Letter of Support

As individuals and representatives of organizations and institutions we support the youth initiative which seeks to implement a youth journal service in the Latin American and Caribbean countries using radio, television, written, and other multimedia forms. This youth news service will be produced by, for, and with youth of varied social and economic strata. The product will not only be a form of protest, but will be proposals in the field of strategic development for human society. This project is the next step in youth media, building upon the positive experience of the first youth news service in Ecuador which was initiated in 1997.

We defend the independence and autonomy of youth information, its freedom of expression, its capacity to construct new proposals, and the way it enables democratic and alternative communication. The vision of this youth news service is to contribute to new and sustainable social and economic models for the development of humanity, and to foster a culture of peace to which the majority of our youth is dedicated.

Within the Latin American context, this is a unique product based on interculturality, dependent on a high participation from youth of mestiza, indigenous, black, white, and other populations. The youth news service will be involved with social movements and youth organizations and this is why we support its character as culturally, ethnically, socially, economically, and sexually diverse. This product will increase the variety of news formats (pluriformity) in existing mass media, which very often don’t take into consideration this new format of innovated journalism with voice of youth.

The indefinite duration of this proposed youth journal and its dissemination in Latin America, the Caribbean and a large part of Spain, Portugal, the United States and Canada will help value youth as authentic social actors with political incidence. It will help the youth in their struggle against the information gap.

The youth news service of Latin America and the Caribbean will contribute in the struggle against poverty and hunger, against violence and war, fomenting a culture of peace, struggling for basic education, for youth rights, gender equality, and autonomy of women, for the respect of sexual diversity, to combat the causes of increased cases of HIV/AIDS and other serious diseases, for the reduction of infant mortality and better pre-natal care, for youth employment, for fair trade and the struggle for the environment, for the free association of youth, family and community within and between borders, against racism and cultural segregation, planting the seeds of tolerance for individual and collective development with international solidarity.

Quito, July & August 2004.

Signed by 128 persons and institutions of 31 countries of mainly the continent of America.