“We’re Putting It In Your Hands”
BANAC finds its partner for its La Paz Christian station
But First, Some Background
If you’ve read me for the last year or so, you might be familiar with the National Bar of Christian Lawyers — Barra Nacional de Abogados Cristianos, A.C. (BANAC for short). BANAC is more strongly opinionated than its legal title might indicate. It is firmly in evangelical territory.
In 2007, for instance, it warned that religious hatred was increasing against non-Catholics in Chiapas, which has a higher than average proportion of evangelical Christians. Last year, it accused officials in the Huasteca region of Hidalgo of discriminating against evangelicals and inciting hatred on the part of Catholics toward them.
But it’s in radio where BANAC has been quite involved in recent years. In March 2019, Voz de Transformación, A.C., came away with three concessions for new FM radio stations in San Felipe, Baja California; La Paz, Baja California Sur; and Chilpancingo, Guerrero. These had been filed for in the 2018 PABF alongside applications, yet to be adjudicated, for Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, and Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. When the paperwork for these stations showed up in the RPC, I learned about BANAC as its legal representative was the president of the bar: Alfonso Abraham Farrera Padilla.
I learned the way that BANAC worked after I got into an interesting discussion that actually was an outgrowth of my En Frecuencia special from March 2019 on the Radio Tamaulipas state network:
In the process of writing that article, I learned that a pirate radio station known as Vida FM had started up on 90.9 MHz in Tampico, which is assigned to the long-dormant Radio Tamaulipas repeater XHTPI-FM there. I struck up some words with the station’s manager, Natán de los Reyes. I suggested he move to one of the frequencies in Tampico’s freshly cleared reserved band (he chose 107.9) and apply for a station — I steered him to ORC. Later, he told me that while ORC wasn’t willing to pick up a religious applicant, he found a group who was: a bar of Christian lawyers. That bar.
BANAC is not building a national network. It’s instead serving as something of an equivalent to AMARC or ORC, except that the concessionaires are themselves part of the association. Through Voz de Transformación and more recently another association known as Manantial de Voz, A.C., BANAC has been applying for concessions for local religious ministries in hopes of winning them. (Manantial de Voz applied for Tampico and San Juan Bautista Tuxtepec in the 2019 PABF.) I call both of the associations BANAC vehicles.
The first of the original BANAC stations began formal operations in October when Radio Restauración, a Christian pirate on 89.1, moved to 104.3 and became XHCSBI-FM. But nothing had been heard yet from San Felipe at all, or from La Paz besides one lone Facebook post.
Until Sunday.
“They Called Me from Mexico City”
On Tuesday, I was contacted by a reader of En Frecuencia who lives in La Paz. He had a question for me:
“Do you know anything about the authorization of 101.5 FM in La Paz, Baja California Sur, to a religious organization?”
I told him what I knew — that XHCSAP-FM 101.5 was a BANAC vehicle station — and he told me this.
“On Sunday, I went to my wife’s church (I’m not Christian), and I heard the pastor give the news that they had given the church the responsibility of running the station and also a TV station.”
Television? That’s a surprise. But I wanted to know who the pastor was.
Pastor Moisés Mireles Carrillo, but everything’s coming from Mexico City. I offered him advice because he seems to know nothing.
I now had a name to go on. That led me to the Centro Familiar Cristiano in La Paz, and to the 43-minute mark of this past Sunday’s church service, which is helpfully available in its entirety on Facebook:
The following is a transcript in Spanish of Mireles’s remarks:
Hace algunos días, me llamaron de la Ciudad de México…uno de nuestros líderes, dijo, “Pastor, tengo un proyecto para ti. Hemos estando orando acá, hay un ministerio muy grande acá en México, yo soy parte de ese ministerio, hay un proyecto para La Paz, salió un proyecto para La Paz y queremos compartírtelo a ti.”
“¿De qué se trata?” le dije yo.
“Mira, se trata de esto. En La Paz hemos logrado sacar una concesión para una estación de radio en FM. Te la estamos poniendo en tus manos. Ya está todo autorizado por el IFETEL, ya está todo. Aquí está la concesión para que tú la coordines allí en La Paz. Son 25 mil watts de potencia. Si ustedes logran poner eso, van a compartir el Evangelio hasta Mazatlán, hasta allá va a llegar la Palabra. Eso es lo que hace el Señor, eso es lo que hace el Señor.” Yo me quedé sorprendido, me dijo, “Allí está. Aquí está. Tómalo, y adelante.”
Y yo dije, “Claro si…pero…y ahora ¿qué hacemos? ¿Cómo lo vamos a hacer esto?” El Señor ha empezado a añadir personas claves para la visión. Ya tenemos la torre, ya hay un equipo disponible para hacer esto una realidad muy pronto. Si es que les invito porque vamos a iniciar programas. Yo se… Recuerden cuando estuvimos con la radio por internet? Siempre me quedé con esa cosita, bueno pero por que estuvimos allí, Señor?, y de repente viene esto. Era como una preparación, sí, es que estuvieron los programas, prepárense porque va a venir un tiempo para compartir, ya no solamente por internet, 101 … .5 FM, aquí en La Paz, en el nombre del Señor lo vamos a hacer.”
Y el proyecto va más allá. Porque me dijo, “Eso es algo histórico. Solamente en La Paz — ellos están ganando concesiones para todo el país este ministerio. Quieren ganar — sacar mil estaciones de radio para todo el país y ya van cien.” Me dice, “¿Sabes qué? Pastor, en La Paz es la primera que nos dan esa capacidad, pero… Esto es una parte. La segunda parte es que también es para televisión.” Wow. “Si tu quieres poner una televisión, ya lo puedes hacer, aquí para nuestro estado.”
So let’s recap. Someone in Mexico City, presumably connected to BANAC, called up the Centro Familiar Cristiano — which had in the past run an internet radio station — and told them, “we have a concession for La Paz and we want you to operate it”. Literally, “we’re putting it in your hands”, with all of the IFT paperwork cleared and the (Class B1) station ready to go. They already should have a transmitter, which was granted to them in the IFT’s social station transmitter donation program, whereby seized equipment used by pirates is given to community, indigenous and social stations that need it. (XHCSAO and XHCSBI have also received equipment through this program.)
There are also some lines in the last paragraph that are so worthy of our time and attention that I’m going to translate them:
And there’s more to the project. He told me, “This is historic. In La Paz alone — this ministry, they are winning radio concessions nationwide. They want to win and put into service 1,000 radio stations nationwide, and there are already 100.” He tells me, “You know, Pastor, in La Paz this is the first place where they’re giving us this ability, but… This is just part of it. The other part is that it also gives us the capability for television.” Wow. “If you want to build a TV station, you can do it, here in our state.”
First off, this is wrong. It’s not the first time people have been a bit confused as to what a concesión única actually does. To build a broadcast TV station requires a separate spectrum concession, and no such application is on file with the IFT. Being a broadcaster does give one the right to provide certain other telecommunications services, but not ones that require additional spectrum to operate, such as other radio or TV stations or a cellular network.
But the idea that the goal of the BANAC is to build 1,000 radio stations? Many of these are certainly already operating without a concession, but there are, across all services and social subtypes, 313 authorized social broadcast stations as of December 9.
Last year in an editorial, I noted that any legalization of religious radio, while likely necessary, would precipitate these consequences:
A tidal wave of applications at the IFT. Let’s say the IFT creates a new “social religious” station class that can be owned by ARs. I would expect the agency to be inundated with hundreds of applications from coast to coast, many of them requiring comparative hearings.
The saturation of many remaining frequencies. Mexican radio has had much more room to grow because of the 800 kHz station separation policy and the lack of religious stations. There would be a surge in station count once the IFT processed the applications described above and much of the supply of frequencies would be eaten up by religious radio stations.
The words of Pastor Mireles Carrillo here bear out that idea. BANAC and the parties that are associated with it are firm in their belief that the longstanding prohibition on radio stations owned by religious associations violates freedom of speech and freedom of religion. We’ve already seen an uptick in this sort of activity, even now where people (that aren’t religious ministers) and specially designed civil associations (that aren’t religious associations) are used to apply for new social radio stations (that inevitably wind up with religious programming). And as I have noted, this has gone on even before the renowned La Visión de Dios case, where it was the name of the civil association that sparked national furor over an application. From the En Frecuencia perspective, this is something of a familiar story now.
The idea that BANAC is going around getting concessions, either on behalf of ministries that have already reached out to them (like Vida FM Tampico) or in a speculative capacity to find a church that is willing to take on the operation of the facility, almost feels César Guel-esque.
Depending on when it comes to air, XHCSAP will be the first or second social station for La Paz; also nearing a sign-on at some point soon is XHBCPZ-FM 95.1.
