mining, adding that, for the first time, the Ministry of Economy “must comply with its constitutional and conventional obligations regarding the rights of indigenous peoples” when considering mining rights.

After the historic ruling in 2017, the Ministry of Economy appealed the decision. The appeal currently rests in the hands of the Circuit Court in Acapulco, Guerrero state’s capital. In order to highlight the importance of this case and make sure that the Júba Wajiín secure justice, WITNESS and Valerio Amado Mauro, President of Communal Property of Júba Wajiín screened the documentary at a film festival organized and hosted by the Mexican Supreme Court. At the screening, the community’s lawyer called upon the Court to bring about a final resolution to the case.

With this collective effort, WITNESS helped ensure that the voices of the Júba Wajiín were heard by Mexico’s highest court, by lawmakers, fellow citizens and grassroots activists. It also paves the way for many other indigenous communities who might want or need to use video protect and defend their rights and their land against extractive industries and government interests.

This convening comes three years after a 2012 gathering of video organizations after which theV4C Network was founded. And while many of the network members from 2012 were in attendance, new faces and organizations added great additional energy, experience and perspective to the meeting. The groups present represented a gamut of approaches to video and social justice including organizations that work on participatory video, citizen journalism, social justice film festivals, video as evidence, and video advocacy.

During the meeting, participants reviewed network-supported projects from the past 3 years including the creation of V4C.org (which features training resources, blog posts and news from network members), the Video for Change impact research,  a number of training resources including the Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video, and numerous regional Video for Change convenings around the globe. Participants discussed the state of the movement, identifying the primary challenges and opportunities for video as a medium for change in 2015. These challenges included a wide range of issues, many of which are directly relevant to WITNESS’ work, such as  protecting the rights of activists to record, the (in)accessibility of video equipment for much of the world, using video evidence in human rights and judicial processes, providing support in times of crisis (and dealing with vicarious trauma) and the effective distribution of video content.

From these challenges, many potential projects and collaborations arose amongst network members. Participants left excited and ready to get to work on initiatives that will ideally strengthen both their work and the overall video for change landscape. As these projects solidify and get off the ground, more news will be shared via V4C.org (or on Twitter via @video4change). We are also formally adding a number of members to the network (stay tuned – exciting news to come via V4C.org), with the hope of continuing to grow slowly over the coming years.

Directly following the convening, V4C Network member SocialTic organized a public day of workshops and panels in Mexico City. Activists from around Latin America who were arriving for the Latin America V4C convening, (which directly followed the global convening – more on that here), joined activists from Mexico City to participate in workshop sessions on topics like video as evidence, filming in high-risk situations, video distribution, community cinema and more. Later in the evening, all of the participants made their way to the Center for Digital Culture for panel discussions. Many of the global V4C and Latin America V4C participants shared their work over the course of the evening. You can review some of the topics  and ongoing discussions on video for change by looking up the hash tags #video4change and #videoparaelcambio.

Now, a few weeks out from the gathering, WITNESS is looking forward to the future of the V4C network. We are excited and energized to start working on new projects with so many amazing video organizations from around the globe!