Reply All - #92 Favor Atender: The Return

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

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? (NOTE: We first broadcast this story in 2015, but we have since gone back and added a new chapter.) This story was originally reported by Silvia Vinas of the radio show Radio Ambulante. Listen to a Spanish language version of the story on their website. Subscribe to the Reply All newsletter over at replyall.soy/newsletter! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody, PJ here. So this week, we are revisiting a story that we first looked into two years ago. A lot has changed since we reported the story, which means that first of all, we've added a whole new chapter to this story. Also, you might notice that a lot of things, a lot of our assumptions about, say, political reality have shifted since the story's broadcast. We are aware of this too. It doesn't make it any less enjoyable. Please enjoy. 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 Alicorn, 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 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 friend Vinny, who is de Blasio's cousin. 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. And I could tweet from here until the end of time 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, SFUSD. Like, 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, 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. Thank you. 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 de Kurchner.

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 assiscentes to the event. Seran to the campola, and were only for the alos and the petulio? More than a thousand attendees at this event. Did they come just for the lice or in the

Petlolo? 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. Rafael 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, Favor Attender. Please, like, 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, favor of attender. Oh, it's like, it's actually, if you look at his replies,

it's like almost, it's most of what he says. Like, favoritend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, like he's super active on Twitter, and the majority of what he does is, 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 comments 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 Correa'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 an axe behind his back. And that avatar would appear as kind of like a watermark in these memes that Crudeau 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 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 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 Crudeau 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, Korea 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 Crudor. Crudow 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? Right?

And the meme that Crudel made was essentially just calling out Correa, you know, for being a hypocrite. Crudow, seeing a clear opportunity, added some text based on those old MasterCard ads. Oh, here it is. For the pelucones that compere on the internet and affect the production national, impuesto dollars. But that they're in the lojosa mall of Europe, no t'precio-mold of Europe. So, for the peluconnes that buy on the internet and impact the national product, taxed 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 Crudow's 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 Korea's political opposition. And that Crudeau used some kind of specialized software to scour the internet for mentions of Korea, and then automatically turn those mentions into mocking memes. He implored his fans to storm Crudow'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. 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 Crudeo Ecuador on national TV. And the thing is,

Correa 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. We identify another to-theter. This is a-roba, Danny. 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 friend. 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 Cruto 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 Gabrielle Gonzalez. And compared to the character he played online, he's actually pretty mild-mannered. He would tweet about, like, 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 Crude Ecuador very much, like, have this mass appeal or to be as if it was the voice of the people, you know. But 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. 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's for me a good province of Waias, "'disulting of his meresiedas' "'withan of his meresied vacations, "'what that will be a moment of relaxation "'that signific a parenthesis in so much stress "'that exigen those "'not-than-assertes. 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 Yias, which will bring you a moment of relaxation after your not-so-appropriate activities. Oh, my God.

Creehame that's always with our interest and attention while dur is your valentia. That's the part that kills me. Believe us that you will leave 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, it's,

there's just no other way to interpret that except as a threat. Like, Mientas dures and his valentia, as long as your bravery lasts, is it's kind of this roco-co-sentence 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 Cru de 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 people to investigate who had done this. And eventually, one of the ministers, when asked, are you investigating the threats made on Cruz 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 Crudel was like, all right, bullshit, and he went on TV and was like, hey, I'm Crude Ecuador. Who is you? Well, my name is Gabriel Gonzalez. I'm 32 years. I'm dedicated to what is dissonial multimedia, manage of redos.

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 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. ever can. And when Daniel put that to Gabrio, 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? Crude 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. after the break, the return of Crudeau. Welcome back to the show. Okay, so it has been almost two years since we first reported that story, and we were really curious about what has happened to Crudu since then. So we figured we would talk to somebody who might know, Crudeau himself. Hello? Hi.

Gabriel, this is Alex and PJ. How are you? Fine, thanks. Gabriel talked to us from his home in Quito, and we were super excited to catch. up with him. Thank you for doing this. We really appreciate it. Okay, enough proof. We also had on the line a friend of the show who is happy to interpret for us. I'm Sylvia Vinyas. I'm an editor at Radio Ambulante, and I was a co-producer for the Spanish version of Crudor Story that we did for Radio Mulante. So the first thing we wanted to know was just what were those early weeks like? What did it feel like after Gabriel quit posting?

Were you seeing things that you felt like, oh, I have a great idea for a post, but I'm not posting? Did it feel hard not to comment? Yes, because this was my hobby. My wife actually would encourage me sometimes to post. She would be like, why don't you post something? Because the president, he would talk about. other people on the internet like me. They were still making

fun of the government. And he in La Sabatina said, ah, they're just crazy much. And we'll see when we do what we're doing the same, we'll see if they're so much as they're saying

so much and in one of his Saturday addresses, he said, oh, they think they're so funny. Let's see if they're still laughing when we do what we did to Cruel Ecuador.

Wow. I was getting madder and madder because I really wanted to post. But I, But I was still scared. But after months of fear and frustration, something changed. Gabriel was approached by some potential new allies.

This group of journalists who had been threatened as well by the government came to me, and they said that they were starting this website called Quattro Pelagatos. And so about a year ago, I started very, slowly because I was still scared, but I started making some memes for the website. The new memes were a lot like the old ones. There's one from January 2016 where Crudeau is making fun of this new position Kraya created, the Minister of Good Living. He takes a photo of this new minister and photoshopps it onto the movie poster for the pursuit of happiness. Crudeau makes it so that the little kid who's holding Will Smith's hand is now the

minister. And have you gotten any attention from the government since you started doing this again? Yes, so after I posted my first meme, getting back to doing it, I was concerned, and so I was watching the Saturday address. But nothing happened. But then about like three, four months, but then about like three or four months, But then about like three or four months later, this news report came out saying that the Pelle Gatos, which was the team of journalists and myself and other people that we worked for the CIA.

Oh, wow. So the first thing I did when I saw this CIA thing is try to see what my followers thought about it and what people would comment on news related to it. and I saw that, especially my followers and people in general thought that it was ridiculous. And since no one was taking it seriously, I wasn't concerned. It was just another way that they were trying to attack me, but it didn't really work. Alex and I both found this really surprising, especially just considering how much power Craya had had a couple years ago. But Gabrielle said Ecuadorians have just gotten way more skeptical since then. Correa's popularity has really gone down before.

If it was daytime and he said it was night, people would believe him. But now that has changed a lot. In the 10 years when he was president, you know, he would have like unwavering support during his Saturday addresses, but recently, for the first time in 10 years, people were yelling like, out Correa, out Correa, because of his kind of, like, politics of hate. So since we're in an election and his popularity is so low, I thought, okay, it's the perfect time for me to go back to my Twitter and Facebook and post my memes there. That election he's talking about won't include Correa. He can't run again because of term

limits. And the combination of Correa finally leaving and a brand new election, it was too much for Gabrielle to resist. And so on December 4th, 2016, he announces that he's relaunching the Crudo, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. He does this with a video. Alongside footage of people going voting booths and politicians and women on the beach, he posts his message to Ecuador. Good news for some, bad for others. Raw Ecuador returns. But not long after that, this suspicious car shows up on the street. And it stays there. For months, there are always men inside watching. They said they were his neighbor's new security guards, but his neighbor told him they'd never heard of him.

And about a month ago, someone on Twitter posted a photo of my wife and my daughter at 6 a.m. in the morning as she was taking my daughter to school. But, yeah, that was just a month of three weeks to a month ago. So apparently, you know, they're still watching me. He's almost done being president. Like, why is he still threatening people? Like, at this point, it's not like, it's not like your criticism hurts his ability to do his job. So the thing is he's not going to be the president anymore but everyone else who worked for him

will still be there. The same lawmakers, the same prosecutor, controller. And the candidate that's running for Correa's party lately has shown he's just doing a very dirty election. And so it seems like it's more of the same thing.

What kind of dirty? There was a lot of hacking of accounts of WhatsApp of the other candidates' WhatsApp accounts. And they, so they saw conversations that they have like with their lovers. And they posted those. Oh, my God. Yeah. So those are the kind of tactics. So there's a good chance there will still be worked. to do after this election.

Yeah. Yeah, because, as I said, all the people is the same. Simply change the head, but all are the same. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

The only thing that changes is the head, but the rest of the people are the same. Ecuadorians will pick their new president on April 2nd. The guy Correya is supporting Lenin Moreno is facing off against

businessman Guillermo Lassau. And just this week, of course, Correa got angry at Guillermo Laso and blocked him on Twitter. Thanks again to Sylvia Vinyas.

check out Radio Envalante. Their episodes are in Spanish, but there are English translations for all of their shows on their website. Go check it out. That's our show this week. But one quick note before the credits, it's come to our attention that a lot of people don't know we have a weekly newsletter.

A weekly newsletter where all the members of our show go out and find things they love on the internet or movies or television, like in life, and recommend them. Apparently it was a big secret. Anyway, if you would like to subscribe, just go to reply. all. Soy slash

newsletter. Okay, our show is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced this week by Tim Howard, Truthy Penmanini, Fia Bennon, Chloe Pristinos, and Damiano Marquetti. We were edited by Alex Bloomberg. Production assistance from Sylvie Douglas.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan and by the Reverend John DeLore. You can hear a Spanish language version of this story on Radio Alante. Special thanks to Lily Sullivan for translation assistance. Our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Our ad music is by build buildings. Matt Lieber is a new kind of sandwich you've never seen before. You can find more episodes of the show at iTunes.com slash replyall

or at our website, replyall.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks. Reply all is produced by Breakmaster Cylinder. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, where our boss, Alex Bloomberg, finds the most inscrutable stuff on the internet. You hear that? All right, so I have this tweet. It's from a person named... I think PJ is hiding behind the curtain. PJ. So what's going on with you?

What's new, man? How's it going? Twas really big and the slightly toves. A giant and jamble in the way. All mimsy were the four roves and the moan raths outgrape. Alex Bloomberg. Do you understand this? No. Alex Goldman, do you know what PJ means? I'm a solid no on this.

PJ. I've been taking acid at work every day. We're at yes, yes, yes in a big way.