The office park is nearly empty.
Miles away, casinos blink and blare. But this place looks like it could be anywhere in cookie-cutter America. There’s no sign on the glass door, but inside, in a cramped backroom behind a riot of cords and a minimalist desk, something intriguing is happening.
A man leans into a microphone.
“¡Esto es ‘Battleground Americano,’ mi gente!” (This is “American Battleground,” my people.)
The call to political combat comes each weeknight from a pol turned radio guy named Jesús Marquez, who hosts his two-hour “Battleground Americano” program on Americano Media, an upstart venture that bills itself as the first national Spanish-language conservative radio and streaming news network.
Marquez, a 48-year-old Mexican American who split his childhood between the Los Angeles suburbs and Zacatecas, Mexico, has sold many things in his life: washers, dryers, air conditioners, political advice. It’s his “gift,” this ability to sell, he said in a recent interview, and the product he’s offering now is a brand of political conservatism steeped in what he calls “Trumpismo.”
As a radio host, Marquez is part of a complex and audacious experiment, a long-game wager that the drift of Latinos toward the Republican Party in some states is far from over, and that it’s the Spanish-dominant speakers who are now the most ripe for persuasion. His network hopes to woo “conserva-curious” Spanish-speaking voters and convert Latinos it believes are already conservatives but, as the Americano team puts it, don’t know it yet. In an era when the Latino population is growing at a faster rate than the nation as a whole — winning them over in a big way could mean, quite simply, winning.
From left, Marquez, Flores and Americano Media founder Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
Marquez’s program is just one in a suite of 18 hours of daily news and opinion offerings from Americano, which started modestly last spring on satellite radio and has since shifted to traditional terrestrial radio, podcasts, internet audio and video streaming, and app- and web-based audio via the broadcast giant iHeart.
Its founder, Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, a former Donald Trump surrogate who made a pile of cash selling personal protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic, envisions a “Fox News in Spanish.” His network has adopted a Spanglishy, Trump-style motto: “No más fake news.” It has set a goal of airing on 50 radio stations in key political markets by the end of the year, which the company has estimated would give it the potential to reach as many as 10 million listeners — approximately 1 in 6 Hispanics in the United States. The timing is important, Garcia-Hidalgo said, because he wants his network “robust and ready” to play a role in trying to boost the percentage of Latinos voting Republican in the 2024 presidential election.
Americano is modeled on the Fox News formula of right-leaning news programming bookended by much-further-right-leaning opinion shows. Its opinion programs frequently hammer “woke” culture, criticize policies that expand inclusion for transgender people, paint Democrats hyperbolically as “communists” and “socialists” and — perhaps counterintuitively for those unfamiliar with a certain segment of the Latino population — advocate for beefed-up border security and more restrictive immigration policies.
Its arrival alarms some liberal Latinos concerned that it will add to the prevalence of disinformation on Spanish-language media in recent years, including anti-vaccination messaging during the pandemic. Americano sees itself as a counterbalance to the dominance of left-leaning Spanish-language network Univision and the takeover of more than a dozen radio stations — including Miami’s legendary right-wing stalwart Radio Mambí — by a left-leaning group that secured financing from a fund affiliated with liberal investor George Soros.
Flores, center, speaks with people before the Americano Media town hall. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
The political brawl over a giant of Spanish-language radio in Miami
For Americano to emerge as a major player, Garcia-Hidalgo has to overcome a significant barrier that is bigger than just a shared language: Will the flame-throwing Cuban American hosts he’s been poaching in Miami, with their high-decibel, metronomic anti-communism screeds, resonate with the immigrants from Mexico in Southern California? Can the former Colombian and Venezuelan beauty queens (who also bring with them TV news cred) and the Venezuelan telenovela actress he’s hired to anchor lifestyle programming click with the Guatemalan Americans in the mid-Atlantic and Salvadorans in the South and Midwest?
The accents are different. The volume is different. The slang is different. But might the core values be the same?
Garcia-Hidalgo is chasing what has almost gained mythic status for both political parties: that long-hoped-for, mega-bounce, paradigm-altering, supersize, nationwide Hispanic voter explosion that seems so tantalizingly achievable, yet so frustratingly elusive, even as Hispanics have now spent two decades as the country’s largest minority group.
Several of the network’s initial lineup of radio stations are in central Florida, an area chosen specifically because it’s known for swing voters. On the opposite side of the country, Americano has just inked a deal to add its fifth land-based radio station, in Bakersfield, Calif., in a region with a large Latino population. But that wasn’t all that excited the network. It was also the overlay map its staff produced, showing that the station’s signal covered much of the congressional district of a politician whom it’d like to hear its viewpoints and whose constituents it’d like to influence: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Flores spoke on immigration, school choice, gender identity and the importance of voting during the town hall. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
The origins of this effort trace as far back as an evening in the early 1990s, on a Potomac River booze cruise, when a 20-something congressional press gallery official, Michael Caputo, looked up and saw someone familiar: Tom Woolston, a 20-something CIA technical operations officer. They’d gone to school together as kids in Lima, Ohio, but had lost touch. Though neither man speaks Spanish, that chance encounter and the friendship it kindled would become a seminal moment in the creation of a Spanish-language news network.
In the intervening decades, Woolston left the CIA, practiced law, invented online auctioning systems, won a huge patent fight with eBay and made a lot of money.
Caputo — among many, many other things — worked in politics in the United States, Russia and Ukraine, palled around with political trickster Roger Stone, advised Trump, left a Trump administration gig amid coronavirus controversies and a Facebook meltdown, got pudgy, got skinny, got cancer, got healthy, got religion.
In 2020, Caputo was promoting his book and accompanying documentary, “The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment.”
In one of his appearances, he met Garcia-Hidalgo. They hit it off. Garcia-Hidalgo in those days had been hosting low-budget Spanish-language political talk shows based in Washington and airing on different platforms, including, at various times, Facebook and YouTube. One of the shows — airing on a Colombian television network — had a point-counterpoint debate format with an unlikely friend: Jose Aristimuño, who had been a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration and deputy national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. (Aristimuño now co-hosts a liberal vs. conservative debate program on Americano.)
“The goal,” Garcia-Hidalgo said, “was always, you know, Fox News, Fox News, Fox News in Spanish.” (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
Garcia-Hidalgo had grown up in suburban Washington, the son of a successful Peruvian American civil engineer. He’d gone on to be a high-ranking telecommunications sales executive. But what really turned him on was politics, leading him to ditch his high-paying corporate gig in 2009.
He was early to Trumpism. He wrote an online column in 2011 — four years before Trump announced he was running for president — headlined “Trump: The leadership America needs.” He loves to tell liberals that Trump was the first Hispanic president — a riff on another era’s Democrats calling Bill Clinton the first Black president.
“They go nuts,” Garcia-Hidalgo said. “But it’s true. Hispanics were doing great with Trump. That’s why the needle’s moving.”
Miles away, casinos blink and blare. But this place looks like it could be anywhere in cookie-cutter America. There’s no sign on the glass door, but inside, in a cramped backroom behind a riot of cords and a minimalist desk, something intriguing is happening.
A man leans into a microphone.
“¡Esto es ‘Battleground Americano,’ mi gente!” (This is “American Battleground,” my people.)
The call to political combat comes each weeknight from a pol turned radio guy named Jesús Marquez, who hosts his two-hour “Battleground Americano” program on Americano Media, an upstart venture that bills itself as the first national Spanish-language conservative radio and streaming news network.
Marquez, a 48-year-old Mexican American who split his childhood between the Los Angeles suburbs and Zacatecas, Mexico, has sold many things in his life: washers, dryers, air conditioners, political advice. It’s his “gift,” this ability to sell, he said in a recent interview, and the product he’s offering now is a brand of political conservatism steeped in what he calls “Trumpismo.”
As a radio host, Marquez is part of a complex and audacious experiment, a long-game wager that the drift of Latinos toward the Republican Party in some states is far from over, and that it’s the Spanish-dominant speakers who are now the most ripe for persuasion. His network hopes to woo “conserva-curious” Spanish-speaking voters and convert Latinos it believes are already conservatives but, as the Americano team puts it, don’t know it yet. In an era when the Latino population is growing at a faster rate than the nation as a whole — winning them over in a big way could mean, quite simply, winning.
From left, Marquez, Flores and Americano Media founder Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
Marquez’s program is just one in a suite of 18 hours of daily news and opinion offerings from Americano, which started modestly last spring on satellite radio and has since shifted to traditional terrestrial radio, podcasts, internet audio and video streaming, and app- and web-based audio via the broadcast giant iHeart.
Its founder, Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, a former Donald Trump surrogate who made a pile of cash selling personal protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic, envisions a “Fox News in Spanish.” His network has adopted a Spanglishy, Trump-style motto: “No más fake news.” It has set a goal of airing on 50 radio stations in key political markets by the end of the year, which the company has estimated would give it the potential to reach as many as 10 million listeners — approximately 1 in 6 Hispanics in the United States. The timing is important, Garcia-Hidalgo said, because he wants his network “robust and ready” to play a role in trying to boost the percentage of Latinos voting Republican in the 2024 presidential election.
Americano is modeled on the Fox News formula of right-leaning news programming bookended by much-further-right-leaning opinion shows. Its opinion programs frequently hammer “woke” culture, criticize policies that expand inclusion for transgender people, paint Democrats hyperbolically as “communists” and “socialists” and — perhaps counterintuitively for those unfamiliar with a certain segment of the Latino population — advocate for beefed-up border security and more restrictive immigration policies.
Its arrival alarms some liberal Latinos concerned that it will add to the prevalence of disinformation on Spanish-language media in recent years, including anti-vaccination messaging during the pandemic. Americano sees itself as a counterbalance to the dominance of left-leaning Spanish-language network Univision and the takeover of more than a dozen radio stations — including Miami’s legendary right-wing stalwart Radio Mambí — by a left-leaning group that secured financing from a fund affiliated with liberal investor George Soros.
Flores, center, speaks with people before the Americano Media town hall. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
The political brawl over a giant of Spanish-language radio in Miami
For Americano to emerge as a major player, Garcia-Hidalgo has to overcome a significant barrier that is bigger than just a shared language: Will the flame-throwing Cuban American hosts he’s been poaching in Miami, with their high-decibel, metronomic anti-communism screeds, resonate with the immigrants from Mexico in Southern California? Can the former Colombian and Venezuelan beauty queens (who also bring with them TV news cred) and the Venezuelan telenovela actress he’s hired to anchor lifestyle programming click with the Guatemalan Americans in the mid-Atlantic and Salvadorans in the South and Midwest?
The accents are different. The volume is different. The slang is different. But might the core values be the same?
Garcia-Hidalgo is chasing what has almost gained mythic status for both political parties: that long-hoped-for, mega-bounce, paradigm-altering, supersize, nationwide Hispanic voter explosion that seems so tantalizingly achievable, yet so frustratingly elusive, even as Hispanics have now spent two decades as the country’s largest minority group.
Several of the network’s initial lineup of radio stations are in central Florida, an area chosen specifically because it’s known for swing voters. On the opposite side of the country, Americano has just inked a deal to add its fifth land-based radio station, in Bakersfield, Calif., in a region with a large Latino population. But that wasn’t all that excited the network. It was also the overlay map its staff produced, showing that the station’s signal covered much of the congressional district of a politician whom it’d like to hear its viewpoints and whose constituents it’d like to influence: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Flores spoke on immigration, school choice, gender identity and the importance of voting during the town hall. (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
The origins of this effort trace as far back as an evening in the early 1990s, on a Potomac River booze cruise, when a 20-something congressional press gallery official, Michael Caputo, looked up and saw someone familiar: Tom Woolston, a 20-something CIA technical operations officer. They’d gone to school together as kids in Lima, Ohio, but had lost touch. Though neither man speaks Spanish, that chance encounter and the friendship it kindled would become a seminal moment in the creation of a Spanish-language news network.
In the intervening decades, Woolston left the CIA, practiced law, invented online auctioning systems, won a huge patent fight with eBay and made a lot of money.
Caputo — among many, many other things — worked in politics in the United States, Russia and Ukraine, palled around with political trickster Roger Stone, advised Trump, left a Trump administration gig amid coronavirus controversies and a Facebook meltdown, got pudgy, got skinny, got cancer, got healthy, got religion.
In 2020, Caputo was promoting his book and accompanying documentary, “The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment.”
In one of his appearances, he met Garcia-Hidalgo. They hit it off. Garcia-Hidalgo in those days had been hosting low-budget Spanish-language political talk shows based in Washington and airing on different platforms, including, at various times, Facebook and YouTube. One of the shows — airing on a Colombian television network — had a point-counterpoint debate format with an unlikely friend: Jose Aristimuño, who had been a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration and deputy national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. (Aristimuño now co-hosts a liberal vs. conservative debate program on Americano.)
“The goal,” Garcia-Hidalgo said, “was always, you know, Fox News, Fox News, Fox News in Spanish.” (Amber Garrett for The Washington Post)
Garcia-Hidalgo had grown up in suburban Washington, the son of a successful Peruvian American civil engineer. He’d gone on to be a high-ranking telecommunications sales executive. But what really turned him on was politics, leading him to ditch his high-paying corporate gig in 2009.
He was early to Trumpism. He wrote an online column in 2011 — four years before Trump announced he was running for president — headlined “Trump: The leadership America needs.” He loves to tell liberals that Trump was the first Hispanic president — a riff on another era’s Democrats calling Bill Clinton the first Black president.
“They go nuts,” Garcia-Hidalgo said. “But it’s true. Hispanics were doing great with Trump. That’s why the needle’s moving.”
