In the framework of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have congregated in El Salvador in the International Forum: Communication and Citizenship, to reaffirm the right to communicate as a necessary condition for the construction of a democracy based on ethnic- racial diversity and equity between women and men, that promotes justice and human dignity.

The contemporary world is characterized by the development of technologies that are making universal communication possible. Nonetheless, these technologies are concentrated in the same groups that control economic and political power and hegemonize media globally. This results in selective exclusion from human development of a large percentage of the planet's population.

The dominance of the market and the dogma of profit pave the way for the expansion of monopolistic capital. This in turn is choking alternative and community media, as well as small and medium communication enterprise.

Dominant trends are subordinating the social character of communication to economic power and countering one of the most important conquests of humanity: the right to information and freedom of expression, the full exercise of which requires plurality of sources and of media, and their democratic and transparent management.

The market economy has imposed the domination of economic factors over political ones, with the result that men and women are considered only as consumers and not as people with rights to the full exercise of citizenship.

It is a universally accepted criterion that democracy is strengthened by citizens' participation. Such participation requires the different sectors that make up society both to be adequately informed and to produce their own media, so as to generate communicational processes that contribute to strengthening and developing social movements. Moreover, it means local, regional and national media should prioritize quality in form and content, giving visibility to the important matters that determine the daily life of citizens.

This implies that civil society should participate in the distribution of the radio-electrical spectrum, in access to satellite band-waves, in the use of new technologies, and in running alternative media; that indigenous peoples can set up their own media in their own languages, among other things.

We therefore adhere to the commitments made in different international conferences: Bangkok (1994), Toronto, Beijing (1995), and we support the petition to the United Nations formulated in the "Vienna + 5 Forum" to convene a World Conference on Communication, guaranteeing broad participation of citizens, with the mandate to analyse and defend the Right to Communicate, for true consolidation of our democracies.

Similarly, we join the initiative that has emerged from the People's Communication Charter, to hold a World Congress on Media and Communication, with the purpose of consolidating a global social movement to challenge the new orthodoxy of market dominance in the field of communication.

Ratifying our commitment to the full exercise of the right to citizenship, that has motivated our presence in this Forum, we assume the responsibility of supporting and contributing to the development of a broad civic movement for the democratization of communication.

San Salvador, September 11 1998