Community radio is a lifeline for Q’eqchi speakers in Guatemala – and a target for the powerful
In most parts of the world, the hegemonic role of radio as the medium of the masses, a tool for conveying the information a government (most probably) wanted you to hear, or for shaping popular narratives, reached its peak sometime in the twentieth century. Then came television, and then the fracturing of national monocultures through the internet and social media. In 1938, Orson Welles created panic about alien invasion across the United States through a radio play. It’s hard to imagine that now.
But radio can still be a powerful community-builder – a means for physically disparate groups to understand and organise itself in the world, a public service, a virtual university, even a tool of resistance.
Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a, an indigenous community radio station affectionately known as ‘the voice of the mountains’ (‘la voz de los cerros’) has played all of these roles for indigenous Q’eqchi speakers in the uplands of Guatemala. Plaza Pública journalist Xiomara Ajín travels to El Estor to meet Ana Chen, the semi-fugitive director of the radio station and to speak to the listeners for whom it is a cultural (and sometimes literal) lifeline.
“Radio is very important to us,” says Reginalda Che, who lives in a wooden house with a tin roof in El Estor’s Santa Cruz district, making a living breeding chickens to sell to a local butcher. A photograph by Edwin Bercian shows a small portable receiver dangling precariously from her kitchen ceiling. “When my husband comes home, the first thing he does is turn on the radio”, she says: “they speak to us in our own language.”
Though the station also sometimes broadcasts in Spanish, its use of the Q’eqchi language was essential during Covid, when it translated Covid-19 protocols and provided public health information. “We did what the government was supposed to do,” Chen says. It also activated the community in other ways: “people survived not because of help from the state, but because communities shared their knowledge of ancestral medicine”. When a barrage of hurricanes hit shortly after, the station coordinated humanitarian aid.
There was a time when everyone wanted to be on the radio: local politicians, health officials, the police. Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has hosted programmes on demystifying the workings of the law in Guatemala, and on women’s rights. “Before, they did not know their rights”, presenter Guadalupe Xol Quinich tells Plaza Pública: “radio has been very helpful”. Alfredo Bax calls it “our university.”
Despite this, Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has long operated in a grey zone, regularly facing threats of closure. Ana Chen has been harassed on Facebook. Even the community radio station’s inaugural broadcast in 2017 was accompanied by security training, with the example of Éxitos 97.1 FM fresh in people’s minds – a private station that was raided the previous year, and whose director ended up in jail. “Not because the radio station was illegal”, a journalist from Prensa Comunitaria explains, “but because it was providing human rights’ training, and denouncing corruption and pollution by companies”.
There is a deeper, structural issue, Plaza Pública reports. Out of over five hundred officially registered radio stations in Guatemala, only one is an indigenous community radio station. A 2021 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights stated that the way radio is regulated in the country amounted to a de facto prohibition on the free expression rights of indigenous communities.
Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a has been forced off the air several times. In October 2021 its studio was raided by over twenty police after it reported on rolling demonstrations against a local mining project. “We managed to get the equipment out,” says Robin Macloni, a long-time contributor. Local journalist Julie López blames a “structure of corruption” in the region which can serve both local mining interests and those of drug traffickers. Chen has been working remotely ever since.
The station continues to broadcast, but more irregularly now. “Young people are always ask us: ‘what happened to the radio?’”, says presenter Guillermo Sam Kabnal. Though some express confidence in the future, the situation remains fragile.
For Ana Chen, “the satisfaction of turning feelings into words and allowing indigenous communities to exercise their right to use their own forms of communication” is a reward without price.
Full original article by Xiomara Ajín, with photographs by Edwin Bercian, available here.
‘Una radio comunitaria que hace el trabajo de gobierno’, 28 January 2025
Plaza Pública is a Guatemala City-based, Spanish-language magazine publishing longform articles about social injustices online.
Xiomara Ajín, a journalist of Mayan K’iche origin, writes primarily about environmental issues, indigenous people and their human rights, with a particular focus on women and children.
