Reply All - #47 Quit Already!

Episode Date: November 30, 2015

Everybody has that one Facebook friend who just won't stop posting their political opinions. This week, we talk to one of those Facebook friends, someone whose opinions got her into an enormous mess. (ALSO, be sure to check out the Radio Ambulante story this-a-way: http://radioambulante.org/audio/renunciaya) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Bo. So one of my Facebook friends is this guy, going to call him Dave, who I haven't seen in maybe 15 years. I think the last time we saw each other, it was the 90s and we were at a pop-punk show. I haven't talked to him since then,

but every single day, I watch him argue about politics with his Facebook friends. Trump, the troops, gun control, repeat. Nobody ever changes their mind. I watch it and I feel physically tired. I feel like I'm at, somebody else's awkward family dinner, but one that goes on infinitely. I was thinking about Dave recently because my newest Facebook friend, Lucia, is also somebody

who gets into a lot of political arguments on Facebook. And recently, that became kind of a problem for Lucia. This is a story about the weirdest summer of Lucia's life. I talked to her about it on Skype. Okay, so I have a million questions. Go ahead. I guess the first thing is just like, Before any of this happened, like before everything, like, I'm, if it's okay, like, I wanted to just see your Facebook page.

Yeah. I have a lot of stuff. That's my dog, Benny. I have another one. She still looks like a puppy all the time. She gave me a quick tour of her page. Lots of funny memes from NineGag, pictures of her grandson, and some Facebook games. For a while, she got real into FarmVille.

She said she would end up running virtual farms long. side strangers in the Middle East. But then it went crazy. There was people who get up and put their alarm set for three o'clock in the morning because if they didn't lift their crops, the crops will die. Oh, my God. And it was like, yeah, I know. People was crazy about that.

I want to be more judgmental about it, but I play this game that's called Simpsons tapped out, which is just, it's the same game. It's just like Farmville but the Simpsons. And I will sometimes like pretend to go to the bathroom because I need to check all my crops. He means here at work. This is the first I'm learning about this. That profoundly disgusted voice belongs to reply to all senior producer Tim Howard. Oh, that's crazy.

Lucia lives in the suburbs outside of Guatemala City. In real life, she runs this real estate business with her husband. And when she's not doing that or tilling crops in Farmville, she likes to hang out in this Facebook group called politically incorrect. She likes to argue with people there about genetically modified foods or taxes. It's a good place to just go spar, even though the people there can be sort of quick to name call. A lot of people, they will tell me, oh, you're a communist and other people, oh, you are from the ultra-derrecha. I don't know how to say that. Far right. Far right. Those are the opposite communists and far right. But you know, and you're talking with people that talk about

middle ideas, then you must be from the far right and vice versa. Do people fight over the same things time and time again, or is it whatever's in the news that day? Usually it's about whatever it's in the news, and usually it's about the same thing. I don't know if you know, but in Guatemala, we had a war for 30 years. Guatemala had a civil war that lasted for 36 years. Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were killed by the government. And this war ended pretty recently, like 1996 recently.

There hasn't been a real thorough truth in reconciliation. And many people in the country just are not interested in talking about what happened. A lot of people just don't want to talk about it. They don't want to know about it. They don't even want to hear about it. And I think that's really twisted because we need to talk about it and we need to understand what happened and move forward. When Lucia argues politics on Facebook, these are the politics she's arguing. And talking about those kinds of things in public can still get you in trouble.

I first heard about all the trouble that Lucia got into from a reporter named Luis Trais. He reported about Lucia for Radio Ambalante. And the story starts with this big scandal in Guatemala. In April of this year, a corruption scandal broke out. And it was basically called La Linea, which translates as the line. It was a corruption scheme that involved custom officials that were asking for bribes in exchange for not collecting import taxes. And over 20 government officials were originally indicted. And the highest in the chain of command of these government officials was the personal secretary of vice president, Roxana Baldetti.

Roxana Baldetti is a former beauty queen turned conservative cable news correspondent turned politician. Luis says that Guatemalans are used to corruption. But Baldetti is on a whole other level. At one point, a Guatemalan newspaper reported that she and her husband had $13 million in assets. They had a private helicopter and five properties, which was many multiples more what a politician salary should have been able to afford. In response, that reporter was banned by the courts from being. near the vice president.

And the thing that really drove Lucia crazy about Roxanna Baldetti wasn't the corruption. It was that whenever she got called out in public about it, she would tell these lies, and the lies didn't even make sense. Like at one point, she was accused of looting an environmental fund. And she said, I swear, listen, I swear I didn't steal one red penny from Guatemala. and I swear it on my mother's life who's dead. So she said, she was really saying, like, if I'm lying, may my mother die, and she didn't think anyone would check.

Yeah, exactly. I swear on my mother's life, who's dead? So the Lalina scandal happens. And even though people are used to bad behavior from Baldetti, this scandal feels worse. In Lucia's Facebook group, politically incorrect, there are people who are so fed up that They say that they might just void their ballots in the next election as a protest, which Lucia thinks is pointless. So she gets on her computer and tells people what she thinks they ought to do. She immediately gone on her Facebook page and started ranting and saying that, you know,

she called for the country to, you know, go and protest in front of the government palace. Can you read me the post? Yeah, if you give me one the post. search it? Yeah. This is an invitation to everyone

who have expressed their intention to vote nulno in the next next elections. I asked Lucia to

translate her note in real time for me and she gave a shot. If ever in Guatemala needed that

everyone go out to the streets for the return of the millions that they

have stolen, it is now. I wrote that like I was Yoda So Lucia gives her post a Yoda-like name Something along the lines of Protest to get Vice President Roxana Baddi to resign

It was like the worst name ever It was like the most boring Terrible name ever for a demonstration Had you ever tried to do anything like this for? Like, had you ever, like, tried to stage a protest? Of course not. No way. Lucia told me that she figured that somebody who actually knew how to do these sorts of things

would see her Facebook post, and they'd come up with a real plan for a real protest, which is not what happened. A newspaper picked up this Facebook event and ran it, and suddenly she has, within 48 hours, she has hundreds of people just confirming that they will be assisting the event. And this is where Lucia starts to get pretty worried. In Guatemala, it can be very dangerous to protest against the government. In 2012, demonstrators gathered on a highway to protest high energy prices. Seven people were shot and killed, many more were wounded. It seems almost certain that the military, who was at the protest, fired on the crowds.

But the president claimed that the soldiers weren't carrying guns. The protesters, he suggested, probably fired on themselves. That was a statement. That incident happened in a rural area, and Lucia knows that the government tends to be more violent towards rural, indigenous people than city people. But on the other hand, she's demanding the vice president's resignation. So she's scared.

And she finds herself just refreshing the Facebook page over and over, watching as more and more people share it, and realizing that this thing has taken on a life of its own. That week, it was thousands of people who were confirming that they would go to this demonstration. You know, and it's like 15,000, 20,000. And the bigger it gets, the scarier it gets for her as well. And I remember, like, pulling my mother and said, Mama, I think I wrote something.

And she says, what? I think this and this. And she said, oh, okay, so maybe you should get together with them, get, some help. So she looks for help. And what she does is she recruits the son of a friend of hers, right? That she knows since this guy was born. This guy is called Gabriel.

And the first thing Gabriel does is say, we have to get rid of that name. Demonstration to ask Roxanna Valdei to resign is not going to cut it. So he comes up with a hashtag. And he comes up with a hashtag that is called renunciaya. Renuncia yeah. In English, resign now. Or if you prefer,

quit already. Quit already. Yeah. He says like, this will catch on. Trust me. Gabriel and Lucia form a small team to turn Renuncia Yat into something more organized. The team's half Lucia's friends, half Gabrielle's friends. Two generations working together.

Which Lucia said felt strange. Because these kids didn't remember Guatemala's brutal civil war, the long, dark period that people don't talk about much, but that Lucia had to confront from literally the moment she was born. My mother always tells this story that when I was born, it was midnight when her water broke. So she had to call the doctor and doctor had to make arrangements with the government for some army cars to come into our house and accompany my mother and my father to the hospital. Because otherwise, if they would see you outside of your house, they would shoot you. Oh, my God.

No question says. That's the Guatemala I was born and into. That past Guatemala has a way of popping up in the present. For instance, the man widely held responsible for the massacres, General Rios Mont, was tried for

genocide in 2013. And during Mont's trials, something unexpected happened. A former soldier was testifying that he and his troops had been ordered to burn down the villages of indigenous people, to cut off their tongues, pull out their fingernails, and later execute them. And the soldier said that the orders had come from his commander, a man who

since the war has become very famous in Guatemala. The commander's name was Otto Perez Molina, Baldetti's boss, the president of Guatemala. Perez Molina denied the accusations, as he's denied similar accusations of war crimes. But understandably, a lot of people fear him. And Lucia has now written a Facebook post directing everybody to go stand outside this man's office, the presidential palace and start screaming at the two of them. Lucia retroactively tried to make her Facebook presence anonymous. She took her profile picture down. She changed her name.

But she was worried about the safety of the kids who were helping her. They don't know how dangerous it can be. So we sat down and we talked about them and said, okay, this can be dangerous. What's like the worst case scenario if you're politically active? To have your head blown at any street. and then appear next day at the newspaper as one of the victims of violence. Is that something that you were imagining? Did that feel like a real thing that could happen?

At the beginning, maybe not, because I didn't expect more than 50 or, let's say, 350 people. But when we reach levels of thousands of people that saying, yes, we're going to attack. At that time, I was really scared. I was really worried, not because of me. I'm 53 years old, I'm a grandmother, as you have seen, and my daughters are both grown-ups, and I'm not ready to die, but that is not something that I will avoid

at all cost. Like for me, it's more important for them to have a great country where my grandsons and granddaughters, if I ever get, will grow up than my life. But I was afraid for the people that was with me and I was afraid for the lives of my dear ones. I believe that people die whenever they are supposed to die. And I am convinced about that. So I said if they're going to kill me,

or either way I was supposed to die that day, maybe in my bathtub or in my bed, but I was supposed to die anyhow. I tell you, I'm crazy. So Lucia had learned something she'd never known about herself, that she was ready to die for the right cause. And she'd warrant the younger people as well as she could. But now, the Facebook page had begun to bubble

with signs that this protest could still get very bloody. There are some voices that are starting to get rowdy inside of the event page. Some kids, apparently, who were like, you know, we got to go in there with our Molotov cocktails and our rocks and our bats. And, you know, we got to make some noise and we have to bring the government down, that kind of rhetoric. The people who were calling for violence, they looked like they had fake accounts. They were all really new and they didn't have a lot of friends except for each. other. Lucia was pretty sure that that meant they were people in the government's propaganda wing, which was extremely bad news. It meant that not only had the government noticed the protests,

but that it was trying to push them towards violence. But what could Lucia really do at this point? If she canceled the event, people would still show up. So she called out the people who were threatening violence. She told everybody in the group that these people were probably from the government and to ignore them. And then all she could really do, do is wait. She told me at one point that it's like in like cartoons, when a character is like in a dark room and daylight a match. And then it is revealed that the room is full of dynamite.

After the break, Lucia, the lit match, and the vice president. Okay, so, April 25th, Day of the Protest. Do you remember what kind of day it was outside? It was a nice Saturday. It was a really nice. The kind of Saturday you would choose to go to the pool and relax and do nothing, you know. How are you feeling? Scared to death.

She eats lunch with her mom. The protest is supposed to take place in the Plaza de la Constituzion, the main square in front of the government palace. It's the center. All roads in Guatemala lead out from this one square. Lucia parks far away in case the thing is packed, in case people do show up. and she starts walking in. And in her head, she's picturing everything that can go wrong. An empty square because nobody shows up.

A square that is full, but of protesters either being beaten by cops or protesters who are beating each other. From far away, she starts to hear yelling. People are flowing into the square. A small group of people stops at a nearby cafe, trying to convince the patrons to come with them. Up close, it's hard to even see the scale of the thing until a friend lets her into a nearby building

and they go upstairs. We go up and I look out the window and it was like, all you see was heads and signs and hats. The National Palace is this concrete monolith. It's all towering columns and high walls. The square in front of it is completely covered in protesters. They're waving Guatemalan flags and they're wearing its colors, blue and white. It's hard to actually pick out any individuals. It starts to just look like one enormous, many-limbed organism that speaks in cheers and blaring horns. I was in tears.

I didn't cry in that moment with that. In my heart, I was in tears of emotion. And even though I may say a lot of things that don't sound like, oh, she's over. At that moment, I did thought, I'm all that. Louise says the crowd wasn't just spectacular and large. It was diverse. It was made up of every kind of person. I mean, conservatives, liberals, just people, they really did what they wanted to do,

which was gather people who were fed up with corruption. Louise says everybody was united by their utter disgust with Baldetti. So much so that they even all sing the national anthem. And of course, it was terrible. Lucia says that there were so many people that they couldn't actually get the song going in unison. It sounded like waves, you know. It was cacophony, just all this joyful singing crashing against itself. But it was so moving, and at that time, we did cry.

Lucia started to think about how Guatemala is seen in the world. There's this violent, violent place, a place whose people kill each other. and yet we were there in peace. It was like nothing she'd ever experienced. She found herself really listening to the words of the national anthem, hearing them freshly. There's a line about how Guatemala has once achieved peace without violence, and that seemed possible again. They stood outside the palace for hours.

But Roxanna Baldetti was nowhere to be found. Lucia doesn't even think she was in the palace that day. Baldetti didn't show up for two weeks. And when she did, it was actually her boss, President Perez Molina, who made the big announcement. She resigned. And that was most unexpected, very welcome. And how did it feel to watch that? You're going to think I'm crazy.

Well, at West, we already established that. I was happy, but not surprised. It was the reasonable thing to be done. Like, if you prepare a cake and you beat it and you put it on the oven, you're not really surprised when it comes out of a cake after an hour of being in the oven. Right. but I get pretty excited about cakes when they're ready to eat. Yeah.

Yeah. It wasn't long, though, before Lucia found something that she could get really straightforwardly excited about. It's called Esquaches, you know, like when they hear the... Wiretaps. Yes, wiretaps, exactly. Where the president is giving instruction, not somebody else talking about him. but it was himself talking and given instructions. Turns out the same team of investigators who caught Baldetti

also had tapes of President Perez Molina incriminating himself in the La Lina that same custom scandal that had ensnared Baldetti. And there's the actual recording of this. Like you've heard this recording. People have heard this recording. Yeah, everyone. Wow. The protesters went nuts.

The group was like, we got the vice president to resign. Now we need to get the president to resign. And so a whole new round of protest interrupts throughout all of Guatemala. It's like wildfire. Every single weekend, there are people outside waving signs demanding that their president resign. But there's a catch. Foreszmalina just refuses to quit. And while the prosecutors have built a strong case, he can't be arrested because there's this rule in Guatemala

that the president is immune to criminal prosecution so long as he's in office. The only way you can arrest a president is if Congress votes to strip him of his immunity. which of course has never, ever happened. It's just an absurd pipe dream. But everything about the summer is absurd. The wave of protest that comes out of Lucia's, it doesn't stop. It gets bigger. And the investigators dig deeper.

And the press doesn't back off. And the pressure just builds and builds. And then in August, there's a general strike. Then a new hashtag came up. Hashtag, I don't have a president. The entire country. comes to a halt, and even Congress can't ignore it. They take away Perez Molina's immunity.

The vote's unanimous. After that vote, he really has to resign. And that very same day, he's in prison. He's in a holding cell as he awaits trial in a day, in a single day. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy.

I mean, like, he was present in the morning, and he's in a jail cell. By evening. That day, that day I was, I think it was one of the happiest days of my life. Because for the very first time in my life, finally justice had been served. Did that ever seem possible? No, actually, it didn't. That's why I was so happy. every single one of the Congress

that word that day had the Congress and had to make the decision voted, yes, I want to cry that right now. I'm so overwhelmed and excited on that. It's so nice. I'm crying, but I'm crying of happiness. Louise says that considering everything Lucia did, it's really surprising that she hasn't used Renunciahia Ya

as a springboard. like say into a political career. A different person would be running for president right now. If Lucia were a different person, she would be a total political rock star right now. But that's not what she wanted. That wasn't the point of it. And what do you think it is?

Like why? It just, I mean, I feel like a lot of people start out that way. And then, you know, you see things you can fix. But to do that, you're going to have to make a deal with this person. And, like, you know, like politics tends to corrupt very well-intentioned people. Like, what is it about her that she, I don't know, inoculated herself? That's a great question. And she's, I think she's always been very clear.

I think she really, really dreams of a better Guatemala, a Guatemala where the hospitals work because politicians aren't stealing money, where people are paying their fair share of taxes. I mean, she's so idealistic. At some point, she told me that she started putting out these renuncialia hashtags, which were like quit corruption and quit smoking inside public places and quit running red lights. And, you know, like, that's the kind of Guatemala that she wants to live in. Lucia is so busy imagining her grand vision for Guatemala

that she doesn't really worry about her role in it. Remember, she took away her picture and her name from her Facebook profile, which meant that on the day of that big protest, when she was in a crowd of thousands of people who'd assembled because of her note, she was anonymous. A really funny thing is that even though I had invited all my friends, very few people knew that I had been the one posting the event in Facebook. What did that feel like to have that secret?

It was so much fun. That was the greatest feeling of all. Like, I have a secret. How did you not tell everybody? I thought it was a proper thing to do. It was really fun. It was nice to have a secret. And I think if I did, if I tell the people I, what I did,

it was like seeking recommendations. mission. And I didn't do it for that reason. I never did it for that reason. So the obvious next question for both Lucia and Guatemala is the same. Now what? It's hard to say, but Lucia's optimistic. Everything just seems so possible now. She gave me a quick update on what's happened since the protest. Perez Molina is under house arrest. Baldetti's been arrested too. Lucia is not crazy about the new president. But she's She's been paying a lot more attention to the judicial system, and she says she likes the judge who's presiding over the Perezmolina trial. And as for her, she says she might want to teach a class on ethics now.

She wants to spend some time with her kids. And she told me about this old saying. I don't know if you heard this, but they say that you have to have a child, plant a tree, and write a book. So maybe I will write a book. Have you planted a tree? Yes. That's what this whole story was. was, PJ, where were you? This is a...

I thought it was a literal tree. No, it's better. Way better than a literal tree. No, but I did plant a real tree and not one, but many. Sometimes I don't know what to do with them. On Lucia's Facebook page these days, the cover image is a new hashtag. In big, bold white letters, over a picture of everybody

gathered in the square, it says Esto Apenes and Pisa. This is just the beginning. If you'd like to hear Radio Ambalante's Spanish language version of the story, you should check them out. They're at Radioambolante.org. We'll have a link to it in the podcast description. For bio is me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard,

Shruthy Pinnamanini, and Fia Bennett. Our editor is Peter Clowny. Production assistance from Kalila Holt. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks to Emily Kennedy, Francisco Goldman, Diego Albures Guireras, and Kate Saunders Hastings. Our theme music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. and our ad music is by build buildings.

Matt Lieber is a spontaneous road trip. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash replyall. Our website's replyall.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.