Guatemalan historian and journalist Quimy De León was looking for a way to change how women, youth, and Indigenous peoples are represented in the media.
In 2012, in the midst of a collective action or protest against mining extractivism in a small province in the Guatemalan Altiplano, she founded Prensa Comunitaria, an alternative news agency specializing in environmental and human rights issues.
“Community journalism is one of the currents that wants justice for these people who have been historically marginalized or left out of the story, the media and journalism,” De León told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
At Prensa Comunitaria, Indigenous authorities, union members, nurses, workers and peasants are considered important sources and are treated as the protagonists of their own stories.
Prensa Comunitaria's publications focus on community mobilization in the social, cultural and political spheres; as well as memory, history, violence against women and feminisms.
De León said her team doesn’t seek to contrast opposing opinions but rather to bet on the richness of voices. “Everyone has an opinion and we have something to say about the problems that afflict us,” she said.
Prensa Comunitaria currently has 100 correspondents around Guatemala and a central team of 16 people. In 2017, as an extension of the work they had been doing, they launched Ruda, a feminist digital magazine dedicated to sexual and reproductive rights.
In recent years, journalists and organizations defending freedom of expression have expressed concern about threats, violence and criminalization against the journalistic profession in Guatemala.
De León and her team have not been immune to this. Journalists from Prensa Comunitaria have been attacked, beaten and have had their equipment stolen when covering demonstrations or local news.
In addition, representatives of the media outlet have been summoned by the Guatemalan Public Prosecutor’s Office for their coverage of a case related to the takeover of the University of San Carlos de Guatemala in 2022 that emerged as a protest to the process to elect university authorities.
Several community journalists accredited by Prensa Comunitaria have also faced criminalization for their reporting on extractive operations in Indigenous territories, corruption or violation of human rights.
On Sept. 18, 2014, Indigenous journalist and correspondent for Prensa Comunitaria Norma Sancir was detained when she was documenting the eviction of an Indigenous community in the border area between Guatemala and Honduras. She was imprisoned for five days. Nine years passed before three agents and a commissioner involved in her detention were convicted for abuse of authority.
But Sancir wasn’t the only Prensa Comunitaria journalist to be held by authorities.
“Between 2016 and 2019, five of our journalists were detained for no more than two months,” De León said. “Transnational or extractive companies have a lot of impunity in countries like Guatemala.”
Despite the constant attacks, 2023 was the first time that Prensa Comunitaria had to send members of its team into exile. According to figures shared with LJR by the group Nos Nos Callarán, around 25 journalists from that country had to go into exile between 2020 and 2023.
“Three of our colleagues are in exile, they had been reporters at elPeriódico and after its closure they came to work with us. While here they found out that they were linked to criminal proceedings against elPeriódico,” De León said. They are Alexander Váldez, Ronny Ríos and Cristian Véliz.
After almost 27 years of operation, elPeriódico closed in May 2023 after its president and founder, José Rubén Zamora, was accused of the alleged crimes of money laundering, influence peddling and blackmail. Zamora remains in prison although his sentence was revoked and numerous organizations have pointed to irregularities in his trial.
“By having reporters outside Guatemala, circumstances change. We are concerned about the safety of the entire team, both physical and emotional,” De León said. “There is a gradual deterioration of the democratic system in our country and that has been quite complex for the independent press.”
To counteract this situation, Prensa Comunitaria has an internal self-care and protection program for community journalists where the safety of its team is supported and monitored. De León said this is possible thanks to alliances with various human rights organizations at the national and international level.
Prensa Comunitaria is in fifth place among media outlets with the largest presence in Guatemala, with more than 4.3 million interactions in the first quarter of 2024. This according to an internal analysis of the media outlet in which the interactions of different Guatemalan digital platforms were measured and compared.
“The numbers speak of the enormous and hard journalistic work we have done in recent years and how well our work has been received,” Juan José Guillén, from the Prensa Comunitaria social media team, told LJR.
“Regarding the number of monthly readers, through Google Analytics we have recorded more than 2.2 million visits so far in 2024, 76,000 visits to the site in the last 30 days and more than 1.4 million organic searches for our site in the last year,” he added.
Yet, the journalists at Prensa Comunitaria still struggle with racism and discrimination.
“Community journalists, mostly belonging to Indigenous groups, are not considered journalists, not only because they do not have a university degree but because sometimes they are not even considered people,” De León said.
As De León describes it, community journalism is a journalism of resistance exercised by citizens themselves on issues that directly affect their communities.
They are “Indigenous communities or populations in rural areas that have an identity and that through communication want to tell their stories and talk about the issues that interest and concern them.”
Prensa Comunitaria also struggles with sustainability. The media outlet uses most of its resources to pay its journalists and correspondents and is maintained through grants, philanthropy or international cooperation. That is, it operates as a non-governmental organization (NGO).
This makes them the target of possible use of the “NGO Law,” approved in Guatemala in 2020, which gives the government the power to remove the registration of an NGO without having to go through a court, in addition to imposing sanctions on its associates when it considers they “use donations or external financing to carry out activities that disturb public order.”
Despite the challenges, the world is turning its gaze to Guatemala and community journalism. In September, De León received the 2024 International Press Freedom Award given by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) thanks to “her dedication to public-interest journalism and achievements fostering media inclusivity throughout the country.”
Women journalists from the Gaza Strip, Russia and Niger were also recognized along with De León.
“This award largely recognizes that you can give back from the local to the global,” De León said. “Additionally, being awarded with three other women is important. When we see the nationalities of these women it shocks us and also indicates how the world is and how women are contributing to making it a better place.”
