An Interview Series on the Political Implications of the Pandemic
By Fabiana Natale and Gilles de Valk
Over the summer of 2020, Fabiana Natale and Gilles de Valk conducted the ‘Conversing COVID’ interview series on the political implications of the pandemic. Now that many countries are experiencing another wave of infections and the world has learned more about the virus, Fabiana and Gilles are launching a second interview series: ‘COVID Continues’. They will speak to experts from different backgrounds on the (geo)political, security, and societal consequences of this pandemic.
For this second episode, we spoke with Giancarlo Fiorella, Investigator and Trainer for Latin America at Bellingcat. Giancarlo is also a PhD student at the University of Toronto, writing his thesis on protest policing in Venezuela, focusing on the role of civilian armed groups. During our conversation, we discussed the benefits of open source investigation as well as the impact of the pandemic in Venezuela.
Could you give us an example of what you have been working on for Bellingcat recently?
In the last weeks, I have been working on an academic journal article that is a combination of my academic work and my work for Bellingcat. Bellingcat investigates the authenticity of user-generated content online, by verifying the time and location of videos and pictures, for example. We tried to apply this methodology to the academic context with two colleagues, making the argument that it can be as useful for academic researchers as it has been for non-academic and human rights investigators.
Another project I have been working on recently is the development of a database of aviation related to Venezuela. In Venezuela, there is no public aircraft register, which are usually held by national aviation authorities and are publicly available in other countries. I have been developing this for a year, mostly through flight tracking. It was very interesting to discover, for instance, that a plane that looked like a simple commercial airplane, was actually a luxurious jet used by the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, and his friends.
What are the benefits of open source investigation?
Open source investigation can be very beneficial when it comes to investigating human rights abuses, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. One of the more practical benefits is reactive fact checking, which can be achieved with a wide range of digital tools, ranging from Google, Yandex, or Bing searches to reverse image searches.
These tools can be applied, for example, to press conferences held by Venezuelan government officials, in order to verify their claims. It can also be used to verify stories that are spread via Twitter accounts with large amounts of followers. A person can share an image or a video from ten years ago in combination with an unrelated event that is happening right now. This happens every single day and it is important to debunk such information before it causes widespread panic.
Besides, open source investigation is so broad that you can apply it in lots of different areas. In that sense, your imagination is the limit. It also works well in academia, for instance. I am doing my thesis on protest policing in Venezuela, but did not need to go into the field, because I was able to access hundreds of pictures and videos from protests that people had shared online.
Can you tell us about the impact of the pandemic in Venezuela?
I noticed a couple of trends in Venezuela early on in the pandemic. First of all, there was a malignant underreporting of Covid-19 cases by the government. While Colombia would report hundreds of cases per day, Venezuela would report six or seven. Although the low numbers occurred due to a lack of testing capabilities and appropriate infrastructure, the government celebrated those low figures. Eventually, testing ramped up and their record reached hundreds of cases a day. To compare, they reported over 28,000 cases in September and only 190 in April.
Another interesting thing to look at is the government’s quarantine measures. While the incubation period is considered to last up to two weeks, the Venezuelan government implemented the so-called ‘seven by seven’ (siete por siete) quarantine. It means that you can go out for seven days and then you stay home for seven days. This scheme came across as nonsensical and maybe unique in the world, but it might have been motivated by economic considerations. Even on the days that one has to stay home, hardly anybody can afford to do it. When large segments of the population are chronically poor, people cannot wait for tomorrow as they need to make money.
Finally, another trend is the government’s demonisation of migrants, who were coming back to Venezuela from Colombia. Maduro himself accused the Colombian government of purposefully infecting people with Covid-19 and sending them to Venezuela to spread the virus, and state officials engaged with this rhetoric of ‘biological warfare’.
What was the impact of this demonisation of refugees?
There was already a humanitarian crisis happening in Venezuela before the pandemic hit, with a mass exodus of refugees, and this rhetoric only worsened it. Quarantine camps were set up at the border and migrants are kept in quarantine before they are allowed to travel further into the country. Several shocking testimonies revealed that the conditions of the camps are deplorable. They are overcrowded, inhabited both by sick people and pregnant women. People have been denied clothing, sleeping quarters, and access to food and medicine. The way those camps operate are the result of this demonisation. When the country’s leader accuses migrants of being walking weapons, it is impossible to implement a policy aimed to improve their well-being.
How did the public react to the government downplaying the situation and demonising refugees?
That is hard to say, but I suspect that people followed these government announcements with caution. The majority of Venezuelans are used to having a government that lies. There is no meaningful counterbalance, as the government has a tight grip on the media. Because of the lack of reliable sources, there is a general disinterest in what the government says, also when it comes to the number of reported cases of Covid-19.
Regarding the demonisation of refugees, some Venezuelan human rights organisations denounced state officials’ comments about migrants being biological warfare agents, as well as the poor treatment of refugees at the border. However, the average citizen is not necessarily aware of those issues.
Did the relationship between police and society change in Venezuela during the pandemic?
For my thesis, I am interviewing people about how they feel about the official government forces, which are the police and the national guards, and about the civilian armed groups (colectivos armados) that attack protesters. People tend to empathise somewhat with the police and national guards. Even though they do not agree with the repression, they understand that those forces are simply doing their job. I do not think that the pandemic changed anything in this sense. If anything, there have been fewer protests, so people are being less exposed to antagonistic contact with the police.
You mentioned civilian armed groups that also intervene in protest policing. Are they motivated by overlapping interests with the police in stopping the protests?
The colectivos armados are usually regarded as pro-government groups. Some of them are directly financed by the government to repress protestors or they may receive privileges, such as priority access to housing. However, they also include people who are not in direct contact with the government.
In most countries, there are no civilian groups repressing protests alongside the police. In the United States, however, this is starting to change, with neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacist militias. They are not officially allied with the police and are usually even against the police, but in that specific protest window, those civilian groups and the police have an overlapping interest in repressing it.
Do you think that such violence against protesters has increased since the beginning of the pandemic?
In Venezuela, such responses to protests go back to 2014, when Maduro faced the first anti-government protests. Nevertheless, the precursors to these colectivos armados already existed in the 1960s, when leftist guerrilla groups were operating across the country. Today, you still see protests happening in Caracas. They are mostly short in time and related to a specific sector, like a week of demonstrations by nurses, but major nation-wide demonstrations occurred in 2014 and 2017.
Furthermore, the pandemic has led to an increased dissemination of conspiracy theories. Did this make your job at Bellingcat more difficult in any way?
This did not necessarily make our job harder, because most Covid-19 conspiracy theories are not really new. Many of them are simply modifications of existing ones. For instance, the idea that 5G towers are causing Covid-19 is piggybacking on the theory that 5G is harmful, which is based on the belief that electrical transmission towers are dangerous. Either way, the fast spread of conspiracy theories related to Covid-19 demonstrated that there is a certain segment of the population that will not seek the scientific truth and will simply accept such theories without double checking. However, I see my job at Bellingcat to give the most fact-based account of events, but not to convince people of a particular thing.
What can we learn from this pandemic?
The pandemic has taught us that a significant segment of the population will not listen to reason and will not take the most basic and reasonable steps that are needed for their own good and for the good of others. This is especially worrying to me when I think about what we will have to do against climate change, which will demand larger sacrifices. The kinds of sacrifices we are asked to make to face Covid-19, such as not going to a bar or wearing a face mask, are not comparable to those we will have to make against climate change. It makes me sceptical about whether we can deal with the climate crisis in an effective manner as a species.
A positive element, though, is that we were able to come up with a vaccine in record time. Thus, it also shows our ability to react in extreme situations and that results can come from a concerted effort. In that sense, I think we can say that crises bring out both the best and the worst of societies.