Reply All - #25 Favor Atender

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

In the United States, the idea of having a conversation with the President is pretty outlandish. But in Latin America, it's a regular occurrence. The most accessible president on Latin American social media is Ecuador's Rafael Correa. But what's it like to get the attention of a head of state when you may not exactly want it? This story was adapted from a Spanish Language version that originally appeared on the radio show Radio Ambulante. Listen to that here: http://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/correa-vs-crudo SPONSORS: Framebridge: http://framebridge.com (offer code "reply") Stamps.com: http://stamps.com (offer code "reply") Animoto: http://animoto.com (offer code "replyall") Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gimla co-founder Matt Lieber. So, uh, there's a couple F-words in this week's show. Which ones? Which F-words? Yeah. You're not talking about, like, frailties or foibles or... Friendship? I think you can guess.

So, should we have a language advisory? At this point, if you have to ask, then the answer is yes. Listener, you've been advised. All right. So let's say you're the one person in the country with the knowledge that in 24 hours, aliens will invade the earth. Your only hope of stopping them is warning the president in time. How do you get the president's attention? It was a question that my friend Sam threw out there.

It was basically a thought experiment. Like, how would you get in touch with the president? This is Daniel Alicon, and this week's show comes to us by way of his radio show, Radio Ambulante. My friend Sam, I think, went to Harvard. His entire strategy to solving the game was to work his way up, the administration of Harvard to get to see the president of Harvard who would then presumably be able to talk to a senator or someone in the president's cabinet and maybe the president himself. But you know, like if you don't go to Harvard, how do you do that?

If I were to try and like use the connections that I have in the world, I don't think I could do it. Like I don't think that I know anybody who is influential enough. Yeah. I would go to my to my friend Vinny who is de Blasio's cousin. The de Blasio, he's, he's referring to as Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City. And that would be my pretty direct route. I think De Blasio can get Barack Obama on the phone. But what if you don't know, Vinny? Maybe you panic and decide to take a bustle out of hostages, screaming out the window.

You might get some attention for a minute, but let's face it, a SWAT team would take you out in no time. So how about something quicker, more direct, like Twitter? Daniel is understandably skeptical. could tweet, you know, from here to the end of time, like, at Barack Obama and I wouldn't respond. You know, like, I could probably tweet at my House of Rep person, and they might not even respond. You know what I mean? Like, maybe the mayor of San Francisco. Actually, no, that's not true.

I tweeted at the mayor of San Francisco once. Actually, no, I've done it. I tweeted at Mayor Ed Lee. I tweeted at San Francisco Unified School District, because we live across street from a school. And they left their bells on over Christmas break, so New Year's Day. Like the bells ring at 7 in the morning. I was like, fuck you, S-F-U-S-D. Fix that.

Did they respond? Hell no, they didn't respond. And Daniel says that in the U.S., that's basically how it goes. You know, democracy so often feels like a joke, doesn't it? And, you know, maybe if you could get in touch with the president or if power itself didn't seem so distant and, you know, like a mirage, then maybe it wouldn't feel that way. It's hard to imagine a place where there aren't 10, 12 layers between you and the president,

where if you had a problem, big or small, you could just reach out and say, hey, man, could you fix this, please? But that place exists. And this week, we go there. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. Show about the internet. I'm Alex Goldman. So Daniel told us that in a lot of Latin America, it is strangely easy to get the president's ear,

especially through Twitter. Twitter in Latin America and presidential Twitter, you know, it's like you really get the sense that these people, these presidents, these politicians have their phone in their pocket. And they're actually doing it themselves. By way of example, he told us a story from a couple months ago about Argentinian president Christina Fernandez to Kirchner. The president of Argentina had tweeted this ridiculous, racist statement, basically where she made fun of the way Chinese people speak Spanish. Whoa. What did it say? She was in China, basically, begging for money, as people do when they go to China. Presidents do. Oh, here it is. Here it is.

More of mil assicentes to the event. Seran to all the campola and vinyon solo for the alos and the petulio? More than a thousand attendees at this event. Did they come just for the lice or in the petulio? So instead of rice, she said lice. And instead of petroleum, she said petroleum. That was her tweet. Ridiculous. Oh, man.

So obviously people responded and were like, yo, are you out of your mind? And she was like, oh, in these difficult moments we have to, on Twitter, right? In these difficult moments we have to laugh and make jokes. I seriously doubt that Christina Fernandez de Kurchner has a social media team helping her craft racist tweets. Daniel says that this is a trait common with many Latin American presidents.

Argentina, Peru, one of Daniel's sister-in-law's favorite pastimes is arguing with the former president of Columbia on Twitter. And then there's the shining example. Raphael Correa, the president of Ecuador, Mr. Accessible. According to a survey by a U.S. public relations firm, Correa is the world's second most responsive president on Twitter behind only Rwanda's Paul Kagame.

And not only is he tweeting, but he's on Twitter responding to the concerns of the people of Ecuador. If you look at Correa's Twitter feed, he has this phrase, Favore attend to this request, basically is what it means. So people will tweet him, hey, you know, like there's a road that's very rudded in my neighborhood and the city won't fix it or whatever. And he'll respond and he'll mention the mayor of that town. And then he'll put like, Favore attender.

Oh, it's like, it's actually, if you look at his report. It's like almost, it's most of what he says. Like, Favora Tendera. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, like he's super active on Twitter, and the majority of what he does is that sort of like direct responses to citizens. So if you're Ecuadorian, this is kind of cool. You can very easily reach your president online.

But there are limits to what you can say online. In 2013, Ecuador's National Assembly passed a controversial law. The communications law came out, And it basically made newspapers liable for things that were said in their comments section. And so in response, a bunch of newspapers just cut that. Yeah. Because they were like, we don't want to be held for like, you know, legally liable in this kind of like ever tightening press situation in Ecuador for like, you know, someone insults the president and then we're like responsible. So a bunch of newspapers shut down their comment sections, which should have made Correa's life easier.

Now there were fewer places for his critics to talk about him. But instead, this created an environment that helped give birth to Crudeau's greatest online nemesis. A man who so missed the conversations that he had on newspaper websites that he created a new place where people could talk freely, a Facebook group. The man called himself Crudo Ecuador, which is Spanish for Raw Ecuador. He existed on the internet purely as a cartoon avatar, this spiky-haired, mischievous-looking kid holding a... acts behind his back. And that avatar would appear as kind of like a watermark in these memes

that Crudeo Ecuador would make. Images, plus some snarky text, jokes that took aim at Ecuadorian politicians, bureaucrats, and corruption. And the public ate it up. People started sending him things because they knew that he had, he was a big megaphone, you know, in Ecuador, right? And so he received a photo of a letter. And it was a letter from the, like the National Institutes of Health, basically, the health system, the national health care system. And they'd given him an appointment for 2020, like February something in 2020. You know? I mean, even when I think about that, it just cracks me up, you know, because it's so preposterous.

Just to be clear, this is a photo of an actual letter from the health care system, saying this person had to wait five years for a doctor's appointment. And it was signed and it said, you know, please, please, arrive 15 minutes before your appointment. So Crudeau posted the letter. He added something like, you know, like, oh, honey, don't worry. I've already made my appointment for, you know, 2020. And it has a picture of a man like clutching his chest, you know. And then below it, a photo of the appointment letter, you know.

And it blew up, you know, it was shared, you know, thousands of times. And it eventually reached the ears of the health system. And the next day, the guy got an appointment. like the very next day. Daniel actually spoke to Crudo, and Crudo told him this made him feel really good. All of a sudden, he could spotlight an issue that didn't show up on TV or traditional media.

Just because of the communications law, so I could address it in a fan page and those would go viral or get so big that they go from being background issues to being front-page news. It was like he had this rare, valuable superpower. And he did, because all across Ecuador, Crudo was blowing up.

He had hundreds of thousands of followers online. And riding this wave, Crudor decided to take aim at his biggest target. The president himself, Rafael Correa. So what happened is Korea passed a $42 tax on online purchases from abroad as a way to keep people from bypassing the Ecuadorian economy. And then, Correa took a trip to Holland. He's walking through a mall, and these Ecuadorian immigrants recognize him. and they're like, oh, Mr. President, can we take a picture with you?

And he's like, sure. And they take a picture with the president. And in the picture, they posted on their Facebook page, and eventually that image got to Crudo. Crudeau is ecstatic. I mean, here's Correa, the guy who just passed attacks on foreign goods, getting caught shopping for foreign goods at a mall in a foreign country. The immigrants are like, a hell of smiley, you know.

They're just, like, thrilled to be in a photo with the president. Correa looks a little bit less thrilled, but, you know, he's being the president. He's got a bag, a shopping bag, in his hand. And to Crudeau, this was pretty hypocritical. More or less a double standard, right? That is, if I said to you right now, listen, how could you possibly eat foreign food

and tomorrow you find me at a McDonald's, then that's my double standard, right? And the meme that Crudo made was essentially just calling out Correa, you know, for being a hypocrite. Crudo, seeing a clear opportunity, added some text based on those old MasterCard ads. Oh, here it is. For those pelucones that compere on the internet and affect the production national, impuesto dollars.

But that they're in the lusosso mall of Europe, no has price. So, for the pelucones that buy on the internet and impact the national product, tax, $42. But getting caught at a luxurious mall. in Europe shopping? Priceless. And again, Crudeau's meme blew up.

It was shared tens of thousands of times. But what he didn't realize is that he had totally, deeply misjudged Correa's sense of humor. Korea has a weekly TV show called La Sabatina, where he does interviews

and addresses the Ecuadorian people, and he brought up Crudos meme on the show. And at first, Korea sounds affable. He was like, well, we weren't going shopping, and we was actually just cold, and we walked into the mall to get out of the cold, you know. Yeah, we just wanted to buy a little gift for a friend of one of my daughters.

You know, and it wasn't a luxurious shopping. I mean, it's like, who cares, man, just ignore it. Like, it's Twitter. You know, you don't have to respond to everybody who critiques you. Plus, you're the president. And then, Correa turns his attention to Crudeau himself. And he starts making outlandish claims. Like Crudeau's a paid operative for Correa's political opposition.

And that Crudeau used some kind of specialized software to scour the internet for mentions of Correa. And then automatically turn those mentions into mocking memes. He implored his fans to storm Crudor's website and, quote, react to these stupidities and acts of manipulation. And then, Correa says this. Let's see if he's so funny once we know his name, you know? He said that on TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's see if he's so funny once he's been outed. Coming up after the break, what it's like to have the ear of the president when you may not exactly want it. So, before the break, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, took the extreme step of threatening to publish the identity of Crudo Ecuador on national TV. And the thing is, Korea takes this extreme step a lot. You should watch these videos because they're nuts. I mean, because we're talking about the president of a country saying, you know, like someone added me, you know, and like it's outrageous, you know, like super offended that someone wrote something mean about the president on Twitter. Is he, he's on television just reading mean tweets that people sent him? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. And then he's like, you know, reads their avatar name or whatever. And then he's like, well, this one, and his real name is so-and-so, and he's 18 years old, and he lives in Quito. How is he doing that? How did he know people's real identities? Well, we don't really know that. We don't know how we knew.

She's 22 years old. He outs this woman. It's just not a fair fight. It's like, dude, what are you doing? Just let these people be. This is a pretty bald-faced intimidation tactic, right? If you criticize the president online, he'll docks you on television. And what's worse, Correa has a ton of supporters,

so inevitably, being named publicly leads to harassment. Death threats, all the wonderful mob behavior the Internet's famous for. And now, Correa had his sights set on Crudeo Ecuador. But in spite of Correa's claims, Crudeau wasn't a paid provocateur or some entrenched political operative out to undermine the office of the president. He was just an ordinary guy named Gabriel Gonzalez. And compared to the character he played online, he's actually pretty mild-mannered. He would tweet about drinking on the weekends and stuff and he told me, he was like, I don't even drink, you know?

He would tweet about soccer matches and he's like, I don't even like soccer, you know? But he was trying to make Kruikodo very much like have this mass appeal or to be as if it was the voice of the people, you know? But, you know, in real life, he described himself as kind of a quiet guy, had a desk job, basically, that allowed him a bunch of free time, a job that had him in front of a computer screen online a lot. He knew something about marketing and social media, married, father of two young kids. Suddenly, this dad with an office job had become public enemy number one. And at first, Crudeau wasn't worried exactly because he was anonymous.

So he's like, I'm fine, you know, everything's fine. he keeps doing his page, everything's fine. But then they publish his address, his phone number, his ID number, the name of his father, his mother, his kids, their ages, you know, all the stuff that was in the civil registry. They also publish a photo of him. It's a grainy photo taken from a distance with a cell phone. In it, Gabrielle is walking through the food court holding a tray of food,

and walking next to him is his son. I see that they publish my photo. and is not one that they've downloaded for my Facebook. When I show my wife, she tells me, hey, that's where we went three days ago, remember? Because you said that we should escape the stress for a little while and go eat something, and I said, sure. So there, you'll see that they're following me to take my photo.

Gabrielle's freaked out, and he decides to leave town with his family, ASAP, until things blow over. So they go to a little town outside of Quito, where a friend of his lives, and they don't tell anybody where they're going. going. And a few days later, someone rings the doorbell and it's a letter for him and some flowers. And the letter says,

"...con satisfaction, I have to confess that it's for me a good place that's the country of Guayas, disultando of his meresiedas vacations, what he'll tryer a moment of relaxation, which means a parenthesis in so much stress, that exigen those not-than-acerted activities. It's a very baroque sentence. I confess that it gives me great satisfaction

and it's a great pleasure to know that you are passing some much deserved vacations here in the province of Yas which will bring you a moment of relaxation after your not so appropriate activities.

Oh my God. Creehame that always contra with our interest and attention while dures her valentia that's the part that kills me. Believe us that you will always you can always count

on our interest and our attention so long as your bravery lasts. And they mentioned, like, his wife by name, his kids by name, sincerely, and then they put the logo of Crued Ecuador. Oh, my God. It's like the godfather or something. It is the god. It's like waking up with a horse head in your bed.

Well, I mean, there's just no other way to interpret that except as a threat. Like, Mientas duress and valentia, as long as your bravery lasts, is kind of this roco-co-sendent structure, but it's pretty clear what they're saying. Gabriel and his family were exhausted and frightened, and he decided he'd had enough. Within a few hours, he published a photo of the picture and the flowers on kind of a black background with white letters. White and yellow letters, it said, Mr. President, hashtag you won.

Ustead Garnaud. And that was the last time he published anything on Cruz Ecuador. In the wake of the incident with the flowers, Gabriel tried to prompt the government to investigate. He tried to put in a police complaint. You know, he did a bunch of stuff to get to. people to investigate who had done this. And eventually, one of the ministers, when asked, are you investigating the threats made on

Kruhe Ecuador, he was like, oh, well, we would like to, but, you know, he's technically still anonymous because he's never said that the names that were published were actually his. So we can't, we can't investigate. Which Krudo was like, all right, bullshit. And he went on TV and was like, hey, I'm not. Crude Ecuador. Who is behind of Crude Ecuador?

Who are you? Well, my name is Gabriel Gonzalez. I'm 32 years. I'm doing to what is multimedia, manage of

the reds. Nothing came of his public plea. Daniel and his staff at Radio Ambulante reached out to the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Interior,

but they never heard back. To be clear, there's no proof that the government sent the flowers. Correa says that it was actually his own opponents

who sent the flowers to discredit at the government. But Gabrielle can't imagine that anyone but the government sent them. He says that his life as an online provocateur is over. Daniels have two minds about what happened to Gabriel. On the one hand, making fun of the president basically ruined Gabriel's life. But on the other hand, this ordinary nobody was able to speak truth to power in a way that Americans never can. And when Daniel put that to Gabriel, that's silver lining. He just didn't buy it, you know? He was like, yes, I mean, I suppose.

but it does go both ways. You know, it's like, okay, I can reach out and touch power. You know, but oh shit, power can reach out and touch me. And that's when the scale of the imbalance is made, you know, perfectly clear to me. All my relatives were frightened, like they didn't want to go out anywhere. I thought I might go to the zoo with my kids that day, but they didn't want to leave for anything. We're all crazy. We're like, where will they be?

Where will they be watching us? Crudeo Ecuador. Gabriel sees a dark future for free speech in his country. From his perspective, it turns out that it would be nice to have 10, 12 layers between you and the president. You know, just to keep you safe. And we tweeted at Correa asking for an interview. And the most amazing thing happened. He didn't reply.

Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. Our show was produced by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnameney, Fia Bennon, and edited by Alex Bloomberg. Production Assistance by Sylvie Douglas. Matt Lieber is the confidence to fight through the self-doubt that keeps you from being your best self. Our show was mixed by the Reverend John DeLore and the super-chill dude Rick Juan. You can hear a Spanish-language version of this story

on Daniel Alicon's excellent radio show, Radio Ambulante. Extra special thanks to him and Sylvia Vinias for their help with this story. Special thanks also this week to Lily Sullivan for translation assistance. Our theme music is by the Mysterioio. breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash replyall, and you can find this

week's episode in article form on dig.com. Our website is replyall.com, which was designed in partnership with athletics. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.