Still making waves.

• Author: Robinson, Richard
• Position: Latin American radio

In the still blackness of the predawn hours, the passengers dozed or sat in silence in the back of the open truck, sacks of cargo as mattresses. Soon they will begin their fourteen-hour journey from the frontier village of Chiwankeri, in eastern Peru, south to the town of Quillabamba, along rutted mud roads, slithering between steep rock walls and sheer drops to the Alto Urubamba River below. Luis, fiddling with the dials of an immense plastic and chrome radio, hits on a strong signal. A woman's voice speaks in English, persuasively, seductively.

"What's she say?" asks one. Someone else replies that the lady is an evangelist and ideally would like him to switch churches. Luis flicks the dial and picks up a samba station from somewhere in Brazil. The driver emerges from a shack and as the door stands open, soft candlelight and the faint patter of a second radio spill out. The engine fires, the truck radio is switched on--a popular music station from Quillabamba--and the forest clearing awakes to the cacophony of competing sounds.

In the Caribbean and South and Central America radio continues to play an important part in peoples lives, especially outside the cities where media choice means local radio and little else. The world's greatest profusion of small radio stations is here, constantly pouring out a rich diet of music, news, advertisements (deep male voices with lots of echo and verbal exclamation marks), and local information. In remote areas, radio may be the only way to keep in touch with the outside world, or even with events in the next town.

In the back of practically every shop, bar, and restaurant a radio can be found. Taxi drivers and construction workers cannot function without them. Travelers might spot a radio strapped to the back of a packhorse, suspended from a nail at an Amazon trading post, in a mountain refuge, or on the table or shelf of the humblest of homes. In Latin America, the transistor radio is ubiquitous.

The telecommunications revolution, which has secured a wide choice of quality audio and visual products for every home in North America and Europe, is unlikely to have reached far beyond the principal cities of the Caribbean and Central and South America. Most of the continent is sustained by low-cost old-technology radio, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The system that Marconi first used to bounce a message from England to France in 1899 and that was developed to perfection in World War II remains reliable, cheap, and well suited to the needs of the Americas.

Although it is the second smallest republic in South America, Ecuador is a microcosm of radiobroadcasting throughout the region. Its difficult terrain is a severe hindrance to communications, its road network far from complete. Telephone and television services are limited to the principal towns; many rural dwellings are not served by electricity. The estimated 3 million radio sets provide a vital link within the country and with the world outside. By contrast there are only 750,000...