Tortilla con Sal, May 28th 2020
Interview with Dennis Schwarz, Director of Nueva Radio Ya
23rd January 2020
Tortilla con Sal: We are with our colleague Dennis Schwarz, Director of the Nueva Radio Ya here in Managua. Thank you for receiving us, Dennis. We wanted to interview you to learn about your vision of the role of Nueva Radio Now in Nicaraguan society and perhaps a little of your history, for people who don't know about you...
Dennis Schwarz : Let's start with the history of Nueva Radio Ya, since very little has been told, very little is really known about that. Nueva Radio Ya started in December 1999. But we came out of a previous Radio Ya. And Radio Ya in turn was born out of La Voz de Nicaragua. La Voz de Nicaragua was the official radio of the revolutionary government in the 1980s.
When the elections were lost in the 1990, people said that a radio station had to be created because the governments that were going to take office were anti-revolutionary, they were counter-revolutionary. So that meant the possibility existed and we really saw for ourselves soon after that we were going to lose the voice of the people which is the voice of God, a means of communication that had opened the microphones with the Revolution so everyone could express themselves.
So in order not to lose that voice that was given to the people with the Revolution, Radio Ya was born. And it was born with a transmitter and a small console that was donated by the then Czechoslovakian Youth to the Sandinista Youth, but it had not yet been used on air. So, from there, the first step was taken with that type of equipment for Radio Ya to start.
Because many people have said we are a radio that came about as a result of the so-called piñata and it was never like that. There was so much euphoria when Radio Ya was born that people even brought us recorders, stationery, pens, everything because they knew that we always defend and represent the people, and there was this extraordinary communication that the people turned out to support. They brought furniture, chairs, everything... typewriters which is what were used at that time.
And that's how Radio Ya was born, defending the people and denouncing the abuses that were taking place or the lack of proper functioning of the institutions. In 1999, for political reasons, after the previous administrator of the radio station turned against the Sandinista Front, we recovered the frequency. Nothing else, just the frequency, that was 600 kilohertz in the AM band. Absolutely nothing was touched among the equipment of that administration, because they also came after us saying that we were thieves. We never stole anything from anybody. We just... the Sandinista Front recovered the frequency and so we were born with that transmitter that the Czechoslovakian Youth had sent as a gift and we were located in the Barrio Camilo Ortega, there at an crowded site, pure dust, transmitting directly from the antenna.
We suffered a lot of aggression from the authorities of the neoliberal governments, who did not let us operate. They superimposed a noise on the AM signal like a whistle, that they interposed very loudly, solving that meant we had to juggle a thousands things so as not to obstruct the quality of the sound and so people could hear us. It was a terrible problem. So, where we had on the radio at the end of 1999, we were at the Barrio Camilo Ortega, exposed to the winds and the dust. Our seats were paving stones, and the table where we had a from small console that Evert Cárcamo had lent us, and laso a radio-telephone service that the Bell South company had started, which we also used for our journalists in the street, we put a microphone on them and there we broadcast direct to the speakers.
That table was one of those tables that were used in the haciendas in the old days, that would get steadily thinner from so much washing with the wire scouring brush. That was the table where we had the console, the microphones and that telephone that we used to broadcast from the journalists that were on the street. So it was a moment, an example of entrepreneurship, that out of nothing we managed to build this radio up to the conditions we had when the opposition vandals in the failed coup d'état burned us down. Why did they burn us down? Because we are a radio station with Sandinista principles and a popular vocation. We attend to everyone's priorities, their needs, whatever they need.
There on the radio we attended to former Contra people who used to come to us ask for economic help or for some tests in the hospitals or for their fare because they had to return to their communities in the north and once after the war was over we attended them as brothers. We have always been basically a social service radio station. I believe that the Sandinista Front or Sandinistas in general were born to serve our people, not to serve ourselves but to serve our people. We have that vocation of service and the greatest inspiration we have is our people, to see that they lack nothing, that their problems are solved.
And so we grew, from 1999 onwards with the support of some people who knew about the conditions in which we worked and offered their grain of sand to help us maintain our staff and to break the siege that the advertising agencies also imposed on us. Because they said, "no, that's a Sandinista radio station and we can't advertise on it, you can't advertise there, you shouldn't advertise there. We broke that siege because most advertising agencies depend on their headquarters in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras or Costa Rica.
And when one of those officials came here they would say "What's going on? Why don't you advertise on this radio station which is the most popular radio station in Nicaragua". Because all the opinion surveys always put us in first place, by the grace of God and thanks to our people who have always given us the privilege of being the number one radio station in Nicaragua. So the agencies here said that they didn't give us advertising because we were a Sandinista medium. But the people who know how important it is to advertise their product where they can sell their brand said "It doesn't matter to me that it is Sandinista, I want my product everyone to hear about my product, so my advertising reaches everyone" and so we broke that boycott and they started to advertise on our radio.
In relation to the burning down of the radio, it took eight months for them to create the conditions they needed to burn down the radio, by repeatedly saying we were the official voice of the Sandinista Front, that we made fun of ordinary people, that we attacked sexual diversity a lot, which is not true at all. And they created this huge snowball of fake opinion to justify what they had planned in advance on May 28, 2018, to burn us down. They created so much "fake news", so many lies around our operation and all they wanted was to justify the burning of the radio.
We are a social service radio station fundamentally. Here we help our people to resolve their problems, for example, with cat scans, computerized tests, magnetic resonance tests, electrocardiograms, or encephalograms, or with medicines, bus fares, coffins for deceased loved ones, interceding with local authorities so that they can allow them to bury their relatives in the cemetery, because sometimes they don't afford to pay for it. In other words, we are a radio station that feel what happens to others as if it happened to us and we help them in all that we can. They ask us for blood, so we donate blood. They ask us for a bus fare sometimes. So we manage to help some people with the fares they need to get to Mexico for health care or to Costa Rica.
We've always been like that and I hope and trust in God that we're always going to be like that. Are we political? Yes. We are a Sandinista radio station. But that doesn't affect our service to the community which is without distinction of any kind. Those who burned the radio station were young people, some of them were even on scholarships from us in the universities, both in the coup university, the Central American University, that became the effective coup headquarters and also in other universities. And we did not go around asking anyone where they are from, whose side are they on, what party are they from, what ideology or what religious belief, nothing. We helped people to deal with the human problem they brought to us.
That has been fundamentally the history of this radio station and that we have a very Nicaraguan identity, which is our people's idiosyncrasy, fond of double meanings. That's why perhaps some people misinterpret some information we may broadcast. Because that sense of humour is characteristic of the Nicas. We Nicas may find ourselves perhaps in the jaws of an alligator but we go on laughing, telling jokes or making fun of why we got there. That's us. It is an idiosyncrasy we have that was there already at the time of the Guegüense who made fun of the Spaniards and so it's in our DNA as well as anti-imperialism too.
That is also in our blood. We are one of the Latin American countries most besieged by the empire. And we are anti-imperialists because of that too. It's not that we are against the American people as such, but we are against the interventionist policies that have bled us, plundered us, ruined us, impoverished us and I think that's enough. So this dignity of our people has been a reality since the cacique Diriangén, I don't know if you know the history, that when he faced the Spanish colonialists he preferred to throw himself to his death off a precipice, rather than allow himself to be captured alive, tremendous courage.
When he was confronted by the colonialists who bore firearms and gunpowder and muskets and he with his arrows and his spears, he decided to take his life before surrendering alive. This has to do also with our particularity of being in the center of the American continent, so perhaps we are totally different from other countries in that type of behavior. We are not submissive. We treat each other as we really are. We are human beings and we respect those who think differently, but others will attack and kill us, or sow hatred, just as the Catholic Church sowed hatred in this failed 2018 coup d'état that was like a nest of devils.
I don't know how Satan managed to subvert so many religious gowns to create such a difficult situation for us. Because we are a developing country, that needs the collaboration of all its children to go forward economically, in the peace and tranquility with which we used to live. But the traitors turned up. Unfortunately, there is always a Judas or a Cain who appears and kisll his brother. Unfortunately, society is plagued by such people.
TcS : During a recent visit to Caracas, with other people working in the media in Nicaragua, we had the opportunity to exchange with community radio communicators in Venezuela. For example, comrade Camilo Calero from Canal13 was interviewed by comrades from a community radio station in the state of Mérida and they discussed the social and political function of communications and the importance of community radio in maintaining and feeding, strengthening and consolidating the people's conscience, in that case of the Bolivarian Revolution. Does Nueva Radio Ya here in Nicaragua fulfil a similar function?
Dennis Schwarz: Of course, that's why they burned us down. We fulfilled that function, when I was talking to you about La Voz de Nicaragua, Radio Ya, and since the first months of 1999 ourselves too. But now there is the phenomenon of social networks that contribute quite a bit to distorting reality. So we are fighting against them and to reach a phase where we can talk about politics to our people, first we have to educate ourselves, I think, because the political culture here makes it difficult for people see where the country is going or why things are done this way or that way.
However, if you see in other places the political function is posed as one of confrontation. We don't have a policy of confrontation. We let people who are against Sandinismo say what they want. What if we were to try and answer all that? We would never have peace and quiet. We have to win over the people with facts. And I think that without a doubt the revolutionary government here is achieving this with the development of awide range of different infrastructure, roads, hospitals, schools...
But we must not neglect the political formation of our cadres who are going to be multipliers for other generations or those same generations do not understand the political world because they are bored, because they don't like politics. Because remember Nicaragua has long been a country where we have fought each other like cats and dogs. That's why we lost the territory of Nicoya to Costa Rica, because we were in a civil war here and the people in Nicoya wanted to annex it to Costa Rica because it was quieter, there was no conflict there.
So how do we educate ourselves politically? That is the magic we need to discover in this cruel world. For example, some people have access to the Internet, others, most of them, don't. How are we going to reach all those people? In what conditions? How are we going to talk to them? Will they understand me or not if I talk to them about politics? What if they are hungry, if they do not have a job? How am I going to explain that to them? It's a reality that we lived through strongly in the 1980s. At that time we had study circles. We were all preparing ourselves. But in the end, perhaps beacuse we neglected that aspect, this debacle came to us in 2018 when we were caught unawares. We were taken by surprise at how they used social networks to destabilize the country with so much false information.
So, how should we address the issue of political education now? It is also part of educating ourselves, of putting in place a political literacy, developing ways for people to know how to explain to others why they act in this or that way. It's really interesting to follow this mechanism, but for most people it is boring. Because if you watch political programs here on radio or television now, they don't have much of an audience. Or if they do, it's the very same people who are interested in politics. What do people want? Fun, entertainment, and maybe political education in the sense that they are hear about the reality we are living. So, all of that must come together.
TcS : Yes, I suppose your job is to open up the path as you go. I remember that the last time we spoke was in that same year 2018 when you took us to the site of what was left of the Nueva Radio Ya after it was totally burned down by the coup activists. Aside from the physical destruction, there was a strong impact, of course, on the radio personnel who experienced that ruthless violence. Can you tell us a bit about how you have recovered from the aftermath of the attack?
Dennis Schwarz: That has a lot to do with what we talked about in relation to political education. We've know how to choose people who understand what our social project is, what this project entails, understand what the risks that we lived through that day. All of them assimilated that moment initially with fear, because we did not know if we were going to lose our lives or not, when we were under the siege of the bombs, of the bullets, of the flames of the Molotov cocktails. So then our people understood their place and our work very well, that we are a Sandinista radio and we are capable of giving our lives if necessary for our people.
That is what fundamentally characterized this collective of 22 people who lived through such a cruel and hard moment, and one so unexpected for us as well. Because we supported the students when they were fighting for 6% during the neoliberal governments. At that time we were hit by tear gas bombs that were fired at them, and we gave them shelter, we gave them water with salt so that they would not be so affected by the gases. And now in 2018 it was the other way around.
And without a doubt the particular political formation of our people and knowing how to choose our personnel is what enabled us to emerge from this and that we have not had any of our staff give up and desret us as a result of this type of aggression that we lived through, while perhaps in other media many people did give up. Not here. Here we have sought out and recruited people and we have politically prepared and we meet regularly from time to time and we talk, plan and express what we are, where we are going and what we want. This has helped us a lot to have a collective consciousness of the social project that this Revolution embodies.
TcS : And what is the vision of Nueva Radio Ya now for the future?
Dennis Schwarz : The vision we have for the future is how to migrate towards the social networks. We were the first radio station in Nicaragua to have 24 hour audio on the internet, we were the first radio station to have our own web page, and we are now one of the most read media in Nicaragua nationally and internationally, and we have managed to position ourselves there still. And now young people prefer to listen to the radio on their phones so now more people are listening to us on their phones than on a radio.
Maybe radio broadcasting will tend to disappear. That's how it was said with the television, that the radio was going to disappear, but thank God it hasn't disappeared. In our countries the culture is still one of listening to the radio. We have that advantage. But we are already planning how to keep up to date, although we have the website, we have Facebook, Instagram. We're on Tik Tok now so as to reach fun loving young people. There are different platforms that we are using so as not to lose popularity and to reach all those cybernauts that are looking for information 24 hours a day .
And we do ask our team for the best possible writing of different kinds of articles because one thing may go on the air via our frequencies - and we have 8 frequencies for national coverage - but for the web page that should have another form of writing or content or use vocabulary that people who use social networks understand better so that writing it should be more concise. So those are the steps we have to take. Achieving this and continuing to be a leader, a super-leader in the networks is our goal.
TcS : And you I guess you have a wide network of communicators and journalists in the different departments of the country so as to get the widest coverage at national level.
Dennis Schwarz : We have tried to encourage people to seek out news stories. They feed us with information from their communities or wherever they go and if there is something relevant happening around them, they call us and we spread the word.
We are going through a difficult situation right now again with another economic blockade because now the Nicaraguan Organization of Advertising Agencies, ONAP, has directly told its advertising agencies not to advertise on our radio because they say we are a government radio station, so many lies like that are told about us and this has affected us. So far, thank God, we haven't had to dismiss any of our colleagues due to the economic situation caused by the boycott against us.
Some companies still maintain their advertising, although almost all the publicity has gone and the agencies do not want to give usa advertising at all. We are fighting to stay on air full time, not to close the radio at any time nor dismiss any of our comrades. That is our struggle right now, the economic struggle, how to break through the boycott that is making life very difficult for us.
TcS : Clearly, where you are operating now is on a temporary basis. What are the prospects of being able to have your own radio facility again?
Dennis Schwarz : We are in negotiations right now with Managua's local authority because our original location is in front of the Central American University. There they are going to extend the main highway to 10 lanes and take the whole of our old building. So, the local authority has to indemnify us, and with that, we are going to build another building, maybe a little smaller. I hope not though because we want to have space to receive different artists because we support Nicaraguan artists and to receive all the people who come to us. We want to have a small recording studio that we don't have right now, or rather to recover the one we had because now we have to use one on loan.
That's the dream. To return to our original nest because it is the one most accessible to our people, because the number of public transport buses that pass by there makes it easy for people to get off there, an make there way to us. That's what we're aiming for. The amount we may get for the building and its land where they are going to extend the main highway whcih will enable us to build has not been specified yet. It's going to be difficult because the terrain is very steep and will require a lot of infill. But the idea is to retrun to that site, although we are very grateful for the solidarity we have been given to work from here.
We have to return to our original nest because it is so much more accessible for everyone to get there and we are always looking for ways to serve our people better. For example, we have a tradition every year of promoting mass weddings. This year, on February 14, we are going to do a mass wedding at the Masaya Volcano with more than 200 couples. And apart from that, as I mentioned, every fortnight we facilitate medical consultations involving different specialties, gynecology, endodontics, orthodontics. We ask for blood donors ... and every month too we celebrate the birthdays of the children who have a birthday that month.
We celebrate them at the Water Park here in Managua with the support of Managua's local authority. We distribute toys, piñatas, we provide clowns, the singer Mario Montenegro comes to sing songs and stories to help bring joy to the children helping them to grow into what we are, namely one big family, and that way the children get to know each other, they make friends and they develop love, that most sincere love children have and we help them develop that love for when they are older.
In other words, we do all kinds of activities to help all our people, we continue to give support with families who need help with funerals, with bus fares for needy patients from the departments, we look for ways to ensure that they will can get any kind of laboratory tests done that they need... everything that our people ask of us.