Abstract
Radio CX-30 is a small, independent radio station in a country ruled by the military; its director explains how he and his station have managed to survive.
Plaza Independencia is at the very heart of Montevideo, Uruguay's capital on the Rio de la Plata. Its buildings are symbolic of both the country's past and what has happened during the past decade of military rule. In the centre of the square is a statue to General Artigas, a hero of the fight for liberation from Spain in the nineteenth century, who put forward revolutionary land reform proposals. He died a pauper in exile. Opposite is the one-storey Presidential Palace, now in the shadow of a ten-storey military headquarters under construction for the past few years, but still unfinished. The other side of the square is dominated by Montevideo's traditional luxury hotel, the Victoria Plaza Hotel. This too has changed hands in recent times, and now belongs to the South-Korean inspired Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’) who bought it in 1982. To make their financial dealings simpler, they bought a majority shareholding in the Banco de Credito, Uruguay's third largest banking group. They also set up an evening newspaper Ultimas Noticias, run by the former secretary of the armed forces' information services. At one end of the Plaza Independencia is the arch leading to the spur of land which comprises the old city and the port. These were sealed off in June 1984 when a leading political exile, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, returned from eleven years abroad after being elected as the Blanco party presidential candidate for controlled elections which the present military-backed government has called for November, after all their previous plans for continuing their own rule met with steadfast opposition from the Uruguayans.
The radio station which has been prominent in giving a voice to that opposition is housed at the opposite end of the square, in the Palacio Salvo, a piece of grandiose Spanish architecture which somehow suffered a mid-century continental drift and found itself on the far side of the South Atlantic rather than in Barcelona. Radio CX-30 occupies the second floor of the rambling building. The defiant stance it has adopted towards the military government, particularly since 1980, has made it very popular, and its entrance is thronged constantly with people hoping to get their complaints heard, or to talk with its director, German Araujo. He is a small man with aquiline features and seemingly boundless energy. Appointed to head the radio in 1973, his personal prestige has grown with its popularity, and reached a high point last December when he embarked on a hunger strike in protest at the government's closure and occupation of the radio.