Over the past several years, Bolivia has been through waves of new mobilizations, encounters, and dis-encounters. We now feel an urgent necessity to clarify the truth behind these events, to speak our minds and give public voice to the lives of those around us, with whom we fight to change this world.
From the Water War to last year’s January 11 mobilizations in Cochabamba, we have seen both valiant struggle and great suffering. Yet the voices of Bolivia’s humble have not been able penetrate the thick walls of impunity and violence that passes for democracy and civilized progress in this country. Every day, indigenous communities bleed out as we continue on our road to privatized neo-liberal regional development.
The commercial media are the tools for the ‘learned’ class—those that have always represented power, knowledge and progress. Conversation among friends, family and the debates in the plazas almost always end with harsh critique of the media’s role and function. People talk of how social movements become senseless, human-less, amorphous masses through the media’s lens.
Now is the time to to answer back by making sense of what is portrayed as senseless. Now is the time to give space to the ones continually struggling for change in this country, who are desperately trying to make us understand that today in Bolivia, things are not always what they seem.
Ubtv is born from this restlessness. It’s here to counter the myopic vision sold to us by those who defend nothing more than their interests and privileges, those who continue the exploitation and under whose power the commercial media becomes an ideological weapon to confuse, dumb-down and lie to the population.
Ubtv is not just a media and information outlet but also a space for reconstruction and making visible the faces, experiences and lives of our compañeros, so that they can feel present in the history they are making.
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