In Argentina, Rural Residents Send Messages Over the Radio

One evening in March, 2020, a gaucho named Jorge Elías Pereyra was preparing dinner inside a stone sheepherding outpost when he remembered that it was time to turn on the radio. It was almost seven, and the light of late summer was growing long across the Patagonian steppe. He turned on his receiver—the program he wanted to catch lasted just a few minutes. His black radio was plugged into a small solar panel, which also powered the outpost’s sole light bulb. Pereyra, who was twenty-seven, lived alone on the coast of the Península Valdés, an egg-shaped landmass in southern Argentina which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. His outpost was fifty miles from the nearest village—to get there, he had to navigate a rough dirt road across a desert—and more than a hundred miles from the nearest small cities with radio stations, Trelew and Puerto Madryn. He spent his days repairing wells and tending to flocks of sheep owned by one of the area’s leading wool-producing families. He had no internet access or cellphone service. Even the AM-radio reception was unstable. He had to whack his receiver a few times before it stopped crackling.The program about to start was called “Mensajes al Poblador Rural,” or “Messages to the Rural Settler.” Several times each day, major AM-radio stations in Argentina broadcast short personal messages intended for residents of its remote and sparsely populated regions, most of them pastoralists who otherwise have little or no way of communicating with one another, or with the outside world. As long as a message can reach the nearest radio station—whether via phone call, WhatsApp, or a scrawled note delivered by hand—it is read aloud during that day’s programming. Every night, Pereyra listened at the same time, hoping to receive a brief update from his family members, most of whom worked on ranches scattered across thousands of square miles.At the time, I was travelling around Argentina and had found my way to the peninsula, which is famous for its wildlife. Elsewhere, the covid pandemic was just taking hold, and would soon make extended isolation a strange new experience for billions of people. It was eerie to be in a place where communal solitude had always been the norm. The messages I remember listening to with Pereyra that night were surprisingly mundane. One family communicated to a relative that everyone was “doing fine,” and sent regards. Another message announced that a wallet had been lost, and shared a number to call should someone find it.The host read the messages in the third person. (“For Armando Nahuelquir—his wife, Casilda, communicates to him that she is travelling to the campo and will arrive today.”) The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. There was no message that evening for Pereyra, and as the station moved on to the regular news I caught a crestfallen look on his face. He quietly prepared a stew of fresh lamb, potatoes, and onions, then played the guitar until it was time to turn in.A few years later, I came across a book by an Argentinean photographer, Jorge Piccini, who had set out to create a visual archive of so-called Mensajero Rural programs, with a focus on the handwritten notes submitted to the stations. The messages, scribbled on whatever scrap of paper a sender could find, often featured misspellings and shaky penmanship; many older residents of rural areas did not know how to read or write well, if at all. Such a note would be handed to the next person travelling to a city, who would deposit it in a mailbox outside the radio station.In the book, which was published in 2022, Piccini included a long list of stations in Argentina that have historically aired these “radio letters”; some of them are still active. In our era of incessant texting, the concept of these radio missives struck me as both archaic and romantic. Argentina, the world’s eighth-largest country, has a low population density: about a third of its forty-five million residents live in the Buenos Aires area, and huge expanses of the countryside are very sparsely inhabited. In these areas, some people live fifty miles from their nearest neighbor. These were lives of extreme independence, yet multiple times a day they all engaged in the same ritual: sitting in silence, hoping for a few seconds of information about people they’d left behind.From my home, in New York City, I began tuning in to these broadcasts via online streaming sites. Listening to the messages felt a bit like eavesdropping. Residents across Argentina notified one another of planned visits, and of delays. (“He begs that you wait for him.”) People passed along birthday wishes, condolences, and general saludos. There were many notices about animals that had wandered off—horses, dogs, cows—and it was not unusual to hear, later, that those creatures had been found. I learned from LRA9 Radio Nacional, a station in the southern mountain town of Esquel, of a local hilltop nicknamed La Señal—the Signal—where people know that they can catch cellphone reception in order to submit, or respond to, radio messages. In northern Argentina, people sent radio messages asking their relatives to use an improvised pulley system to hoist their phones, in tin cans, to the tops of trees, in order to get enough wireless connection for a text to go through.Pereyra had told me that it was not uncommon for gauchos living in outposts like his to hear on the radio that their wives had given birth, or that relatives had fallen seriously ill. I heard messages like these, too. From LU20 Radio Chubut, the largest radio station in the Patagonian province of the same name, I heard, “Inosencio Belisle, in Chubut, is advised that his brother Baldobino is sick and hospitalized in General Roca”—a twelve-hour drive away. A number was provided “if he would like to communicate . . . with his niece Malvina.” I began to recognize certain names that were regularly mentioned on the broadcasts. I listened for “Jorge Pereyra,” but the name never came up.Since the popularization of broadcast radio, in the nineteen-twenties, people have been experimenting with ways to use the far-reaching signal to send personal messages back and forth. “Radio is one-sided,” Bertolt Brecht lamented in a 1932 essay, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.” “The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life,” he went on, “if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.” Brecht’s vision, of course, never fully came to pass; the rise of the telephone, among other technologies, basically obviated the need for radio messaging.Argentina’s Mensajero Rural tradition has few analogues in the modern world, but it has many precursors. Such experiments have tended to thrive in contexts where landline-telephone use was impossible, for reasons of cost, infrastructure, or circumstance. In the seventies, the writer John McPhee, while travelling across Alaska for this magazine, heard of a radio program called “Tundra Topics,” which was basically a Mensajero Rural for isolated Alaskans. The show was, in theory, illegal—the Federal Communications Commission has long defined radio broadcasting as “intended to be received by the public,” rather than by individual listeners.The Argentinean countryside had the right combination of factors for “radio letters” to take root and persist. Although the Andes form the country’s western border, much of Argentina is flat, particularly in large swaths of Patagonia and the Gran Chaco, allowing AM signals to travel hundreds of miles without obstruction. By the end of the Second World War, half of Argentinean households had a radio—more per capita than some European countries. The practice of airing private messages on broadcast stations in Argentina is believed to have begun in Patagonia, in the late thirties and early forties. Based in the southern cities of Comodoro Rivadavia, Río Gallegos, and Bariloche, these AM stations were controlled by some of the region’s largest landowning families, who, in addition to broadcasting talk shows, news, and music, used the new technology to communicate with their workers out in the fields. The progression to ordinary individuals sharing personal messages seems to have happened by chance. Juan Ignacio Revestido, a professor of communication studies at the University of Patagonia in Esquel and the author of a study about his local station’s Mensajero Rural, told me, “One day, the story goes, a woman delivering a work-related message on behalf of her boss also had a relative she needed to reach, and she asked the operator to slip her personal message into the broadcast.” When others heard it, they wanted to do the same.“Watch out. He’s in one of his moods.”Cartoon by Mick StevensAs more radio stations opened across the countryside, they established Mensajeros from the beginning, because they were a sure way to create a devoted audience. The format has always been the same: a message is shared with the radio station, and then the host reads it out for all to hear. The service is usually free.By the seventies, radio letters had become deeply entrenched in rural Argentinean life and culture, especially in Patagonia. During this era, Mario Novack began his career as a radio broadcaster in Río Gallegos, a city just north of the island of Tierra del Fuego. On May 3, 1982, he was starting his morning shift when he received a message to read aloud: “Attention Gómez Roca—we’re waiting for you in Puerto Deseado.” Novack repeated it on the air several times that day. The message was far more significant than he realized. A few days earlier, the war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over control of the Falkland Islands (which Argentina calls the Malvinas) had begun. Early that morning, an Argentinean naval tug had been bombed by the British, destroying its communications systems. The