Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:

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Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Six) – Huehuetenango

by Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

I first heard of Huehuetenango in February 1974. I had gotten my first serious receiver, a Barlow-Wadley XCR-30, a few weeks earlier. Now I could try for stations in the 120-meter band. The first one I heard was Radio Maya de Barillas on 2360 kHz from a place named Barillas in Guatemala. And Santa Cruz de Barillas (the town’s full official name) was in a department named Huehuetenango. The name sounded exotic and magical.

In my mind, Radio Maya de Barillas was the ultimate DX target. The Evangelical Protestant station used a tiny amount of power in 120-meters, the shortwave band that provided the most challenge to DXers. The programs were in Mayan languages with mostly hard-to-pronounce names. And my map showed that Barillas was literally at the end of the road. There was nowhere to go beyond Barillas.

That sense of Huehuetenango being on the edge of civilization was totally correct. The department contains the rugged Cuchumatanes mountains, the highest non-volcanic mountains in Central America. It’s the only place in Central America where it’s too cold to grow corn. Instead, people get by raising sheep and planting potatoes. The mountains explain why eight different Mayan languages (belonging to three different language families) are spoken in this one department. Steep rugged mountains are a barrier to communication. A lack of communication causes a common language to diverge into multiple languages over just a few centuries.

The Mam, numbering about half a million, are the fourth largest Mayan group in Guatemala and their homeland extends into other departments in the south. But the other seven languages are only found in Huehuetenango with maybe a little spillover across the borders. The largest of those is Kanjobal, spoken by about 80,000 people today. The Tectiteco (Tektik) number just a little over two thousand.

As noted on the back of my QSL from Radio Maya de Barillas, that station broadcast in six of the region’s languages, including Mam and Kanjobal, the language spoken in and around the town of Barillas. For about a decade Radio Maya was the only radio station to broadcast in the region’s languages. Then in 1975 the Roman Catholic church opened an educational station, Radio Mam, in Cabricán to the south in Quetzaltenango department. But Radio Mam only broadcast in the Mam language. (And, unfortunately, I never got to visit the station.)

Visiting Huehuetenango (or not)

When I was traveling to Guatemala while living in Honduras in the early 1980s, one of my goals was to visit as many Guatemalan shortwave stations as possible. Yet I never once considered going to Barillas. Sure, I knew that the dirt road from the town of Huehuetenango to Barillas was one of the worst in Central America and that the bus ride took twelve hours. That wasn’t going to stop me.

 What stopped me from visiting Radio Maya was that Barillas was right in the middle of the area of the heaviest fighting between the government and the guerrillas. This may surprise you if you’ve read the previous parts of this series, but there really were some things back then that I knew better than to do. Going into the worst part of a war zone was one. The closest I came to Barillas was passing through the southern part of the department on the Pan-American Highway on my way to Mexico in December 1984. That was just a few weeks after a guerilla band had ventured south and blown up four bridges on the road.

My (ex)wife and I started grad school in 1987 and our academic calendar included a long winter break, from the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of November until a few days after the New Year. We decided to spend a month making a loop starting and ending in Mérida, Mexico.  From Mérida we would travel south to Belize and then across Guatemala with stops in Guatemala City and the Lake Atitlán region before returning to Mérida. Once again I would cross southern Huehuetenango department on the Pan-American Highway but I would not be travelling to Barillas. The war was still going on there.

Radio Buenas Nuevas

Two months before our departure a new station named Radio Buenas Nuevas came on the air on 4800 kHz from Huehuetenango department. It was located just off the Pan-American Highway in the town of San Sebastián Huehuetenango. We added an overnight stop in Huehuetenango to our travel plans so I could visit the station.

Radio Buenas Nuevas, or Radio Good News, was a new station with a long history. The Central American Mission (which owned Radio Cultural in Guatemala City) had operated a mission in San Sebastián since the early 1960s. For over twenty years the mission had produced prerecorded programs in Mam for airing on Radio Maya de Barillas and Radio Cultural. The radio programs and other missionary activities gradually brought converts until by the early 1980s the Iglesia Evangélica Nacional Mam had around 15,000 members.

The growing church wanted its own radio station and in 1982 applied for a shortwave license. Four years later, in 1986, it was granted. The next task was putting the station on the air. Radio Cultural agreed to loan the new station its 250-watt backup shortwave transmitter and chief engineer Wayne Berger came out to San Sebastián to install the transmitter and a temporary dipole antenna. At this time, in 1986, the station was only testing for a few hours during the day so it was still unknown to DXers.

With Radio Buenas Nuevas now on the air using temporary equipment, Wayne Berger flew to Oklahoma, USA, where he bought a junk one-kilowatt Gates transmitter and a worn-out pickup truck at a bargain price. He used the pickup truck to haul the transmitter south through Mexico and then sold it in Guatemala City at enough of a profit to pay for the transmitter and the parts needed to fix it. Wayne spent most of December 1986 repairing the transmitter at Radio Cultural’s workshop.

After the New Year, Wayne and Bob Rice, the newly appointed head of the San Sebastián mission, hauled the transmitter out to Huehuetenango, installed it, and erected a new antenna tower. After more testing the new station was officially inaugurated on 25 July 1987.

Dropping By

After finishing our stay in the Lake Atitlán area we spent a night in Quetzaltenango and then the next morning caught a bus to north to Huehuetenango. After dropping our stuff off at our pension, we got a local bus up the highway to San Sebastián. There we met station manager Israel Rodas, Bob Rice and his wife, and Dr. Tom Godfrey and his family. Dr. Godfrey was a missionary with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and was there working on a revision of the Mam version of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

The radio station was part of a larger mission complex that included a health clinic, a community education center, and homes for seven families including those of Israel Rodas, two station announcers, and Bob Rice and Dr. Godfrey. Dr. Godfrey’s four children were learning Mam from their Mayan playmates.

At the time of my visit, all programming on Radio Buenas Nuevas was prerecorded because the only building the station had was the original recording studio. A second building with a studio for live broadcasts was under construction.

One of my goals for the visit was to obtain QSLs for myself and several DXer friends. Here Señor Rodas looks over the reports I had brought. I’m holding the prepared cards for him to sign and seal.

After our visit was over Bob Rice was kind enough to drive us back to downtown Huehuetenango.

Radio Buenas Nuevas, 4799.8 kHz, as heard by Mickey Delmage in Alberta, Canada on 23 March 1992 at 0300 UTC:

Also via Mickey Delmage, here is the Radio Buenas Nuevas sign-off announcement in Mam and then Spanish later that same evening. According to the announcement, since my 1987 visit they had added programming in the Aguacateco, Acateco, Quiché, and Chuj languages:

Radio Buenas Nuevas, 4799.8 kHz, as heard by Jean Burnell in St. John’s, Newfoundland on 01 July 1989 at 0127:

Another Huehue Station

Huehuetenango had several commercial medium wave stations. I didn’t visit any but I did take this picture of the offices of La Voz de los Cuchumatanes, 1050 kHz, as I was walking by. I had heard them several times when I lived in Santa Bárbara, Honduras.

As it turned out I would hear the station again five years later, except this time it was on their second harmonic of 2100 kHz. I was living in Davenport, Iowa, USA at the time.

La Voz de los Cuchumatanes, 1050 kHz, recorded in Panajachel, Guatemala in June, 1983:

La Voz de los Cuchumatanes heard on their second harmonic of 2100 kHz in Davenport, Iowa, USA on 29 December 1992 at 1102 UTC:

Radio Cultural Coatán

In 1994 another evangelical broadcaster, Radio Cultural Coatán, came on the air from a town named San Sebastián in Huehuetenango department. But this was not the same San Sebastián. The station was in San Sebastián Coatán, one of the main towns of the Chuj Mayans. It’s in the center of the department, not far from the highway to Barillas. Initially the station was on a nominal frequency of 4850 kHz but later switched to 4780 kHz.

The story out of Guatemala was that the Chuj Evangelical church put this station on the air independently and that Radio Cultural in Guatemala City had not approved of the use of the Radio Cultural name. The station was always weak and irregular, unlike other stations that Wayne Berger was known to have worked with. After a few years the name was shortened to Radio Coatán.

Radio Cultural Coatán, 4849.5 kHz, as recorded in Davenport, Iowa, USA on 8 October 1994 at 0100 UTC:

Next: Part Seven – Radio Maya de Barillas

Links

• Radio Buenas Nuevas website.
• Radio Buenas Nuevas Facebook page
• Radio Coatán website.
• Radio Coatán Facebook page.
• La Voz de los Cuchumatantes website.
• Official website of San Sebastián Huehuetanango.