Broadcasting Expertise in Cold War Latin America

This paper analyzes how a transnational network of Indigenous campesino radio stations—headquartered in Quito, Ecuador and representing local broadcasters from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to Central America—engaged Cold War projects of rural development in the 1970s. The paper addresses Indigenous broadcasters’ initial embrace and later refusal of development experts’ programming. This radio network and its affiliate radio stations emerged in the early 1970s as central fixtures of Catholic development projects, designed to evangelize and modernize rural, (oftentimes monolingual) Indigenous communities in the Latin American countryside. In its early days, the network circulated programming designed by foreign “experts” from the Global North. These academics, trained in the sciences and social sciences, advocated for technical interventions and rigorous measurements as solutions to global questions of politics and poverty. From instructional programs for latrine construction to sponsorships of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, these experts’ broadcasting materials promoted scientific approaches to rural change and became core programming at many local radio stations. However, Indigenous radio network members found these outside practices often incongruous and incompatible with the real-life experiences and expertise of their Indigenous campesino listeners, leading them to dismiss experts’ teachings on air by the end of the decade. This transnational radio collective’s initial alignment and ultimate distancing from top-down development frameworks presents a case by which to understand how Indigenous communities related to and reformulated practices of rural development.