A Station Built for the Campesinos

By the early 1970s, Ecuador's Bahá'í community had grown quickly among the Quichua-speaking indigenous population around Otavalo, a wave of conversion that left the young community facing a practical problem: how do you serve thousands of new believers spread across rural highland communities with no reliable way to reach them at once? A native of Otavalo and chairman of Ecuador's National Spiritual Assembly, Raúl Pavón, began investigating radio as the answer, leasing an existing station in 1973 and running fourteen hours of daily broadcasts to test the idea. The Universal House of Justice, the Bahá'í Faith's highest governing institution, formally set the project in motion in a December 1974 letter, and on October 12, 1977, HCRN-1 signed on the air from Otavalo as the world's first Bahá'í-owned and operated radio station.

The station was never built to preach at its listeners. Roughly 80 percent of its programming was music, local and national, carried in both Spanish and Quichua, wrapped around development content addressing the practical needs of campesino life alongside religious material. Within its first decade the station had become an Otavaleño project in the fullest sense, run almost entirely by indigenous staff rather than outside administrators, one of the earliest examples anywhere in Latin America of community radio built specifically to serve the people producing it.