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Why would you care about the madness that has taken over Venezuela? You are right—you don’t have to care. Venezuela is just another Banana Republic at the brink of a civil war instigated by a postmodern dictatorship. After fifteen years of a nightmare called chavismo, I understand that we are alone in this. We always have and always will. So this post is just a bottle I send to the Internet sea with no other intention than letting out my frustration.
Here is some background information about what’s going on there, as The Guardian reports:
“Week-long protests in Venezuela turned violent on Wednesday leaving three people dead, more than 20 injured, and the president, Nicolás Maduro, struggling to restrain mounting discontent among opposition groups and radical elements of his Chavista movement
(…) During this week’s protests, thousands of Venezuelans took to Twitter to report disturbances across the country, many of which included clashes between colectivos and protesters.
(…) The government denies accusations of censorship but has warned local and international media that it will punish organisations that release content likely to incite violence or be construed as “an apology for crime”. On Wednesday night the Colombian news channel NTN Noticias was taken off-air during a broadcast of that day’s street protests in Venezuela”.
Like all countries experiencing sociopolitical convulsion, Venezuelans are alone in their struggle, but some still want to believe in magic solutions and pray for the international community to save us from our own madness. Truth is, the so-called international community is but a Gothic entity ruled by bureaucrats and lost souls, and states act motivated by predatory instincts. And when the international community does intervene, the outcome is even worse (examples abound). Venezuelans learned it the hard way in 2002.
In 2013, about 24,000 people were violently killed in a country that has so much oil that gives it for free to Venezuelans and other friendly countries. Who is gonna want to play risky games in the name of “democracy” and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? This is why, in this context of political isolation and Orwellian control, social media has become our only ally.
The images of the recent protest in Caracas (here) reminds me, mutatis mutandis, of those seen in Egypt or Tunisia during the Arab Spring. It is said that Twitter and Facebook played a staring role helping the opposition in those countries organize and communicate to fight their dictatorial regimes.
Some disagree. In his famous article Small change: The revolution will not be tweeted, journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well”, Gladwell writes. “Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?”
Granted, networks can be very anarchical—even more so online,where it’s more difficult, perhaps impossible, to control the information flow and know for sure what’s true or false. But in a place where the government violates people’s constitutional rights every single day, punishes those who opposes it, and controls all public institutions and more than 90% of the media (see here), the Internet becomes our only source of news and freedom. No wonder why newspapers and political leaders launch their own TV stations (i.e., EUTV and Capriles TV).
In his book The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom, Evgeny Mozorov dedicated chapter five to explain how late President Hugo Chávez and other not so democratic world leaders understood that the best way to counteract Internet freedom is to turn it into a Spinternet, that is, “a Web with little censorship but lots of spin and propaganda”.
The 2013 Venezuela country profile on Internet freedom made by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project run by the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, gives an excellent illustration of how the the Spinternet started in Venezuela. “Twitter has become a popular tool for political and social activism in Venezuela, due in part to President Chávez’s enthusiastic adoption of the platform. Chávez, who (posthumously) had over four million followers as of May 2013, publicly encouraged allies Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join him in bringing the “ideological battle” against capitalism to the Twittersphere. While President Chávez encouraged all Venezuelans to get online and to use Twitter so they can engage in the battle, he also condemned tweets that are critical of government programs, calling them a form of “media terrorism”. Chavez’ s successor, Nicolas Maduro, is an active Twitter user as well, and continually calls upon the group “Twitteros Revolucionarios Organizados por la Patria” (Revolutionary Twitter Users Organized by the Homeland or TROPA) to flood social media with hashtags that are pro-government, or against the opposition”
But although Mozorov’s formula seems to have worked, at least to a certain extent, for late president Hugo Chávez, president Nicolás Maduro clearly plans to try a different, more radical approach. In addition to taking news channel NTN Noticias off-air for being the only TV channel broadcasting recent street protests in Venezuela (the government owns or controls, directly or indirectly, all national TV stations), Maduro also blocked its website. It’s true that he had blocked other websites before, but this is the first time in 15 years that the chavista government actually blocks a hardcore news site.
The fact is that the overflow of photographic and video material circulating online and showing the way students protesting were brutally repressed by the police and military with firearms, drove Maduro nuts. In a desperate act, the Venezuelan government blocked images on Twitter. Nu Wexler, a Twitter spokesman, confirmed in an email to Bloomberg that the Venezuelan government “was behind the disruption”. “Twitter Inc. (TWTR) said the Venezuelan government blocked users’ online images as opposition groups marched through Caracas for a third day, demonstrating against record shortages and the world’s fastest inflation“, the article reports. Of course, the chavista government denies it.
Don’t forget that the once privately owned CANTV, now operated by the state, is the main Internet and ADSL service provider in Venezuela; in 2012, it was reported that 90 percent of Internet users connected to the Internet using CANTV. Other larger broadband service providers include Movistar, Inter, and IFX Networks. But the crux of the matter is that in 2010, Venezuela established a network access point that is managed by CANTV. In May 2012, CANTV ISP subscribers reported that they were unable to access certain sites, including independent news website La Patilla. (source: ONI).
In April 2011,the ONI carried out technical tests in Venezuela on two ISPs: the state-owned CANTV and the privately owned Cable Plus. “Testing found evidence of one blocked pornography website on CANTV; no other evidence of technical filtering was found”.
Clearly, it’s time to run another test…
Falla de borde 