Radio

For 10 years, I was part of FM ALAS, community radio in El Bolsón, Río Negro, Argentina. As everything gets to Patagonia much later, during that time we did not do digital radio. We broadcast on the air, over actual analog FM radio waves. You could listen in your car, in your livestock post perched on a mountainside, in your bed, in your office. Much of this work is preserved at the station’s archive, but is not available online. Much of it was ephemeral, only broadcast live. So there’s not much of a “paper” trail to see if you’re not in the area. The radio is still on the air to this day, almost 40 years after its founding. Stop by and tune in to 89.1 MHz.

This excerpt here of a special program I produced in 2019 was one of the last things I did for the radio. I include it here as an example.

Memoria sonora:

a los 2 años de la desaparición de Santiago Maldonado

I produced this special program to commemorate the second anniversary of the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado. It includes the live work of FM ALAS during the military operation in which he vanished, but also the previous day, the situation that gave rise to the blockade of Route 40, the similar military raid in January, and everything that occurred during the first week he was missing. During those first few days, before this was making national headlines, very few of us knew his name. When something is on everyone’s lips for so long, sometimes it is worth going back to the beginning, to the primary sources right at the beginning before it was a nationwide media phenomenon.