Felon in America, Station Owner in Mexico
Tampico’s new social FM has ties to Nuevo Laredo, Mapastepec, and Texas court records
If the name Arlene Jasmine Elsie Alvarado Cuéllar — what a mouthful — isn’t familiar to you, let me give you a quick recap. Alvarado Cuéllar is the owner of the — as far I can tell — unbuilt XHCSAC-FM 94.3, a social station that will serve Mapastepec, Chiapas. She has also applied for a digital television station that would serve Matamoros, and her brother Michael Jonathan Alvarado Cuéllar holds a cable system concession in Nuevo Laredo and is an applicant for a new social AM to be built at Morelia.
It turns out that Arlene Alvarado Cuéllar — whose XHCSAC concession was signed for by Tapachula evangelical leader Antonio Morales Hernández and is one of five stations with the legal address of Calle 35 Poniente 13-C in that city — is a second-generation religious broadcaster.
In trying to find information about Arlene earlier this year, I learned about a bizarre case out of Laredo, Texas, that mostly played out in 2013. Elsa Cuéllar (full name Elsa María Ester Cuéllar Armenta) and her husband Miguel Alvarado were accused of housing 10 children in their Laredo home and enrolling them in the United Independent School District, forging identification to claim that they were their kids. The children, aged 5 to 17, all thought they were Cuéllar and Alvarado’s children, but none of them were.
The report from the San Antonio Express-News says the then-55-year-old Cuéllar “runs a nondenominational church here and preaches on a radio station in Nuevo Laredo, across the border”. Aha, a radio station! Some additional searching turned up a few references to her station. On December 3, 2012, Alma Niger of Hoy Tamaulipas put out this item:
IMPULSANDO EL CRISTIANISMO
Y ya que ando entrado en la actividad de los políticos, Fernando Castillo Villarreal, del grupo Impulso, participó recientemente en el festejo que la comunidad cristiana de Nuevo Laredo realizó con motivo del primer aniversario de Stereo Unción 93.7 FM, celebrada en el Centro Cívico de Nuevo Laredo. Fernando asistió a invitación de la señora Elsa Cuéllar, directora de dicha estación de radio cristiana. Sea pues.
So her station is called Stereo Unción, and it went on the air in November 2011. Indeed, it’s still a thing, and still at 93.7 MHz. It went off the air briefly in June, owing to damage to its transmitter, but it seems to be back up. (By the way, a real 93.7 can’t exist here; it’d be short spaced by 33 kilometers to 93.5 C3 (B1) Zapata, TX, an allotment that is currently unused.)
The Laredo case shifted to the justice system when authorities arrested Elsa Cuéllar and charged her with 11 counts of tampering with government records. Her bond was reduced at a June 14, 2013, court hearing in front of judge Joe López. The Laredo Morning Times Spanish-language report I just linked contains some of the highlights of the hearing, notably:
- Cuéllar was not in good medical shape. According to her attorneys, she suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and cirrhosis. Additionally, she had just had surgery to remove a 45-pound tumor from her body.
- Prosecutors considered Cuéllar a flight risk because of her interests in Nuevo Laredo.
Additionally, it describes some of Cuéllar’s other activities:
- She had bank accounts in Tennessee, California and Texas.
- Cuéllar flipped homes to sell them at a profit and once owned a rental property.
- Her main source of income, however, was donations from churches at which she preached and organized events.
The story, and court records, also show that this was not Cuéllar’s first rodeo in the Texas judicial system: Cuéllar is a convicted felon. She pleaded guilty in May 1999 to hindering the apprehension or prosecution of a known sex offender, a third-degree felony under state statute, and was sentenced to 10 years probation and 150 hours community service. Additional charges in the murder of 14-year-old Juan Valentín Alonzo were thrown out due to lack of evidence. (Her probation was ended early in 2002.) In addition, in 2003, she was accused of falsifying a birth certificate.
After paying a $130,000 bond to be released from the Webb County Jail, the aforementioned case ended in March 2014 with Cuéllar pleading guilty to five charges of tampering with government records (license/seal/etc.) with intent to defraud or harm, a second-degree felony, and being sentenced to 10 years probation. Attempts to contact the Laredo Morning Times for more information on the case did not lead to a reply.
In short, Elsa Cuéllar is a convicted felon in the United States. North of the border, she wouldn’t be eligible to hold a broadcast license. In the highly publicized Entertainment Media Trust case, four St. Louis-area stations are currently on the chopping block — hearing designation order and all, in a throwback to the FCC of yore — for being allegedly controlled by a convicted felon. Other stations have lost their licenses for the same reason, notably the 2001 Michael Rice case, which pulled five outlets off the air; subsequent attempts to have his rights restored have been denied by the FCC. Even amateur radio licenses aren’t exempted from this simple rule.
No Way in America, No Ley in Mexico
However, Mexican law doesn’t seem to have much to say about what to do when concessionaires have a legal past. The only broadcasting case I can recall is in 2018, when in the process of considering the application of Yuririapúndaro 104.7, A.C., for a community station at Yuriria, Guanajuato, the IFT consulted the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes. The SCT noted that some of the principals of the applicant had a criminal record. Commissioner María Elena Estavillo Flores voted against the resolution to approve the award when it came up in November, after a three-month delay to get more information.
The charges against the principals certainly rose to the level of an American felony: they included kidnapping, robbery, public drunkenness, and possession of firearms. However, IFT president Gabriel Oswaldo Contreras Saldívar said that denying their participation in a concessionaire might be an unconstitutional extension of a penalty outside the normal sphere of justice:
Yo quisiera fijar posición, también respecto de todos los asuntos, acompañándolos y entendiendo la dificultad que se plantea en dilemas como éste, yo he sido consistente en mi votación dado que, de acuerdo con los criterios de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, pues no podríamos hacer extensiva una pena a otros ámbitos distintos de aquellos en los cuales se haya impartido justicia en el sentido que haya sido, hablo incluso de personas condenadas, eso es lo que establece nuestra Constitución, tenemos un deber de hacer actuaciones, respetando los derechos humanos, interpretando pro homine, pero más allá de eso, pues negarle a alguien la posibilidad de participar en el capital social de una persona moral que viene por una concesión, por el hecho de que alguna vez estuvo sentenciada, pues claramente sería inconstitucional, en mi opinión, siguiendo los criterios de la Corte.
In 2017, the IFT similarly wrestled with an issue in which kidnapping of a minor was among the charges of an individual who was to receive a ham concession. Then-commissioner Adriana Labardini pointed out that the requisites established in the LFTR and the IFT’s guidelines for awarding concessions did not require citizenship, but rather nationality — which meant that, according to Labardini, even a minor could meet the requisite:
Entonces, pero no es un asunto menor, que sabemos conforme a una serie de normativas del Código Penal, a qué derechos políticos está privado un sentenciado, y quiénes no tienen capacidad jurídica de ejercicio, por lo menos los menores de edad, la persona con cierta, privada de ciertas facultades mentales, pero no se dice nada de este tipo de personas condenadas, y tampoco nuestra Ley de Telecomunicaciones habla de la necesidad de ser ciudadanos, lo cual nos lleva, incluso, a pensar que un menor de edad podría ser titular de una concesión, nada más bajo la patria potestad o tutela ¿no?, porque no está exigido en ley la ciudadanía, sino la nacionalidad mexicana, en fin.
So there are evidently no barriers to prevent even those convicted of serious crimes in Mexico from being qualified concessionaires, due to the design of the law.
Tampico’s Second Christian Radio Station
What makes the story of the now-approved Elsa Cuéllar application, soon to become XHCSAF-FM 91.3, even more compelling is that it creates a case where both mother and daughter are concessionaires. It also ties back to what appears to be a growing network of religious radio concessions which, unlike noted wolfpacks, group operators and the BANAC vehicles, is entirely composed of women as concessionaires.
Earlier, I mentioned that Arlene’s XHCSAC-FM listed as its legal address Calle 35 Poniente 13-C, Col. 5 de Febrero in Tapachula. Four other radio stations list that address as their own, including XHMRT-FM 102.5 “Radio Oasis Vida”, Tampico’s first authorized Christian radio station:
- XHCSAD-FM 101.1 Pijijiapan Chis., Keren Victoria Morales Ruiz
- XHMRT-FM 102.5 Tampico Tamps., Martha Morales Reséndiz
- XHPECO-FM 105.5 Monclova Coah., Pamela Verenice García Aguirre
- XHVDR-FM 100.3 Cacahoatán Chis., Juana Patricia Ruiz Sánchez
Additionally, applicant Vidalia Castillo Javier, who was told by the IFT in 2014 that there was no room to consider new radio applications in Villahermosa, listed that as her address.
Furthermore, the concessions for XHCSAC-FM and XHCSAD-FM Pijijiapan were both signed for by Antonio Morales Hernández, a noted evangelical leader in Tapachula.
XHVDR’s file includes its code of ethics, whose copy is identical to that of two other religious outlets: XHJUX-FM Santiago Juxtlahuaca Oax. (Radio InspiraZion) and XHAGP-FM Agua Prieta Son. (Radio Alcance). These stations list local legal addresses.
More Could Come
A review of the En Frecuencia lists of social station applications pending turns up that Elsa Cuéllar is on the hunt in the 2019 PABF for another social station. This time, however, she’s looking closer to home, filing on September 30 for the social television allotment at Nuevo Laredo. The two other filers are serial: José Antonio Aguilar Arellano and the as-yet-unknown RYTSM, A.C.
Her daughter’s Matamoros social TDT filing from the 2018 PABF has yet to be adjudicated. However, En Frecuencia research revealed earlier this year that the only competing applicant, Claudia Méndez Villagómez, is a ministra de culto and thus ineligible to hold a broadcast concession.
It seems like a fitting ending to a tale best summarized this way. In Mexico, priests can’t own stations, but felons can; in the United States, it’s the exact opposite.
