THE STATE OF DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN THE ERA OF THE INTERNET Bernardo Sorj and Sergio Fausto Editors POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN THE ERA OF THE INTERNET Plataforma Democrática (www.plataformademocratica.org) is an initiative of the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais and the Fundação Fernando Henrique Cardoso, dedicated to strengthening democratic institutions and culture in Latin America through the pluralist debate of ideas on the social and political transformations in the region and worldwide. Collection: The State of Democracy in Latin America Directed by Bernardo Sorj (Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais) and Sergio Fausto (Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation) Revision: John Wilkinson Translation: Raymond Maddock Cover: Brian Solis and Lincon Justo Graphic design: Lisia Lemes © Plataforma Democrática © Bernardo Sorj and Sergio Fausto São Paulo: Edições Plataforma Democrática, 2016 ISBN: 978-85-92661-01-4 The publication of this book was made possible with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundation, to whom we are extremely grateful. We also would like to thank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for supporting the English translation of the book. We would like to stress that these institutions bear no responsibility for the opinions expressed in the book. All or part of this work may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes free of charge as long as the original publication and its authors are duly acknowledged. POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN THE ERA OF THE INTERNET Bernardo Sorj Sergio Fausto Editors Summary 09 Preface Bernardo Sorj and Sergio Fausto 11 Online/offline: the new fabric of political activism Bernardo Sorj 37 Argentina Rocío Annunziata, Emilia Arpini, Tomás Gold and Bárbara Zeifer 111 Brazil Rodrigo Savazoni and Kalinca Copello 167 Chile Rayén Condeza, Marcelo dos Santos, Alonso Lizama and Paz Vásquez 233 Colombia María Paula Martínez and Estefania Avella 287 Ecuador Orazio Belletini and Adriana Arellano 351 Venezuela Francine Jácome 9 Preface In this book we continue Plataforma Democrática’s efforts to contribute towards the debate on the paths of democracy in Latin America and worldwide, focusing on the use made of the new means of communication by political activists and how these in turn influence the ways in which politics is conducted. Contemporary democracies face enormous challenges: weakened political parties, global processes that redefine the national State’s possibilities for action, social inequality and distrust of politicians. All these areas — and others not mentioned — , are colored and influenced by the new communication media. This book contains 19 case studies taken from six South American countries, presenting a broad range of innovative experiences and their impacts on the ways in which civil society, political parties and governments are organized and act. The cases of cyberactivism analyzed indicate that none of them represents a “silver bullet” — an experience capable of resolving the multiple challenges faced in constructing higher quality, more robust democratic institutions. But they all indicate new possibilities and new challenges for the development of virtuous relations between the traditional forms of participation (both in civil society organizations and in political parties) and activism in the virtual space. We are at the beginning of a new era, and there is much to learn, to monitor and to analyze. Without ignoring the fact that every attempt at synthesis is partial and temporary, we hope that this book may contribute to 10 the debate on a subject crucial for the future of democracy. Lastly, we would like to acknowledge the important contribution made by the participants in the workshops in which the preliminary versions of the texts on the diverse countries studied were presented. Bernardo Sorj and Sergio Fausto Directors - Plataforma Democrática 11 Online/off-line: the new fabric of political activism Bernardo Sorj1 This book is dedicated to understanding and analyzing the transformations in political activism in Latin America produced by use of the new communication media. The different chapters are based on the hypothesis developed in a previous work,2 in which we argued that: 1. We may distinguish three major waves in the formation of civil society in Latin America in the XX and XXI century. The first wave comprised organizations that represented broad social sectors, generally grouped around social and economic or professional interests, whose leaders, in democratic regimes, were chosen by their members. The second wave, whose typical format was that of the NGO, consists of myriad organizations, mostly small, whose legitimacy is sustained by the moral value of the causes they advocate (such as human rights, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, environment etc.) and not a mandate granted by a determined audience. Lastly, the third wave 1 Full professor of Sociology, UFRJ (ap), Director of the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais and the Plataforma Democrática project. 2 Sorj, B y Sergio, F., Internet y Movilizaciones Sociales: Transformaciones del Espacio Público y de la Sociedad Civil, São Paulo: Plataforma Democrática, 2015. Available at: http:// plataformademocratica.org/Arquivos/Internet_y_Movilizaciones_Sociales_Transformaciones_ del_Espacio_Publico_y_de_la_Sociedad_Civil.pdf 12 Bernardo Sorj is constituted within the virtual world, comprising citizens who issue opinions, mostly of a personal nature, on the social networks. None of these waves eliminate their predecessor; they overlap and influence each other mutually, with each new wave tending to occupy spaces of the previous ones, both in terms of organizational format and in the content of the messages they convey. 2. The impact of the new virtual world may not be dissociated from broader social processes in society and in the political system which, in turn, are affected by the new forms of communication. For example, the social transformations — in the world of work and consumption, individualization processes, the crisis in the ideological frameworks which structured political life in the 20th century, the weakening of political parties — date from before the emergence of communication via the Internet, which is influenced by these preexisting trends, while at the same time modifying them. 3. The bibliography on the effects of the virtual world counterposes “pessimists” and “optimists”. The optimists stress that the communication technologies open up new possibilities for horizontal communication among citizens, diminish communication transaction costs in the public space, accelerate communication and eliminate physical distance enabling people and groups to issue opinions and establish dialogues on an unprecedented scale, reducing the relative importance of the old communication media and opening up new alternative information channels for citizens. The pessimists believe that impacts of the Internet are the impoverishment and polarization of political culture and debate, the destruction of privacy — providing the State and companies with access to databanks which enable the manipulation and control of individuals —, and the illusion of Online/off-line: the new fabric of political activism 13 click activism, which would be a form of catharsis producing little of consequence. They also state that the basic power structures, be it in the offline or online world, remain the same as in the past, dominated by large companies and by political power. We consider that both positions indicate real phenomena and that cyberactivism is influenced by both tendencies. 4. Online and offline worlds cannot be dissociated. The offline world plays a key role in the virtual space, whether through its capacity to intervene directly in the social networks, or through the appropriation of movements of opinion and mobilizations generated and/or promoted by the virtual world. As such, the virtual world and the offline world are profoundly interlinked. The analysis of how they relate, be it through offline actors who initiate virtual movements or intervene in virtual communication, be it at later phases, when the political dynamic is redirected to other spaces, occupies a central place in the studies in this book. 5. In a way, the virtual public space has deepened but also modified certain tendencies, already present in the second wave of civil society, of political fragmentation and the distancing of society from party political life. The new forms of communication tend to eliminate the separation between the public and the private merging the subjective and the public, the personal and the collective, and valuing messaging in which individual malaise and denunciation predominate. If the first wave of civil society was built on political ideologies with visions of the whole of society, and the second around the defense of the most diverse rights, both were sustained by the arguments and world views of a desirable society. In the new communication format dominant in the virtual world, there is a predominance of short messages (or 14 Bernardo Sorj images) related primarily to contextual situations that mobilize essentially reactive feelings and attitudes. 6. One of the major challenges for the Internet as a public space based on standards of civility is its anonymous nature, that is, the difficulty or impossibility of identifying the authors of messages. An ever- growing number of messages circulate on the Internet produced by robots and trolls (generally professional