The social networks have played an important role in citizens’ initiatives to organise protests against the gas price hike in Mexico and in the government’s strategy to curb cyber-activism. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 19 2017 (IPS)

The scene in the video is simple: a bearded man with a determined look on his face sitting in front of a white wall witha portrait of Emiliano Zapata, symbol of the Mexican revolution.

“Mexicans to the battle cry, the moment has come to overthrow the corrupt political system we are under, it is now or never. We will show what we are made of. With just two steps we will be able to write a new history, which our children and grandchildren will also enjoy,” lawyer Amín Cholác says emphatically.

In the video titled “Mexicans to the cry of: Peña out!,” Cholác urges people to take part in demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience against the rise in fuel prices adopted Jan. 1 by the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto.

“I made this video because we cannot stand it anymore, this country cannot take it any longer,” the founder of the non-governmental organisation Dos Valles Valientes, who lives in the southern state of Chiapas, told IPS.

The video has thousands of views on Youtube, and in other video networks, and has also spread over Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp.

“It has been well received, people from all over the country have joined, they have communicated via social networks or by phone. But I have also been threatened, they put an image of hitmen, they insulted my mother, but if I had been scared, I wouldn’t have done it,” said Cholác.

The activist, whose organisation fights increases in electricity rates, said “the networks are a double-edged sword. They have worked extraordinarily well for us, because they are very accessible and cheap. Whatsapp reaches every corner, as do text messages.”

But activists are also threatened through the networks, said Cholác, whose Facebook account was cloned twice. “I opened another one, and I promised myself that for every Facebook account that was cloned, I would open three,” he said.

The video’s wide dissemination reflects the growing use of the Internet in Mexico to drive political and social movements, such as the resistance to fuel price increases. But the social networks also serve to promote counter-attacks against citizen initiatives by the political powers-that-be and the spreading of misinformation and propaganda by the other side.

The up to 20 per cent hike in fuel prices unleashed the latent social discontent, with dozens of protests, looting of shops, roadblocks, and blockades of border crossings throughout the country, as well as a wave of lawsuits filed by trade unions and organisations of farmers, students and shopkeepers.

The simultaneous price rises for fuel, electricity and cooking gas were a spark in a climate of discontent over the public perception of growing impunity, corruption and social inequality.

The protests, which have waned somewhat but show no signs of stopping, have led to at least six deaths, the arrests of 1,500 people, and the looting of dozens of stores.

Topics addressed by accounts implicated in the dissemination of fear messages in the social networks to neutralise the protests against the fuel price hikes in Mexico, which were also promoted over the same networks. Credit: Courtesy of Rossana Reguillo

“The protests in response to the price rises arose from spontaneous calls disseminated on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. A call started to circulate for people to not fill their gas tanks for three days, and around new year’s day the calls for protests started, mainly along the border,” said Alberto Escorcia, with the group Loquesigue TV.

On Jan. 4, the group published an analysis of the rumours and calls to violence, which were fed by 650 Twitter accounts and more than 7,600 messages – allegedly false accounts used to fight back against the protests.

As a result of the group’s publications, Escorcia received threats, he told IPS.

According to a study carried out last year, in 2015 Internet penetration in Mexico was 59 per cent, in a population of 122 million, in spite of there being almost one mobile phone per inhabitant. This is an indication of the relative power of digital democracy in this country.

Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Twitter are the social networks preferred by Mexicans.

“Between Jan. 2 and 3 the ‘gasolinazo’ (the price rise) was going to be an important trending topic, because it is a noble theme, in the sense that it attracts a variety of sectors and affects society as a whole,” expert Rossana Reguillo told IPS.

“But on Jan. 4, the countertrend started. ‘Bots’ and ‘trolls’ gained visibility, giving rise to other trends. The (protests against the) gasolinazo started to lose ground,” said Reguillo, the head of the interdisciplinary laboratory Signa Lab, at the private Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

The lab examined Twitter and detected more than 10,000 accounts involved in the dissemination of some 15,000 messages aimed at neutralising the social unrest. Standing out in this effort were the online groups Legión Hulk and SomosSecta100tifika (which translates into ‘We are a scientific sect‘). The latter promotes the trending topic #GolpeDeEstadoMx (Pro Coup D’etat Mexico).

This counteroffensive shows how the citizens‘ online mobilisation triggers a response from the powers under attack, as well as threats against activists, such as the ones received by Cholác and Escorcia.

“We have found a pattern of fear-mongering and anonymous calls similar to what we saw ahead of the inauguration of Peña Nieto (in December 2012), when weeks before, rumours of looting began to circulate,” said Escorcia.

In his opinion, “this time there was greater damage, because the fear of going out and the encouragement for people to get involved in the looting spread from the web to the streets,” he said.

A precedent to this was the reaction sparked by the notorious quote by then Attorney-General Jesús Murillo, who said “I´ve had enough“ in November 2014, referring to the unresolved case of the forced disappearance in September of that year of 43 student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero.

That expression generated the trending topic on Twitter #YaMeCansé (“I‘ve had enough“), as well as an attempt to neutralise it.

A study “On the influence of social bots in online protests; Preliminary findings of a Mexican case study“, published last September by academics from Mexico and the United States, concluded that there was an important presence of bots, which simulate human beings, affecting discussions online about the case of the missing students.

This phenomenon is widespread, and in Latin America the experts consulted by IPS mention in particular the case of Brazil, during the lengthy process that lead to former president Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and removal from office, in August 2016.

Their hypothesis is that companies dedicated to these services work for governments and political parties to silence online dissent.

In the case of Mexico, Escorcia said “there are companies that generate anything from online attacks to fake news items and political campaigns, which have worked for all kinds of organisations: left-wing, right-wing, and obviously for the PRI,” the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party.

For Reguillo, who has also been a victim of social network attacks on several occasions, the main question is who is behind this cyber activity.

“There is money involved here, it’s not a group of young people who say ‘let‘s crash the web‘. There is a clear strategy to silence debate, to invade the public space and turn Twitter into a battlefield. They destabilise the space for discussion,” she commented.

“Nobody can stop this. People have become aware and are protesting,” said Cholác, who is calling for mass demonstrations on Feb. 5.

Another fuel price hike scheduled for early February will spark further online battles.

Protestors at a Jan. 17 rally sing songs against Malawi’s president, Joyce Banda. Credit: Mabvuto Banda/IPS

By Mabvuto Banda
LILONGWE, Jan 22 2013 (IPS)

She has taken a personal pay cut, promised reforms, resumed aid flows from Western donors and put her predecessor’s private jet up for sale.

Malawi’s president Joyce Banda seems to be making all the right moves to win over the hearts and minds of this impoverished southern African nation’s roughly 14 million people.

With over 65 percent of the population living below the poverty line, 1.4 million children involved in child labour and 74 percent of the country scratching out a living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, Malawi is desperate for change, and Banda has been the face of it for nearly a year.

Riding on a groundswell of popular support, the president came into office in April 2012 after the sudden death of her mercurial predecessor, Bingu wa Mutharika; but that popularity is eroding fast as she implements painful austerity policies to fix a sputtering economy.

The aid-dependent country teetered under the late Mutharika, whose squabbles with international donors led to a freeze in major assistance packages amounting to about 500 million dollars.

The cut in aid, which has traditionally accounted for 40 percent of the country’s budget, coincided with a steady decline in tobacco sales, Malawi’s main export earner, which have gone down by more than 50 percent since 2010.

In fact, experts here say that the high-level visit early this month by IMF Chief Christine Lagarde may have done more harm than good for Banda’s waning popularity.

Already the president has capitulated to unpopular reforms demanded by the IMF and other Western donors on whom Malawi is heavily dependent, such as devaluing the currency by 49 percent, increasing petroleum prices three times in her presidency and cutting off subsidies by moving to an automatic fuel price adjustment mechanism.

These reforms have had devastating domino effects on the country’s poor, affecting people like Shadreck Kumwembe, a primary school teacher who earns less than a dollar a day.

“My real income has halved in the last few months because of the devaluation, and yet food prices have been going up — I can’t afford to pay for everything,” Kumwembe, who also disclosed that he has not received his salary from the government in the last three months, told IPS.

Commodity prices have soared and pushed inflation to 33.3 percent in December – far higher than the government’s forecast of around 18 percent for 2012.

The latest data from the Centre for Social Concern, a local research institution focusing on the cost of living in urban Malawi, showed that since Banda took over, a family of six now needs an average of 200 dollars per month to meet basic food demands – bad news in a country where the minimum monthly wage is about 20 dollars.

On Jan. 17, just a few days after Lagarde’s visit, thousands of Malawians took to the streets peacefully in all three major cities of the country for the first large-scale protests under Banda, against what they described as “the IMF’s wrong economic prescriptions”.

“I blame IMF policies for all these high prices and job losses we are experiencing. Lagarde’s insistence that Malawi continues on this path underlines how out of touch the IMF is with reality,” said James Chivunde, a civil servant who joined the protests last week.

“Late President Mutharika refused to listen to them (IMF) to devalue the kwacha (the local currency) because he knew exactly how that was going to impact us,” Lloyd Phiri, another protestor, told IPS.

According to John Kapito, head of the watchdog known as the Consumers Association of Malawi, Banda has “transferred power” to the IMF and the World Bank.

“Like many leaders of poor countries, the problem with Joyce Banda is that she doesn’t think on her own. She is listening to everything that the IMF and the World Bank are telling her. She (agreed) to devalue the kwacha, agreed to remove subsidies on fuel without considering the impact of these decisions on the poor,” said Kapito, who helped organise the latest demonstrations.

Meanwhile, the IMF is adamant that the only way out of the cycle of poverty is for Malawi to continue to abide by the Fund’s prescriptions.

“There have been huge efforts undertaken by the Malawian government and the Malawi population and it is really important to stay the course,” Lagarde said during a press conference held in the capital Lilongwe on Jan. 5.

She assured that the country is at a tipping point, that soon inflation will start dropping and prompt the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) to revisit the base lending rate.

“Investors will return and we are confident that growth will resume,” she added.

Some local economic experts are inclined to agree with these sentiments.

“There will be no quick fixes, but any U-turn from the current course will be disastrous,” said Ben Kalua, professor of economics at Chancellor College, part of the University of Malawi.

“What is needed is a credible and consistent policy aimed at making economic growth more inclusive by ensuring the development and protection of social safety nets and expanding access to financial services so that everybody, including the poor, has access to credit,” he said.

Executive director of the Malawi Economic Justice Network, Dalitso Kubalasa, also backed the IMF and blamed the late Mutharika for delaying implementation of economic reforms.

“We are now paying the cost of the previous administration’s (policies) but we have to stay the course to (solve) the economic problems,” Kubalasa told IPS.

While admitting that the government underestimated the impact of austerity policies on the masses, Finance Minister Ken Lipenga stressed that donor support is enabling the government to implement a fiscal budget that provides adequate resources for the delivery of social services and to increase resources allocated for cushioning the most vulnerable.

“We have introduced food for work programmes aimed at assisting the poorest in our communities to cope with the unintended effects of the reforms,” Lipenga told IPS.

But Banda’s waning popularity may affect successful implementation of the reforms as she prepares for an election next year. Her biggest test will come when the parliament convenes in February, when she will be forced to reckon with the fact that many members of her governing party are losing faith in her leadership.

(END)