When the bloodthirsty Atlácatl battalion of the Salvadoran military massacred Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría and seven others on the campus of the Central American College (UCA) in San Salvador on November 16, 1989, the information exploded like a bomb on the clandestine frequency of Radio Venceremos, the army command’s nightmare: “The assassination confirms that the regime has collapsed,” declared the station of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). That rebel echo, which set the tone for a decade of struggle, turned a voice of knowledge and agitation, however it fell silent for many years. Till now, when it has been revived in a podcast that not solely recounts its historical past but additionally confronts the historic revisionism of Nayib Bukele, the president intent on erasing the scars of the civil battle that bled the Central American nation.
That now‑legendary station broadcast from the center of the Salvadoran mountains, dodging bombs and military sieges. A gaggle of younger folks armed with microphones, recorders, and a bulletproof ingenuity, led by Venezuelan Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (alias “Santiago”), fought probably the most singular battles of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992). The radio station emerged in 1981 after the assassination of Óscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, and have become a precedence goal for the army, which sought to silence it due to its propaganda and agitation position in a rustic mired in a deep political disaster and underneath army violence decided to root out any signal of insurgency.
The podcast that now rescues its story, titled Venceremos, is the results of a partnership between Casa Centroamérica, Ibero 90.9 (a station of the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico) and the manufacturing firm Tanto que Contar. For Andrés Torres Checka, the podcast’s director, the spark was lit in 2016 throughout an opportunity go to to the Museum of the Phrase and the Picture (MUPI) in San Salvador, the place he purchased the ebook Las mil y una historias de Radio Venceremos by broadcaster José López Vigil. The seed germinated years later amid an simple regional disaster. “It is a context through which the media is under siege across Central America. Many Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Guatemalan journalists at the moment are in exile. Speaking about what it was to have a radio underneath a dictatorship and with limits on freedom of expression resonates inevitably with at the moment,” the director displays.
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Un podcast contra el olvido
The narrative soul of the podcast resides within the voice of Mexican actress Eréndira Ibarra. For her, lending her voice to this story was not simply one other skilled project however a journey to the roots of her personal childhood. The actress is the daughter of famous producer and journalist Epigmenio Ibarra, who was a struggle correspondent in El Salvador for 12 years, accompanying Radio Venceremos.
“I grew up surrounded by these folks, however in a distinct context. They have been my uncles, they have been the explanation for my father’s absence,” the actress says emotionally. Amongst these “uncles” was Hernán “El Maravilla” Vera, the long-lasting voice of Venceremos, and the Venezuelan Henríquez Consalvi. “Once I learn Las mil y una historias at 14, I understood why so many issues occurred. Listening to the podcast now has been magical, cathartic and therapeutic. It has created conversations I believed I’d by no means have with my father and my sisters,” the actress provides. Guided by director Tamara Mazarrasa, Ibarra moved away from impartial journalistic narration to hunt an intimate, weak tone. She defines that tone as a dialog “within the ear,” an “intimate name to motion.”
The primary episode of Venceremos begins exactly on the day tens of hundreds of Salvadorans gathered within the capital’s central sq. to bid farewell to Romero. 1000’s tried to enter the cathedral to see the coffin, however a bathe of lead rained down on the group, inflicting a stampede and exhibiting that the troopers have been able to the worst. Though these wounds stay open, in Bukele’s El Salvador memorials to victims at the moment are being eliminated, the official narrative reduces a decade of blood and utopia to a mere act of corruption, and even the commemoration of the Peace Accords that ended a civil struggle that left greater than 70,000 folks useless has been suppressed. Amid this historic revisionism, the 4‑episode podcast not solely seeks to rescue the guerrilla radio frequency but additionally to confront collective forgetfulness.
To reconstruct the story, the crew — which included a quartet of writers to sift by means of lots of of hours of archive donated by the Museum of the Phrase and the Picture — needed to flip to exile, a specter as soon as once more sweeping the area. Bukele’s authorities pressured former officers and ex‑FMLN combatants to flee to Mexico. Key voices for understanding the context of the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, similar to ex‑guerrillas in exile Douglas Santa María and Felipe Dubón, have been recorded in Mexico Metropolis, which, due to refuge supplied by Casa Centroamérica, turned the podcast’s operations hub.
The sequence doesn’t stay solely within the guerrilla trenches. In an effort to construct a full reminiscence, the producers traveled to San Salvador to interview retired military captain Herard Von Santos Méndez, who now paperwork confrontations minute by minute. “He informed us: ‘If we don’t inform our story, it’s as if we by no means lived it.’ They’re additionally silencing the voices of the troopers who took half,” Torres Checka says.
The podcast chronicles painful moments such because the Ellacuría bloodbath and Romero’s assassination, delves into the traumas of the struggle, and examines the insidious and notorious U.S. intervention underneath Ronald Reagan, who was prepared to erase the Salvadoran guerrillas, whom he thought to be a “terrorist” group. A lot in order that, in line with one interviewee, Washington supplied the Salvadoran military with $1 million per day for coaching and provides. It additionally recounts moments of worldwide solidarity with El Salvador — a Chilly Conflict battleground — and actions the FMLN hailed as victories in its liberation battle. One such episode was the killing of Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios — brutal and, in a darkish approach, farcical.
Monterrosa Barrios hated the radio not solely due to the propaganda that seeped into properties nationwide, however as a result of a comedy program known as La guacamaya subversiva ridiculed him and portrayed him as a murderous thug. One episode claimed he had an affair with the army chaplain and that the 2 spent passionate nights at San Salvador’s most well-known lodge, a spoof the colonel couldn’t ignore.
In his effort to remove Radio Venceremos, Monterrosa fell right into a guerrilla entice. On October 23, 1984, the military’s most emblematic soldier believed he had lastly silenced the rebel voice after capturing a transmitter in Joateca, within the nation’s north. He known as the press to show the system as a trophy of struggle symbolizing the FMLN’s definitive defeat. However nothing was because it appeared. Monterrosa and 6 of his males loaded the transmitter onto a helicopter, not realizing that the guerrillas — these younger movie and journalism college students who had made the radio iconic — had turned the gear right into a lethal booby entice loaded with explosives. Shortly after takeoff, the system detonated within the air, wiping out the army management within the space. The chaplain was among the many useless.
Debate and remembrance
The impression of Venceremos has gone past the basic podcast format on platforms similar to Spotify. By importing episodes to YouTube (accompanied by visible work from Oronda Studio), the undertaking pierced an sudden generational hole, reaching lots of of Salvadorans aged over 55. Within the feedback part, struggle veterans from either side, exiles, and civilian survivors have begun to debate and keep in mind. “There are very shifting feedback from individuals who keep in mind listening to the radio very quietly,” Checka recounts. Others, from the other facet, the director says, insist the guerrillas additionally dedicated abuses in opposition to civilians. For the creators, this conflict of opinions reinforces the undertaking’s relevance: the previous just isn’t useless, it’s only ready for a frequency to talk once more.
Thirty‑two years after the Peace Accords that demobilized the guerrillas and silenced the weapons, the echo of that radio that broadcast from the trenches of the mountains in northern Morazán is sounding once more. This time the sign doesn’t dodge machine‑gun bursts however a contemporary authoritarianism that seeks to rewrite historical past by decree. However as Venceremos reveals, reminiscence all the time finds a frequency by means of which to filter. In an El Salvador decided to look towards a future with out reminiscence, this podcast forces an inward look. As Ibarra says: “I’m going to let you know a narrative of how we will defeat the monster, as a result of we have now performed it earlier than.”
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