The XHROJ-FM Story
A revolving door of owners, operators and frequencies clouds the story of Cancún’s most interesting radio station — and the stations it spawned along the way
This story was initially published on the WTFDA Forums on July 26, 2018, and has been updated continuously since with new developments.
Good Music, Better Causes
On January 21, 2010, Cofetel approved the award of 19 permit stations in one fell swoop. While the assignments to Congress, the Universidad de Guadalajara and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana were the most important, the most convoluted history belongs to one station on the Caribbean coast.
XHFMC-FM 104.3, awarded to the Fundación Maya Cancún (which took delivery of the permit on February 25), seemed innocuous enough when it was awarded, but it soon became more complicated. The “name of organization” callsign was switched out on March 16, within weeks of receiving the permit, for the not-so-standard XHROJ-FM; the legal representative, Sergio Rojano Sahab, is a central character in this saga. After asking for an extension of time to build the station in March 2011, Fundación Maya Cancún made its debut on the Cancún airwaves on May 24. Broadcasting as Yaakun FM — Buena Música, Mejores Causas (Yaakun means “caring” in Maya), this station also had the distinction of being Grupo ACIR’s first, and so far only, permit wolf. ACIR’s involvement is confirmed in two ways. The URL for Yaakun FM was yaakun.fm/cmai/ at a time when the “cmai” appeared in all ACIR sites. Radio ACIR, S.A. de C.V., holds the trademark for “Yaakun 104.3 FM”, with expediente number 1173808 at the IMPI (Mexico’s USPTO), which was filed for in July 2011 and still remains valid.
Yaakun came to the air embodying its social side out of the gate. It offered a variety of Spanish-language adult contemporary music but also emphasized its connection to social causes. It also was connected to ACIR’s own charitable arm, the Fundación ACIR. Gisela Casarín Landy was listed as part of the foundation’s Evaluation and Selection Committee in 2011, and Casarín was also mentioned in a news article published in Latitud 21, a local business magazine, that came out in July 2011, about a month after the station signed on the air.
Yaakun operated this way for a little over 18 months. On December 20, 2012, the newspaper Quequi ran an article titled “Sergio Rojano, abusivo de las telecomunicaciones” (Sergio Rojano, abuser of telecommunications). The article described how Rojano scammed and stripped cable system franchise holders of their concessions and began unfairly competing. It also warned that Rojano Sahab had set his sights on Quintana Roo, “with the objective to take control of radio and television concessions held by local businessmen who have for years invested in this tourist destination”.
It was a warning that the newspaper should have heeded.
The First Quequi Era and the 104.3–103.5 Split
Not even a month after the report ran in Quequi, the newspaper took operating control of QFM. On January 7, 2013, the station held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, attended by Governor Roberto Borge Angulo, and it relaunched as QFM 104.3, with an English classic hits format and new news programming. Among the debuts on QFM was the newscast Qué Pasa en Quintana Roo, hosted by Rafael Santiago. An article from this period introduces another name of interest: José Gabriel Gutiérrez Lavín, who is described as QFM’s operating director.
What Quequi might not have known was that something was coming in the summer of 2013 that would set off a confusing series of events.
On June 19, 2013, Rojano Sahab, representing Fundación Maya Cancún, filed with Cofetel an application to relocate XHROJ-FM from 104.3 to 103.5. This application specified continued use of the ACIR/XHYI-FM broadcast tower at much the same technical parameters. This application was approved by the IFT on July 28, 2014 — but its existence was not made known for more than three years. (Rojano Sahab is an engineer by trade who received a Premio Antena from the CIRT this year for his role in promoting training for engineers.)
Even if we had known, it would have been a completely unexpected case. qfm.com.mx, the QFM site at the time, continued to advertise that this was a station of the Fundación Maya Cancún. At the studios at the Quequi headquarters on Av. Francisco I. Madero, 750 meters away from the XHYI site, a 6-bay FM antenna had also been put in place — marking a definitive technical split from the 103.5 plans that nobody knew about at the time. In fact, the only reason to suspect a second radio station was even at the XHYI-FM site was the fact that there were two six-bay antennas on it, something I immediately noticed in my attempt to find Cancún’s radio stations at the tail end of 2016 (I correctly suspected XHROJ at the time).
XHROJ moved to 103.5 pretty quickly, it seems: the first report of Yaakun on 103.5 FM dates to December 1, 2014. Without a web presence, we wouldn’t have a clue. (Recordings of 103.5 XHROJ from 2016 now exist as well. The legal ID mentions Fundación Maya Cancún and gives the address corresponding to the XHYI-FM tower.)
From Q, an Acustik Is Formed
QFM remained a Quequi-operated station through the summer of 2016, when the logo was changed to redesign it away from the Quequi slab-serif Q logo and the mention of Corporativo Quequi was removed from the website. An infographic from that summer shows the new logo and continued use of the XHROJ-FM callsign for 104.3, a year and a half after the real XHROJ moved to 103.5.
It took me until August 2017, seeing reviews on the Yaakun 104.3 page mentioning 103.5, to get an idea that this might be happening, because Yaakun has no web presence or stream.
That fall, QFM gained a sister station, an outright pirate, known as Acustik 95.3. Acustik is the Spanish hits complement to QFM. The Acustik history site says Gutiérrez Lavín acquired QFM in 2016. Its name seemed a footnote, but 2017 would be a year in which we got as many questions as answers.
It started with the IFT-4 radio station auction, in which Acustik was the biggest winner of all. Through three concessionaires — Escápate al Paraíso, Centrado Corporativo, and Akustik Media (note the K) — the company directly won 24 stations from Hermosillo to Peto, Yucatán. A partnered company, Grupo Informativo Fusión Peninsular, picked up three stations in Chiapas (which does not have a peninsula), and Media Group in Michoacán won eight stations, which it built into Acustik Michoacán, a state talk network that lasted until March 2019. (Three Coahuila stations seemed likely to follow but have yet to materialize.) An associated group with Grupo Informativo Fusión Peninsular, known as Yantra Informativo Fusión, bid for a social station at Playa del Carmen and lost it because it was associated with Grupo Acustik. Acustik also participated in the IFT-6 television station auction but came up empty-handed — the only one of 14 qualified bidders that walked out without a station.
Acustik also went to work expanding and building out a stable of talent. It acquired LiveNetwork, which owned two cable channels, and began signing marquee names like Javier Solórzano, Fernanda Tapia, and most known of all, Víctor Trujillo — aka Brozo. The Informe Brozo, as well as Acustik TV, launched on January 15, 2018, and radio syndication of it also took place to affiliates across the country, including XEOC Radio Chapultepec in Mexico City, the mysteriously fed NotiGAPE Nuevo Laredo, and other stations that Acustik does not own. (In August 2018, Trujillo and Solórzano both departed from Grupo Acustik.) Acustik also built out dozens of social media pages, including the underhanded acquisition of a “Frases de Vida” account to transform into @AcustikNoticias, which at launch had a million Twitter followers, more than Azteca Noticias but still less than the largest established outlets in the country.
Acustik also became a sponsor of Cancún’s Ascenso MX soccer team, Atlante FC. Gutiérrez Lavín was named as the club’s chair in October.
But back to Quintana Roo, where Acustik’s operations are the most mysterious and the least above board. With the launch of Acustik came a studio relocation to the Plaza Península shopping mall on Avenida Bonampak. Atop the new Acustik studios is a new six-bay FM antenna — just one, which makes me think it’s used for 95.3 and the Quequi site still housed 104.3’s transmitter even when Acustik was operating the station. Acustik also received some of the state government’s advertising budget (313,000 pesos a month).
In July 2017, the IFT uploaded the XHROJ frequency change authorization to the RPC, which caused serious consternation for me. At the time, I advised databases to not reflect the change because I needed more information.
With more information, we now can say with certainty that a 103.5 and a 104.3 are transmitting at the same time in Cancún. Both say they are run by the Fundación Maya Cancún. Both say they are XHROJ-FM. But only one can be the legitimate station. The editors of the WTFDA database will need to figure out which XHROJ is listed.
It is worth noting that I sent a letter to Acustik in Cancún in November 2017 via email, but I never received a reply.
Back to Quequi, A New Acustik Frequency, and Another Mystery
Something happened in the middle of August 2018 to necessitate writing another chapter in the XHROJ story. Quequi took back QFM, reinstated the logo it used when it ran 104.3 from 2013–16, and even restored its newscast name. Qué Pasa en Quintana Roo is once again the name of the main newscast on QFM, broadcast just as it was years ago from the Quequi headquarters. Additionally, Acustik 95.3 went off the air for two weeks. The reasons for the change in operation of QFM are unclear.
When Acustik 95.3 returned on September 3 at noon, it had dragged another frequency into the saga, and a legal one at that. XHAKUM-FM 105.5 had been awarded to Enlace Social Akumal on January 31 and began simulcasting the pirate.
The capital associated with XHAKUM is owned by Administradora de Conjuntos Hoteleros, S.A. de C.V., the legal name of the Hotel Akumal Beach Resort. The legal representative for Enlace Social Akumal, David Ortiz Mena, is additionally identified as a hotel owner in Akumal and was recently tapped to head the Tulum Association of Hoteliers. The connection between the hotel and Acustik is not clear, but one news report suggests another Akumal resort, Secrets Akumal, is owned by Carlos Ortiz Salinas, identified as an investor in Acustik, and that Ortiz Salinas is the son of Antonio López Mena (1907–2007), who served in the federal cabinet as finance secretary in two consecutive presidencies from 1958 to 1970, and the cousin of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
A New Origen
Late in 2018, Acustik Quintana Roo began branding as Akustik (with another K) in what appeared to be the first signs of a serious schism at a shop that once looked united. Retaining the Acustik name was the Mexico City operation, which evidently is now headed by Roberto Arandia — the guy once of LiveNetwork. Meanwhile, Gutiérrez Lavín, and the Quintana Roo operation, rebranded as Origen Radio y TV. (Both showed up to NATPE and were described as the presidents of their respective companies.)
Origen then fired a shot across the bow when on March 1, 2019, it announced plans to launch in Guadalajara on 1510 AM and 91.9 HD2. (The 91.9 HD2 didn’t last long and never got greenlit by the IFT.) 1510 is XEPBGR-AM, one of the Radio de Ayuda stations. Radio de Ayuda, in turn, forms part of the PSR social wolfpack, a sprawling Jalisco-based wolfpack with heretofore unbuilt stations in Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco, Colima, Zacatecas, and the State of Mexico under the names Radio de Ayuda, Fundación Educacional de Medios, and Frecuencias Sociales. Its principals are associated with a broadcast supply company trading as Partes y Servicios para Radiodifusión and even own stations in the US. There’s an En Frecuencia special about them, too:
Late in the year, Origen added a second frequency in Guadalajara, 99.1 FM, and soon after, 1510 became its own station as Radio Miled, remaining a social wolf but with a different operator. There are three 99.1 stations near (but not in) Guadalajara, but based on PSR’s history and client base, I believe this to be Mazamitla’s XHZAM-FM:
The Origen Radio site at https://origenradio.com.mx emphasizes the Guadalajara station, though it seems to maintain its own Facebook presence from the one that had been used in Quintana Roo. (The designer for the new Origen site and PSR’s is the same agency, Chilaquil.)
