"Find me on the Waves" brings Canary Islands, Colombia and Chile onto a single shortwave night

At 23:08 UTC on 16 July 2026, the press agency Pressenza published a brief, dry note: on the night of 15 July, a programme called "Find me on the Waves" ("Encuéntrame en las Ondas") had linked three studios on three continents into a single broadcast. From Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, the musician and presenter Michel Valdés sat down with the singer-songwriter Tinguaro. From a Colombian studio, contributor Ángel Rivero joined the line. From Chile, the nonviolence educator Luis Cuello carried the closing segment, sketching out the activist infrastructure his organisation, Casa de la Paz, has spent years threading across the southern cone.

The point of the exercise was modest and concrete. A handful of producers wanted to test whether pirate radio, the cheapest and oldest of long-distance broadcast formats, could still function as a working corridor for cultural exchange and nonviolent organising between Spanish-speaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The 15 July transmission suggests it can. It also reveals something about how Latin American civil society is reconstituting its own media layer, on its own frequencies, after a decade in which social-platform algorithms have absorbed much of that work.

A night, three studios, one frequency

The format was unscripted in the manner of community radio rather than the manner of a podcast. Valdés, working from the Canary Islands, opened with music and introduced Tinguaro as a guest who could speak to the specific texture of Canarian song, the archipelago's hybrid Atlantic identity, and the way pirate-radio operators there have historically used pirate frequencies to bypass Spanish mainland media gatekeepers. Ángel Rivero joined from Colombia to widen the frame to the Caribbean-Pacific corridor, where shortwave has long been a fallback when local FM licences are politically contested. Cuello, speaking from Chile, closed the loop with a grounded account of what nonviolent organising actually looks like on a Tuesday in Santiago or Valparaíso: training cycles, school visits, the unglamorous logistics of moving bodies through streets without breaking them.

What the broadcast was selling, in other words, was not ideology. It was capacity: a shared studio, a shared audience, and a shared sense that the people tuning in across the Atlantic were listening to the same program at the same moment.

The counter-frame: why pirate radio now

The mainstream read on alternative media in 2026 is that the work has been absorbed. Podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok explainers, WhatsApp voice-notes, encrypted Signal groups: the assumption in much industry coverage is that political and cultural organising now travels through platform infrastructure rather than over the air. That assumption is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Pressenza's own framing of the 15 July broadcast treats pirate radio not as nostalgia but as a deliberate counter-infrastructure, chosen precisely because it cannot be throttled by a single corporate platform, demonetised for political content, or quietly downranked by an opaque recommendation system.

That is the structural frame worth sitting with. When a movement's reach depends on a handful of private content-moderation policies, its audience is rented, not owned. Shortwave, by contrast, is leased from physics. The 15 July broadcast did not require any of the three contributors to log into a platform, accept terms of service, or trust that an algorithm would carry the signal across the language barrier. The trade-off is range: pirate shortwave reaches far fewer listeners than a viral clip. The gain is sovereignty over the transmission itself.

Latin America's slow reweaving of its own media layer

Seen from Caracas, Bogotá, Buenos Aires or La Paz, the last decade of media change has been read less as liberation and more as displacement. International wire desks still set the agenda in Spanish; a small number of metropolitan broadcasters still mediate what the rest of the Spanish-speaking world hears about itself; and the platform companies that actually carry the bulk of grassroots traffic do not answer to any of the region's democracies. The "Find me on the Waves" format is one small answer to that, but it sits inside a wider pattern. Across the southern cone, community FM stations have proliferated, often on pirate or grey-market frequencies. Indigenous-language radio has expanded in Bolivia, Ecuador and southern Mexico. Afro-descendant and rural radio collectives in Colombia and Brazil have used the pandemic-era expansion of low-power transmitters to lock in permanent licences.

Pressenza's coverage treats Cuello's Casa de la Paz as a representative case rather than an outlier. The organisation's work is explicitly transnational: training cycles that move facilitators between Santiago, Buenos Aires and Lima; school programmes that pair Chilean and Colombian classrooms; a documentation arm that archives nonviolent action in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. None of that requires a satellite link. It requires a microphone, a frequency, and someone willing to stay up past midnight.

Stakes, and what the broadcast did not settle

The honest reading of 15 July is that it proved the format works for one night. It did not prove that the format can sustain a movement. Pirate radio has always lived with three constraints: limited range, constant interference, and the legal exposure of its operators, who in Spain and much of Latin America can face fines, equipment seizures and, in some jurisdictions, criminal liability for unlicensed transmission. The 15 July broadcast did not address whether the three studios have a plan for repeat transmissions, whether the audience can be grown beyond the already-converted, or how the project will pay for transmitter time, studio rental and the basic administration that any regular broadcast requires.

What it did establish is that the demand exists. Pressenza's choice to document the broadcast rather than just promote it suggests an editor who sees this as the start of a beat, not a one-off stunt. For readers in the wider Americas, the takeaway is narrower than the framing suggests and more durable than it looks: a small group of producers has decided that some conversations belong on the airwaves, not on the platforms, and has shown the technical and political will to put them there.

This piece sits one step removed from the wire. Pressenza is an explicitly peace-focused outlet with a long history of covering nonviolence movements in Latin America; its framing of 15 July privileges the organising story over the technical one. Readers looking for independent verification of audience size, transmitter power, or broadcast duration should treat those as unconfirmed.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio