 Good afternoon Sha Thank you for attending this talk Give yourself a warm applause because you're in here while the weather outside is really great Come on It's good to be in here. Who here is from outside of Europe? Awesome. Give these people warm applause because they traveled very far. I Hope that we all know that the internet Expands outside of Europe And most people here are interested in human rights, but our focus has mainly been on European issues And now we have a speaker here who is going to explain human rights issues And impacts in Latin America. We have gizela who is a Mexican lawyer And she's going to talk to us about the situation in Latin America. Give it up for gizela Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for being here. It is indeed a super warm day, which you do not get a lot of here So I really appreciate it Yes, I am gizela. I'm a Mexican lawyer and journalist. I Specialized in freedom of speech and gender in Latin America precisely and what I want to do today is tell you a Bit of what's going on in my continent. What are the protests about? What are our biggest some of our biggest battles on the upcoming years and more or less? What's a political situation at stake right now? so It's super interesting because I've seen Quite some several talks about given by women where they start apologizing Pre-apologizing saying oh, I do not know a lot about this topic so if anybody wants to jump in I am super open about that and I am a lawyer I am Coding a bit bad at it But getting there but then I was thinking of pre-apologizing and saying hey, I am not technical bear with me But then I thought I am technical I can get really lawyer in you and be super technical a doctor can be super technical The indigenous person that works with ancestral medicines can get super technical and that led me to think what is being technical Is it working with technology? But then how do you define technology itself? yesterday a very interesting talk Had me thinking if body could be a technology itself. It all depends on how you define it, right? so I am technical just a different type of technical and I have four points to make So the very first one or rather the very first two have to do with all the myths and mythologies That probably surround European thinking around Latin Americans and our use of technology and my very first Example and my favorite one is the Sapatistas Can I get a race of hands if you ever heard Talk about the Sapatistas Okay, that's a good share of the crowd. So Yeah, basically the Sapatistas in Spanish is ECLN. It stands for Ejercito Sapatista de Liberación Nacional. They are in an indigenous rebel army that Started their uprising in the same day that NAFTA came into effect NAFTA is the North American free trade agreement It started in 1994 and essentially there was a clause in NAFTA that was going to override the protection of indigenous lands from privatization by the private sector, which is obviously what happened, but They still the the indigenous Sapatista army Rebelled and declared the war on the Mexican government with beautiful poems So it quickly became the hotspot for leftist tourists around the world the wife of The widow of François Mitterrand was there Oliver Stone there was even Proposal by Benetton to do a campaign on the Sapatistas, which the Sapatistas of course being anarchists said a big no and Then here comes the myth The Western media were just going crazy about it. Can you imagine with the they called them they called it the Sapatur It was super hot and trendy at the time. I was obviously five years old. I've been there in the past years But I was not there in 1994 So essentially this whole narrative started about how the Sapatistas were becoming cyber guerrilleros They were doing this informational warfare throwing This rebellious cries from the Lacandon jungle using the internet and high-tech Weaponry There's this myth that subcomandante Marcos was using a satellite phone to communicate with cyber terrorists around the world Whatever that means to that subcomandante Marcos wrote in 2013 ha Really come on like we're talking about rural Mexico here in the 90s They barely had any electricity Sapatistas Most of them do not even speak Spanish. Do you really think subcomandante Marcos had? Super high-powered satellite phone through which he organized the whole cyber warfare No, it was their Western collaborator collaborators that took the Sapatur that were doing that for them He then said this is a really beautiful poem actually I will upload it to the Talk description afterwards. I think it's really worth reading. It was just super long. I would have paced it all But he then explained in 2013 how it was a nerd from Texas who started uploading all the communication That's how they got Spread into cyberspace right, but they did not have internet It was not them and when you see the pictures it becomes really ridiculous this narrative, which is also partly explained because 70% of the blogs that talk about the Sapatistas are either From the US or European so what kind of narrative won here if Mexican media and Latin American media were not even producing enough materials at the time of course this explains partly because of governmental censorship and the Control that the Mexican government has over the press, but still we can understand how some narratives get imposed over others So just a quick update on how aware the Sapatistas are right now At the time of the Internet of the 90s the Sapatistas were very much in tune their anarchist ideology was very much in tune with the decentralization Collaborating with indie media The internet as an agreement, but then as we have shifted to social networks world gardens private platforms privatized and Properties software and algorithms the Sapatistas have also changed their minds for them now They believe that social networks are an instrument of capitalism and that resistance cannot be articulated there and They also believe we should prioritize Communitary work and community building in a physical relationship, and I don't mean infrastructure I mean actually touching and seeing people and talking to them and making them and learn things and teaching each other So that's where the Sapatistas are now regarding the internet It's not they have actually took a step back and rejected the internet principles as we know it now So second myth, this is really good, too This is Guillermo Gomez Peña. He's what we call a Chicano Not in a bad sense. It's not a bad word He's Mexican, but he lived in the United States for a long time and what he basically He has this beautiful thing that I'm gonna quote directly It goes like this the mythology goes like this with Latinos cannot handle high technology We are caught between a pre-modern past and an imposed Modernism that prevents us from being anything but manual beings Artisans not technicians our understanding of the world is strictly political Poetical or at best metaphysical, but not scientific or technological whatsoever We are highly emotional passionate creatures Meaning irrational and when we decide to step out of our primitive zone and create high technology We are pretty much doomed to copy what others the Anglos and the Europeans have done better So we're pretty much screwed right This is a mythology what I think is very interesting. He wrote this at the end of the 90s It was around 99 2000. He was also part of the electronic disturbance theater We Latinos often feed this mythology but rings by Reinstating our romantic and humanistic nature and by portraying ourselves as Victims of a colonialist technology and you will see why this is relevant in a few slides So as I was thinking this I was also thinking how We could do the same with gender, right? Just change the Mexicans or Latinos for women women are irrational passionate creatures that cannot handle high technology How's that for a stereotype? We are passionate Metaphysical beings that are made for cooking, but why would you? Why would you mesh with software? Why would you call? Why would you and this is also a stereotype? This is also a mythology So very quickly because gender is going to cut through my whole presentation. Let's just agree on what gender is Gender is all the role spaces behaviors attitudes clothing colors and topics of conversation that are deemed appropriate for men and women This means that I mean deemed appropriate if you're born with a penis or a vagina if you're born with a penis Then it's appropriate for you to wear pants and like blue and play with Legos when you're young If you're born with a vagina then they will put pink dresses on you give you a doll so you can fit and Tell you that playing soccer is for boys So this is essentially the social programming we get and this construction is the gender Construction which is different from sex which is rather biological and it's not non-binary either But I am not getting into that discussion right now Just so we all know and are on the same page on what gender is and how it is artificially created and it's not biologically determined So countering the myths. I really dislike the digital literacy approach where the Google creators buzz just Strolls in Latin America saying come create apps be a web developer I am not referring to countering the myth of Latinos not creating technology in this sense But I would rather talk about technological appropriation questioning infrastructure questioning What technology itself and how we define technology itself? It is not a neutral matter All the power relationships that go on in the world replicate in this infrastructures and replicate online as well Not because we have a chat it means that everybody can express themselves equally minorities will still be oppressed and women will Still be genderized we cannot talk nowadays online or Twitter or Facebook about things that are outside of our gender stereotypical Behavior, I will tell you a bit more about that later, but this is basically the concept of Appropriating technology so two really quick examples are in Mexico the project of Rizomatica, which is the first indigenous communitarian Telecommunication service operating with a license. They actually got a license in Mexico over 50,000 communities do not have telecommunication services because it's super expensive It's not profitable for companies to set an antenna in their communities because it's sometimes less than 3,000 people living there So Rizomatica has managed to create the technology and to teach the people so that it's the only indigenous community that actually Manages it then also in Argentina We have Niqua Channis who has been with mini max networks creating community of Wi-Fi networks Altar Mundi is the name of the project and Then I want to tell you about this one, which is definitely one of my favorites. It's autonomous feminist infrastructure I know that for some of us here in this room the mere word feminist sometimes causes us to cringe I would ask you to be a bit tolerant with it because it's also gendered It's also to say that all feminists are ugly lesbians Harry angry only lesbians is also a construction that has been made about dissident women So let's just think about the term feminism once again and how it relates to infrastructure So this is kefir kefir what I really like about this project is that it it questions the economy of Autonomous infrastructure itself because basically it's based on voluntary work and donations and you know who has time to volunteer mostly white men Because free time is a privilege Do you think an indigenous woman that has a job and then an invisible job that is called housework? Taking care of children cooking and cleaning which is not recognized It's not paid and you were expected to do it as a woman anywhere in the world But even more in certain communities that have a much more said gender standards Do you think an indigenous woman has time to volunteer? for an auto for the keeping up of the unautonomous server or keeping up any other administering any other service So basically their discourse is about how non-binary it means people that are not identified as men or women or non diverse or diverse people non-white people non-seismail people have more complications getting into autonomous Infrastructure autonomous technologies. I've been thinking that even free software is a privilege Do you know how much time and knowledge it goes? Into making that transition have you ever wondered that or we just born in an environment where you could do it You could get it and then you just assume everybody else should Is it the most ethical thing so? What the feminist infrastructure is worried about is actually making the shift and Caring for the way that people are learning to take care and appropriate their own technologies I really like this quote. We don't want to scale up We want to skip it keep it small in the sense of a neighborhood where everybody knows each other so the way that Capitalism has shaped the internet nowadays has us thinking that there's only one way of providing services and this is massively Because a massive service means more profit. So once again, we need to really find technology. This is high technology Even if it's a small autonomous server that is only working for a community. It is high technology It doesn't mean that we have to have Facebook drones to be considered as high technology And then this question about digital colonialism I have to say it's been kind of getting track in the Latin American civil society environment I question the concept itself because as I told you earlier citing Gomes, Pena the performance artist. I think that if we assume ourselves as victim of colonial technology, we're also Indicating the own stereotype. So my approach is rather just question the concept of technology itself And how are we defining our relationship to technology and what power is being invisible eyes there power and voices there for? so Basically the premise of the digital technology with the digit sorry digital colonialism, which is essentially true is that most of the world Most of the internet speaks English. Here's a 2017 statistics. It's true English Chinese and then Spanish and Because of these the content created by the people in the global south is much less Which opens up a lot of discussions, right? Because then if say the history of Latin America in Wikipedia was created Well, this is the Freebase graph the Wikipedia one is not that good. It's a bit crooked But the argument is that there are more Wikipedia articles inside of this circle than outside of it This is Europe and as you can see the other all the other parts of the world are not that the knowledge is not being as produced in the global South this one as well This is the IP for utilization in I believe this is 2016 and This for me is shocking We have content in English created by the global north in terms of I carve out archival processes This is quite complicated because then it means that we get historical narratives from the global north Search algorithms. I'm super worried about that Properties search algorithms that are also secret. We don't know how they prioritize information and we don't know how Google for example Decides not to index something Why why would they not index something and we don't even know about it? It's the biggest and most monopolistic search engine in the world Should there be any kind of accountability for this? And then of course the bomber for they copyright So basically the fight of copyright I could talk for hours about this. I will not But basically via the flexibilization of patents And the harshening of copyright norm is in favor of multinationals and this is why NAFTA is going to be a big issue right now the free trade agreement The one that the Sapatistas rebelled against in 94 is being renegotiated as we speak by at least two morons My president Enrique Peña Nieto that cannot even mention three books that he has read at a book fair and do not yet Even been getting me started about Trump like I cannot talk about that right now But copyright provisions being loved by big multinationals are going to get in Into NAFTA. How are we going to push back and what are we going to do about it? Because that's going to change the whole ecosystem of the internet so Third, let's take a quick glimpse at Latin America We have our own problems and we have our own solutions for them Just because you went backpacking to Latin America for two months That's not me in your Che Guevara or you understand the reality of the content to the continent Guess what? We are not even a continent. We're different countries stop calling us the developing Country we're not a country. There's a lot of them. There's not an homogeneous reality. We cannot even agree amongst ourselves So let's drop the Che Guevara for digitization as well Just a quick statistics We have around almost 60% of internet penetration rate Compared to Europe and North America is quite a bit. Mexico is included in the North America one by the way so that my shift percentages a bit as well and One of the projects that was done Who here knows Facebook free basics, do you know what I'm okay? So basically Free base books is free basics was about not charging for Facebook data and it was beautiful because global voices just published Study about how it was a big fail Because it's digital colonialism. They do not take into account the local language of the population All you get is ads from the UK and US in the case of Mexico for one of the most rich men in the world, which is Mexican and Well, it's not the internet. It's just Facebook and some of their crappy services So why would that be a solution for the lack of connectivity? The answer is it's not and Then hashtags everywhere How despite these platforms being evil or having their own Rules the world gardens they have been useful and we have to acknowledge that for political organization. This is the Yo soy 132 I am a hundred and thirty two It's the one of the first and most important social movements created by a hashtag and a trending topic in Mexico and That spread through Latin America in the coming years It was against who the moron who is now a president. He was a candidate back then And the creation of trending topics is crucial because in countries where you have media being manipulated by the government and trending topics are a very effective way of counter-narrative Then take the street against corruption in Peru Yeah, I can say this is So the state the Mexican state disappeared 43 students for 43 anarchist indigenous students and What the DA's Office the police said oh, I'm tired of looking for them. We could just we just cannot find them I'm tired. So we made a hashtag saying hashtag. I am tired reappropriating the hashtag it took a lot of people out on the streets and this was actually the first Regional movement with a lot of solidarity with a lot of causes because we're talking about force disappearance And we're talking about media not talking about force disappearances. So then how do you get past that? informational gatekeeping Definitely Twitter was a big tool at the time Pyro webs against the metadata retention in Paraguay then Guatemala with Quit now they kicked out their president who was Presumably involved in the Maya and genocide in Guatemala and also killed one of the opposition leaders and For a temer temer is the now president of Brazil that made a coup d'etat against Dilma Rousseff Which was one of the first Latin American female presidents in the continent. She was in Brazil The downsides of protesting in these platforms are the Twitter bots The how they they are behaving I'm calling in the Latin American fake news just because this term is super Trendy right now, even though I do not agree with it and then of course the private censorship that goes on in the platform So basically the government's especially in Mexico has been documented in Ecuador and Venezuela as well Which are three super hot political spots right now in Mexico what the what the Mexican government does is have a lot of but accounts to Repress hashtags and prevent political organization How they do this is that they coordinate spamming through all these different bot accounts that through the years They have become really sophisticated. They are not as hard to catch as they were before So when spamming the hashtag the Twitter algorithm algorithm just takes it down from the trending topics does Disabling political organization and in impeding us through the actual creation of counter narratives We know what to do with propaganda, right? You just burn it or something You know how to deal with parades been around forever political propaganda But what do you do when you effectively have? What it looks like a cyber riot police around your Twitter conversation? How are you going to fight that if we're talking about private platforms? proprietary algorithms and Just the Silicon Valley company that is not that sensitive to these kinds of topics because they don't need to get spam out So these are the questions that we're facing nowadays Would the answer be oh just go and get organized in your own autonomous platform How would we teach people to do that? What would be the learning curve and how could we effectively organize if we do in such a platform? This might be a matter of life and death It's not It's not that light Rumpelmiedo means do not be afraid the repression of protests was so much in Mexico at one point that people stop protesting It's the chilling effect you silence yourself you self-censor yourself So we made this hashtag where we essentially monitored where the cops were coming from so we could effectively run away from them So we had people monitoring telling us where the greatest exits were and So then if the government spams that you get detained You get taken into the special unit for crime or gonna say for criminal organizations because of course protesting is a crime And then protesting with more than five people is organized crime And then well you just opened that door in the Mexican judicial system, right? Gender has also been super active through hashtags My first harassment especially was a very big hashtag through all Latin America women want to be alive And women life's matter was more or less that we got a lot of oh all lives matter too It's like yes, dude But you have two houses One is burning down and the other one is not burning down and you're putting out the fire in the one that is not burning down Just give the fire hose to the people that actually need it. No, so it was complicated like that offline the Femmyside raid in Latin America is very big at least 1678 women were killed because of gender-based crimes, which means essentially gender-hate It's really hard for me to talk about this because I've been close to it in Several investigations and occasions, but it's just bodies that are treated like nothing In a cat the pick one of the most dangerous sites in Mexico to be a woman We found eight female bodies dumped in a sewage in a trash bag So when we talk about online gender violence, we have to know that the internet is not an isolated reality But it that it's also connected to this Offline violence and machista violence that does exist abortion a basic reproductive, right? It's still prohibited in Chile Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haitian Suriname and not only that But if you are a pro-abortion activist because you're not supposed to be a pro-abortion activist You will probably get a lot of gender-hate on your social networks if you're a feminist if you're a I have friends that are anchor women for Fox sports and They get so many death and rape threats because women are not supposed to talk about sports Because women look better when they shut up because you are go back to the kitchen That's the insult that they get the most go back to the kitchen Well, that doesn't is the kitchen my place Should I not be speaking about politics or sports because it's not gender appropriate and the online violence that they get It's part of the social norm to perpetuate gender standards So no the internet is definitely now not a safe place at least not from where I see it very quickly What my first harassment hashtag allowed us to actually do was visualize and talk about topics that were not That were taboo before it was just about saying when you were first harassed You cannot see this graph this well, but this is 18 years old and This is 10 years old and this is five years old So most women in Mexico And this was Mexico and Central America get harassed the first time when they are between five and ten years old We're basically talking about child abuse here This was a very good campaign because through hashtags We could actually get all that information and start making network analysis and talk and Make people more conscious about this topic and also break the taboo if you're a woman and you have been harassed It's okay to tell your story. It's not your fault. It was not you you can speak up. It's fine It was a very beautiful and very emotive social network millennial moment Then the downsides of course on the other side is all these platforms censoring Politically relevant and politically protected content via their terms and conditions like this picture We know of Facebook sensors nipples They censor nipples because our female nipples are connected to a reproductive function and because they are connected to a Reproductive function they are deemed as erotic socially because your guys nipples are not Connected to a reproductive function, then they are not so that's the stupid reason why Facebook sensors nipples It's either algorithmic or it's their content managers We have no fucking clue because of course the algorithm is secret So black women protesting this is obscene for Facebook. They took it down So then the question about the feminist infrastructure come backs comes back up Can we resist on the same platforms that are effectively colonizing us and well? Instagram on shaving bikini lines need to be censored somehow because sure women need to be perfectly Well-shaved right we guys can be hairy women have to be shaved. That's gender again. It's definitely not biological We're all born with hair So super quickly Let me go through this surveillance scenario, which is also not very good I'm sorry. I hope I don't depress you but This is an investigation I made in 2015 about hacking team We all I'm going to assume we all know the hacking team thing this Italian malware company That's all the Galileo and they got hacked by Phineas Fisher in 2015 As you can see in this map almost all Latin America either bought malware from hacking team or Was negotiating with hacking team when they got hacked and they couldn't go through the purchase Which is worrisome for two reasons first because we have authoritarian governments buying malware with no regulation and then we have regulated we have malware that is being used in the framework of the laws that were valid in dictatorships So dictatorial laws for surveillance now being used with a super super invasive malware How would that go wrong? Well, how can that go wrong? Can you can somebody please tell me? So the biggest client of hacking team again in the world was Mexico buying almost 6 million euros Then we have Brazil but quite a bit as well and what was concerning here. Well, it was Brazil Colombia Ecuador Honduras and Chile what was very concerning here was that In Mexico it was used to spy against activists and political opponents in Ecuador It was used to spy against political opponents and because of the hacking team emails We knew that the DEA effectively intercepted all internet communications of Colombians Which was quite a scandal by itself It got lost within all the hacking team false emails But I think it says a lot also about US intervention in Latin America still nowadays Then we have a pack rat, which is one of the first proven example of Ideologically directed malware because pack rat this study published by cities and love showed how it was targeted against Communist countries except for Brazil the rest of the countries that where pack rat was detected where The communist allegiance the Bolivarian allegiance in Latin America and then we get to the bad guys I think of the year NSO group sold 250 million dollars to the Mexican government worth of Pegasus this malware that it's also remote control malware and It was used against the fiercest critics of the president the female journalist That uncovered the biggest corruption scandal the White House Her kid because she was smart enough not to click on the fishing links that And as the the Pegasus malware sent to her to get infected It was used against the lawyers that are litigating the disappearance of the 43 in the inter-american court and Against anti-corruption activists and then we knew they were used against government opposition and Some more journalists and some more lawyers Ah, and also there was a special commission that was investigating the disappearance of the 43 a special international commission They got spied on also with Pegasus Approximately each piece of malware costs one million dollars So it's a very expensive piece of malware that is Supposedly being used for national security reasons, but obviously this shows what the abuses of malware are So if there's any malware development Developers in the room just think about how these technologies being used in other places with the pretext of Preventing crime terrorism or the Chappals man escaping from jail again Well, this is just a cool project these Protestos by article 19 and quoting rights, which was a response to counter surveillance a protesting surveillance Just like some tips on what you can do you can cover your face some legal advice Take care with what you post encrypt, etc so essentially Yes, we have our own problems, but we have our own solutions as well It does not necessarily mean that We are idiots or we cannot do technology ourselves as I already said I Went through the myths of the sapatistas I went through the myth and mythology of how Latinos and us women cannot create technology and I've been I take I retake what the latest poem of the sapatistas on the internet is Well, first of all, there is not one internet. Let me just be clear about that the internets are a lot and They are connected to geopolitical realities as well And I was I was saying it's not a neutral space not just because you have a chat or a platform or a mailing list It means that everybody can express themselves equally because power relationships are being replicated Gender class and race Relationships are being replicated So essentially the question of the sapatistas is is the internet seated still a space of dispute and struggle or how we completely Lost that battle. What can we do now here from our privilege to keep? feeding a more open and diverse space so For four and a half things maybe five first do not appropriate our narratives Now just because you went to an encuentro zapatista once does not mean that you know what you're talking about We are not just emotional and irrational people. It would be super nice to have that acknowledged every once in a while Be self-conscious about your privilege Having time to volunteer is a privilege. Do not judge people that do not have it Take a pause and think about diversity in your own work environment Pause and think how you can get more women in your hack spaces Pause and think what you are doing to effectively silence minority voices online or offline Are you trolling the woman? Are you the troll that is trolling the woman? Are you the troll that is trolling the Indian guy at the tent next door Let's be conscious about our privilege. This is definitely the first step online or offline Recognize that we might have some solutions for our community problems. It's not only a one-way street It's not only what is done in Europe what should be copied because a lot of things are not working here We might have creative solutions for that and finally ask questions before telling us what to do or the famous mansplaining I have to say I've been getting it quite a lot here at a chat But don't assume that you are right just because you are right Ask questions first get to know the other person. Let's intersect. Let's touch each other more Recognize the gender class and race are a real problem outside of this bubble Let's make this a real conversation We all want a more diverse equal and open internet for everyone. Thank you very much Thank you very much, Kiesela. Do we have any questions? We have some time for questions. I won't bite I promise. I was a bit harsh on you at the end All right, let's thank you so again. Thank you