On Google Maps, Kibera appears under the name of ‘Kibera Slum’. A sort of space that is well bounded but undefined. A greyish mass which is a stark contrast to the rest of the places in Nairobi, Kenya. On Google Maps, one can make out some roads, but it is difficult to identify them. Have the satellites not detected anything? Did the Google Car forget to go there? Did it experience any difficulty in getting to this place to photograph it and chart it? From what is to be believed of the services of the American giant, this area is an uninhabited place without life or trade. However, Kibera is one of the most populated ghettos in the world. In Kenya, there is one smart city project, but there are ghettos everywhere that are home to great poverty. In Brazil, there is Porto Digital, but there are also thousands of favelas. In South Africa, internet is advanced, even though technology is a little late in the townships. Everywhere in the world, the digital can be used as an economic driver in places that are fashionable and cool, but it can also be used as an urban revitalization tool in the ‘zonas de miseria’, as they call the difficult zones in Mexico. In the ghettos, favelas, townships, barrios, slums and other shanty towns, internet falls within a context that is often difficult and sometimes dangerous. But its reason for being, its use is only more decisive.
‘Welcome to Kibera,’ says Josphat Keyat. He adds ‘jambo’, ‘hello’ in Swahili. With his long tresses, his pair of unlaced Converse shoes and his smartphone, Josphat works at Kibera TV, that can be reached after three hours of impassable road at the heart of the ghetto. Two feet down on Karanja Road are the premises of Map Kibera. A team of volunteers feed an electronic map, available online (mapkibera.org), where everything that Google Maps service did not see, appears: the streets, dirt roads, drinking water points, demolished houses, schools, churches and of course, internet cafés.
‘The map is constantly updated, and when a water point is closed or a tank is moved, we indicate it on the map. It is free and public. It is the answer of all the inhabitants of Kibera to Google. Oh yes, we exist!’
Map Kibera was developed by a non-profit association in Nairobi called Ushahidi (‘witness’ in Swahili). This group works out technological solutions to collect masses of data furnished by the people, to organize them by geo-localizing them, and after verification publish them in the form of maps that are freely accessible to all. ‘We created Map Kibera, but it is the community that manages the map, not us. The residents of the area can include on it whatever they want. This way, they really participate in the life of Kibera. It is a kind of empowerment: we give back the power to people,’ explains Daudi Were, one of the heads of Ushahidi. He adds, ‘Google Car does not penetrate places of this kind and so Google knows nothing about Kibera. But people who live here, they do. And they want a map of their place.’
More than 40,000 plans were created using cartography tools developed with free software by Ushahidi. The software, called Open Street Map (OSM), which can be freely reused, is now used in 159 countries in thirty languages. In the streets of Kibera, extremely poor and even devastated, I see sewage flowing in the open, polluted rivulets, stagnated and stinking; refuse piled at the edge of the roads, foul; flies buzzing in clumps, animals wandering about, two- or three-year-old kids crawling and trampling about in the dirt, without worrying about diseases. Even if malaria is not common in this ghetto, typhoid, cholera and dysentery strike intermittently and there is a high prevalence of AIDS here.
However, in this ghetto of poverty, I see hundreds of small buildings which are local shops and let’s say, shops of fortune. I also see children coming out of one of the rare schools of the ghetto, beautifully dressed, in ties, in the midst of the hovel. There is scholastic and economic life.
How many people live in Kibera? It is impossible to say. Often, it is estimated at a million, but it is certainly overestimated. With 500,000 inhabitants, Kibera would still be one of the biggest ghettos of Africa. ‘Nobody really knows the number,’ says Jesse Zachary. ‘There are sedentary residents, crammed, cornered and condemned to stay. And then, there are a lot of temporary residents, because, surprising as it may seem, Kibera is a place of social climbing.’ Jesse is from the socially climbing group. He came a year ago from his village, located six hours away to the north of Nairobi, and settled, for the lack of better places, in the ghetto. He currently works as the guard at the public library of Kibera, where I meet him. A small scar on his face, wearing a full military costume, he is twenty-four years old. His shoes are worn out, but he makes an effort to look presentable, almost chic. ‘I work here day and night, five days out of seven. I guard the library and make sure that these kids don’t steal books. I have to search them thoroughly when they leave or they would take the books away to sell them. Sometimes, they hide them even in their socks.’
The local branch of the Kenya National Library is situated at the heart of the shanty town. One gets here by taking an ochre dirt road, heavily cracked. A library? That is saying a lot. It looks like a shed with a tin roof, surrounded by a barbed iron wire. ‘Electrified,’ says Jesse. On the shelves, there are around 8,000 books and around 200 people come to read them every day, according to the director, Peter, a nonchalant and fatalistic man, who does not live in Kibera. Access to the library is not free (20 Kenyan shillings a day, or 300 shillings a year upon subscription, that is, €3). Children make up the majority of the users, as the place also hosts after-class programmes.
I browse through the library with Jesse and Peter. The latter shows me the Samsung tablets that have just arrived, that he keeps in a locked cupboard awaiting Wi-Fi installation. This should provide better access to the internet in the building, where, at the moment, one has to climb on to the roof to get 3G access on their smartphones. ‘Everybody here has a basic mobile phone,’ adds Jesse. ‘On the contrary, smartphones are still rare. As for computers, they are also rare due to the price and also because people are afraid they will be stolen, as the houses are not secure. In Kibera, one would rather buy a smartphone than a computer.’
In this shanty town, like elsewhere on the continent, Africans skip the step of buying a personal computer to get internet by directly buying a tablet or a mobile phone. We end the visit of the library on the roof. From there, one can see the whole stretch of the ghetto—corrugated tin as far as the eye can see. In every sense of the word, Kibera is very much a ghetto. Suddenly, I see a plastic bag shooting above our heads and crashing on to the roof of a house. ‘Here, one needs to be careful of where one walks and of all that flies,’ jokes Jesse, referring to the ‘flying toilets’. Having no toilets, the residents do their business in plastic bags and get rid of them by throwing them on the roof.
One hundred metres from the library, on a heavily sloping street where goats and ducks shuffle around in the dirty water, Wilfred runs a small ‘computer’ boutique called Multiple Biz. He has two desktop computers connected to a generator and to Wi-Fi through a 3G stick. In this shop, the locals come to charge their mobile phones. He takes my phone, connects it to the computer: ‘There, it works like this. Leave it with me and it will be charged. It costs 20 shillings per hour to charge.’ Wilfred and many other Kenyan traders have invented a business model in a country where electricity is rare: offering a service to charge mobile phones! In the shop, one can also make photocopies, browse online or place an order for DVDs. Wilfred, translated by Jesse, explains to me in Swahili how it works. He takes a blank DVD and inserts it into the computer. I see a list of movies on paper, mainly Hollywood blockbusters, but also from Nollywood, the cinema industry of Nigeria, and once my choice is made, Wilfred would burn the DVD for 40 shillings ($0.35). ‘It is legal, absolutely legal,’ says Wilfred, on seeing my sceptical look, brandishing an official document, duly sealed, authorizing him, it seems, to run this pirating shop.
Kibera TV, Map Kibera and the Voice of Kibera blog are among the rare media of the ghetto and they are fully digital. ‘We are a TV channel that is only available on YouTube,’ explains Josphat Keyat. With his team, he has produced around 100 short films of two or three minutes each which aim to tell the story of Kibera in a ‘positive’ manner. The films are then posted on YouTube.
Here, electricity comes and goes. The premises of Kibera TV are equipped with UPS generators, a mini transformer which automatically cuts the current when it gets overcharged and works as a replacement battery when it runs out. At the heart of the shanty town, electricity is not only intermittent, it is also of very bad quality. So, the residents either innovate or have to make do with it. They experiment and play as a team—they recycle paper, share TV connections and try generating electricity with small, cheap solar thermal collectors, powered by lithium, developed by Safaricom, the national telecom operator. But more often, each manages on his own—the DIY (Do it yourself) is the basic survival mode in the ghetto.
They also share Wi-Fi. ‘The problem is that few people have access to internet in Kibera. So, when somebody is lucky enough to get a connection, everybody connects to it and that’s why you see wires running between houses. It’s the same for electricity and water,’ explains Zena, a woman militant who coordinates the Mchanganyiko Community Centre, further into Kibera. ‘“Mchanganyiko” means “diversity” in Swahili,’ she clarifies. In this cultural centre, every Sunday, conferences like TEDx are organized. True to the nature of the American site TED, which is its social model, these informal public meetings are an occasion for discussing everyday problems, made more lively with videos. ‘People live here in the present, they don’t get preoccupied by the future. It is necessary to talk to them of what concerns them today,’ explains Kevin Otieno, the head of TEDx Kenya, who lives in Kibera. ‘Two hundred residents come every week to participate in our discussions,’ confirms Zena.
In a bungalow made of wood, belonging to the community centre, a room is reserved for computers. They are on and I see open on one of them the Voice of Kibera home page, the blog of the ghetto. ‘This is community information. We do SMS reporting—when we have important news or when we see something weird, we send a text message to Voice of Kibera with a code to alert them and they post it on the blog.’ Most of the time, the computers are used to teach children of six to seven years how to use them, when they get out of school. ‘After that, when they turn eight and nine, we don’t know what to do with them. We deal with the smallest kids. For the older children, there is no programme and we can’t have them over after school,’ regrets Zena. She knows that all the children she patiently trains until they turn ten will loaf around on the roads afterwards.
Idleness and inaction are prevalent in Kibera. Unemployment rate is very high and poverty rampant. But to dismiss this slum as passive and sluggish would be a mistake. And Jesse, the library guard concludes: ‘Kibera is an ambitious place where people come from villages to win. It is a slum that overflows with hope and with people who want to pull through.’
Can the digital help ‘pull through’? Can smartphones become an advantage in difficult zones and make a difference? Can internet become a tool of revitalization? These are some of the questions that I asked myself and for which I tried to look for answers in dozens of favelas in Brazil, barrios in Colombia and Venezuela, in the ‘zonas de miseria’ in Mexico, the Black and Latino ghettos in the United States, the townships in South Africa, the Palestinian refugee camps and the slums of India. I am not sure that the answer will be all positive but the day I discovered M-Pesa in the Kibera slum, I understood that technology can truly be used for something.
M-Pesa is the most original invention that Kenya conceived. It is the only service created by the telephone operator Safaricom, the leader of the national market (40 per cent of whose shares are held by the British Vodafone). ‘M’ for Mobile and ‘Pesa’ meaning ‘money’ in Swahili.
With M-Pesa, Kenyans can pay for all their purchases and safely transfer money. I try creating an M-Pesa account and paying for a drink at Pete’s Coffee in Nairobi. I connect to the application built for a Samsung mobile, that I use locally, under the service provider Safaricom, and I press ‘Buy Goods’, followed by the amount in shillings and a PIN code. Seconds later, I receive an SMS confirming that the transaction was successful while the vendor also receives the notification, through an SMS, of the payment. It’s efficient, simple and fast.
In the shanty town of Kibera, everywhere I see, in streets, shops and even with itinerant traders, green boards with the logo ‘M-Pesa Till Number’ are visible from a distance, and show that the traders accept this transaction mode. (Safaricom estimates there are 60,000 M-Pesa points in the whole country and one can safely assume that even in the slum, there is high penetration.)
‘Few Kenyans have bank accounts. Before the launch of M-Pesa, they could never transfer money. If they wanted to send money to parents living in the village, they had to put it in an envelope and entrust it to a matatu driver. It may reach the recipient, or maybe not, many days later. Today it takes a few seconds by M-Pesa and it’s very safe,’ explains Thibaud Rerolle, a Frenchman who is the technical director of Safaricom. At the head office of the company, a huge compound in the north-western part of Nairobi, Rerolle himself is amazed at the success of the project. ‘Every day, seventeen million Kenyans use M-Pesa on their phones. We estimate that 30 per cent of the GDP goes around through M-Pesa!’
Other than for transferring money between individuals and paying for goods in shops, the system is also used for buying on mobile phones and the internet, and it can be used to pay electricity bills and school canteen bills, for a small commission (around 1 per cent per transaction). Some companies transfer salaries of their employees to their M-Pesa accounts. ‘The application is very secure because there are three types of control stages to set up an account, deposit or withdraw money: An ID proof, a personal password, and the need to own a personal telephone,’ explains Jimmy Gitonga, the manager of the Nairobi incubator, iHub. The accounts are also limited to a ceiling of 100,000 Kenyan shillings (€850) and in case of an error in the amount or in the recipient, a ‘reverse’ function is allowed, to cancel the transaction, with the consent of the recipient. Other solutions are available for traders such as to increase security or to go past the fixed ceiling.
The most fascinating thing about Kenya is that it is a country that skipped the step of landline phones and directly went to mobile. Its progress into banking and mobile money is spectacular. Developed in Kenya, the M-Pesa system is currently being marketed in East Africa, especially in Tanzania, as well as South Africa and Afghanistan.
‘I am a Kikuyu and I speak Kikuyu,’ affirms Riwel. Wearing a small cap and, happy and affable, he is a taxi driver and every morning at 6 a.m. he stands in front of the same building in Nairobi where for years he has been looking for customers. ‘I have regulars. People wait to find me here. I must be here. It is as if I ran a shop. And they know that if they don’t have money, they can always pay me on M-Pesa. His car is tired. Its gimbals are on the verge of breaking and they make a troubling sound, but his telephone works and his M-Pesa account is always active.
Like everywhere in Africa, the change that led to the development of M-Pesa in Kenya is the mobile phone. ‘In Kenya, there is an ongoing revolution and it’s clearly a mobile revolution. Seventy per cent of the population has a mobile phone. And 90 per cent of internet connection is through the phone. These days, there are smartphones for 8,000 shillings (about €70). They are Nokia or Huawei phones running on Android. They are called mini-smartphones and everybody wants them,’ says Sam Gichuru, head of one of the start-up incubators in Nairobi. ‘Kenyans,’ continues Gichuru, ‘are ready to make many sacrifices for a good phone or for direct access to internet. Sometimes, they forego meals and electricity for it. Soon, all of them will have a smartphone.’
In Kenya, a ‘pre-emergent’ country, there is not always electricity, but there is Android. And many think that the mobile phone is going to contribute to the development of the whole of Kenya: ‘Most of the start-ups,’ says Gichuru, ‘find their business model here thanks to M-Pesa, which is an online payment solution with reduced economic effects.’
Do information technology and communication contribute to the revitalization of ghettos? In Kenya, with M-Pesa, the answer without a doubt is that it works.
Favelas and ‘Inclusion’
Another country, another model. Brazil too has been innovating for many years to revitalize its favelas. President Lula made the digital one of the axles of his social policy, which is followed today by Dilma Rousseff. With a few failures, but with also a few wonderful successes.
The Complexo do Alemão is one of the biggest favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Situated in an area called Penha, forty-five minutes north of the town, it is accessible through Brazil Avenue. The Policia Militar controls the entrance to the ghetto but it is easy to get past the checkpoint (the area which actually regroups many favelas was ‘pacified’ in 2010 by the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora).
At 371 Rua Doutor Nogachi, the Comunidade Em Ação is found. One can’t miss it: the name of the centre is written in paint on the wall of the blue building. The building also adjoins a school. On the left, to access the space, one can work his way up a huge, narrow, steep and sloping staircase—we are indeed in a favela. A board at the entrance indicates: Centre for Digital Inclusion along with the slogan: ‘Transformando vidas através da tecnologia’ (which can be translated as ‘Changing life with technology’).
The Vigario Geral favela, not far from here, also experiments with digital projects. At Grupo Cultural, on Rua José Rucas, it is actually a priority. An ‘Espaço Digital’ and a ‘University Online’ were launched. Here, everybody is persuaded that technology can improve life in the favelas. ‘We don’t like to use the word “favela” any more. Remember that we have been “pacified”. We are more of a “community”,’ says Jorge Luiz Passos Mendes, the head of the cultural centre. Many of these ‘communities’—we count a thousand of them in Rio—were constructed on the slopes of a hill. In the beginning these favelas sprang up illegally, without any construction permit, with no access to electricity or water. Now, some relatively modernized communities have access to everything, including an ownership title. Travelling by car in this place is often impossible either due to the narrowness and the sloping nature of the streets or because it is voluntarily curtailed by the self-proclaimed local groups who, on the fringes of legality, ensure security of the area. One must therefore climb up the streets on foot, in moto taxis or by cable car and here again, Google Car never goes, adding the lack of cartographical existence to its problems. At other times, drug and arms trafficking is so common that local gangs have taken control of the favelas, assuring a reign of order and, vis-à-vis the police and outsiders, terror. The ‘pacification’ brought about by the Lula government and maintained since by Dilma Rousseff comprises regaining control of the favelas one by one from that of the drug traffickers and reinstall public services instead of gangs. Special and heavily armed law enforcement forces have generally been posted here for many years. The result is lukewarm.
Walking on the streets of the favelas Complexo do Alemão, Igreja da Penha and Vigario Geral, I am struck by the presence of the many ‘LAN houses’. They are cybercafés, often illegal and wild, where one can browse the internet, burn DVDs, make photocopies, fax, spend time playing video games or buy a cold drink. ‘In a nutshell, a LAN house is the poor man’s internet in Brazil,’ explains Régis Andaku of the UOL portal. The name comes from the fact that, unlike classic internet cafés, originally their computers were not directly connected to the internet, but to a local network (LAN stands for Local Area Network). Through a principal server which was connected to the internet, even though in a pirated way, video games could be accessed on this network. Today, most of the computers in LAN houses, even if they have kept the name, are connected to high-speed internet, as often attested by the board fixed to the entrance that reads ‘Banda Larga’ (Portuguese for high-speed).
Bruno, nineteen, runs J.L.A.com, a LAN house. He is wearing a Nike T-shirt in Brazilian colours. ‘Boys come here in groups in the afternoon, after school. They immediately log on to Facebook.’ Every computer has been allotted a number: LAN 01, LAN 02, LAN 03, etc. The hourly price is around 2 reals (€0.70). ‘Young adults of the favela also frequent LAN houses. They come to prepare their CVs, print bills or laminate their ID cards,’ says Bruno.
‘These communities are experiencing a true economic development,’ says Jorge Luiz Passos Mendes of Grupo Cultural, in the Vigario Geral favelas. ‘But the situation is still precarious,’ he adds. ‘This morning somebody took a shot and the police came with a tank.’ Indeed, almost everywhere in the streets, I see ‘peacemaking’ policemen with blue helmets, and visibly very well armed.
At the office of Viva Favela, in the area of Glória in Rio, a dozen activists run a community blog which aims to recount life in the favelas, without the prejudices of the mainstream press. ‘This is the first time that we are offering information, articles, photos and videos made by the residents of the favelas. In the field, our 300 correspondents freely talk of their day-to-day lives. Thus, we are able to give an altogether different image of life within the communities,’ says Viktor Chagas, one of the managers of Viva Favela. ‘We want to change the image of the favelas and it can only be done by looking within and sharing inside perspectives,’ Mariana Gago, deputy coordinator of the blog clarifies for her part. These militants are persuaded that internet can profoundly transform these regions and bring more ‘inclusion’. The word is often repeated by my interlocutors: ‘digital inclusion’, ‘visual inclusion’, ‘better inclusion’.
‘The government, like the NGOs, constantly insists on priority to be given to “inclusion” and “digital literacy” in the favelas. These are words that everybody uses. But it’s very stupid! Because, here, even in the favelas, all the young people have a smartphone and know how to use it better than adults,’ says Bruno the manager of the LAN, putting things in perspective.
Greatly used to the public policies, the Viva Favela team refines its approach and considers that inclusion must accompany a combination of three other factors: social integration, access to internet, reduction in the number of fire arms (on the ground floor, there is a programme to report a weapon and to destroy it on the spot). So the LAN houses appear to be the first, useful step, but it is not enough. ‘In the beginning, it was a typical community solution. The residents needed access to internet. So small-scale entrepreneurs developed their businesses with a connection that was more or less legal and with a local network,’ confirms Viktor Chagas. Today, the importance of the LAN tends to diminish as people log on to the internet from their homes or on their smartphones (in 2011, Brazil’s population was more than 100,000. While 96 per cent of rich households have internet at home, only 5 per cent of the popular class do. Unsurprisingly, the residents of the favelas are among the poorly endowed).
On the streets of Complexo do Alemão, I observe with amazement dozens of electric wires that go between one house and another, from one LAN house to another in a disorderly fashion. ‘This is how we get access to electricity, cable TV and internet in the favelas. When a resident gets a subscription or a connection, he shares it with others for a remuneration,’ says Bruno. In Brazil, this system of mutual pirating has a name: the ‘Gatonet’ (net chat). In Africa, these illegal network connections are called ‘spaghettis’. In both cases, I was struck by the inventiveness of the ghetto residents and by the unexpected ways of diffusion to which internet lends itself.
On the Alice Street, in the Larenjeiras area of Rio, Rodrigo Baggio receives me at the headquarters of the Comitê para Democratização da Informática (CDI ou Center for Digital Inclusion). He created the association twenty years ago and his urban revitalization programme is seen as a model across the world. ‘We believe in digital empowerment,’ says Baggio. ‘We use new technology to act, to transform the life of Brazilians, but not forgetting that internet must be at the service of individuals so that they identify the problems within their own community, understand them, before identifying solutions. CDI gives them the means of resolving these problems that have freely chosen to tackle.’ His tone is calm and unbelievably persuasive. Rodrigo Baggio, huge like a Seleção Olympics athlete, with a permanent smile on his face, strikes me with his determination, pragmatism, as well as his somewhat mystic belief in the internet. ‘We train and educate people to become community managers, entrepreneurs, teach them to create applications, build sites and start-ups. This is what we believe in: if we make positive use of technology, we can really help people become change makers, and therefore, change the world.’ CDI does not take action directly: they train those who will take action on the field. They train trainers, to summarize. It is essentially a network of hundreds of schools, NGOs, associations, community centres, all of which apply the method of CDI. ‘We always work with partners and intermediaries who are really involved in the community,’ says Baggio. With the CDI teams, I visit one of the 715 schools, in a small favela in the Leblon area in Rio—a Catholic school run by a bossy and ascetic nun who is also connected. Then, when I also take a tour of the Centro offices, in the east of the city, I take part in a ceremony honouring high-schoolers who imagined creative apps for smartphones. Everywhere, the local actors themselves manage the programme; CDI limits itself to guiding and assisting them. ‘In the favelas, there is still a digital apartheid,’ resumes Rodrigo Baggio. ‘But access to internet is improving slowly. In five years, the digital divide will be resolved in part and the main thing will be digital empowerment: how internet helps people get emancipated and take control of their own existence. And how Brazilians would take their lives in their own hands.’
At the CDI, Viva Favela, Grupo Cultural de Rio of Janeiro and also Serviço Social Do Comércio (SESC) of Sao Paulo, and in the dozens of similar associations that I visited in Recife, Porto Alegre and in the many towns of Brazil, people kept telling me that the battle against poverty is fought through the digital. This can offer a business model and give rise to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Precise methodologies are used and the first figures of the result are encouraging. Around 780 spaces of ‘digital inclusion’ have been created in Brazil—they may have contributed to helping around two million people come out of poverty (according to the numbers furnished by CDI).
Likewise, the SESC, a large scale cultural and social centre, somewhere between the Anglo-Saxon Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the French Maison des jeunes et de la culture, chose to emphasize the digital. Collectivist in inspiration, the SESC has a number of ‘units’ across Brazil. When I visited SESC Pompéia and SESC Belezinho, in São Paulo, I was surprised by the number of public computers, multimedia halls and computer courses. ‘This approach was not natural at an organization like ours. It is a break from the educative and socialist tradition that has been ours since the Second World War, but we took it up because it is a very efficient integration tool. It works,’ Roberto Cenni, one of the managers of SESC, explains, in São Paulo.
President Lula, who is himself from the popular class was fascinated by the digital effect on the area. During a highly publicized visit to a LAN house, he publicly shared his fascination. And later on, during his second term in office, after much hesitation and delay, he chose to make the digital one of his priorities. His government has donated cheap computers to associations in favelas, encouraged the development of free software, made promises to massively finance high-speed internet. As the World Cup and the Olympics approached, his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, multiplied these programmes.
The city hall of Rio de Janeiro is not inactive. It launched a programme conceived with IBM, to detect, using video cameras and digital sensors, landslides, frequent in favelas. Connected to the weather forecast and algorithms, it enables the anticipation of these incidences which are often linked to heavy rainfall. ‘The digital helps both access to information and also transmit it. It goes in both directions. In case of violent storms which can lead to a serious collapse, an alert is swiftly sent thanks to the sirens installed in sixty-six favelas,’ underlines Viktor Chagas.
There remains a lack of objective and large-scale evaluation of the real effects of the priority given to the development of the digital sector in Brazil. The World Bank estimates that the GDP of a country grows between 0.6 per cent and 1.2 per cent every time 10 per cent more of its residents adopt the mobile phone. Carlos Graieb, director of the website of the newspaper Veja says, when I meet him in São Paulo, ‘It is difficult to say what great energy leads a country like Brazil to emerge. But we can already say that Brazil emerges with the internet. The two phenomena, emergence and the digital, are linked. Brazil will continue to grow with the internet.’
Twitter against the narcos
The digital can contribute to the revitalization of ghettos; it can also help bring information to areas of great violence. For example, to Monterrey, Xalapa and Veracruz, three towns where homicide rates are among the highest in Mexico.
‘#Monterreyfollow is neither an individual nor an account. It belongs to nobody. It is a dialogue,’ says Tomas Hernandez, professor, artist and local journalist. We are at a café in Monterrey, a huge city in the desert in northern Mexico. Two hours away is the river Rio Grandé—the Mexicans prefer calling it Rio Bravo—which marks the country’s border with the United States. Today, this region is considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world.
With more than 70,000 deaths and 30,000 disappearances, the war of the drug traffickers is concentrated to the north and to the east of the country. ‘Here in Monterrey, the situation is terrible. It is a city of violence. All moral values have disappeared. The fabric of society has been torn. We don’t know where the criminality begins and where it ends,’ says the poet Javier Sicilia. This activist of fifty-eight years leads a ‘walk for peace and dignity’, since his son, Juan Francisco was murdered by the drug traffickers. ‘I really love my son. I really loved my son. He was kidnapped along with some friends and they were murdered. In a cowardly manner. It was an act which was completely unjustified.’ Sicilia adds, ‘Even if we lose the battle, it is necessary to continue to defend life.’ With his white beard and white hair, sitting at a table on the terrace of a Holiday Inn in Monterrey, where the heat is smothering, Sicilia is a determined man. He does not fear the drug traffickers any more.
Rare are writers, journalists and bloggers who investigate drug trafficking in Monterrey. Most of them were killed for simply having written on the subject. ‘Nobody dares speak of it in the press,’ says Sicilia, despairingly. ‘We don’t write about murders. Nobody knows anything. Yet, we need journalists who are pro-life.’
There is a blog (blogodelnarco.com) which seems very well informed about the movements of the traffickers and their crimes, but nobody knows who runs it. Rumours abound on the fact that it may be connected to a dissident cartel, which is not proved. In any case, nobody writes with an unveiled face. There is a code of complicity, with a few exceptions, among journalists to not speak on this matter.
Diego Enrique Osorno is one such exception. I meet him at Café Punta Del Cielo in Monterrey and he joins me alone, without any security, with a slightly distraught look, in a hurry. Before us, like everywhere else in the city, I see the police making rounds on black 4x4 vehicles, heavily armed. ‘There have been a thousand murders in the last six months here. Even this week, sixty people were kidnapped and murdered,’ says Osorno. Writer and journalist, he has authored many best-sellers in Mexico, among which are El Cártel de Sinaloa or the recent La Guerra de Los Zetas, works that recount the story of cartels. Rest of the time, taming his own audacity, he publishes articles on the internet as a freelance journalist, maybe due to the lack of a physical editorial board courageous enough to regularly publish his writings. He maintains a blog, manages the Barrio Antiguo site that he created (elbarrionantiguo.com) and regularly publishes news, photos and short videos under his own name, from his Twitter account (@diegosorno).
Why does he do this, alone against all? What cause can be worthy of risking someone’s life to this point? Does he have a wish to play hero against the villains of the play? Is it a taste for transgression? Diego Osorno tells me that he simply followed his path and that he is doing his duty. The circumstances, by definition, are independent of will. And a territory which has made full use: Monterrey.
The core of Osorno’s work: to describe the societal and economic consequences of the drug traffickers’ war. ‘I pay a great deal of attention to what I write. I always try to be neutral and not choose one cartel over the other. I never use anonymous sources. I am scared, very scared, but this fear is one of the vehicles of my work. Fear, a writing technique. Being scared makes you respect your sources. But, of course, I don’t write everything. If I had used everything I knew, I would have already been dead.’
For Osorno, like many others, the social networking sites, like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr, constitute an important source which have reduced the silence of the local press on cartels.
To keep themselves upated, the residents of Monterrey have started following, since 2000, the hashtag #Monterreyfollow—a key word on Twitter. ‘We know in real time where the danger is, where a killing is taking place, where police checkpoints are placed, and conversely, which bar or restaurant is safe,’ explains Carmen Junco, a head of state of Nuevo Leon, of which Monterrey is the capital. She adds, ‘When somebody like me has a nineteen-year-old son who goes out in the evening, one is obliged to look at #Monterreyfollow.’ The advantage of following a keyword on Twitter, rather than joining a social network or a blog, is the confidentiality. Everybody can read and repost, without being responsible for the creation or risking retaliation.
José Escamilla of Los Santos is the digital director of the Tecnológico University. ‘Monterrey was a safe town a few years ago. Everything brutally degraded between 2009 and 2010, when the war between the cartels started. Since then, the town has become hell.’ From the window of his office, he shows me the spot where two students were killed, on the very premises of this prestigious university. ‘From the moment the traffickers started fighting in the city of Monterrey, everything just fell to pieces. We have no news any more. We didn’t know what to do. In the evening, before going out to a restaurant or café or a casino, we must check the reliable Twitter accounts or follow the well-informed hashtags. If we get to know that there were explosions somewhere, we avoid that area. We also get to know of street accidents and police blockades. The situation today continues to deteriorate. And in the evening, it’s simple—nobody goes out any more.’
The Monterrey Tecnológico University is generally considered one of the best Mexican engineering schools, a local MIT. In Latin America, it is the university to refer to for digital questions, and visiting the campus, I am indeed impressed by the technical means, the digital studios and the online media. However, due to the war of the cartels, the number of students, according to Los Santos, has been constantly on the decline for a few years. In order to save its reputation, the university chose to open other campuses in less dangerous regions of Mexico and developed an important digital portal that allows taking lessons online and get a degree, in absentia.
In the context of endemic violence, social networks appear to be precious. Though they are American platforms, Twitter and Facebook are used in different ways from one country to the other. ‘In zones of drug violence, they are often very simple messages without names or pictures like: “There are nine bodies on such and such a street,” or “Three bodies are hanging on this bridge.” A global tool, like Facebook and Twitter, is used for a conversation that is very local,’ comments blogger Antonio Martinez Velázquez (when I interviewed him in Mexico, the employees of his NGO had received death threats from drug traffickers and the federal police were stationed at the spot).
In Monterrey, one of the cities with the most number of Twitter accounts in Mexico, the system has broadened with more keywords (#mtyfollow, #mtyalert and #monterreyshootings) and with accounts providing a summary of the news (like @Cicmty or the site cic.mx). Everywhere in Mexico, in risky areas, this anonymous way of electronically sharing information about criminality has been duplicated: #reynosafollow in Reynosa, #xalapafollow in Xalapa, #veracruzfollow in Veracruz, #juarezfollow and also #juarezawareness in Ciudad Juárez, the other city on the ‘frontier’, on the same level as the Texan city of El Paso, with galloping criminality.
‘Situación de riesgo’ (Situation at risk): these words often appear on the social networking sites. ‘We write this or just SDR, on Twitter to notify about danger in such and such place,’ says Julian Herbert, a blogger and writer I meet in Veracruz. Located on the Gulf of Mexico, to the east of the country, this great city is another crime capital. ‘Violence has exploded in Veracruz because it is a huge port through which drugs transit. Journalists especially are targeted here. It is one of the most dangerous cities in the world for them. Around 120 reporters have been murdered here. So, everybody now writes under a pseudonym on the social networking sites. Nobody knows who can be trusted any more. We even think that there are policemen on Twitter because the photos they post can only come from a crime scene,’ pursues Herbert. According to the association Article 19, an NGO in Mexico which enquires into the violence against journalists and bloggers, a significant part of these incidents are due to the local police, public administration, private enterprises and political parties, corruption being the reason, and not just the narcos. In the rest of the cases, the violence results from territorial wars between cartels, and the journalists ‘embedded’ in these criminal groups are then targeted. According to Ramón Alberto Garza, director of the newspaper Indigo in Monterrey, ‘Of the assassinated journalists, 60 to 80 per cent were either exclusive enquirers or informers for a cartel—they were killed because they didn’t bring enough information or because a concurrent cartel identified them.’ According to Daniel Moreno, director of the independent site Animal Politico, who was interviewed in Mexico, ‘The biggest danger for reporters is to reveal the connection between the narcos and the local authorities.’
Another day, I am sitting on the terrace of a ‘cantina’ in Xalapa, a medium-sized town at an hour’s drive from Veracruz. Here too, the special police patrols on 4x4 cars with six men on board, wearing bulletproof vests, and armed to the teeth—and the expression seems to me to be completely just. Feli Dávalos hosts a radio channel in Xalapa. He says, ‘Neither the papers nor radios talk of the violence here. Everybody goes about as if it doesn’t exist. Not long ago, a website recounted facts related to the narcos. A bomb exploded near their premises. And since then, they haven’t taken up the subject either.’
Social media is however not just the preserve of journalists writing under pseudonyms. They are also used by the cartels. Los Zetas, in particular, made themselves known through their macabre productions on YouTube. ‘The narcos have a true culture of violence. Explicit. Atrocious. For example, executions are regularly filmed and posted online, with unbelievable sadism. Los Zetas excels in this genre. It is a little like they are trying to recreate, without any talent, Godfather or Scarface,’ says the British journalist Ed Vulliamy (whom I interview in Paris) who has published a well-researched enquiry on the war of the narcos. I watched a few of these criminal videos—they show murders, throats sliced open with a chainsaw, decapitated bodies hung from bridges—but very thankfully YouTube systematically removes them once they are reported.
On YouTube, there is also a prevalent ‘narco-culture’ which is easily accessible. This is the case of the famous ‘narcocorridos’, songs that are often popular, broadcast sneakily or during occasions like a wedding, which has become a kind of narco counterculture. Videos of songs made by groups like Los Tigres del Norte were viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube (El Niño y la Boda, Contrabando y Traición, Camelia la Texana). But the war doesn’t spare these artists: seventeen singers and musicians of the narco music group Kombo Kolombia were assassinated by the Gulf cartel after a concert in January 2013, near Monterrey.
‘The culture of drugs, crime and violence takes over culture. And this gets made into films, books and a whole narco folklore,’ argues RamÓn Alberto Garza, an influential mediaperson in Mexico. A former employee of Televisa and Reforma, he runs the entirely bimedium journal Indigo. When we dine together in Monterrey, he insists that I try out the Mexican specialities and suggests different kinds of locusts, worms, tacos made from monkey brains or ant eggs. I chose the ant eggs, called escamoles. ‘Good choice! It is the Mexican caviar,’ says Garza.
Despite their discourse, the internet embarrasses the cartels. And even though they have succeeded in silencing the press, the multiplying number of bloggers, the anonymity of social media and decentralization of Facebook and Twitter pose a problem. Many young bloggers have been killed, as a sign of retortion, for example, in the city of Nuevo Laredo in September 2011— their bodies were hung on a bridge with a board cautioning everyone who ‘spies’ on the internet.
What is more, many anonymous informers on Twitter and Facebook are not trustworthy. Rumours spread faster than verified information. Some create panic. ‘Everything rests upon confidence,’ says Julian Herbert. ‘We follow sites we believe are true, and if we find out that we were taken in, then we unsubscribe. There are accounts that have lost almost all of their “friends” and “followers” at the same time.’ Antonio Martinez Velázquez says, ‘Social networking is auto-regulated by the public: misinformation and “trolls” are immediately identified.’
‘In reality it is often difficult to separate truth from lies. The main player is organized crime. But the worst is impunity. There is no investigation for that. The police do not act. And the connection between the local authorities and the narcos is one of the problems of this war,’ explains Daniel Moreno, director of Animal Politico. He continues, at the head office of the site in Mexico, ‘I have put a lot of journalists on the question of the relationship between the narcos and the local politicians. But they need to take a lot of precautions to protect themselves. They follow a very precise security protocol. They are constantly geo-localized; they change hotels every night; they give us the names of people they will be meeting; and of course, they write under pen-names. In any case, we never send anybody to towns that are completely under the stronghold of the narcos, like Tierra Caliente or Ciudad Juárez. If we investigate there, the chances of the journalist coming back alive are very slim.’
Mexico is a unique example of local use of social networking in an area of great violence. Other than national specificities—importance of mobile internet, insufficiency of regulation and monopoly in telecom—there are also practices that can be original. Internet appears therefore to be particularly territorialized, social networking having great success while being well anchored in the local space.
26 SEPTEMBER 2014: Forty-three students from a rural training school near Iguala, a good hundred kilometres from Acapulco in Southern Mexico, were kidnapped. Ayotzinapa is the name of their establishment. This is a remote area, aboriginal and poor, where there is still no press. Their disappearance could have gone unnoticed. But the families of the 43 students began spreading alerts on social media with a simple hashtag #Ayotzinapa. In a few weeks, going viral and becoming one of the ‘trending topics’, the kidnap became an affair of the state, resulting in the fall of the governor of the Guerrero region; in the fleeing of the mayor of the town; and triggering an unprecedented political crises that even affected President Enrique Pena Nieto. Finally, in November, the Mexican Minister for Justice had to acknowledge that the suspects had confessed to murdering the 43 students who were delivered to them, under the order of the mayor, by the police officers linked to Guerreros Unidos, a drug cartel specialized in kidnapping and in drug refinement. The bodies had been burned.
‘We are fighting for our 43 friends who have disappeared,’ says Yara Almonte, in Mexico in late 2014, a student of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, on indefinite strike. On the university campus, I see slogans on banners: ‘Ayotzinapa vive!’ and ‘Alto a la represíon y tortura contra los Normalitas Rurales’. And on social media, #justiciaAyotzinapa is omnipresent. There is indignation everywhere. Anger.
‘We are living through a national tragedy, one of the worst moments in the history of Mexico,’ says Jorge Volpi, a famous Mexican writer and intellectual. ‘This is the worst moment in the recent history of Mexico,’ says Jose Woldenberg, an intellectual considered as one of the spiritual fathers of Mexican democracy, whom I spoke to in his office at the University of Mexico. It must be said that this spectacular kidnapping incident has thrown light on all the failures of the country: corruption, poverty, failure to integrate indigenous populations, criminal links between elected representatives and drug traffickers, police corruption, powerlessness of justice and the failure of political power. ‘The impact of this incident will be structural and it might result in important changes in the political life of the left,’ says Marcelo Ebrard, former mayor of Mexico and one of the potential presidential candidates for 2018, in his report from the Condésa area. As for Jorge Castaneda, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Fox government, he tells me, by way of prognosticating that ‘it is a very grave situation from which neither the right nor the left would recover.’
Meanwhile, far away from the silence of the political parties and the prevarications of the government, the Mexican youth rose on the internet. Artists created a multitude of work on blogs, Instagram and Facebook, to recall the fate of the 43 innocent students of the training school in rural Ayotzinapa. Everywhere, on campuses, on streets, on social media, I see their photos and short biographies: most were between the ages of 18 and 21; they were children of poor farmers or from indigenous communities. Here, in a moving text, the brother of one of the victims describes his gentleness and generosity; there, a mother speaks of her dear son who didn’t deserve what befell him. Others speak of the progressive and secular model of education at this atypical training school, anchored in the history of the Mexican left, where, anti-globalists and hailing from solid communities, young boys were trained in field labour and read Marx. Thanks to the internet, the names of these young victims, which may have remained anonymous, are now known to everybody in Mexico: Jesus alias ‘el Churro’, José, Miguel, Victor, Israel…
Through these tragedies, Mexico has shown that social media can have specific usages in zones of violence.
A last example in digital technology remains, in an extreme context, and this one not only concerns revitalization of areas or information in narco zones, but the very business of some of these ghettos.
419 scam
Entering into the internet café, I feel like I am trespassing. Strong metal gates protect the small shop, a glass-encased cabin protects the shopkeeper and there are huge locks here and there. It is very strange to be afraid of thieves when one is a thief himself.
The name of the area is to be taken at face value—CBD for Central Business District. I am on Pretoria Street in the Hillbrow ghetto, at the heart of Johannesburg, in South Africa. It is a dangerous area where one is strongly advised against going out alone and going out at night. The ‘central business’ here is known under the name ‘419 scam’.
At the entrance to the internet café, a man in his thirties who is eating rice and meat in a small Tupperware container asks us what we want. We are in an internet café and we want to simply browse the internet, explains Noma, a South African from the region, who accompanies me. Before us: a dozen computers, not more, are logged on, and visibly busy clients are active on their computers and speaking Zulu loudly among themselves. The keeper retorts, with suppressed violence, that the ‘internet is not working today’. It is clear—we are intruding. We insist. A new scathing retort comes from the man with the air of a buccaneer who clearly does not wish to be disturbed in his scheming. We understand that it is better to leave.
The internet cafés of Pretoria Street don’t allow access to internet in an orthodox way. These shops are fronts that conceal an organized trade of online piracy. Unscrupulous tradesmen at odds with the society deploy a wealth of inventiveness. ‘In these cafés, there are all kinds of illegal activities. They sell drugs here, unlicensed alcohol, banned porn movies, make false documents and it is especially from these activities that all internet scams originate,’ decodes Noma. A scam in English means a rip-off or a swindle—they generally talk of ‘419 scams’, in reference to an article under the penal code of Nigeria which condemns such online scams. But the phenomenon is not only restricted to Nigeria—it is widespread in Benin, Togo, Pakistan, Russia and here in South Africa.
The varieties of ‘scams’ are innumerable. An email announces that you have received a huge amount of money from a lottery or a fallen dictator and you must furnish the number of your debit card to get the money. A friend writes to you because he is all alone abroad with no papers, and he stands in need of immediate financial help from you. Or you receive a false message from Yahoo or Hotmail asking you for the passwords to your email accounts. Whatever the model, all these examples, and many others, are all ‘419 scams’.
Noma continues, ‘Here, we always talk of “Nigerian 419 scams”, because we pretend that it comes from Nigeria and that it doesn’t exist here. But the reality is that all these internet frauds are one of the principal businesses of this street in Hillbrow.’ Here, in this South African ghetto, when one receives bulk emails, they don’t say ‘spammer’ but ‘scammer’. And it is a profession.
We visit other internet cafés on Pretoria Street and the same glacial welcome is accorded to us. All the keepers are similar. They seem more afraid of being observed by strangers than of being at odds with the police, who, in any case, don’t differentiate between gambling and phishing.
Sometimes, one is allowed to browse the internet or buy ‘airtime’ (prepaid minutes to recharge mobile phones). It is also sometimes possible to make a phone call, as most of these internet cafés have a landline outside on the street that can be used to make international calls just with a few coins and at preferential prices. In one of these internet cafés, I notice posters advertising ‘penis enlargement and male enhancement’ techniques. In another, I see, as one might suspect, ‘It is prohibited to consult porno sites like YouTube’.
Hillbrow is situated above the good and the bad. One can be unscrupulous but not lecherous. Shady characters wear amulets but one has no right to be vulgar. One has the morality that one can, morality of Godfather and not that of Mandela.