Making Waves: RADIO CHAGUARURCO
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: Radio Chaguarurco
COUNTRY: Ecuador
MAIN FOCUS: Rural community development
PLACE: Province of Azuay
BENEFICIARIES: Rural dwellers of Santa Isabel and Pucará
PARTNERS: ALER, Coordinadora de Radios Populares el Ecuador (CORAPE)
FUNDING: Intermon, Caritas, Manos Unidas, community
MEDIA: Radio
Marcela Pesantez was there: On January 1, 1995 we went on-the-air. It was the most beautiful thing. Beautiful. With lots of people listening. We were crazy. Greeting all the people. Thanking the ones who had been with us since the beginning, those who had taken courses with us, the correspondents. Making calls to Cuenca to see if the signal reached the city. We made calls to Machala to see if they were listening. There were some people who knew we were going to be on-the-air and they called us. It was crazy. We played lots of music and every few minutes going on-the-air, "This is Radio Chaguarurco! We're on-the-air! Listen to us, at 1550 kilohertz! Tell your neighbours to listen!" It was beautiful. After a while,we started to calm down. But it took at least three days until we were calm enough to start doing the real work of the radio station.
Marcela Pesantez studied communication in Cuenca. When she finished, she went back to her hometown of Santa Isabel, not sure of what she would do, but wanting to help her own people break out of their precarious condition. When she heard about the project to start the radio station, she immediately volunteered to help. The fact that she had never studied radio did not stop her from immersing herself in the medium and becoming one of the project's trainers. "I think it was good that none of us knew anything about radio. It meant that we didn't have any preconceptions about how it had to be done, and that meant that we could do it in a different way".
It quickly became apparent that the "real" work of the radio station involved a lot more than simply producing radio programmes. After years of waiting, people's expectations were high. They were not going to be satisfied with a station that sounded like all the rest. They wanted to hear their own experiences and concerns told in their own voices and in their own language. "I think the famous phrase that described the radio stations, and what we wanted to do with it, was now you're not alone" explains Marcela Pesantez. "Now there's a communication medium where you can talk, say what you feel, and denounce that person who is giving you a hard time. Now you're not alone. That was the phrase that motivated people".
In September 1992 the Chaguarurco Foundation for Rural Development was established with representatives from campesino organisations, from the Catholic parishes, and from the workers and volunteers of the radio station. From the beginning it was agreed that the parish or any single person would not own the radio station. It was to be owned by the grassroots organisations, by the people.
While the station did count on the support of international solidarity for major capital expenses (US$80,000 from Intermon), the Chaguarurco Foundation decided that the healthiest way for the station to operate was to pay its own way. The volunteer labour of the programmers is one way the community contributes. In addition, the studios in Pucará and Santa Isabel are in space provided free bythe local church, and there is always someone around to offer their skills when the station needs to renovate a studio or paint the offices. However, volunteer labour cannot cover all the costs, and Radio Chaguarurco has to generate some US$2,000 per month to cover its operational expenses.
The station's financial situation is healthy. Chaguarurco not only manages to generate enough revenue to cover its fixed costs, it is also able to put aside a few thousand dollars a year to improve its equipment or cover unforeseen costs. Sources of revenue include advertising(20 percent of the revenue), community announcements (40 percent), production services, and remote broadcasts of cultural events.
Radio programmes are locally produced. Music, news and interspersed community announcements are the most popular segments.
The radio dramas - acted out by the station's own staff members - provide a valuable way of explaining complex issues in everyday language people can easily understand. Themes for the daily dramas are varied, covering health, environment, politics, culture and human rights.
Volunteers produce the weekly programme El Mercado (The Market), hosted simultaneously in Pucará and Santa Isabel. It looks at prices and trends,and has played an important role in controlling prices and speculation.
A recent change to the programming has been the inclusion of news from Latin America and the world that the station gets from ALRED, the radio service of the Latin American Association for Radio Education (via a satellite dish on the roof of the Pucará station) and the Púlsar news agency (via the Internet).
While Chaguarurco is located in the two towns, the townspeople are not the main audience. Of the estimated 65,000 people in the area, only 20 percent of them live in the dozen or so communities. The station's listening area is primarily mountainous, but also includes part of the coastal lowlands, where bananas and cocoa are produced and mining is an important activity. Most listeners dedicate themselves to agriculture.
According to a 1996 survey of 4 people, Radio Chaguarurco is number one in terms of audience in both the towns and the countryside. It is, however, most popular in the countryside, among adult listeners, and with people with less education. Of the respondents from the villages, 40 percent claim to listen to Radio Chaguarurcoeveryday . In the countryside this figure rises to almost 50 percent.
The results of the survey showed that the radio station was being well received by its audience but they also showed where improvements could be made by adjusting the schedule, providing better training for the announcers, and putting more agricultural information in the station's programmes.
Most community radio stations in Ecuador are licensed as commercial or cultural stations. Community radio was not recognised until 1996 when the government approved a law that made special provisions for community radio stations. However, it placed severe restrictions on them including prohibiting commercial activity, limiting transmission power to 500 watts, and requiring approval from the army for reasons of "national security". CORAPE, the national association representing community radio, brought a constitutional challenge to the law.
The idea of setting up Radio Chaguarurco started in 1990 with a series of workshops organised by campesino organisations and by the local churches in Santa Isabel and Pucará, in the province of Azuayin the southern part of Ecuador. The purpose was to organise the communities to gain access to basic services (drinking water and electricity) and to ensure that human rights were being respected.
The question of where to establish the radio station, in addition to technical and financial considerations, had a political dimension. The selected community, Santa Isabel or Pucará, would be more likely to have its concerns broadcast, its members interviewed, and therefore it would benefit most from the station. Decentralisation was one of the objectives of the project, and in the end it was clear that wherever the station was located, that community was going to benefit, possibly at the expense of the other.
Pucará did have one important advantage: while Santa Isabel was larger and a more important economic and communications centre, Pucará's altitude (3,100 metres above the sea level) and more central location meant that from a technical perspective it was a better place to locate the transmitter. The solution was to put a 5,000-watt transmitter in Pucará, the administrative centre in Santa Isabel, and studios in both communities linked via microwave.
This is how peasants themselves evaluate the changes brought by the radio station:
Communication is easier now. The radio has a system of communiqués. Every day we can send all kinds of messages the situation of patients in the hospital, deaths, lost animals, meetings. The radio is the telephone for those who don't have [one].
The authorities, institutions and merchants are more democratic. Before it was easy to abuse a campesino, charge higher prices, or steal material intended for public works in the communities. Now when there is an abuse, everybody hears about it on the radio. The radio serves as a sort of guardian in the democratic game.
The radio has served to let us share experiences and problems. People from communities tell about their experiences on the radio, and this helps the others seethe process solutions to everyday problems are shared.
The radio is contributing to the valorisation of our culture, our music, our way of speaking. These programmes are generating renewed pride in our own culture.
Radio Chaguarurcos success is not just a result of being the choice of more people than any other radio station. It has worked alongside other development and democratic initiatives to make a number of important changes in community life. It has improved communication, helped bring about more democracy and less abuse, made a positive contribution by promoting the sharing of experiences and solutions to problems, and made people more aware and proud of their own culture.
Like other radio stations, Radio Chaguarurcos programming incorporates news, interviews, music and cultural programmes. There are, however, a number of important characteristics that distinguish Chaguarurco from other stations. The most important of these is the priority the radio station gives to local voices, language and culture. Unlike radio stations in the city, with announcers who try to hide any regionalisms in their accents or their language, Chaguarurco's announcers celebrate their own way of speaking.
Another important distinction is the way the station actively seeks out the participation of people from the countryside, inviting them to visit the radio station, to tell their stories, sing, or just to greet their friends and family members over the air.
To produce the kind of radio that the community wanted required a different kind of relationship with the members of the community than an ordinary station might have, and a different kind of radio producer. Only four of the eight full-time staff and 20 volunteers at Radio Chaguarurco have ever formally studied journalism, the others learned their skills in Chaguarurco's own courses, but all of them work as journalists and programme producers, in addition to sharing the secretarial, sales, technical and administrative tasks. Five of the full-time staff are based at the station in Santa Isabel and the other three in Pucará.
The station never forgets its important role as a communication channel at the service of the communities, the telephone for those who don't have telephones.
The first problem Radio Chaguarurco faced was obtaining a broadcast license. In 1992, Ecuadoran law did not recognise community radio. Getting a commercial license involved a complex and long process that, even after years of waiting, was as likely as not to fail, unless one had better political contacts and more influence than the people of Santa Isabel and Pucará did. Fortunately, there had been a station in Santa Isabel a few years before. The man it had belonged to had died and since then the station had been off-the-air. However, the license was still valid and the former owner's son was willing to sell it. Buying a station still requires government permission, which involves a process almost as long and complicated as being assigned a new frequency, but it doesn't require the same political influence.
The need for continuous training and the time it could take was underestimated, resulting in the loss of volunteers and difficulties in replacing the staffers that left. "Some of the correspondents lost interest. Radio is lots of fun, but when you don't have a salary or a stable job, no matter how much you like radio; you have to think about finances. You grow up and you want to get married and have kids and all that stuff. So, little by little people started leaving".
Last but not least, successive changes of station managers during the initial years, affected the stability of the project.
This chapter was entirely based on Radio Chaguarurco: Now You're Not Alone by Bruce Girard, at and e-mail exchanges with the author.
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