Ana Lorena Cartín Leiva can now laugh at that moment when, accompanied by her lawyer and eight months pregnant, she arrived at the trial that the Government of her country undertook against her “for attacking national security” by being the legal representative and general director of Radio Noticias del Continente (RNC). He laughs because he remembers the police siege around the courts, and the phrase that one of the agents said while blocking their way: we are here because a guerrilla is going to be tried, and it is possible that an armed command will come to try to set her free.”
It was 1981 and the shortwave radio station, legally established in the Costa Rican capital, was only three years old and had four bombings against its facilities in its brief existence. It was built there legally thanks to the efforts of several former members of the Argentine urban guerrilla group called Montoneros, who fled the country’s military dictatorship after Jorge Rafael Videla’s coup d’état in 1976. With the help of an antenna specially designed for the station to transmit in short wave —that is, for electromagnetic waves to bounce at different heights in the ionosphere and allow signals to reach faraway points and even go around the planet— a group of engineers, administrative staff, and workers broadcasts began under the tutelage of the Costa Rican Ana Lorena Cartín Leiva, who had become the director of RNC after being chosen by her fellow political activists to lead the radio project.
An investigation by the Mexican Aníbal Fernández García points to the ex-montonero Raúl Cuestas as one of those who led the efforts outside his country to link more opponents in the region and find a way to communicate to the rest of the world what the Latin American military did systematically against anyone who opposed or threatened their government and control project.
In addition, the omnipresent shadow of the United States fell on the shoulders of the military governments, to prevent undertakings labeled as “subversive” such as RNC from being replicated in the region. So the pressures that not only the workers of that radio station experienced, but also the government of then President Rodrigo Carazo, ended up imploding a collaborative project that sought to denounce the serious human rights violations that were taking place from Central America to Patagonia. .
Cartín Leiva was a chemist by training, from a young age she was interested in participating in politics, but also in generating changes “from below”. She assures that only in this way would things have a real transformation that would cause people a genuine desire to participate in them. She had already done radio years before together with a friend, they had a program that sought to achieve “that culture be democratized and that it was not only for the elites.” Her election as general director of RNC, in 1979, when she was 31 years old, took her by surprise: “I always believed that I was going to be part of the team, that I was going to work, but I did not expect that my colleagues would have visualized me. with that capacity for militant solidarity and they gave me such responsibility,” he says.
With the suspicion caused by being a radio station established by a South American guerrilla, the station’s news began to spread by word of mouth, weaving networks among other guerrillas or groups opposed to governments or dictatorships, almost at the same time that Operation Condor created links powerful among the Latin American military to persecute, torture, disappear and assassinate those who they considered a danger in any territory, sea or sky, where they were hiding. Transnational cooperation projects cannot be compared, but RNC began to be that place where the Sandinista National Liberation Front of El Salvador, the Nicaraguan Resistance, Guatemalans fleeing violence, or Panamanians fighting to have the control of the Panama Canal, came to transmit messages, war reports, or complaints of violations of their rights and those of the populations to which they belonged.
With the questioning of its financing method and the constant attacks by the local media, and especially by the far-right group Costa Rica Libre, there were also attacks—the station suffered four in total—and death threats against Ana Lorena. “They constantly called me to tell me that they were going to kill me.” In addition, he assures that during the experience that lasted three years with her in charge of her, the fact of being a woman posed much more serious situations for her than if she had been a man. “I had to steel myself because many times the fact that she was a woman in charge of the radio was underestimated. For being in front, and for that alone, they said that I was a prostitute. They called the phone asking for the prostitute. I once faced them and responded: look, I could be a prostitute, but I’m not a coward.”
She also remembers when a television journalist interviewed her. When the result of that talk was transmitted, Cartín Leiva was stunned. “I had been edited so much, that I myself came out hurting myself, looking bad. And I said, it can’t be, because if it had been a man they would have respected him more”.
In 1981 the last of the attacks also ended the project. The Government closed by decree the right of the station to have transmission waves. Every time Ana Lorena Cartín remembers this moment, she remembers that it is something that she can never forgive President Rodrigo Carazo, who, overwhelmed by pressure from right-wing groups in his country, businessmen, governments such as Argentina, Guatemala, or the United States , he made the decision to end the problem.
During her trial, which lasted more than eight months, Ana Lorena Cartín faced the pregnant trial, fearing for her family and herself that her son would be born in prison or that her health would seriously deteriorate before receiving a verdict. She remembers when she asked the judge that her appearance be delayed due to the advanced state of pregnancy that she presented and the resounding refusal of the lawyer. Despite those years of great solitude —her fellow militants had to leave the country and her workers liquidated for her services— she always felt proud of the work she did. “I do not regret it because the objective was achieved: to say what was happening in El Salvador, in Gutemala, in Nicaragua, Chile, with the miners in Bolivia, the struggles of the Panamanians; the atrocities of both (Jorge Rfael) Videla and (Augusto) Pinochet, the demonstrations that were taking place in Brazil, etc., we broadcast everything”.
In March 1982, the judge closed the case of Ana Lorena Cartín and erased all traces of the accusation from her file, with a clear warning: she was prohibited from using radio transmission waves and from carrying firearms.
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