A 30-Year Wait, a 23-Day Turnaround
Nacajuca, Tabasco, is back on the indigenous radio map — with astonishing speed
Updated February 13, 2020, to incorporate information from the newly uploaded concession document. The title was changed to reflect the actual timespan between application and award.
More than 30 years ago, on September 29, 1989, a political firestorm pitting the hegemonic PRI against local opposition took out XENAC-AM 1440 “La Voz de los Chontales” in Nacajuca, Tabasco, an indigenous radio station then part of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista. Then, it was Governor Salvador Neme Castillo, who took action to shutter the station in retribution for claimed “subversive statements” against his state administration, after already having cut all funding for XENAC in 1989.
Since that time, there have been efforts to get Nacajuca a station again. However, nothing has been more beneficial for these efforts than having a Tabasco native win the presidency. The INPI announced that a new station would be on air in 2020, though it was not clear what mechanism this would take. On Saturday, at an otherwise unrelated event attended by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples announced that the IFT had awarded it a public concession for radio station XHCPBS-FM 98.7 in Nacajuca. La Voz de los Chontales is coming back from the dead. And fast.
Zooooooooooom
From the call letters, it’s abundantly clear that XHCPBS is a public station and it came out of a PABF with its templated call sign. En Frecuencia has a full database of applications from all of the previous PABFs and did not have any on file for Nacajuca as a public station. (However, the record does have one important pre-LFTR filing that is related; more on that in a moment.) But this station came out of the 2020 PABF, which did list a frequency for Nacajuca along with seven other localities. It sped through Insurgentes Sur in what must be record time; the filing hit the IFT on January 13, and the station was greenlit at a February 5 Pleno meeting. This was possible because, very unusually, the IFT in writing the final 2020 PABF put Nacajuca in the first window for public stations, which this year was January 13–24. That raises some eyebrows in two ways. First, that window was the earliest it’s ever been; in 2019, it was April 1–12. And typically, the IFT puts the first half of the listed stations in each category in the first window and the second half in the second window. (This means that public and social allotments in states later in the alphabet are filed for later in the year.)
Table 2.1.2.2, referenced above, is the public FM assignments table, and #7 is the Nacajuca allocation.
That 23-day turnaround is remarkably fast. By contrast, in December, the IFT adjudicated the oldest pending public station application, 34 months after the filing (the Tepic municipal FM). The same day the concession for XHCPBS was uploaded, the IFT also uploaded that for social station XHRNV-FM Naranjos, Veracruz, with a nearly 9-year wait.
The frequency has yet to be revealed, and there is a discrepancy about the station class. INPI stories have specifically mentioned a 6 kW ERP, which would make this a Class AA station. However, the 2020 PABF, and the concession, specify a Class A allotment, which will limit XHCPBS to an ERP of 3 kW.
Not Just AMLO
If AMLO was the catalyst, the effort has been there the whole time. But it’s been so poorly coordinated that nothing ever came of it.
After a 1992 push to revive the station from facilities in Villahermosa fell flat with the locals, in 2005, officials from the then-CDI visited Nacajuca to inspect the former XENAC facilities. They found them in poor condition and with unusable equipment, according to a 2006 report by Tabasco Hoy. The station apparently would have needed a total overhaul, including a new 5 kW AM transmitter, to effectively do its job.
The primary vehicle for most of the activity pre-2018 was the municipality, which on April 18, 2008, filed for a new FM radio station. (The municipal president at the time was Avenamar Leyna Gómez.) 3.5 million pesos was invested in new equipment, and the municipal government didn’t wait for a federal green light, either, building and signing on (for a short time) “XHNAC-FM” 99.9. But their efforts were crippled by local and federal inaction. In early 2014, new municipal president Pedro Landero López said that work to sign on XHNAC as “La Nueva Voz de los Yokot’anob” (page 9) was dependent on getting the permit from Mexico City. Those efforts suffered from an equipment theft in 2016 that left the municipality out some 6 million pesos. That article from Tabasco Hoy also blames political bickering for the failure of successive municipal governments to do anything. So too does a second article from 2017 on the failure of the station to transmit. (Left unsaid: the concession never got approved.)
Never mind that there has been continual outcry, and furtive pushes, to resurrect La Voz de los Chontales. It’s clear that the driver behind the fastest station approval in IFT history is the president. In fact, there are plans to have AMLO return to Nacajuca and dedicate the station on February 21, International Mother Language Day, according to a Friday column by Víctor M. Sámano Labastida in Presente. Sámano goes on to note that 1.5 million pesos for facility rehab were contributed by Pemex; another report from the paper says the municipality is supplying equipment.
In just 11 days, Nacajuca’s radio drought ends after more than three decades. And in this case, you already know who to thank.
