The voices that wait
Published February, 2025
by Easterndaze
This essay explores my encounter with the archive of Chile al día, a broadcast transmitted from Radio Berlin International in the GDR between 1973 and 1990, during the same period as Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. I visited the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg, where this archive resides, six times between 28 August and 18 October 2024. Those visits involved me with it on different levels, whereas my listening practice was affected as I opened myself up to an aesthetic of resonance (Friz, 2009). From my listening experience, I shift the definition of this archive as such, presenting it rather as a radio show capable of creating an elsewhere from the sonic.
A knowledge becoming
“Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in standing still, boast about.” Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation.
First, I salute the porters. They gave me a card with supposedly full access. It’s always tricky as I don’t speak their language. They don’t speak mine either. Our arms and hands move in different directions, trying to communicate between ourselves. I tried to see their screen to find my name, but it was impossible, as I believe it has one of these privacy screen filters. After a while, a lady gave me a piece of paper with a pen. I wrote my name. They tried to spell it, and we all laughed. We all agree it’s hard. They gave me a card, and then I went in. A lady was waiting for me. We don’t speak each other’s language, but we share a common one that allows us to communicate the essentials. We entered the room: there was one computer, one set of headphones, two speakers, a hidden machine and some piles of boxes. I smiled and thanked her. We said goodbye while she closed the door.
Some tiny lights are tinkling: the machine is on. I checked the levels, pressed the button and the ride started. I sat calmly, closed my eyes and listened to a charango, followed by a voice saying firmly: “Chileno, no estás solo.” “They speak my language,” I thought. “They’re speaking to me”.
I immersed myself, surrounded by voices, little bugs, extensively elaborated discourses and music I felt as part of my cells. Through this sonic realm, I transported myself into another familiar atmosphere, although it was my first time here. I have encountered a time machine whose shape is undefined.
I stopped for a while. I breathed and looked at the blue sky while the trees waved in the wind. People walked outside the room where I was. I wonder if it’s common for them to see someone in this room listening for hours and hours. I wonder if maybe I had the volume too low. The building feels empty.
I started to read documents. They played “Ni toda la tierra entera” by Isabel Parra. The broadcaster said the following:
“Isabel Parra sings to her land, distant, trapped in a nightmare. She expresses the feelings of all the Chileans who have been forced to leave their homeland. Many of them have found refuge in the GDR, where friendship, internationalism, fraternity and solidarity are not mere words.” 1
A tear came to my eye.
While I listened, I couldn’t look anybody in the eye to share what I was feeling. There was no way to find complicity with anybody. So, surrounded by aged smells, my hands caressed the papers. I had dived in, and I didn’t even break for lunch. The papers were mostly thin, some even transparent. Are these papers going to vanish? Has anybody else looked at them before? I turned one page after another carefully, repeatedly. I don’t know how much time I spent doing that tiny exercise.
Someone knocked on the door. “Hey, I’m leaving. What time are you staying until?” the woman asked. “I think until 5 pm,” I replied. “OK, don’t stay longer. Otherwise you’ll be trapped inside the building as everyone leaves at that time.” We said goodbye.
I continued reviewing the manuscripts from 1974, and I read “El hombre es un creador – Victor Jara”. Immediately, the song started to play in the background in my mind. Meanwhile, I read a commentary by the journalist Victor Vio, a passionate, direct and political piece, transmitting an intense bittersweet feeling, mixing anger, sadness and sarcasm. His words took me elsewhere. I couldn’t stop caressing the papers containing his words. It felt addictive, it pulled me along, and I couldn’t stop listening to one, two, three and four commentaries. His words were resonating inside my head. I wanted to hear his voice and discover if it sounded different. What was his timbre like? Did he speak with pauses or quickly? Did he modulate the “S” properly, or did the “S” sound almost mute, like a sigh (as we all Chileans do)?
I changed seats, played “El hombre es un creador” from my laptop to accompany us, and started to recite Vio’s commentary following his imposed and enraged voice:
“This journalist has never, in his professional career, spoken in the first person. But tonight, dear listeners, you will forgive me, for I must do so…
Dear listeners, you will forgive me for not addressing the millions of dignified and respectable human beings who listen to us daily. And you will excuse me, for tonight I wish to speak to a single man, the one who records our broadcasts every night, to listen to them and listen to them again. I’m referring to you, wretched and murderous Augusto Pinochet. How can you be so unhappy, Pinochet, so cynical, so repugnant? Here, in my hand, fascist traitor, is the speech you gave yesterday when, like a vile vampire, you celebrated, along with your accomplices, the first year of genocide in our homeland. You celebrated with your clique of killers, having sold yourself to the xxxxxxxxxxx imperialists to deceive the majority of the Armed Forces and Carabineros of our country. You celebrated, Pinochet, the 40,000 corpses xxxxxxxxxxx of the best sons of xxxxxxx our Chile, whom you have xxxxxxx had murdered. You celebrated the terror of 40,000 widows, who have nothing to feed their 72,000 children. You celebrated, murderer Pinochet, having xxxxxxxx 150 concentration camps throughout our country, filled with dignified, pure, unblemished men and women whom you order to be tortured in the worst way ever known. You celebrated, Pinochet, earning the title of the most degenerate killer in the contemporary world. You celebrated, Pinochet, leading all Chileans, from all social classes, religions and political ideas, to die of starvation. You celebrated the fact that you have murdered, and continue to do so, xxxx all the soldiers who realise that you deceived them into betraying the nation. You care for nothing, human monster. All of humanity rejects you as the most repulsive being, murderer Pinochet. (…)”. 2
I continued to the end of the two-page commentary while Victor Jara’s song accompanied us. Once he stopped, I kept silent, looking at the papers that contained all these words. What will it be like to live in exile? Would have been worse to hide here in Berlin or to escape and leave my loved ones behind?
A voice that is ours
I was getting to grips with parts of a broadcast transmitted more than 30 years ago. I didn’t even exist at that time. Even in the final broadcast on 11 March 1990, I was suctioning nutrients from my mother while I was inside her womb. Yet I was also sitting in a room with one computer, one set of headphones, two speakers, a hidden machine and some piles of boxes, drinking water from my aluminium bottle, smelling old papers and asking myself if I was the only one listening. I was only sure that I just needed to come back and deal with all these voices. To know them, to listen to them.
During my visits, I listened to relevant testimonies given in Helsinki in 1974 at the International Commission of Enquiry into the Crimes of the Military Junta about torture by the Junta, as part of their search for justice. There were also interviews with communist militants such as Luis Corvalán, Volodia Teitelboim, Daniel Vergara and Gladys Marín, as well as socialist militants like Alejandro Bell Jara and Fidelia Herrera, among many others, including Moy de Tohá. Most of them were major figures from the Unidad Popular and the leftist parties in Chile. However, there are also some broadcasts from the beginning of 1984 in which various Chilean people in different contexts gave interviews about the situation in Chile, something that is probably linked to the National Protests Days (Jornadas de Protesta Nacional) that began in 1983. 3
On my journey back home from the archive, I found myself reflecting on every sound I heard during the day. One time, I was ruminating about them when I arrived home and shared what I listened to with my partner. I was telling him about an episode I listened to about a visit the Chilean journalists made to a typewriting factory in Thuringia. I was excited because they met some young workers there who were waiting to gift them seven typewriters they built after their regular shifts to support the Chilean journalist in exile and their job at the radio. I was giving him details until suddenly I stopped talking. I was certain that I had listened to that broadcast, but in fact I hadn’t. I had read the manuscripts. I found out that my excitement was because I realised that, thanks to those typewriters, I could listen to that story. This broadcast of Chile al día was available only in written documents and wasn’t available as a sound recording. I listened to the manuscripts. From that day on, my engagement with this radio broadcast shifted from the sound sources to include the written sources. I could listen to both.
From there on in, I played and listened to hours and hours of the broadcast, excavating recordings and documents repeatedly. I listened to hours and piles of manuscripts with pen marks on them, traces of corrections, handwritten calculations of the minutes to transmit and possible decisions made by hand. I recognised voices, speeches and music. I encountered a collage full of narrations, commentaries, news, testimonies and more. I delved into an archive of human voices, full of a mixture of feelings, stories and testimonies about a murderous dictatorship. I insisted on listening to these voices. Vividly, as if I was there with them, broadcasting, listening to their discussions about what to tell, how and when.
This affective experience confronted me with the idea that I wasn’t just visiting a sound archive and studying its content from a media archaeology perspective, as I expected to do at the beginning. It dawned on me that no matter what media I used to listen to, all the voices contained in this radio archive resonated in my mind, whether it was a digitalisation of magnetic tapes or written text. It didn’t matter that much which media I used to play all these sounds. In the end, it was about how we all gathered around a radio broadcast whose soundwaves remained on the air. I listened to them, as other people also did, and through this delved-immersive listening, my voice became part of this broadcast in a way that relates to an interior world, opening an elsewhere shared by our voices. To summarise these ideas, I recall a phrase I read by the Mexican artist Carlos Edelmiro: “I know someone will read this with a voice that isn’t mine, but that sound resonating in the mind while reading is also my voice. A voice that is ours.” 4
A radio broadcast rather than a sound archive
Radio underwent significant growth during the Unidad Popular, creating a space for political discussion and giving shape to “La Voz de la Patria” (The Voice of the Homeland), a network of different radios that were all responsible for defending the Unidad Popular government’s actions. Considering their force, the military created a communication siege, bombing the transmission antennas of “La Voz de la Patria” when the coup was held on 11 September 1973 5 (Alvarado-Leyton, 2022).
Hence, radiophonic broadcasting transmissions were essential for the Chilean opposition to the military Junta because they were paths for fighting against the disinformation campaign of their dictatorial regime and for calling for solidarity campaigns across the globe. Even the monitoring of the situation in Chile became much more present after the coup, a fact that can be interpreted both as a propaganda necessity of the communist republics, while Chilean journalists in exile maintained their political fight on the radio to help them focus on Chile and not to lose hope of returning to their homeland (Zourek, 2023).
Thus, radio broadcasts about Chile were made in various cities such as Moscow, East Berlin, Prague and Havana. In the case of Moscow, Escucha, Chile (Listen, Chile) was the most famous at the time in the fight against the military regime with the explicit support of the Chilean Communist Party. There was also Radio Prague with the daily show Chile acusa y advierte (Chile accuses and warns), which in the early 1980s changed its name to Chile vencerá (Chile will win), as a way of betting on the idea of triumph over the dictatorship (Fu Rodríguez, 2003; Zourek, 2023). Chile al día was the radio show broadcasted from the Latin American editorial department (Lateinamerika-Redaktion) of Radio Berlin International (RBI). Likewise, it operated as a special form of radio solidarity.
These shows were broadcasted via shortwave signals, a technology that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It works using electromagnetic waves to transmit information from the antenna to the ionosphere, due to its ability to reflect certain frequencies to the Earth. When the waves reach the ionosphere, a phenomenon called the “skip” effect occurs, allowing the waves to travel vast distances and reappear far from their point of origin. Once the waves are reflected, they are captured by a receiver’s antenna, which isolates the relevant frequencies. The electromagnetic signals are then converted into electrical signals, which are processed and reproduced as sound through a speaker, completing the broadcast process. 6
This basic technological principle was a cornerstone of international broadcasting for over 70 years, and it was particularly significant during World War II and the Cold War, enabling global communication in a cost-effective and far-reaching manner (Headrick, 1994; Gallom & Seligsohn, 1997). Radio was also an important means of communication during the second half of the 20th century because of its ability to cross borders and offer a counterpoint to political discourses amid a politically convulsed world.
Chile al día was broadcasted in this context, serving to support the left-wing resistance movement in exile and the underground opposition in Chile. Every day, the jingle of Chile al día declared: “Chileno, no estás solo” (Chilean, you are not alone) (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, 2024), accompanied by a charango and a melody played with a quena from the“Cancion del Poder Popular” by Inti Illimani. For 16 years, a group of Chilean journalists in exile led by Sergio Villegas, together with RBI’s Latin America editor Helma Richter, broadcast daily without interruption, 7 until Patricio Aylwin took office as President on 11 March 1990, after having been elected by popular vote (Radio Berlin International, 1989). Chileans in exile were able to build a counter-narrative and to make the voices that were censored be heard. From there, Chile al día broadcasted a balance between making a constant proclamation and informing the people what was going on in Chile (Villegas, 1983). Therein lay the genius of radio, with its self-contradictory tension between being a controlled medium broadcasting to specific countries while its dimensions cannot be demarcated by national borders and architectonic barriers (Wódz, 2020).
My listening experience to Chile al día was guided by my gut, without expectations and any considerable knowledge about this radio show. That made space for a situated listening practice that interweaved my subjectivity as a Chilean migrant in Berlin with my sensitivity to the history of the place I come from. Therefore, the challenge is to pursue an aesthetics of resonance within radio practices, as Anna Friz (2009) frames in her “Transmission Art in the present tense”, which seeks to understand the radio as a technology that is constantly reconfiguring itself, capable of resonating through time into the present (Pram & Kreuztfeldt, 2016).
This disposition led me to counter-listen to this sound archive, shifting my listening experience from it to a radio show broadcasted originally from East Berlin to the world during Pinochet’s dictatorship. While I was visiting this time machine, my body was constantly transitioning from one character to another: the one who was listening to a radio show, and the one who was researching a sound archive. All of these movements and the sonic realm around this radio show went beyond my visits to the archive and remained in my daily life, bringing this aesthetics of resonance outside the intellectual exercise I was engaged in. During this research, it was inevitable to linger while listening to albums of the Chilean Nueva Canción, such as “Pongo en tus manos abiertas” by Victor Jara, “Canto de pueblos andinos I” by Inti Illimani, “Palomita Blanca” by Los Jaivas, as well as specific songs like “Por todo Chile” by Isabel Parra and “Venceremos” (the anthem of the Unidad Popular) interpreted by Inti-Illimani, among others.
All this sonic realm became my life’s soundtrack, keeping me in suspension between the past I was listening to and its ability to fade into my quotidian life while creating another place where my listening was able to situate me. My cells moved. The aesthetics of resonance brought the past to the present, and the present to the past, building an elsewhere where these two got entangled and I situated myself. An elsewhere, an in-between, a fissure.
Acknowledges
I would like to thank the people at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchive, who helped me along my drifting listening process to the archive with their best disposition, as well as the former worker from RBI with whom I had an interview and shared some time while gently answering all my questions and sharing their memories about those times.
Lastly, I recommend checking out the work of Prof. Dr. Alfredo Thiermann, as it was through it that I learnt about the existence of Chile al día in the first place.
TEXT Kika Echeverría (originally published by 34.sk)
PIC Kika Echeverría
Footnotes
1. Translated from the original: “Isabel Parra canta a su tierra, lejana, sumida en una pesadilla. Expresa el sentimiento de todos los chilenos que se han visto obligados a dejar su patria. Muchos de ellos han encontrado en la RDA un refugio, donde la amistad, el internacionalismo, la fraternidad, la solidaridad no son meras palabras.”
2. Translated from the original: “Este periodista jamás en su trayectoria profesional ha hablado en primera persona. Pero esta noche, queridos auditores, me van a perdonar, pero voy a tener que hacerlo…
Queridos auditores Uds. me van a perdonar que esta noche no me dirijo a los millones de seres humanos, dignos y respetables, que diariamente nos escuchan. Y me van a perdonar porque esta noche quiero dirigirme a un solo hombre que hace grabar nuestras transmisiones todas las noches para escucharlas xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx y reescucharlas. Me refiero a ti desgraciado y asesino Augusto Pinochet. ¿Cómo puedes ser tan infeliz Pinochet, tan cínico, tan repugnante? Aquí tengo en mi mano, fascista vendepatria, el discurso que pronunciaste ayer cuando, cual vil vampiro, celebraste junto a tus secuaces, el primer año de genocidio en nuestra Patria. Celebraste con tux camarilla de asesinos, el haberte vendido a los xxxxxxxxxxxxximperialistas para engañar a la mayoría de las Fuerzas Armadas y Carabineros de nuestra Patria. Celebraste Pinochet los cuarenta mil cadáveres xxxxxxxxxxx de los mejores hijos de xxxxxxx nuestro Chile, que hasta el momento has xxxxxxx mandado asesinar. Celebraste el temer a cuarenta mil viudas, que no tienen qué darles de comer a sus 72 mil hijos. Celebraste asesino Pinochet el tener xxxxxxxx 150 campos de concentración a través de todo nuestro país, repletos con hombres y mujeres dignas, limpias, intachables a las cuales ordenas torturar de la peor manera jamás conocida. Celebraste Pinochet el haberte ganado el título del asesino más degenerado del mundo contemporáneo. Celebraste Pinochet el estar llevando a todos los chilenos, de todas las capas sociales, credos religiosos e ideas políticas, a la muerte por hambruna. Celebraste el hecho de haber asesinado y seguir haciéndolo xxxx a todos los soldados que se van dando cuenta que les engañaste para traicionar a la Patria. No te importa nada, energúmeno humano. Toda la humanidad te repudia como el ser más repugnante, asesino Pinochet (…).”
This comment was part of a segment of Chile al día called “Digno de conocerse”, hosted by Victor Vio, dated 12 September 1974, one year after the coup. According to an interview with a former employee of Radio Berlin International I held in October 2024, Victor Vio was one of the first journalists to join the team of Chile al día. He was present during the first period of the broadcast until he later went into exile in another Latin American country.
The original manuscript had corrections made with a typewriter, which are marked with “xxxxxxx” (just like the version reviewed in the archive). To facilitate reading, I have added a strikethrough to the “xxxxxxx”. ↩︎
3. The Jornadas de Protesta Nacional were a series of mass demonstrations and strikes organised by various social, political and labour groups. They began in 1983 as a response to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the economic crisis of 1982 and called for the restoration of democracy, human rights and social justice. These protests were pivotal in mobilising the Chilean population against the regime and played a significant role in the eventual return to democratic rule in 1990.↩︎
4. Translated from the original: “Sé que alguien leerá esto con una voz que no es mía, pero ese sonido que resuena en la cabeza al leerlo también es mi voz. Una voz que es nuestra.”
Carlos Edelmiro (@sinewavelover), “¿Es necesario escuchar algo de forma física para llamarle sonido?”, Instagram, 21 August 2024,https://www.instagram.com/p/C-6bzLbxWqA/?img_index=1↩︎
5. Radio Magallanes was the only radio station from “La Voz de la Patria” network that was able to continue with their transmissions for a longer time. They managed to broadcast the last speech by President Allende before he passed away at La Moneda – the government palace. This sonic materialhas become an important piece of Chile’s historical memory and it is still quoted to the present day. ↩︎
6. While shortwave broadcasting is effective for transmitting information over long distances and crossing national borders, it has limitations. The sound quality can be inconsistent as it is directly influenced by ionospheric conditions, such as solar activity and the Earth’s electromagnetic field. ↩︎
7. It should be noted that solidarity with the Chilean people existed before the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, where RBI already had a very intense journalistic work with Chile and the Unidad Popular, which was accentuated with the coup d’etat. In other world, the relationship between RBI and Chile didn’t start with the coup, but it was established from before.
References
Alvarado-Leyton, M. (2022). Radio Nacional de Chile. La apuesta radiofónica de la dictadura cívico-militar chilena. Comunicación y Medios, 31(46), 109-119. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1529.2022.66031
Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv. (2024, August 20). »Du bist nicht allein« Radio Berlin International (RBI). Retrieved from https://www.dra.de/de/entdecken/schlaglichter-aus-hundert-jahren-rundfunk/du-bist-nicht-allein-radio-berlin-international
Friz, A. (2009). Transmission Art in the Present Tense. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 31(3), 46-49.
Fu Rodríguez, M. (2003). Impacto comunicacional del exilio chileno: Combatiendo la dictadura desde el exterior.Santiago: Escuela de Periodismo, Departamento de Investigaciones Mediáticas y de la Comunicación. Universidad de Chile.
Gallom, R., & Seligsohn, D. (1997, February). La larga vida de la onda corta. El Correo de la UNESCO. La Radio, un medio con porvenir, pp. 28-31.
Headrick, D. R. (1994). Shortwave radio and its impact on international telecommunications between the wars. History and Technology, 21-32.
Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. (2024, September 11). Sintoniza con la Memoria. Santiago, Chile. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/HqxPSVDT3OI?si=ahdP3_T6WM6HgrTy
Pram, K., & Kreuztfeldt, J. (2016). The Resonance 107.3 FM radio art collection: Towards and archive methodology of radio as resonance. The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 14(2), 159-175.
Radio Berlin International (1989). Chile al día. Berlin, DDR.
Villegas, S. (1983). Memoria dispersa de un ejercicio radial. Araucaria de Chile(24), 77-94.
Wódz, M. (2020). Intimate listening and sonic solidarity. Radio in the works of Radio Earth Hold collective as a way towards the sonic turn. Ikonotheka, 30, 191-207.
Zourek, M. (2023). Czechoslovakia and its Position within the Solidarity Network of Chilean: A Reflection on the Coup and Resistance against Pinochet from a Country with Worn-out Revolutionary Ideals. Bull Lat Am Res, 42, 501-513.
Originally published on 34.sk. This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthening the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union (EU) or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the EU nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.