About Agencia de Noticias Fides

Agencia de Noticias Fides

The Agencia de Noticias Fides, known throughout Bolivia as ANF, is the country's first and oldest news agency and its largest non-governmental wire service. Founded in La Paz on 5 August 1963 by the Jesuit priest and journalist José Gramunt de Moragas, it is a private, non-profit apostolate of the Society of Jesus that has reported Bolivian political, economic and social life for more than six decades. ANF began inside the newsroom of Radio Fides, writing the station's national news and mailing carbon copies to provincial newspapers; it became independent in the late 1970s and grew into a service used, at its height, by newspapers, radio and television stations across the country. It was among the first media to tell the world that Ernesto "Che" Guevara had died in Bolivia in October 1967, it operated through the years of military dictatorship, and it survived into the digital age, although an economic restructuring in December 2019 closed its physical doors and moved its distribution entirely online. ANF is the wire-agency arm of the Fides family of Jesuit media, distinct from the individual Radio Fides stations, and it sustains itself, by its own account, solely from the sale of its news services.

Founding by José Gramunt de Moragas

ANF's founder, José Gramunt de Moragas, was born in Tarragona, Spain, in 1922 and settled in Bolivia from 1952. A Jesuit priest, a law graduate and a journalist trained in Spain and the United States, he took over the direction of Radio Fides in La Paz in 1960 and led the station for about twenty-six years. He founded ANF on 5 August 1963, but, as a vivid account published by SciELO Bolivia recounts, the agency existed only on paper for about ten months: there was no money to launch it. The turning point was a letter containing a small donation from an international Catholic organisation, which Gramunt brandished in the Radio Fides newsroom one cold La Paz morning in 1964 with the announcement that the agency could finally begin. His answer to a young colleague who asked how a news agency was made became part of ANF folklore: they would simply do what they already did every day — write the news — but now with several copies. Gramunt's career extended well beyond ANF. He directed the Spanish agency Efe's operation in La Paz for twelve years until 1979, worked as a correspondent for the German agency DPA, co-founded ERBOL and twice presided over it, received Bolivia's National Journalism Prize in 1993 and the National Press Association's Premio Libertad in 2009, and was granted Bolivian nationality in 1991. The Universidad Católica Boliviana named him doctor honoris causa in 2013 for his defence of freedom of expression. He died in Cochabamba in 2018, aged 96.

Carbon paper, envelopes and the road to independence

The agency's first technology was carbon paper. In its earliest form, ANF was the national news service of Radio Fides: its journalists wrote the station's news, produced multiple carbon copies of each story and sent them in envelopes by post to newspapers in the interior of the country, which otherwise had no regular source of national reporting. Julieta Vidza Tovar Ibieta's 2014 history of the agency's first fifty years takes its title, Del papel carbónico a la computadora — From Carbon Paper to the Computer — from that journey. ANF functioned as part of Radio Fides' information service, sharing staff and working tools with the station, until it became a fully independent medium at the end of the 1970s. From a central newsroom in La Paz it built a network of correspondents in Bolivia's main cities, and its service expanded from text into photography. By the account given in Brun Torrico's academic history of the media in Bolivia, ANF became the nation's largest non-governmental news agency, with around one hundred subscribing outlets — including all Bolivian newspapers with national circulation, radio and television stations, embassies and private institutions — receiving an average of about two hundred national and local stories a day, together with extensive multimedia photo and video archives. Those figures describe the agency in the period the history covers and should be read as a measure of its mature scale rather than as a current subscription count. The agency's own anniversary material gives a more conservative contemporary figure of distribution to more than fifty newspapers and radio and television stations across the country.

Reporting Bolivia's defining moments

ANF's longevity means that its archive runs parallel to modern Bolivian history. Its correspondents covered the Ñancahuazú guerrilla campaign of 1966–1967, led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and ANF, together with the daily Presencia, was the first medium to report Guevara's death on 9 October 1967, an event that concentrated the attention of the entire world on Bolivia. It went on to cover the Teoponte guerrilla episode of 1970. It also lived, alongside Bolivian society, through the military dictatorships that began with General René Barrientos Ortuño's coup of 4 November 1964 and recurred through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The Jesuits of Bolivia, marking ANF anniversaries, have stressed that through dictatorship and democracy alike, and under governments of right and left, the agency maintained the same editorial line of defence of truth, democratic institutions and responsible information. Its 55th-anniversary history, published in 2018, presents that continuity — from carbon copies through teletype to the internet era — as the thread connecting the small Radio Fides news desk of 1963 with the digital agency of the present century.

Ownership, financing and editorial identity

ANF belongs to the Society of Jesus and describes itself as an independent, non-profit medium. The Jesuits of Bolivia state its financing model plainly: the agency sustains itself exclusively from the sale of its news services and operates without support from the government, from political parties or from economic groups. That model has been both its guarantee of independence and its chronic vulnerability, because a wire service paid for by Bolivian media clients is exposed to every contraction in the Bolivian media economy. Sergio Montes Rondón, a Jesuit priest who has served as ANF's director and, in reference listings, its director general, articulated the agency's self-understanding at its 54th anniversary in 2017: media, he argued, help society preserve fundamental values — liberty, freedom of expression, equality, democracy and the rule of law — and ANF's work was a commitment to the country's democracy. In a later interview he urged communicators to focus on persons, on their lived experience and pain, in order to produce information with compassion. The agency publishes in Spanish from La Paz, maintains its public face at noticiasfides.com, where it also publishes a digital newspaper for general readers, and remains distinct from Radio Fides itself: the two share Jesuit ownership and a common origin, but ANF is the wire, selling reporting to other outlets, not a broadcaster.

The death of David Niño de Guzmán

The darkest episode in ANF's modern history came in April 2011. David Niño de Guzmán, a journalist with sixteen years' experience at newspapers including La Razón, El Diario, Última Hora and Presencia and at Cadena A television, had joined ANF as a reporter in 2006 and become its news director in March 2010. He disappeared on 19 April 2011 after leaving work following a phone call, and was found dead two days later, on 21 April, near the Orkojahuira River in La Paz. A forensic report found that an explosive device had destroyed his abdomen. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on the Bolivian authorities to investigate thoroughly and not to rule out a journalism-related motive, a call echoed by five Bolivian press organisations. Investigators officially treated the death as suicide; his family, friends and colleagues disputed that finding and believed he had been murdered. Freedom House's Freedom of the Press 2012 report recorded the killing as the year's only murder of a journalist in Bolivia. The circumstances of Niño de Guzmán's death were still disputed in the sources that documented it, and it remains a defining case in Bolivian debates about the safety of journalists.

Pressure from the state: the 2012 case

A year later ANF faced the state directly. In August 2012 the government of President Evo Morales filed a criminal complaint under Bolivia's Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination against ANF and the newspapers Página Siete and El Diario, over their coverage of a speech Morales had given at Tiwanaku on 15 August about food shortages, in which he had suggested that only laziness could explain hunger in the warm, agriculturally favourable east of the country. The government alleged that the three outlets' headlines — reporting that Morales had called eastern Bolivians lazy — distorted his words and amounted to disseminating and inciting racism, an offence that could carry a prison sentence of up to four years. ANF's position was that it had only reported what the president said. Human Rights Watch and Freedom House recorded the case as the first use of the anti-racism law against media outlets, and the Committee to Protect Journalists called for such charges against the press to be dropped. The case remained under investigation, in limbo, in the years that followed, and it is regularly cited in assessments of press freedom in Bolivia as an example of how anti-discrimination law could be turned against accurate reporting of a head of state's own words.

The 2019 restructuring and the digital-only agency

After fifty-six years, economics forced the change that politics had not. On 10 December 2019 ANF underwent a restructuring for economic problems, closing its physical doors in order to distribute news only via the internet, a step its director Sergio Montes Rondón described at the time as the end of a cycle for the agency. The restructuring came weeks after Bolivia's 2019 political crisis, and one episode from that period drew public criticism of the agency: Telesur and other critics reported that ANF's press chief, Vacaflor González, had signed a contract with the interim government of Jeanine Áñez after the crisis, which critics alleged was intended to discredit former president Evo Morales. That allegation is part of the documented controversy around the agency in 2019 and was reported by partisan sources; it is recorded here as a criticism that was made, not as an established finding about ANF's editorial conduct. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: the agency that began with carbon paper completed its migration to fully digital distribution, publishing through its website and digital newspaper while continuing to supply its wire to client media.

ANF today and its place in Bolivian journalism

ANF's historical position is secure. It was Bolivia's first news agency, founded a generation before the state agency ABI, and for most of its life it was the principal non-governmental alternative to official information — a private, Jesuit-owned, non-profit wire whose copy reached newsrooms in every department. Its history book, its anniversary retrospectives and the academic literature all treat it as a school of Bolivian journalism as much as a business: generations of Bolivian reporters learned the trade in the Fides newsroom, and its founder embodied the figure of the priest-journalist in twentieth-century Bolivia. The agency that entered the 2020s was smaller and digital-only, operating in a media economy transformed by social networks and by the financial crises of Bolivian newspapers, but it continued to publish from La Paz under the Fides name its founder gave it in 1963. For researchers and readers, ANF remains an essential source for Bolivian public life precisely because its reporting spans, without interruption of identity, the guerrilla era, the dictatorships, the return to democracy and the polarised politics of the twenty-first century.

Basic facts

Agencia de Noticias Fides (ANF) is a Spanish-language private news agency headquartered in La Paz, Bolivia. It was founded on 5 August 1963 by Jesuit priest and journalist José Gramunt de Moragas and began operating in 1964 as part of Radio Fides' news service, becoming independent in the late 1970s. It is a non-profit apostolate of the Society of Jesus, financed solely by the sale of its news services, with a central newsroom in La Paz and correspondents in Bolivia's main cities. Reference listings name Sergio Montes Rondón as director general. On 10 December 2019 it closed its physical premises and moved to internet-only distribution. Its official website is noticiasfides.com. It should not be confused with the Vatican's Agenzia Fides in Rome, nor with the individual Radio Fides stations, which are separate broadcast outlets.