Radio UAGro is the university radio station of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero in southern Mexico. It plays music and cultural programming, gives airtime to community voices and broadcasts in indigenous languages including Nahuatl and Mixtec. It is also one of Mexico's most stubborn survivors: the station broadcast for over forty years before it received its first legal concession.
What Radio UAGro Offers Listeners
Operated by the Autonomous University of Guerrero, the station emphasises cultural and public-service content and provides airtime to social movements and dissenting groups, according to Wikipedia's entry on the station. Its official page, radiouagro.com, lists the studio in central Chilpancingo. It is a rare chance to hear a Mexican regional voice that is not a commercial format station.
A Founding Born of Refusal
Radio Universidad-Pueblo first went on air on 4 May 1982 under rector Enrique González Ruiz, conceived to amplify the voices of students, workers and peasants in Guerrero. As Proceso reports, federal authorities refused a licence on the grounds that no spectrum was available. González Ruiz pursued legal action and staged a hunger strike of more than twenty days at the federal communications office, while engineer Eduardo Villaseñor Mercado built the transmission equipment that showed frequencies were in fact free.
Sabotage, Closure and a Relaunch
The early years were turbulent. The communications ministry allegedly colluded with local commercial broadcasters to jam the signal, and technicians answered by building portable 500-watt transmitters for university campuses. A budget crisis then closed the station in January 1985, and journalist Sergio Ocampo Arista led former staff to relaunch it on 7 June 1987, again without official authorisation, according to the same Proceso account. It went on to operate as Radio Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero.
A Legal Frequency at Last
In February 2022, federal telecommunications inspectors arrived with National Guard support to dismantle the FM operation, but community members and journalists blocked the seizure, as the Wikipedia entry notes. In 2023 the university received its first federal concession, a public-use licence for XHCPEV-FM on 101.9 MHz, which Quadratín Guerrero reported came after forty years of broadcasting. The station has long been heard on 840 kHz AM and 90.7 MHz FM, and Proceso says a small team of about eighteen people still keeps it going.
Listen to Radio UAGro Free on Radio Shuffle
Tune in to Radio UAGro on Radio Shuffle. No account, no app, no fee. Press play and hear the sound of Chilpancingo.