About Canal 12 Trenque Lauquen

Canal 12 Trenque Lauquen

Canal 12 Trenque Lauquen is a public television station serving Trenque Lauquen and the north-west of Buenos Aires Province in Argentina. Operated by Radio y Televisión Argentina, the state company that also runs Televisión Pública, it is one of the very few national public stations based outside Buenos Aires, and it has served its region since 1970. Its history is unusual in Argentine television: it began as a local closed-circuit service in 1964, became an open channel 9 in 1970, was taken over by the national state in the 1970s, moved to channel 12 in 1980 and has remained a public, locally rooted station ever since, surviving floods, storms, privatisation pressures and budget crises that the city formally recorded when it declared the station part of its cultural heritage.

The station relays programming from Televisión Pública and the public thematic channels Encuentro and Pakapaka, and overnight from Cine.AR, while producing its own local programmes, principally the newscast Noticias 12 and Pampero TV, a rural programme made with the national agricultural institute INTA that has won national awards as the country's best rural programme. For a farming city on the western pampas, that combination of national public television and genuinely local production defines the station's value.

Overview

Canal 12 broadcasts from Trenque Lauquen on VHF channel 12, with a relay station in General Villegas extending its signal across the north-west of the province. Municipal recognition of the station's fiftieth anniversary described a service reaching more than fifteen localities of north-western Buenos Aires Province by open signal, digital terrestrial television and cable. The station is operated through the Secretaría de Medios y Comunicación Pública by Radio y Televisión Argentina Sociedad del Estado, the public company created by the 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law. Its call sign, LU 91 TV, dates from its origins as a sister service to the local radio station LU 11 AM 1280.

History

Television in Trenque Lauquen began on 12 October 1964, when the station was formally inaugurated as a closed-circuit television service with free connection, operated by Radio y Televisión Trenque Lauquen, the licensee of radio LU 11 since 1963. For its first years, television in the city was literally wired: a local service distributed by cable before any open licence existed. On 17 April 1970, by Decree 1737, the National Executive awarded a licence for channel 9 in Trenque Lauquen, and the licence began regular open broadcasts on 22 May 1970 as LU 91 TV Canal 9.

The station's public destiny was set in the mid-1970s. In 1975 the Argentine state under President Isabel Perón intervened in the channel, and on 14 May that year, by Decree 1291, the national government formally resumed exploitation of the signal and appointed an intervening delegate. In 1976, under the military government of the self-styled National Reorganisation Process, the channel passed definitively into national state hands. In 1980 it moved its frequency from channel 9 to channel 12, the number it still carries, and in 1981 it began colour transmissions, accompanied that year by its first live broadcast, an event the city later remembered as a technological milestone for local public television. The regulator called a contest for the channel 12 licence in June 1981, but the station's state operation continued.

The decades that followed tested the station repeatedly. Municipal records recall the floods of the 1980s, the fall of its antenna, a cyclone that tore the roofs from its building, the risk of privatisation in the 1990s and the crisis of 2001. In 2003 Canal 12 became part of the Sistema Nacional de Medios Públicos, and on 10 December 2009 it passed, with the other public media, into Radio y Televisión Argentina, created by the Audiovisual Communication Services Law. Its historical archive was declared of cultural interest in 2012, with a recommendation, only partly carried out, that the material be digitised for preservation.

Ownership and public status

Canal 12 is a national public station, owned by the Argentine state and operated by Radio y Televisión Argentina alongside Televisión Pública. That status makes it a rarity: Argentina's state broadcasting is overwhelmingly centred in Buenos Aires, and Trenque Lauquen is one of the very few interior cities with a full national public television station of its own. The city has reciprocated that singularity. In 2019 the Trenque Lauquen deliberative council moved to declare LU 91 TV Canal 12 cultural and historical heritage of the district, citing its daily work as the voice of the region's information and its presence at the cultural, sporting, social and political events of the area, even while noting the budget and staffing difficulties that periodically affect it.

Programming

A large part of the schedule relays the national public services: Televisión Pública and the Contenidos Públicos channels Encuentro and Pakapaka, with Cine.AR carried overnight. Within that framework the station maintains its own productions. Noticias 12 is its news service, and Pampero TV, produced jointly with INTA, the National Agricultural Technology Institute, is a rural news and magazine programme that has won the Faro de Oro, Lanín de Oro and Martín Fierro awards as the best rural programme. For a district whose economy is agriculture and livestock, a nationally awarded rural programme made at home is the clearest expression of the station's purpose: public television that treats the pampas not as a backdrop but as its subject.

News operation

Noticias 12, the station's news service, emphasises local news and in recent programme listings has run two weekday editions, at midday and at 9 p.m.; there was also formerly a morning magazine at 8 a.m., Las Noticias de las 8. The newsroom covers Trenque Lauquen and its region, the municipal and provincial affairs, agricultural conditions, sport and community life of the north-western pampas. As the only television newsroom of its kind in the district, it functions as the audiovisual record of the city, a role the council explicitly recognised when it described the station as present at most of the region's significant events and at all of those of the district's head city.

Distribution and reach

The station's reach is built from its channel 12 signal in Trenque Lauquen, its relay in General Villegas and carriage on regional cable systems, together reaching more than fifteen localities in the north-west of the province according to the municipality. An authorised repeater for Quemú Quemú in La Pampa, granted in 1985 on channel 4, was revoked in 1989 after the national public channel installed its own repeater there, a small episode that shows how the station's footprint was shaped by the geography of the public network around it. Digital terrestrial broadcasting developed in stages: in April 2012 the regulator authorised ISDB-T test broadcasts on UHF channel 26; on 7 November 2014 the station began local digital broadcasts on TDA channel 24.4, replacing the Viajar channel in the local grid, and on 19 November that year its new facilities were inaugurated. On 18 April 2022 Canal 12 began high-definition broadcasts, completing the technical modernisation of a station that had begun life as a wired closed-circuit service.

Digital presence

As part of Radio y Televisión Argentina, the station is present within the digital platforms of the Argentine public media system, through which public television content is streamed and distributed nationally. Its local programmes circulate online as part of that system, extending a signal that was once confined to a closed circuit in a single pampas city to any viewer with an internet connection.

Audience and significance

Canal 12's significance exceeds its market size. It demonstrates that Argentine public television is not only a Buenos Aires institution: here is a state station that grew from a municipal-scale local initiative, was absorbed by the nation, and never lost its local accent. Its survival through intervention, dictatorship, natural disasters and the privatisation era, and its formal recognition as cultural heritage by its own city in 2019 and at its fiftieth anniversary in 2020, mark it as an institution of the region in the fullest sense, closer to a public library or a university than to a conventional commercial channel.

Canal 12 today

Today the station continues under Radio y Televisión Argentina, relaying the national public channels, producing Noticias 12 and Pampero TV, and broadcasting in high definition across the north-west of Buenos Aires Province. In an Argentine television landscape dominated by commercial groups in the capital, Canal 12 Trenque Lauquen remains what it has been since 1970: a public channel of the interior, made in the city it serves.