Struggle Against Repression Ends : Paraguay Regime Silences Independent Radio Voice

Humberto Rubin’s radio station, which had become the last vestige of free speech in Paraguay, is silent now, perhaps for good.

The process of silencing the station, Radio Nanduti, was crude and bizarre, a kind of microcosm of life in Paraguay under the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, Latin America’s last “man on horseback.”

At 51, Rubin is tired and broke, but unrepentant.

“The circle is closing,” he told a reporter the other day in his cluttered office. “I believe that to inform and to be informed is a basic human right. Therefore, I’m subversive, and a threat to the government.

“When people are informed, they begin to lose their fear, to assert themselves. That is what bothered them most: People were losing their fear. They were learning that not in every country is crime legal. . . . “

In January, with his advertisers frightened away and his broadcasts jammed, Rubin finally closed his “mom ‘n’ pop” radio operation, ending a nine-month struggle against the Stroessner government.

“It’s an old story,” Rubin said. “What dictatorship can endure a free press?”

Stroessner, supported by the armed forces and the 100-year-old Colorado Party, has run Paraguay for 32 years. Repression has waxed and waned to match the degree of opposition.

Three years ago the government suspended ABC Color, a newspaper that had become independent and critical of the regime.

“We have exhausted all our legal remedies,” ABC Color publisher Aldo Zucolillo said at the time. “All we have left is whatever international pressure can generate. I see no chance of reopening.”

After the death of the newspaper, Radio Nanduti became Paraguay’s lone source of unfettered news and the only national outlet accessible to Stroessner’s critics.

Rubin, who founded Nanduti 25 years ago----the word nanduti means “spider web” in Guarani, the language of Paraguay’s Indians--created an aggressive mix of news, news analysis, open-phone interviews and sports. Reporters in six mobile units chased news across the country and reported it live, something unprecedented in Paraguay.

According to Rubin, a third of the 3.7 million people in Paraguay tuned in for at least part of his two-hour morning news show.

Pioneer in Paraguay

Although there are dozens of larger and more sophisticated radio stations of the same breed scattered through the democratic societies of Latin America, Radio Nanduti was a pioneer in Paraguay, forever testing the limits of government tolerance.

If the gerontocrats in the Stroessner government were asked to draw a picture of the devil, the result might be a fair likeness of Rubin. To the despair of his wife, Gloria, who works at the station along with their seven children, ages 15 to 30, Rubin is steadfastly scruffy. His half-buttoned shirt exposes a hairy chest and a gold Star of David. His belly hangs over his belt. His hair is a tangled mane, his beard untrimmed. He has long been a target of government newspapers and radio stations, which refer to him as “that ungrateful Jew.”

Over the years, Rubin has been detained more than a dozen times and banned from broadcasting on his own station more times than he can remember. For the last four years, the government has turned back his repeated attempts to pay the station’s annual licensing fee.

“The idea was to build a forum for ideas, to give people a place where, for the first time, they could be heard,” Rubin said. “Of course, we exercised self-censorship. Even in the best of times we never dared say more than about half of what was really going on.”

Last April, opposition political parties, students and workers demonstrated in the streets against the Stroessner regime. Nanduti reporters drew special attention from the policemen who scattered the demonstrators with clubs and tear gas.

Mob Attacks Station

On the night of April 28, four days after the demonstration, an armed mob attacked the station, and the station’s reporters traced the vehicles that brought in the mob to government agencies.

On May 3, an attack on its transmitter knocked the station off the air for a day. By then major advertisers had begun to cancel, explaining apologetically that they had been advised not to air their messages on a subversive station. The station’s phone service was interrupted, and the line that brought news from foreign news agencies went dead.

Every time Nanduti began a newscast, the intruding sound of a whistle was broadcast on its assigned frequency. By December, with Rubin selling what he could to cover a $7,000-a-month deficit and stay on the air, the whistle had become an outlaw station playing Christmas carols to drown out Nanduti’s news and its few remaining commercials.

Repeatedly Rubin appealed to the courts and the police in an effort to silence the outlaw station, but without success.

“Officially, the government said it couldn’t locate the source of interference, but at the same time government officials were applauding the problems of my ‘subversive’ station,” Rubin said.

Station Shut Down

On Jan. 14, Rubin shut down. He said without much conviction that he plans to resume broadcasts on April 14. In the meantime, a home has been found for many Nanduti staffers at an Asuncion station owned by Roman Catholic priests.

Rubin wrote to Ismael Rolon, the archbishop of Asuncion, “My very dear friend, I reiterate in the name of the church our commitment to continue fighting peacefully for freedom of expression and information so that Radio Nanduti may return to the air without pressures of senseless interference.”

Parish priests passed the hat for Nanduti. Donations came in from a wide variety of sources, cutting across religious, economic and political lines. An old woman willed her house to Rubin. Another donated a gold ring. A businessman helped to meet the payroll. Help has been promised by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by the U.S. Congress, but it has not materialized.

Paraguay’s bishops have joined with embassies representing the United States, Argentina and several West European countries in publicly supporting the station. One bishop called for Nanduti’s return to the air in a homily he delivered at a huge outdoor mass attended by Stroessner.

Inured to this sort of thing, the Stroessner government has been unbending. Last month it withdrew Rubin’s passport, and now a policeman in an unmarked car follows Rubin wherever he goes, sitting for long hours outside the now-silenced station or the Rubin family home.

Rubin sometimes waves at the policeman, suspecting that if the man could, he would fight the boredom of surveillance by listening to Radio Nanduti.