Page 13 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, OCTUBRE 2021 (English)

capital, and took control of the Government. On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was found on the run and executed, ending the first phase of the conflict.
In Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, protests against Ali Abdullah Saleh lasted for more than a year, until in February 2012 he was ousted from power. Qatar and the United Arab States were the only places that did not have any demonstrations. Six and seven years later the II Arab Spring returned with new protests, helped by smartphones, in 2019 and 2020 in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon.
Citizen Weapons
Although these demonstrations called for democratic freedoms, political, economic and social changes, in no country was democracy achieved; on the contrary, the Islamic State appeared and occupied the digital platform created by these movements.
Beyond the political benefits that the people obtained, the interesting thing is that the tools that unleashed the Arab Spring were social networks and, of course, the internet. Cell phones became citizen weapons of information that allowed them to witness, promote and coordinate the mobilization. On Facebook, stories were published, videos and all kinds of news were broadcast totally beyond the reach of the authorities who had always censored and blocked the traditional media.
“The role of Facebook was decisive,” recalls Hamadi Kaloutcha, who returned to Tunisia after studying in Belgium and who in 2018 launched the forum I Have a Dream. “We could publish the information under the nose of the regime”, he indicates. Thus the police government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was defeated with lightning speed. In less than a month, the Tunisian President left power after 23 years at the helm of Tunisia. In Egypt, “Thank You Facebook” graffiti flooded the country’s walls. All of this, years before the social media giant was questioned for its role in spreading false information. The campaign on Facebook: “We are all Khaled Said” or “WAAKS” (acronym in English) served as a catalyst. This 28-year-old blogger was tortured
to death by police in 2010. Photos with a deformed face circulate on the networks, while the authorities claim, unconvincingly, that he drowned after ingesting a bag of drugs during his arrest.
Alerted by the networks, hundreds of people attend his funeral and, later, silent demonstrations. At the beginning of 2011, the movement broke loose and turned into protests against the Government. Blogger Khaled Saïd became an icon of the revolt and Hosni Mubarak resigned in February 2011, after almost three decades in power. The Internet was erected as an opening channel to the world so that citizens of all countries knew what was happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and other countries in the Middle East. The Internet allowed information to cross national borders and the international voice to echo the problem; it allowed for impressive and unthinkable political changes in weeks, changes that never happened in centuries.
The Conflict in Latin America
Eight years later, a similar phenomenon, inexplicable at first, happened at another end of the world, also caused, in great part, by the same instruments, social networks. In Chile, millions of Chileans express their discontent in the streets, with protests, looting and vandalism as a protest against the increase in the price of transport in the capital’s Metro and start a frontal fight against the privatizing impact of the neoliberal version of education, the health, social security, pension management. Finally, a plebiscite was achieved that approved a new Constitution and the formation of a Constituent Convention that expands political rights and new legitimacies. In parallel, a de facto parliamentarianism begins to rule that limits presidential power in practice, increasingly discredited and weakened by its erratic management during the incidents. In Ecuador for weeks, from the streets and from the countryside, the social outbreak floods the public space with demands that question the so-called “internal colonialism” and the “racism” associated with the International Monetary Fund and its
adjustment-austerity policies. A broad social movement was centred around the National Indigenous Confederation of Ecuador that questions the bias of government policies that promote “extractivism and territorial possession” of indigenous peoples.
In Bolivia, the social outbreak arises around electoral fraud linked to the re-election of Evo Morales and his derivation in the military coup that removed him from office. In Colombia, the massive resistance creates a social outbreak that combines the national strike against non-compliance with the 2016 Peace Accords, with massive violence against sectors of the city and the countryside. Resistance arises to the neoliberal economic reforms that the Government of President Ivan Duque intended: the new Tax Law, Pensions Reform, Labour, Health and Education Privatization. In Haiti there were also social outbreaks during 2019. Discontent against the rise in fuel prices of between 35 and 51 percent revived the resistance against the so-called “long-standing colonial racism”. Starting in 2018, millions of Haitians regrouped in an unconventional anti-systemic movement that raised two demands: the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse (who was assassinated on July 7, 2021, after four years of Government) and the “transformation of the system that reproduces social inequality based on racism and discrimination ”. Puerto Rico also registered unprecedented social outbreaks. Seven massive marches in mid-2019 achieved the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rossello. They repudiated the bipartisan system of Puerto Rico for its manifest corruption and for the death of more than 4,500 people due to severe cyclones and earthquakes; they demanded salary improvements and measures were demanded to reactivate the economy of the Caribbean island. The resistance challenged the presence of American power.
Even in Cuba, although later, the first citizen protests were registered in July 2021, thanks to Internet and the smartphones, which were drowned out by Government repression but which reached the eyes and ears of the world thanks to new technologies.
Montt Latin American Magazine p13
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