About Lapacho TV

Lapacho TV

Lapacho TV is the public television station of the Province of Formosa in northeastern Argentina, broadcasting as LT 88 TV Canal 11 from the city of Formosa. Owned by the Government of Formosa and based at Eva Perón 56 in the provincial capital, it is universally known in the province simply as Lapacho, the name it adopted in December 1999 when it returned definitively to provincial control after two decades in national hands. The station began broadcasting on 8 April 1978, weeks before the 1978 Football World Cup, and began its official emissions in 1979, the centenary year of the founding of the city of Formosa. Its history contains one of the most remarkable ownership disputes in Argentine television: built with provincial resources, transferred to the nation under the military government, reclaimed by the province through the Supreme Court in 1989, restored by decree in 1997 and physically received back in 1999. It is distinct from Formosa's separate Canal 3, and its website is lapachocanal11.com.ar.

A channel requested in 1970 and postponed

The history begins in 1970, when the military governor Augusto Guillermo Sosa Laprida asked for and obtained from the government of Juan Carlos Onganía authorisation to install a provincial television channel in Formosa, but budgetary problems postponed the project. By Decree 2333 of 22 May 1970 the National Executive awarded the Government of the Province of Formosa a licence to exploit the frequency of Canal 3 of the city of Formosa. In the event the frequency plan changed and the station was eventually built on Canal 11. A story preserved in the station's history illustrates the wait: on 26 June 1976, when Carlos Monzón knocked out Rodrigo Valdez in the fifth round in Monte Carlo to keep the unified middleweight title, many formoseños who wanted to watch the fight live had to travel to the Hostería Rodani, on the other side of the Bermejo river, because the neighbouring province of Chaco had had an open channel since 1960 and Formosa still had none.

Construction under Colombo and launch in 1978

In 1976 the media needs of the military process led the de facto governor Juan Carlos Colombo to begin building the Formosa signal with provincial resources. The licence finally began regular transmissions on 8 April 1978 as LT 88 TV Canal 11 de Formosa, inaugurated ahead of the start of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Its first official emissions, however, began only in 1979, on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of the Formosa capital. The first pictures were in black and white, since colour arrived only a year later. The provincial government's own anniversary history stresses the founding paradox that shaped everything after: the channel was a provincial creation, financed by the province and built for the province, a fact that became the legal and moral basis of Formosa's later claim to recover it. Its studios stand at Eva Perón 56 in Formosa city, with its main access also recorded on Calle Junín.

Transfer to the nation and the long dispute

About a year after the launch, by what the provincial account calls an inexplicable management of Colombo himself together with the national government of Jorge Rafael Videla, the station passed into the national orbit. The provincial history describes this in strong terms, as a dispossession that could only be remedied twenty years later. On 3 December 1979, by Decree 3081, the National Executive approved the agreements signed between the Province of Formosa and the Nation that formalised the arrangement. On 15 February 1982, by Resolution 60, the Federal Broadcasting Committee called a competition for the award of the Canal 11 licence, leaving the station's provincial ownership still more uncertain. With the return of democracy in 1983, the province sued before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation for the nullity of that transfer, arguing that the acts approving it had been dictated by illegitimate authorities, acting outside provincial interests, and had not been ratified by the provincial legislature. On 24 August 1989 the Supreme Court decreed the nullity of the agreements that had alienated the Formosa station in favour of the Nation, finding defects of origin and the absence of legislative ratification. The province had won in law; recovering the station in fact took another decade.

Restitution, reception and the birth of Lapacho

On 16 November 1989, by Resolution 2336, the broadcasting committee had already authorised the provincial government to install repeaters at Ibarreta, Laguna Naineck and Las Lomitas. The decisive legal step came on 8 January 1997, when by Decree 14 the National Executive restored the provision and exploitation of the Canal 11 television service to the Province of Formosa, with its buildings and equipment. The provincial account notes that the national Secretariat of Press and Diffusion, charged with implementing the restitution, did not act with the speed the matter required. On 9 December 1999 Governor Gildo Insfrán took direct action, providing by Provincial Decree 1577 for the reception of LT 88 TV Canal 11 into the provincial orbit and designating Dr Jorge Fernández de Azcárate as interventor of the station, who received the totality of its assets by notarial act. Days later, on 13 December 1999, by Provincial Decree 13, Lapacho LT 88 Canal 11 Formosa was created as a deconcentrated entity with direct dependence on the provincial Executive. The new name, taken from the lapacho tree emblematic of the region, and a new logo marked the station's rebirth as a provincial medium. The incoming national government of the Alianza initially declined to recognise the transfer and its Secretary of Culture and Communication, Darío Lopérfido, designated a rival director by Resolution 43 of 2000, but the provincial reception stood.

Legal status and the provincial media network

Lapacho's juridical figure, as stated in the provincial government's own works and actions reporting for 2017, is that of an official open television channel constituted as a deconcentrated entity of the provincial public administration, created by Provincial Decree 13 of 13 December 1999, with direct dependence on the provincial Executive and budgetary dependence on the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Treasury. In that reporting year its approved income and expenditure budget was 45,112,423.36 pesos, of which 43,023,810.60 pesos of income and 42,954,222.22 pesos of expenditure were executed; those figures are recorded here strictly as the station's documented 2017 budget, not as a current figure. The station describes its work as an integrated service, articulating its activities to bring the Formosa and regional audience information, events, news, entertainment and everything of community interest, and it forms the base of the Red Formoseña de Medios de Comunicación, the Formosa media network. Its slogan is Para toda la provincia, para toda la región, for the whole province, for the whole region.

Coverage, satellite and digital television

The station's documented transmission system combines an analogue transmitter of 10 kilowatts with a radial coverage of about 115 kilometres around the capital, satellite distribution to the whole province and in practice the whole country, and carriage on the Argentine digital terrestrial platform through ARSAT-1, with streaming extending its reach worldwide. The AFSCA authorised Canal 11 to test digital terrestrial television under the ISDB-T standard by Resolutions 570 of 29 December 2010 and 689 of 24 June 2011, assigning it UHF channel 29. That year the station began broadcasting on channel 29.1 of the Formosa TDA, and in September 2015 it also began to be broadcast in Clorinda and Laguna Blanca on channel 33.1. The station has one repeater of record, at Clorinda on channel 7, authorised by Resolution 499 of 2007, and a community channel at Subteniente Perín acts as a repeater retransmitting the Formosa signal. Its stated transmission area covers part of the province of Formosa and neighbouring areas, including the centre and south of Paraguay, a natural spillover for a capital city facing the Paraguayan city of Alberdi across the river. The station broadcasts in 1080i high definition, downscaled for its standard signal.

Programming and Noticiero 11

Part of the present programming consists of retransmitting content from the Buenos Aires news signal C5N. That arrangement dates from 2016: on 1 June 2016 Canal 11 ceased broadcasting Telefe programming, and from September of that year replaced it with C5N content, a change reported at the time under headlines noting that Lapacho now retransmitted C5N. Before 2016 the station had carried Telefe, so its national partner history runs from network carriage in its national-orbit years through Telefe to C5N. Local production includes Noticiero 11, its news service; Hola mañana, a morning magazine; Tarde pero seguro, an afternoon magazine; Desde el Litoral, a music programme; and Desde tierra adentro, a general interest programme. Noticiero 11 focuses on the Province of Formosa and has two weekday editions, at 12:30 and 20:00. The newscast began a few months after the founding of the channel under the name Noticiero 11, changed its name to Lapacho Noticias in 1999 after the change in the station's institutional image, and returned to its present name, Noticiero 11, in 2005.

Digital inclusion and rural reach

Formosa's provincial policy has used the channel and the TDA system as instruments of territorial inclusion. Provincial government reporting has presented Formosa as the first province in the country to install digital television in rural colonies, through the mounting of free satellite kits for small agricultural producers in the most distant rural areas, executed by REFSA Telecomunicaciones teams by agreement with ARSAT. The service was directed at families located more than ten kilometres from the influence radius of the provincial fibre-optic network antennas, with kits giving access to the free digital channels and, progressively, to Lapacho Canal 11 itself. The provincial telecommunications head Lucas Vicente presented the deliveries as historic for Formosa, framing free digital television and internet access kits as an equality of opportunity policy of Governor Insfrán. Those reports concern the provincial digital inclusion programme rather than the station alone, but they document the environment in which Lapacho's satellite and TDA presence is meant to operate: a province of dispersed rural settlement where open and satellite television are public policy tools.

Assessment

Lapacho TV has the most dramatic documented ownership history of any station in this batch, and unusually, both the legal instruments and the provincial narrative of that history survive in detail: Decree 2333 of 1970, the launch of 8 April 1978, Decree 3081 of 1979, the Supreme Court judgment of 24 August 1989, Decree 14 of 1997, and the provincial reception and re-foundation of December 1999. Its slogan about serving the whole province and region is matched by a documented satellite and repeater system and by a named local programme slate. On that verified record, Lapacho stands as Formosa's provincial public channel in the fullest sense: built by the province, lost to the nation, recovered by litigation, and renamed for the tree of its own landscape.