NN was born in 1960 in Quito, in a house that had once been a mansion in La Mariscal, located at the corner of Amazonas Avenue and Roca Street. He studied at a semi-military boys' school in the neighborhood, back when it was the residential, commercial, tourist, and banking district of the capital.
His house was on Amazonas Avenue, which was known as the "fool's racetrack," because this, one of the city's first avenues, was a gathering place for the newly rich, who showed off their cars. This neighborhood was the first to have paved streets, houses with front gardens and garages, running water, electricity, and restrooms. Mansions and hotels belonging to major international chains were being built there, and embassies, especially the American Embassy, were located there, as well as ministries such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ecuador's first private university, the Catholic University.
On Amazonas Street, where NN lived his early days with his five siblings, his father owned a radio station that occupied the south side of the house, while the north side was for the family.
That radio station, called Radio Metropolitana, was one of the most popular in the capital. Besides music and news programs, it featured a show called Politiquitis, a dialogue between a man and a woman from the city who criticized the current government, as well as radio dramas about Ecuadorian legends. It also had an auditorium on the second floor, built specifically for young people and musical groups to perform.
NN and his brother would go up there every afternoon after classes at a school called Cristóbal Colón, located on the corner of Amazonas Avenue and Veintimilla Street. For NN, his favorite radio program was watching the actors who did radio sketches about the legends of Quito and Ecuador. For his older brother, the favorite program was listening to the sports announcer, Mr. Carlos Rodrigues, a man from Manabí, who spoke so fast that when he narrated soccer matches, he described every play in detail, guessing what the players were thinking on the field, or what the coach wanted. He commented with such enthusiasm that when television arrived in the 1970s, Radio Metropolitana had the largest audience, even though it didn't show what was happening in the stadiums.
In the new auditorium he built, in the front part where there had been a beautiful garden, the bleachers, and the stone portico of the mansion, the ground floor was rented to Filanbanco, while on the second floor, the seats and the stage were occupied by the artists and fans of the so-called New Wave, who sang the music of Alberto Vásquez, Leo Dan, or the Beatles.
But one day President Velasco Ibarra, who had won the elections in 1974, planted a time bomb in the studio, which exploded during the night, because Dr. Moreno Cordero, owner of the radio station and founder of the Democratic Left party, which in 1974 managed to place the mayor of Quito, Andrés Córdoba Galarza, as governor of Pichincha and Rodrigo Borja as deputy. But when Velasco Ibarra, who had already been in power for three years, again proclaimed himself dictator, as he had done on three previous occasions for which he was overthrown, Dr. Moreno gifted an old war tank to the Central University. This war tank was a memento of the scrap metal Velasco Ibarra had purchased in 1944, after assuming the presidency of Ecuador for the second time. During that term, he disregarded the Rio de Janeiro Treaty, which, in addition to geographical flaws, was imposed for cohesion, as the Peruvian army and its ally, the United States, occupied the Amazon and the provinces of El Oro and Loja, while the United States, Peru's ally, occupied the Galapagos Islands. Velasco Ibarra then rearmed and reorganized the Ecuadorian army, but the weapons he bought from the United States were scrap metal from World War II. The tank that Dr. Moreno donated to the university in 1974 served as a reminder to the country how Velasco had been deceived and had deceived Ecuadorians five times over. He was a demagogue who used electoral campaigns, loudspeakers, microphones, and the radio boom, which since the 1920s had been part of the 20th-century revolution.
After that explosion, the radio station was leased out and moved to another location. Hundreds of records from its sound archive and its recordings were destroyed, as was its mixing console. Dr. Moreno left politics, saying that one doesn't live for politics, one dies for it.
Today, NN, who studied medicine but whose passion was radio—so much so that he even studied radio production at CIESPAL—has created a radio station called Ecotrackers and Eco Rastreadores, Radio Sin Fronteras (Radio Without Borders), in the same location where Radio Metropolitana operated, broadcasting in English and Spanish via the internet.
