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The primary focus of this research is on an analysis of legislation and public policy regarding community media in Bolivia and Venezuela. The purpose is to understand the differences and similarities between the two regulatory frameworks, to identify the policies that have been implemented each country to comply with current legislation, to discover the more relevant results of those policies, to know the rights and duties implied in being dubbed as community media in each of these countries, and to identify legal provisions that can trigger spurious results in relation to government intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies the ways that urban social movements in Caracas have sought to engage the hybrid state during the presidency of radical leftist leader Hugo Chávez. Chávez's election has created avenues for previously disenfranchised groups to participate in governance and decision-making. The structures and discourses of exclusion are being contested in multiple arenas since Chàvez has come to power. But, what lines of conflict are emerging as barrio-based movements demand inclusion in the state? In this article, I argue that as urban movements engage with the political arena, they come up against the instrumental rationalities--both liberal and neoliberal--of state administrators. Barrio-based social movements counter the utilitarian logics of technocrats with alternative visions based in "lo cotidiano" (the everyday), local culture and historical memory. We need to combine Foucault's insights about the operation of power through governmentality with Gramsci's insistence on practical politics, in order to account more fully for the contested nature of power. In this article, I suggest the refraining of a Gramscian notion of hegemony in a positive sense as "everyday wars of position," to think about the quotidian and subterranean spaces where technocrats are confronted with alternative visions from below. I use the example of community media in Caracas to illustrate the ways that social movements engage with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]