Lawfare

Eduardo Silveyra, "Lawfare, the end of the truth" (Google translated from Spanish)

In this text, originally published by the magazine Socompa, Silveyra states that since democratic institutionalization in ancient Greece to the present day, the manipulation of information for proscriptive purposes has changed its tools according to technological advances, but its essence is replicated over time. .

History

The elimination of political adversaries by spurious means is nothing new, its presence can be seen in the Athenian democracy of the 6th century prior to the Christian era of which we are tributaries. In that institutionality, sophists swarmed—scribes in the pay of powerful politicians—who, owners of a rhetorical craft adorned with grammatical formulas and syllogistic recurrences, showed as true what was not.

This discourse had precise purposes, among them the conviction of citizens for electoral purposes, but also the discredit of political enemies, who were condemned to ostracism, a practice by which once a year a number of elected citizens wrote on a tablet ceramic the name of a person who was supposed to be detrimental to democratic functioning. The chosen one had to leave the polis within a period of ten days and for a period of ten years.

In its beginning, the practice was applied to stop abusive and tyrannical practices of those who governed. However, over the years it became a tool to eliminate political adversaries. The reformulations of this practice reach our days with actors who replicate it. In that sense, it can be said that the role of the sophists is the same as that played by the large hegemonic media today, in charge of disseminating biased information consumed by swarms of infomatons - such as Byung Chul Han's definition - with the aim of creating meaning. common and sustain through it the judicialization, with its subsequent condemnation and banning of those political enemies that threaten its interests.

Further back in time, in the middle of the 18th century and in the first years of the consolidation of the national State, the winners of the battle of Caseros, that is, the hosts of Miter and Sarmiento, entered into the dispute for power and put in operation - in a somewhat rudimentary, but precise way - the same practice. Bartolomé Miter himself founded in 1850 in Montevideo—twelve years before founding La Nación—a pamphlet called Los Debates, in which he dedicated himself to a preaching of defamation of the Rosista government. Practice that he continued in La Nación, when he entered into a dispute with Sarmiento, whom he accused with articles published in his pages of being corrupt due to excessive expenses, "a waste," in the purchase of the furniture with which the Casa de Casa was furnished. Government.

The critical impartiality with which La Nación was advertised would have to wait several years—if it ever existed—and in 1874, supported by smear campaigns against his adversaries, Miter can be found in command of an attempted coup. State against the new elected president, Nicolás Avellaneda, who among other measures was dedicated to the revision of the Emphyteusis Law approved by Rivadavia and by which some emphyteustas had accumulated so many plots that they had become landowners.

and rigoyen

Lawfare is a construction supported by four powers ; that is to say: the Judiciary, the media, the corporate and the international. In Yrigoyen's time, not all of these powers were constituted in a framework that would allow the judicial condemnation of a political enemy. The smear campaigns in the press were enough, which allowed an approving consensus in society for the armed forces to overthrow a democratically elected government.

The campaigns were carried out by La Nación, La Prensa and Crítica. In the notes and articles published by these media there was talk of illicit enrichment on the part of Yrigoyen, which acquired fantastic overtones, typical of feverish minds, in which he realized that the walls of the radical president's house were not built with bricks but with gold ingots, a truly absurd fact that was in line with the president's reading of an apocryphal newspaper, in which he only read news of the government's actions. A non-existent duplication, but whose rumor spread in the written notes, to prove the leader's state of senility.

The truth is that the myth ran to this day, although its absurd existence clashes even with the printing techniques of the time. Yrigoyen had two low-circulation media outlets to confront the attacks of the opposition press, Sarmiento and La Gazeta, which were poor enough to confront those of the powerful Gainza Paz and Miter families, who were joined by Crítica. by Natalio Botana, whose massive circulation reached popular sectors.

The radical leader's relations with the press were not good—several times he closed the Journalists' Room of the Government House—and he disparagingly called them "the correspondents." An extreme solution that did not change the situation at all was to publish government actions in the Official Gazette, which due to its limited circulation was ineffective in counteracting the effects of the circulation of false information that created social consensus. On the eve of the Uriburu coup, La Prensa headlined on its front page: "Mr. Yrigoyen's government is dead, the only thing missing is his burial." The tapas the day after the coup spoke of "joy" and "popular uproar in the streets", caused by the overthrow of "the tyrant."

Peron _

If La Prensa with its small number of elitist readers, La Nación with articles with a certain critical approach and Crítica that justified antidemocratic actions, had made their contribution to the overthrow of Yrigoyen, with the arrival of Peronism to power, or to the dispute thereof , the fight for control of the media became more fierce and allows us to see in its development the actions of other actors, previously unnoticed, who today would undoubtedly be identified as the international leg, in the person of the North American ambassador Spruille Braden with their interference in internal politics and in the British embassy itself, as destabilizing operators.

Part of this anti-Peronist propaganda apparatus was controlled and operated in the diplomatic headquarters of Montevideo, where radical opponents, conservatives, communists and socialists and other opponents of the government attended. The graphic material was made up of the mass edition of books, in which the alleged crimes of Peronism were recounted, mostly focused on the figures of Eva and Perón. One of the most popular books was written by the author of English origin, but born in Argentina, Mary Main. The book was advertised with a legend in which it was said that the work had sold 600,000 copies and its title was unambiguous: Eva Perón, the woman with the whip.

The book was published days after Evita's death in 1952, but to avoid problems, the first editions were signed by an unknown María Flores, something that changed starting in 1955. Beyond those operations, upon joining the government in 1945 , Perón did it with the entire press against it. Only one newspaper, La Época, had content favorable to the government. The government, to stop the opposition barrage, passed a law by which the State began to manage the distribution of paper and, in a fact that generated criticism even within the ruling party, expropriated the newspaper La Prensa and put its management in the hands of the CGT. A decision that, however, did not substantially change the situation.

Although some things changed from December 18, 1946, the day on which Law 12908 - known as the Statute of the Professional Journalist - was sanctioned, which ratified Decree-Law 7618/46 of March 25, 1944. The norm It granted rights previously unknown to employers, which placed the journalist in the place of the carefree bohemian, who could be paid meager salaries, delegitimizing any claim.

However, the support for the government generated by the decree that established the Statute was not completely uniform or lasting. Many of the journalists who praised Perón's social policy in 1944 remained relatively silent during the political polarization of mid-1945, as if the dispute between Peronism and the Democratic Union were alien to them. Others, like the socialist Leandro Reynés, president of the Argentine Federation of Journalists at the time the Statute was decreed, took sides with the Peronist movement under construction. Reynés himself declared: «It was Peronism, then, that had not only the institutional capacity, but also the ideological legitimacy sufficient to skillfully insert itself into the important fissures that existed between journalists and owners, between weak and economically powerful newspapers and between the traditional press and the Peronist public.

This dispute that is distant in time, but that keeps its friction and replies with the role of the hegemonic media in its destabilizing role and forming opinion and common sense, keeps its unresolved mysteries. It is Perón himself who reveals that in 1946 he won the elections with all the newspapers against him and in 1955 with everyone in his favor he was overthrown. In fact, only La Época had accompanied its rise, while the morning newspapers El Mundo, Clarín, La Nación, La Prensa and the afternoon newspapers La Razón, Noticias Gráficas and Crítica, like the overwhelming majority of regional media, had supported the Union. Democratic.

cave _

The era of digitalization and social networks have modified the ways of communicating and informing, but the essence remains the same when the task is political and is directed through its practice to a precise goal. In times of Athenian democracy, Plato exemplified the distortion of reality with the allegory of the cave, in which chained beings saw the shadows projected through a bonfire as reality, believing that these shadows were in themselves the true reality.

It is impossible not to agree with the South Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han, who draws a parallel by which the Platonic cave has become the digital cave, where users or infomata believe that all the information consumed on Facebook, Twitter is real or true. or Instagram, platforms whose algorithms determine which swarm of consumers to spill their content on. With the aura of a non-existent democratization, the false spreads like a corrosive liquid, in a battle where power sows information but not truths.

An army of trolls and the so-called influencers launch basic premises or slogans that are installed in the collective unconscious as unalterable truths germinated from the places of hegemonic power. The trolls of the former chief of staff of the Macri government are a perfect example of such an operation: "They are my eyes, my ears and they are me," declared Mauricio Macri at the beginning of his administration, referring without flinching to Marcos Peña.

Part of the official's task lay in the construction of a Hitlerian communication apparatus, supervised by his two aides: Gustavo Lopetegui and Mario Quintana. False information was spread from that place, including that three PBIs were stolen by Cristina Fernández and buried in Patagonia. The hegemonic media showed images of an excavator on the sparse plain, surrounded by police and judicial officials as if to give credibility to an absurd scene, comparable only to the fiction of Breaking Bad, in which Walter White buries barrels full of millions of dollars.

What was truly real there was the revealing presence of the hegemonic and corporate media, officials of the judicial apparatus and the repressive forces, each one representing their role in the construction of a lawfare, which stones and bans a political figure, or stigmatizes the social movements. Seeing the media and judicial operations that led to the judicialization, imprisonment and banning of popular leaders such as Lula, Correa and Evo Morales, one can agree with the formulation of legislator Gisella Marziotta, who in an interview with Página12, did not hesitate to define the lawfare , like the Condor Plan of our century.

In line with that definition, not at all far-fetched, the international leg, or part of it, is manifested in the words and actions of the Republican senator for the state of Texas, Ted Cruz, who presented a letter to the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, calling for sanctions against the current vice president, for carrying out acts for decades that "convulsed her political institutions" and "undermined American interests in the country and, indeed, in the region." Ted Cruz, he is not just any crazy guy, he is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It is worth asking, then, what political actions should be carried out and what tools to use so that the truth - in Han's words - does not disintegrate into the information dust and become, through its manipulation, the germ of political and social hatred.  A hatred installed by the media power, which gives free rein to any type of violence, which ranges from a precarious Rappi worker attacking a group of Cristina's supporters with a wrench to a lone wolf who triggers a gun twice. —covered by the tumult— on the vice president's head.