About ERBOL

ERBOL

ERBOL — Educación Radiofónica de Bolivia, Educational Radio of Bolivia — is a La Paz-based non-profit civil association that is at once one of Bolivia's most influential broadcast networks and a national news agency. Founded on 18 July 1967 as Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia, the Radio Schools of Bolivia, it was created by Catholic-inspired radio stations to teach literacy by radio to poor, rural, Indigenous and peasant communities. Over nearly six decades it outgrew that original classroom: it renamed itself to reflect a wider educational mission, built one of the most sophisticated satellite systems in Bolivian radio, developed its own news wire and digital newspaper, and federated a network counted at around 170 community radio stations in Bolivia and abroad. ERBOL works in Spanish and in Indigenous languages, from its headquarters at Calle Ballivián 1323 in La Paz, under the slogan "La red que nos une" — the network that unites us — also rendered as "La red que une a Bolivia," the network that unites Bolivia. It is a network and agency in its own right, not a single radio station, and none of its member stations individually is ERBOL.

Founding in 1967 and the radio-schools idea

ERBOL was founded on 18 July 1967 and received legal recognition on 28 December of the same year. Its model drew on Colombia's Radio Sutatenza and the ACPO radio-schools movement, which had shown that radio lessons, supported by printed materials and local monitors, could teach reading and writing to dispersed rural populations whom conventional schools did not reach. The Bolivian context made the need urgent: the 1952 National Revolution had brought universal suffrage without a literacy requirement and an agrarian reform, creating a vast new citizenry of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peasants whom the state struggled to educate. Sources differ on the exact number of founding radios — five, six and seven are all given — but the names consistently listed are San Gabriel of La Paz, Pío XII of Potosí and Llallagua, Escuelas Radiofónicas Fides of La Paz, Loyola of Sucre, Bolivia of Oruro, San Rafael of Cochabamba and Esperanza of Aiquile in Cochabamba. Among its principal promoters were two priests who shaped Bolivian Catholic media for a generation: the Oblate Gregorio Iriarte and the Jesuit José Gramunt de Moragas, the founder of the ANF news agency. Their stations pooled their efforts in a single coordinator so that educational programming could be produced once and used across the network.

From literacy to popular education

The network's first task was literacy, but its classrooms widened quickly. Through the 1970s its member stations accompanied communities through the years of military dictatorship, and when democracy returned in the early 1980s ERBOL's agenda had broadened far beyond reading and writing. In the 1980s it formally changed its name from Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia to Educación Radiofónica de Bolivia, keeping the acronym by which everyone knew it. The new name reflected a curriculum of non-formal education for adult life: agriculture and livestock, health, community organisation, trade-union questions and human rights, alongside basic education. Alfonso Gumucio Dagrón, writing in NACLA Report on the Americas in 2012, described ERBOL as one of Bolivia's most influential networks, a judgement rooted in this embeddedness: its member stations were not distant metropolitan broadcasters but community institutions, often the only medium broadcasting in the local Indigenous language and the only forum in which peasant and Indigenous organisations could hear themselves discussed. That local rootedness, multiplied across a national federation, is the source of ERBOL's durability through every change of regime since 1967.

Building the network: from single sideband to satellite

Keeping dozens of scattered stations supplied with shared programming required ERBOL to become, in effect, a telecommunications pioneer. In the 1980s its stations were interconnected by single-sideband radio, a low-cost technology suited to mountainous terrain and unreliable infrastructure. In 1994 the network began satellite work using rented space, and in 2000 it established its own satellite service transmitting from La Paz. Uplinks were added at Radio Pío XII in Cochabamba and at Radio Santa Cruz in 2002, so that production no longer flowed only outward from the capital: regional stations could feed material into the network as well. Gumucio Dagrón singled out this system as one of the most sophisticated satellite networks in Bolivia, capable of reaching Indigenous populations in some of the country's most remote regions. Network size is reported differently according to date and definition. ERBOL's fiftieth-anniversary book recorded growth to 144 stations across all nine departments of Bolivia; Wikipedia, Devex and TuneIn describe a network of about 170 community radio stations in Bolivia and abroad. The two figures are best read as counts from different moments and with different membership criteria, of a federation whose affiliates have always numbered well over one hundred.

The news agency and the digital newspaper

ERBOL's second identity, as a news agency, developed in stages. For some years in the 1990s an Agencia de Noticias ERBOL operated by teletype, distributing news text to member stations. From 2000 to 2003 the network sent its news by email to the whole federation, and in 2004 it launched its digital newspaper at erbol.com.bo, which continues today as the public face of the network's journalism. The shift mattered: a production centre that had once made programmes for member stations now published directly to the public, and ERBOL copy began to circulate nationally in the same news ecosystem as the commercial and state wires. Within the agency, a specialised Indigenous news service, the Agencia de Noticias Indígenas de Erbol, became a cited source in coverage of conflicts involving Indigenous territories — most prominently the TIPNIS dispute over the proposed highway through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park, where the service carried the testimony of Indigenous leaders and experts, such as anthropologist Xavier Albó, to a national audience. ERBOL also runs journalist-training programmes throughout Bolivia, forming community broadcasters in the craft and ethics of reporting, which its anniversary histories present as integral to the educational mission rather than an add-on.

Mission, languages and community radio

ERBOL defines itself as a non-profit civil association that practises journalism and communication with an educational purpose, inspired by Christian values. Its own institutional descriptions speak of building a critical, democratic and supportive society with ecological awareness. In practice that mission is expressed in three choices that distinguish it from commercial networks. The first is language: ERBOL programmes and news are produced in Spanish and in Indigenous languages, notably Quechua and Aymara, treating those languages as full vehicles of news and education rather than as translation afterthoughts. The second is participation: its member community stations give airtime to local organisations, unions, peasant federations and Indigenous authorities, so that the network functions as infrastructure for civil society. The third is formation: from the original literacy monitors to today's training workshops, ERBOL has consistently taught its own audience and its own broadcasters, not merely addressed them. Its Aymara satellite network, the Red Aymara Satelital Erbol, illustrates the pattern — a sub-network of Aymara-language stations linked by the same satellite system that carries the national service.

Recent work and partnerships

ERBOL's recent documented work continues the same lines. A project developed with WACC Global and co-funded by Cultural Survival set out to create radio productions with a "decolonizing approach," challenging the racist and discriminatory discourses that WACC's programme managers identified as obstacles to peaceful coexistence in Bolivia. The project provided training in history, legislation, critical analysis, gender relations in the Andean worldview, communication for peace, and radio production and digital tools, and planned a communication campaign of radio and digital products with an intercultural approach. Its direct beneficiaries were at least forty-two communicators of the Red Aymara Satelital Erbol — thirty-five men and seven women — and its indirect beneficiaries the audiences of twenty-five community radios of that network, in rural and urban communities. ERBOL has also acted as an institutional ally for specialist journalism: it renewed its strategic alliance with the environmental agency ANA Bolivia, an agreement signed for ERBOL by its executive director Inés Gonzáles, committing both organisations to deepen dissemination on the climate and environmental crisis, to seek funds for investigative journalism and to train each other's journalists and communicators. Its digital newspaper, meanwhile, publishes a continuous flow of national political, economic and social news, keeping the agency's byline present in daily Bolivian debate.

Fifty years and after

ERBOL marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, an occasion surveyed by Guillermo Siles Paz in Urgente.bo under the heading "half a century of educational radio in Bolivia." The anniversary book traced the arc from five or so Catholic radio schools in 1967 to a federation of 144 stations in all nine departments. Few Bolivian media institutions can show comparable continuity: ERBOL was founded before the dictatorships of the 1970s, survived them, accompanied the return to democracy, adapted to satellite and then to the internet, and entered the era of the Plurinational State as a recognised interlocutor of Indigenous and peasant Bolivia. Its history also intersects with the biographies of its founders' generation — Gramunt of ANF was one of its promoters, and the Fides stations were among its founders — which makes ERBOL a node in the wider story of how Catholic media built much of Bolivia's independent communication infrastructure in the twentieth century.

Significance

ERBOL's significance lies in the combination it achieved. As a broadcast network it solved the technical problem of reaching a mountainous, multilingual country; as an educational movement it treated its listeners as citizens to be formed, not consumers to be sold; and as a news agency it converted the reporting of more than a hundred community stations into a national wire and, after 2004, a digital newspaper read far beyond its own audience. Scholars of Bolivian media cite it as evidence that, as print media contracted, radio — organised, networked and increasingly digital — remained the country's most democratic medium. For the reader of Bolivian news today, an ERBOL dispatch on erbol.com.bo carries that institutional weight behind it: it is the product of a federation founded in 1967 to teach peasants to read, which grew, without abandoning that educational vocation, into one of the networks through which Bolivia talks to itself.

Basic facts

ERBOL (Educación Radiofónica de Bolivia) is a non-profit broadcast network and news agency headquartered at Calle Ballivián 1323, La Paz, Bolivia. It was founded on 18 July 1967 as Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia by Catholic-inspired radio stations including San Gabriel, Pío XII, Escuelas Radiofónicas Fides, Loyola, Bolivia, San Rafael and Esperanza, with Oblate priest Gregorio Iriarte and Jesuit José Gramunt de Moragas among its principal promoters, and was legally recognised on 28 December 1967. It adopted its present name in the 1980s, established its own satellite service in 2000, operated a news agency successively by teletype and email, and launched its digital newspaper in 2004. Counts of its affiliated community stations range from 144 in its fiftieth-anniversary book to about 170 in more recent profiles. Its official website is erbol.com.bo.