Peace stations in Colombia: the voice of those who were never heard

“Every day I wake up with one goal, to make visible those who have never had a voice,” the phrase is said by Anderson Salinas, a young journalist from the department of Norte de Santander, in northeastern Colombia, while getting ready for a new day of worked.

Anderson is 29 years old, is a social communicator and since 2020 has been a member of one of the 12 Peace Stations that are currently heard in different areas of the country. They are called that because their main objective is that: to build social fabric and speak of peace, in places historically plagued by violence.

The 12 sound frequencies are produced by the Colombian National Radio Public Media System and are the only stations in the world created as part of peace talks. They were born in compliance with point 6.5 of the Peace Agreement signed by the National Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC.

“Each broadcast is a unique opportunity to make known that profound Colombia and to tell the stories from the feelings of the victims, who are those who have experienced the violence in our country firsthand,” adds Anderson, with a strong accent and beatencharacteristic of the area of ​​the country in which it is located.

Accompanied by a backpack, in which he carries his handheld recorder and notebook, Anderson travels weekly to different municipalities of his native Norte de Santander (border department with Venezuela), to relate, through a microphone, those stories lost in years. of armed conflict and shameful violence.

reach every corner

“My region is very rural and it excites me to know that on a daily basis they report to us from very remote places, which had never been protagonists for things other than unfortunate acts of war,” says Anderson.

Your job is just to bring hope through stories of reconciliation, peace and cultureto those listeners who believed that they could never get out of the spiral of violence in which, without meaning to, they were involved for decades.

The Peace Stations operate from corner to corner of the country: in Algeciras (Huila), Puerto Leguízamo (Putumayo), Arauquita (Arauca), El Tambo (Cauca), Bojayá (Chocó), Florida (Valle), Chaparral (Tolima), Ituango (Antioquia), Fonseca (La Guajira), Convention (Norte de Santander), Mesetas (Meta) and San Jacinto (Bolívar). All with the purpose of connecting communities through cultural, musical and informative content from their regions.

“We are outside the traditional commercial radio stations. Weekly we have 104 hours of content on the air, in towns that were never talked about, where no one ever told about their initiatives,” says Nataly Ramírez, content leader of the Emisoras de Paz, who, like Anderson, insists that these “They are not guerrilla stations” and, on the contrary, they give a voice to leaders who work for their communities.

UN accompaniment

In fact, since its inception, this has been a project supported by the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia, whose objective is to accompany people in the process of reincorporation who have found a new job opportunity there.

In total there are 72 journalists, some of them signatories of the Peace Agreement, who are in different parts of Colombia every morning at the head of these stations.

“Although it does not intervene in journalistic content, the United Nations is taking the reintegration processes very hand in hand. of all those women and men who believed in the Peace Agreement and who today are betting on many other activities, including journalism” explains Juan Ricardo Pulido, coordinator of the Emisoras de Paz.

“Without the United Nations and its work with these signatories, we would have much less sound, photographic, journalistic and audiovisual material to show the world,” he adds.

diversity of looks

However, since the goal is for the teams to be made up of Colombians with different perspectives that enrich the content, among its collaborators there are indigenous people, peasants, Afro-descendants, victims, and members of the LGBTIQ+ communities, among other groups.

“Colombia is a country where radio continues to play an important role, despite technological advances, because this is a geographically very rich country, but technically very complex. It is not easy to reach certain territories with platforms like Spotify. For this reason, the medium par excellence for Colombians is the radio”, adds Juan Ricardo, affirming that there is no other station dedicated exclusively to contributing to the construction of peace and showing the transformation of the territories, for which its reason for being makes them so special.

“Communication helps heal historical wounds. We are listening to the communities affected by the conflict and these populations are deciding how to narrate themselves, how to advance their own resilience processes, how they see themselves and how they want to be seen”, concludes Juan Ricardo.

Report produced by Paola Rojas Camacho