Editorial Week | December 29, 2017
By Jose Alfonso Garcia
The popular program “A Fuego Cruzado” produced and hosted on the Mega 1400 AM by Santiago Matias and José Alfonso García went off the air.
The radio program of analysis of sociopolitical content was broadcast every Saturday from 7:00 to 9:00 AM and became popular the type of comments, analysis and occurrences of both radio professionals.
Although Editorial Week has not yet established direct communication with Santiago Matias, Mrs. Milagros Dominguez, wife of the popular radio producer speaking on behalf of the company said that the program went off the air due to the difficult schedule and the lack of time available to produce it.
Santiago Matías produces El Tapón de la Mañana, a humorous and informative program of great success also by the Mega Monday to Friday (6:00 a.m. to 10:00 AM). The only day to rest would be Saturday, said Matias’ wife who is also co-producer of the program.
José Alfonso García is a professor assigned to the Lawrence Public Schools’ Central Office, owns a real estate company and is president and founder of Editorial Week, among other occupations.
García agreed with Mrs. Domínguez that the lack of time is the main factor to cancel the show and thanked Santiago Matías for the opportunity and honor to share with him so many experiences. He also took the opportunity to thank his thousands of listeners and followers of “A Fuego Cruzado” for their loyalty and dedication during his more than five years producing it.
The City of Lawrence, which has the largest concentration of Hispanic/Latino residents in all of New England (80-90% of the total population), has lost almost all of its major radio programs in the language of Cervantes in just one month. This social phenomenon that will affect us all in great scale has gone almost unnoticed by most of the residents who have been so busy in other more important matters such as: rent increases, property taxes, or who is now aligned with the mayor “to see if he gets me what I want”, they seem not to have had time to think about what life will be like without the information programs in their native language.
It all started when, just two days before the municipal elections, WCEC 1490 AM radio suspended all programming with the clear objective that the candidates opposed to Mayor Dan Rivera did not have a communication channel at his disposal to transmit his ideas of changes or disagreement with the administration.
This embarrassing fact was interpreted by the community as an act of censorship against a people eager for obtaining good information, also we have seen it as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment to our Constitution (freedom of the press and expression) or a clear attempt to suppress the vote of the opposing groups, which constitutes a crime punishable by the electoral laws of Massachusetts.
Given this unprecedented fact in the policy of Lawrence, several well-known communicators, including José Ayala, Jean Acevedo and Luis Piñeyro, reacted indignantly and decided to cancel their programs on WCEC 1490 AM.
