Uncovering the history of community radio in Uruguay

El hombre casa II, acrylic and oil on canvas @ Martín Lorenzo @made.uy.

Interview • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Kevin H. Martínez • October 11, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Social movement activism and radical media have a vibrant legacy in Uruguay, including through community radio initiatives. Nicolás Robledo and Diego Castro, both professors at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, have been exploring this history in anticipation of the launch of a new report report titled “Community radio in Uruguay after regulation.”

As elsewhere in Latin America, the experience of community radio in Uruguay is extensive, contradictory and not well understood. For many years, community radio stations played a key role in the struggle against dictatorship and demanded legal recognition and access to radio frequencies. 

In 2007, legislators passed the Community Radio Law, granting community stations use of one third of the radio spectrum. Authorities divided the other two-thirds between public media and commercial or private media. At that time, there were 412 radio stations; later, when the regularization process was formally opened up, between 160 and 170 radio stations participated. Authorities subsequently implemented rigid regulations that have not always been favorable to community radio stations. 

As of June 2023, according to the latest available information from the Regulatory Unit of Uruguay’s Communications Services, there were 149 community radio stations, although researchers believe that there are actually many more. Several stations stopped broadcasting, and others never obtained a signal due to deficiencies in the implementation of the law. The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC, in its Spanish acronym) and the Radio Network include many of these stations as active members. 

In early October, we had a chance to look at the forthcoming report and we sat down with Robledo and Castro to learn about what they found while researching community radio in Uruguay. We translated our interview and lightly edited it for clarity.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar: Why is community radio important in Uruguay? 

Diego Castro: Community radio stations in Uruguay were very important, especially in the 90s, when they grew alongside youth movements. There was a powerful student movement at that time, which nurtured community radio stations. Between the 90s and 2000, many community radio networks appeared, almost all of which operated clandestinely. This meant that they set up their transmitting equipment every time that they broadcast, dismantled it afterwards and often broadcast from different locations. When a more liberal rightwing administration came to power in the 2000s, before progressivism, authorities stopped going after radio stations. Before that, they regularly persecuted them and seized their equipment. 

Nicolás Robledo: At the end of the 90s, radio stations were connected with different spaces of struggle, such as the anti-razzias movement, which is organizing against neighborhood-level police repression and persecution. These radio stations linked up with other movements in the context of the economic and social crisis in Uruguay. Those were their peak moments. Things are different today.

RGA: How powerful are community radio stations today?

DC: Today they are not particularly visible or relevant. Many of the stations that continue to operate today were created in the 90s, which means they are now 25- or 30-years old. These collectivities have been sustained over time and they are important for the collectives that organize them, in many cases within a neighborhood, or in towns in more rural areas. 

When you look at all the work that collectives do, you see that radio stations help communities or neighborhoods express themselves and organize their ideas. They often play a role in extraordinary moments: during floods, climate catastrophes, social conflicts, or when a family needs support. That’s when the radios serve an important and powerful function within the community. It may not have an impact beyond it, but it is significant within it.

NR: The role of radio stations in community and in spaces that feed back into them is crucial. For example, there is the struggle for water connected to Santa Lucía, an important river that supplies drinking water to Montevideo. There is a community radio station there and it is sustained through links with organizations, which are nourished by the radio station and connected to other experiences.

Or there’s the radio station Galpón de Corrales, which is in Montevideo, where there is a meeting area and a soup kitchen where union and neighborhood organizations gather. Organizers say if they were not physically present in Galpón de Corrales—which is where they get together—the station would not exist. 

There is an articulation of community, neighborhood and space that has allowed these experiences to be sustained. Smaller stations are often kept going by larger collectivities, as are some of the more personal-family stations, which are smaller radio stations that have a strong link with the rest of the territory, with schools, with cooperatives and different experiences and organizations. 

RGA: Your research indicates that there is great diversity in the way that communitarian weavings are understood. What does communitarianism mean in relation to radio stations? 

NR: The Law enshrines one of the meanings when it touches on collective ownership and assembly-based decision making. Several of these historical radio stations operate under that logic. Communitarianism is contained in the process of discussing collectively, of making decisions, of linking the station with other issues that affect them, and in always trying to consider the articulation with what is taking place there. 

Some have asked us about the differences between community and alternative radio stations. Some stations are more alternative. They’re created by a group of people who think more or less alike, who organize a station together to express ideas that they all basically share. 

Other community radio stations are collectively owned and managed, while others still are organized in the same way but also seek to build bridges within the area, linking spaces that perhaps do not think in the same way. We found that different types of community radio stations tend to operate according to a similar logic of collective management. 

There are also smaller stations, which we refer to as “personal-family” stations, where the community aspect comes through in the direct link with the realities of the neighborhood, and in dialogue with schools. As we did our research we were told, “if the church is in the neighborhood, the church is also part of the community and can have a place in the radio.” 

Religious and partisan proselytism is something that the legislation limited. So, maybe they had a view of the community not so much as a collective or assembly, but tied to concrete efforts by individuals or small groups linked to their region. 

Kevin H. Martínez: Can you tell us about the differences you found in the two kinds of radio stations that you mention—the personal-family stations and the more collective-militant ones—in terms of how they operate on an everyday basis?

DC: In the realm of family experiences, we documented one station that was operated by a couple and their friend. There is no formal decision-making body or meetings about the radio alone. They often make decisions in a confusing way.

Sometimes the service work within a given territory or neighborhood is less clear, but that’s not always the case. With regard to the stations that we consider more collective and militant, it’s not that there was no strong personal leadership, because we did find strong leadership on the part of one person. In both experiences, there are cases where if someone doesn’t bottomline the radio station’s operation, it collapses. 

How decisions are made and the meaning of the radio station and what it does is linked to daily practice and also with a way of building relations. The militant collective has a more classic logic of relations with social organizations, due to the main issues present in the territory. And the other, which is family run, tends to cover local issues as they emerge and are shared by word of mouth.