Aural Dissent in El Salvador: Music as Resistance on Radio Venceremos

Radio Venceremos was an underground radio station established by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) amid the Salvadoran Civil War. In addition to news broadcasting and the dissemination of guerrilla-supported propaganda, Venceremos included a range of cultural programs that challenged the dominant narratives perpetuated by the ruling elite and, in turn, created an aural counterpoint to the cultural products endorsed by the Salvadoran government. Through radionovelas, discourses, poems, hymns, songs, and series about the history of social struggles in El Salvador, Venceremos provided a platform for voices that were traditionally marginalized from the cultural canon controlled by the urban elites. Simultaneously, these cultural artifacts contributed to the organization and mobilization of resistance efforts from the Salvadoran guerrillas. In this presentation, I will analyze the dissemination of popular folk music in Spanish and the distribution of new songs created by Venceremos’s listening community. First, I will explain how the circulation of music in its airwaves created a sonic space of contestation to the censorship promoted by the Salvadoran government—also sponsored by the US authorities as part of its political campaign of intervention in the Americas during the twentieth century. In addition, by examining its broadcasts, I will reveal how Venceremos’s music programming transcended mere entertainment and served as a catalyst for the empowerment of new artists—i.e., villagers as well as guerrilla members both from the battlefield and captivity—who used its airwaves to create and distribute songs that then became a tool for recruitment, morale-boosting, and rallying the Salvadoran rural communities against state oppression. Through this analysis, I will demonstrate how Venceremos’s role in amplifying traditionally censored voices underscores its enduring legacy in the annals of grassroots activism and media resistance in the Americas, while democratizing the airwaves by including new local artists in its broadcasts.