Radio and Revolution in El Salvador: Building a Community of Listeners in the Midst of Civil War 1981–1992

Abstract

Throughout the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, two guerrilla factions used radio stations to build a revolutionary community. As revolutionary media, the clandestine stations became an integral part of the guerrilla strategy for overthrowing the government. Radio linked the guerrilla-controlled zones to each other and transmitted the daily life of those zones to listeners in the capital, San Salvador, and around the world by shortwave, informing an audience in a nation where the airwaves had transmitted only the government version of events. In contrast to the “imagined communities” of Creoles that Benedict Anderson found that newspapers accidentally created in colonial Latin America, the insurgents deliberately constructed a community of rebel radio listeners. Thus, they created a community of support for the insurgency, attracting people to the rebellion while constructing a vision of the future that this imagined community of listeners would build together. The stations' narrow escapes, packing up transmitters and microphones just ahead of the army, grew into part of the revolutionary mythology, making the stations more than clandestine instruments in the war to overthrow the government. They became symbols of the rebellion they defended.